What was the USSR? — Notes

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Untitled Anarchism What was the USSR? Notes

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The journal Aufheben was first produced in the UK in Autumn 1992. Those involved had participated in a number of struggles together - the anti-poll tax movement, the campaign against the Gulf War - and wanted to develop theory in order to participate more effectively: to understand capital and ourselves as part of the proletariat so we could attack capital more effectively. We began this task with a reading group dedicated to Marx's Capital and Grundrisse. Our influences included the Italian autonomia movement of 1969-77, the situationists, and others who took Marx's work as a basic starting point and used it to develop the communist project beyond the anti-proletarian dogmatisms of Leninism (in all its varieties) and to reflect the current state of the class struggle. We also recognized the moment of truth in versions of class struggle anarchism, the German and Italian lefts and other tendencies. In developing proletarian theory we needed to go beyond all these past movements at... (From: LibCom.org/aufheben.)


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Notes

[1] For convenience we shall at times use the term ‘state capitalism’ for all theories that consider the Soviet Union to have been capitalist. As N. Fernandez points out in a forthcoming book, Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR, many theories, for example those of Bordiga and more recently Chattopadhyay, have for good theoretical reasons avoided the term ‘state capitalism’ in their accounts of the USSR. We will deal with some of the issues raised by the term ‘state capitalism’ in more detail in Aufheben 8.

[2] ‘Ultra-left’ is a loaded and ambiguous term. It was originally a term of abuse used by Lenin against communists and revolutionaries, particularly in West European countries such as Holland, Germany and Italy, who refused to accept the Bolshevik model of revolution and the right of the Russian Communist Party to determine the tactics and leadership of the world Communist movement. These communists were among the first to put forward the idea that Russia was a form of state capitalism. We shall examine such theories in the next issue. On the term itself it should be noted that most people accused of ultra-leftism by Leninists would argue that they are simply communists and that the left, including their accusers, are not. The matter is further confused by the tendency of Leninists to denounce each other for ‘ultra-leftism’ for such heinous crimes as not voting Labor. Perhaps more importantly for us, the term ‘ultra-leftism’ indicates an acceptance, along with Trotskyism, of the idea of tracing one’s tradition back to the social democracy of the Second and Third Internationals. While we will happily restate our position that the German, Dutch and Italian left communists did maintain some important lessons from the revolutionary wave following the First World War, we do not think they had the last word on what revolutionary theory and practice is for us today. This will become clearer once we come to examine their theories of the Soviet Union.

[3] Of course, prisoner support work is an important part of any serious movement against the state, and in the particular circumstances of the anti-poll tax movement when Militant threatened to grass people to the police it did define a radical engagement in the struggle. But there is nothing inherent in leftism that leads it to ignore prisoners. Simply criticizing the ‘left’ for not supporting prisoners ends up as little better than ritual denunciation of the left for being ‘boring middle class wankers’, a poor excuse for a proper critique. Yet it is perhaps little surprise that prisoner support has become an almost definitive position among many anarchists now that denouncing the left for supporting the USSR is no longer viable.

[4] There is little doubt that it was the fear that the whole of Western Europe might go over to the Eastern Bloc in the years following the Second World War which prompted the American bourgeoisie to pour billions of dollars into shattered West European economies in the form of Marshall Aid.

[5] It should be remembered that the reformist parties of the Second International not only betrayed their commitment to opposing the First World War and, as such, were complicit in the decimation of a whole generation of the European working class, but they also played an important role in crushing the revolutions that swept much of Europe following the war. For example, it was under the orders of a Social Democratic government that the German Revolution was crushed and such revolutionary leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht killed. Such crimes could not be that easily forgotten.

[6] Of course, at this point some may object that Trotsky’s record proves that he was a counter-revolutionary and, as a consequence, dismiss any detailed consideration of his theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. For us an extensive consideration of Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state is important not only because this theory has become a central reference point for criticisms of the Soviet Union, but also because it is important to show how Trotsky’s theory emerged directly from the objectivism of orthodox Marxism and was in no way a betrayal of such traditions. Hence our focus will remain on the political economy that developed in the USSR, rather than offering a blow by blow account of the revolution/ counter-revolution. For details on the 1917–21 period that undermine the Leninist account of the Russian Revolution see M. Brinton The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control (London: Solidarity). For a more general critique of the orthodox Marxism of both the Second and Third Internationals see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter IV (Detroit: Black and Red, 1974).

[7] In what follows some readers may think we are treating Trotsky’s theory with too much respect. For some it is enough to list his bad deeds. Some focus on his actions in 1917–21, others more on Trotsky’s later failure to maintain revolutionary positions which culminated with his followers taking sides in the Second World War. From this it often concluded that Trotsky’s Marxism was always counter-revolutionary or, as many left communists argue, that at some point Trotsky crossed the class line and became counter-revolutionary. Either way Trotsky’s theory of a degenerated workers’ state can be summarily dismissed as a position outside the revolutionary camp. For us, however, Trotsky’s theory of the USSR, and its dominant hold over many critical of Stalinism, reflects fundamental weaknesses of orthodox Marxism that should be grasped and overcome. There are very powerful reasons why heterodox Marxists have found it hard to grasp the USSR as capitalist. In rejecting Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state it is not for us a matter of showing how he ‘betrays the true revolutionary heritage of pre-1914 social democracy and orthodox Marxism’, but rather it involves recognizing how true he was to this tradition.

[8] Trotsky originally developed the theory of permanent revolution in collaboration with Parvus. After Parvus withdrew from Marxist politics the theory eventually became ascribed to Trotsky.

[9] Trotsky is himself not very clear at this point as to why the very backwardness of peasantry would lead a substantial part of this class to maintain its support for a workers’ government committed to introducing socialist policies. However, this apparently paradoxical position can be resolved if we consider a little more closely Trotsky’s view of the peasantry. For Trotsky the backwardness and heterogeneity of the peasantry meant that it was inherently incapable of developing a coherent organization that could formulate and advance its own distinct class interests. As a consequence the peasantry could only accept the leadership of other classes i.e. either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. From this Trotsky could conclude that once the peasantry had accepted the leadership of the proletariat it would have little option but to be swept along by the policies of a workers’ government, even beyond the point where such policies began to impinge on the peasants’ own immediate class interests, since they would be unable to formulate any viable alternative.

[10] See The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky (Pathfinder Press, 1972).

[11] We shall give more attention to the ideas Lenin’s left communist opponents in Aufheben 8.

[12] Following Engels, it was generally accepted within orthodox Marxism that there could be no leap from capitalism to a fully fledged communist society in which the state, money and wage-labor had been abolished. It was envisaged that any post-capitalist society would have to pass through a lower stage of communism during which the state, money and wage-labor would gradually whither away as the conditions for the higher stage of communism came into being. This lower stage of communism became known as socialism.

[13] For example, in his Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution, John Molyneux says ‘Suffice it to say that in the early years of the revolution Trotsky stood on the authoritarian wing of the party’. Of course, as Kowalski has pointed out, the divisions of left/right, libertarian/ authoritarian may over simplify the complex of political positions taken up among the Bolsheviks during this period. However, it is quite clear that Trotsky was neither on the left nor the libertarian wings of the Party at this time.

[14] As both Engels and Kautsky had pointed out in relation to Germany, the fundamental barrier to the development of industrial capitalism was the low productivity of traditional forms of small-scale peasant agriculture. If the urban populations necessary for industrialization were to be fed then the peasants had to produce an agricultural surplus over and above their own immediate needs. So long as traditional forms of agriculture persist the total amount of agricultural produce is limited. Thus the only way to produce the surplus necessary for industrialization is to depress the living standards of the peasantry through such means as high rents and taxation. Yet the scope for squeezing the peasants’ already impoverished living standards is limited. Sooner or later there has to be an agricultural revolution which, by concentrating production in large scale farms, allows the introduction of modern mechanized production methods. Under capitalism this occurred either through the landlords or the richer peasants appropriating land and transforming themselves into capitalist farmers. The socialist alternative was to collectivize agriculture. By grouping peasants together in collectives large scale production would be made possible without dispossessing vast numbers of poor peasants. In Russia this agrarian problem was particularly acute. Before the revolution the peasants had been forced to produce for the market in order to pay rents and taxes to the landlords and the state. This surplus had then been used both to feed the urban populations and for export to earn the foreign currency needed to pay for the import of foreign capital required for industrialization. However, with the Stolypin reforms of 1906, the Czarist regime had made a decisive effort to encourage the development of capitalist agriculture among the richer peasants. But this ‘wager on the strong’ peasant was canceled by the revolution. The expropriation of the landlords and the redistribution served to reinforce small-scale subsistence agriculture. With neither the compulsion nor any incentive to produce a surplus on the part of the peasant, food supplies to the urban areas fell. It had been this that had compelled the Bolshevik Government to introduce direct requisitioning under War Communism. With the NEP, the Bolshevik Government now sought to provide incentives for the richer peasants to produce for the market. Collectivization was ruled out since for it to succeed on a large scale it required a sufficient level of industrialization to allow the mechanization of agriculture. To this extent the NEP represented, in part, a retreat to the Czarist policy of encouraging the growth of capitalist agriculture among the rich peasants. We shall examine further this crucial agrarian question in more detail in the next issue.

[15] Trotsky coined the phrase ‘scissors crisis’ in his speech to the 12th Party Congress in April 1923. Trotsky argued that, left to the market, the uneven development between agriculture and industry could only lead to violent fluctuations between the prices of industrial goods and agricultural prices which could only undermine the NEP. Although agricultural production recovered rapidly after the introduction of the NEP, industrial production lagged behind. As a result the price of industrial goods had risen far faster than agricultural prices, ‘opening the price scissors’ and threatening to undermine the incentives for the peasants to produce for the market in the following season. By October the predicted crisis struck home with the sales of grain plummeting. Following this ‘scissors crisis’, measures were introduced to control industrial prices.

[16] While Stalin had established his power-base as head of the organization of the Party through out the USSR, Zinoviev had built his power-base as head of the Party in Leningrad, and Kamenev had his power-base as the head of the Moscow Party.

[17] During the industrialization debate in the mid 1920s, Trotsky, along with the rest of the Left Opposition, was repeatedly attacked by Stalin and his followers for being a ‘super-industrializer’ who wished to abandon the NEP and industrialize at the expense of the peasantry. This has been a common accusation made against Trotsky by Stalinists ever since. But it has also been a criticism taken up by anarchists and others to the left of Trotsky who argue that in adopting the policy of forced industrialization and forced collectivization after 1928 Stalin was simply implementing Trotsky’s own ideas. In this way the essential complicity between Stalin and Trotsky can be demonstrated. In his article ‘The Myth of the Super-Industrializer’, which was originally published under a different title in Critique, 13, and now reprinted in The Ideas of Leon Trotsky edited by Michael Cox and Hillel Ticktin, Richard Day has sought to defend Trotsky from such accusations by both distancing him from the more polemical positions of Preobrazhensky and stressing his support for the workers’ and peasants’ alliance embodied in the NEP. But this does not prove much. None of the main protagonists in the industrialization debate, not even Preobrazhensky, argued for the abandonment of the NEP and the workers’ and peasants’ alliance. What is telling is Trotsky’s own criticisms of Stalin’s eventual policy of forced industrialization and collectivization. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky does not criticize Stalin’s industrialization policy as such — indeed he is careful to praise the great achievements made by Stalin under this policy — but rather the ‘zig-zags’ made in bringing this policy about. For Trotsky the problem was that Stalin’s reluctance to adopt the policy of industrialization put forward by the Left Opposition in the mid-1920s meant a sharper ‘turn to the left’ and a more rushed and unbalanced industrialization later in order to solve the crisis of 1928. But the crucial question is: if Stalin had shifted the burden of industrialization onto the peasantry a few years earlier, would this have been really sufficient to have averted the grain procurement crisis in 1928 and avoided the disaster of forced collectivization in which millions of peasants died?

[18] For a critique of orthodox Marxist interpretations of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism see ‘The Myth of Working Class Passivity’ by David Gorman in Radical Chains, 2.

[19] It should be noted that What is to be Done? was a particularly extreme formulation of democratic centralism that emerged out of a polemic against those Marxists who had argued that the class consciousness of the working class would necessarily develop out of economic struggles during a period of retreat in the class struggle. However, Lenin’s position concerning democratic centralism can be seen to have undergone sharp shifts in emphasis depending on the political circumstances. At various points before 1917 Lenin’s position would have been little different from that of Trotsky.

[20] As well as Bolshevik left communists, many anarchists were also taken in by the ‘libertarian flavor’ of the conception of post-revolutionary power outlined in Lenin’s State and Revolution. This led to accusations that Lenin’s actions after seizing power were a betrayal of the ideas he had himself set out in State and Revolution, and it is then suggested that Lenin had never really believed in them. But while it is undoubtedly true that Lenin did abandon some of the measures he called for in State and Revolution, that text was itself ambiguous, calling for a ‘socialist revolution with subordination, control, and foremen and accountants’.

[21] See for example ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’ in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 87.

[22] The methods of ‘scientific management’ advocated by Lenin were based on those developed by the most advanced capitalist enterprises in the West and which had become known as Taylorism. Taylorism had been specifically developed to break the control of the skilled worker over the immediate production process. Under Taylorism the production process was re-organized and rationalized in a way which removed the initiative of the individual worker and concentrated the overall knowledge and control of how things were produced into the hands of specialized managers. Lenin’s enthusiasm for Taylorism, an enthusiasm shared by Trotsky, is perhaps one of the areas where Lenin most clearly distinguishes his position from a communist one.

[23] It should be recognized that most of these armies did not seriously fight the Bolsheviks. The civil war, as a war between organized armies, was a battle between the Red Army and the Whites, who had material support from the West. But, as well as this, vast numbers of peasants and deserters fought both sides. Indeed, one could say the 1918–21 period was as much a peasant war as anything else.

[24] The introduction of one-man management and scientific management, together with the consequent transfer of power away from the factory committees to, first the trade unions and then to the Party, is well documented in The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control by M. Brinton. As Brinton shows this process began at a very early stage in the Revolution, well before the start of the civil war in the Summer of 1918.

[25] Given the task of organizing the military defense of the revolution Trotsky spent little time in abandoning the Red Guard militias that had been formed immediately after the October Revolution in favor of building a conventional standing army. At first Trotsky sought to recruit from volunteers among the more advanced sections of the working class, and in accordance with the procedures established within the Red Guards, allowed officers to be elected directly from Soldiers’ committees and assemblies. However, once he had established a reliable core for the new Red Army, Trotsky introduced conscription drawing recruits from the broad masses of peasants and workers. With what he considered as less reliable troops, Trotsky abandoned the direct election of officers in favor of the appointment of professional commanders which were mostly drawn from the former Czarist army. To oversee and check any counter-revolutionary tendencies among this officer corp., Trotsky appointed political officers, or commissars, drawn from the Party each of whom were attached to a particular military commander.

[26] As Knei-Paz has pointed out, the idea that the emergence of the bureaucracy represented a Russian Thermidor had been first advanced by the Democratic-Centralist Opposition in the early 1920s. At that time, when he still held a leading position within the Party, Trotsky had firmly rejected the idea of a Russian Thermidor as being ‘ultra-leftist’. However, by 1929, facing disgrace and exile, Trotsky began to come round to the idea and it was only by the mid-1930s that came to fully formulate it within his criticisms of Stalinism. See B. Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 394–5.

[27] Trotsky’s ‘orthodox Marxist’ and objectivist idea of history as fundamentally about the progressive development of the productive forces is perhaps the key to understanding the underlying weakness of his theory of the degenerated workers’ state. For Trotsky’s lyrical accounts of how Stalinist Russia developed the forces of production we need go no further than the opening pages of The Revolution Betrayed. On page 8 of this work Trotsky declares: ‘With the bourgeois economists we no longer have anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not in the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth of the earth’s surface — not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity’.

[28] With the publication of Marx’s early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, it is clear that for Marx the basis of capitalism is not private property but alienated labor. This point, as we shall see, is vital not only in making a critique of orthodox Marxism but in any attempt to develop a materialist theory of the USSR.

[29] Of course, at a more concrete level, it is clear that not all of the capitalist class directly exploit the working class. Bankers and merchant capitalists, for example, draw a share of the surplus-value produced by the industrial capitalists by virtue of their special functions in financing production, and by circulating the commodities subsequently produced. Yet these functions can themselves be seen to be rooted in private property. The bank advances money to finance production as a loan of its own private property, and duly obtains a share in the surplus-value in the form of interest. Likewise, by buying the commodities produced by the industrial capitalist, the merchant capitalists advance their own money-capital to realize the value produced for the industrial capitalist ahead of the commodities’ actual circulation. In doing so the merchant capitalists appropriate a slice of the surplus-value expropriated by the industrial capitalists in the form of the difference between what they pay the industrial capitalists and what they sell the commodities for to the consumers.

[30] See The New Constitution of the USSR.

[31] As we have already noted, the notion that the concentration and centralization of capital inevitably led towards the fusion of state and capital had been central to the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. It had followed from this that the decisive shift from capitalism to socialism occurred with the working class seizing state power. The main question that then divided orthodox Marxism was whether this seizure of state power required a revolution or whether it could be achieved through peaceful democratic means. In What is to be Done? Lenin came to define his own position regarding the primacy of the political. Against the ‘economism’ of those who saw socialist revolution arising directly out the economic struggles of the working class, Lenin had argued for importance of establishing a political party which could seize state power. Of course, it was the basis of this ‘politicism’ which, by implying that the realm of the political can to some extent determine the nature of society, has allowed Leninists to argue that the USSR was a workers’ state while at the same time admitting that the social relations of production may have remained capitalist. As we shall see in the next issue, it was the inability of most left communists to fully break from this ‘politicism’ that undermines their critique of the Bolsheviks.

[32] It was this very transitional character of the Soviet bureaucracy which meant that it was difficult to define what it was. So although Trotsky settled on calling it a ‘caste’ he accepted this was an unsatisfactory categorization of the Soviet bureaucracy.

[33] One of the first groups to develop a proper theory was the ‘state capitalist’ minority within the Workers’ Party. This minority later emerged as the Johnson-Forest Tendency after the pseudonyms of its main theorists — C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. With the collection of previously unavailable writings we can now see that this theory is much stronger than it appears from some of their earlier published works and is far superior to Cliff’s version. See The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State Capitalism, by R. Dunayevskaya, (Chicago: News & Letters, 1992). Since the Johnson-Forest Tendency quickly broke from Trotskyism by rejecting vanguardism and emphasizing workers’ autonomy we shall deal with them in more detail in the next issue.

[34] See C. Hobson and R. Tabor, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism (Westport: Greenwood, 1988).

[35] The Revolutionary Communist Party subsequently broke up and should not be confused with the Revolutionary Communist Party that is around today.

[36] Though this has not stopped the SWP giving ‘critical support’ to some nationalist and Stalinist movements in ‘non-imperialist’ parts of the world.

[37] For a critique of Cliff’s theory of state capitalism from a Trotskyist point of view see the collection of articles on the nature of the USSR in Open Polemic, 4 & 5.

[38] That is the reformism that had been put forward by Bernstein and his followers in the debates in the Second International that there could be a peaceful transition to socialism through democratically won reforms.

[39] Cliff was able to cite Trotsky’s reaction to Stalin’s constitution where he argued that it was the basis for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR as support for the possibility of peaceful counter-revolution.

[40] While most Trotskyists in the 1940s clung on to the belief that the immediate postwar economic boom would be short lived and as a consequence repeatedly predicted an imminent return to an economic slump, Cliff was one of the first to seek to explain the persistence of the postwar economic boom. Central to this explanation was Cliff’s theory of ‘a permanent arms economy’ in which high levels of military spending acted to defer the full effects of the overaccumulation of capital which had led to the great slump of the 1930s. The notion that the permanent arms economy was mirrored in the Soviet Union fitted neatly into Cliff’s overall emphasis on the importance of military accumulation for modern capitalism.

[41] Loren Goldner, Communism is the Material Human Community (Collective Action Notes, POB 22962, Balto., MD 21203, USA.). Also published as ‘Amadeo Bordiga, the Agrarian Question and the International Revolutionary Movement’, in Critique, 23, 1991.

[42] Jacques Camatte, Community and Communism in Russia.

[43] This influence is not confined to the Leninist left. The recent book from Neil Fernandez — Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR — while opposed to Ticktin’s Leninism acknowledges his work as a ‘major theoretical achievement’ in terms of grasping the forms taken by the class struggle in the Soviet Union. The journal Radical Chains has attempted to develop revolutionary critique by combining some of Ticktin’s ideas with others from the autonomist and left communist traditions.

[44] With the growing crisis in the USSR in the 1980s, there were several attempts by leading theoreticians within the Socialist Workers Party to revise Cliff’s theory of state capitalism to overcome its inherent weaknesses.

[45] The collapse of the USSR has forced a major rethink among both Trotskyists and Stalinists. One of the first attempts to draw together the various positions on the USSR was made in Open Polemic, 4 & 5.

[46] In fact, Ticktin’s theory has assumed a strong role among the remnants of the British far left that goes beyond just Trotskyism. The ideological crisis that has accompanied the collapse of the USSR has led the smaller groups to some fairly serious rethinking. Ticktin’s theory seems to offer the best hope of keeping their Leninist assumptions while fundamentally disentangling themselves from what has happened in Russia. Showing some of the strange realignments that have followed the collapse of the USSR, a Ticktinite analysis of the USSR seems now to be the dominant position within the ex-Stalinist group previously known as the Leninist. Having reclaimed the CPGB title abandoned by the old Euro-Stalinists (now New Laborites), this group seems to be attracting quite a few homeless leftists to a project based on going back to the 1920 formation of the original CPGB before the split of Trotskyism and Stalinism. However, we’d suggest that, for Leninists, now that the USSR has collapsed, overcoming the division of Stalinism and Trotskyism is not too hard; understanding much less crossing the gap between Leninism and communism is a more difficult task.

[47] For a discussion of the different ways Trotskyism and left communism interpreted the meaning of these slogans, see our article ‘Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part I’ in Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993).

[48] See, again, our article ‘Decadence’ in Aufheben 2.

[49] See ‘The Leopard in the 20th Century: Value, Struggle and Administration’ in Radical Chains, 4.

[50] The notion of centrism had originally been applied to those within the Second International who sought to combine a commitment to proletarian revolution with a reformist practice — a position best exemplified by Karl Kautsky.

[51] In Marx’s Capital the question of class is not presented until the very end of Volume III.

[52] For a critique of this identification of communism with ‘a law of planning’, or indeed even with planning per se, see ‘Decadence Part III’ in Aufheben 4 (Summer 1995).

[53] Tony Cliff Puts Forward a Similar Position That in the USSR the Workers Did Not Really Sell Their Labor-Power.

[54] Under capitalism, the individual worker can earn more by working harder or longer than the average or norm. However, if the individual worker’s colleagues follow suit, the average or norm of working will be increased and the individual worker will soon find his wages revised down to the value of his labor-power.

[55] Focusing on commodity fetishism helps one avoid the mistake of seeing ideology as predominantly a creation of state and other ideological apparatuses or institutions. To make people work for it, capital neither has to rely on direct force nor on somehow inserting the idea that they should work into people’s heads. Their needs, plus their separation from the means of production and each other, makes working for capital a necessity for proletarians. Commodity fetishism in one sense, then, is not in itself an ideology but an inseparable part of the social reality of a value- and commodity-producing society: “to the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e., they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things” (Capital, vol. 1, Chapter 1, Section 4). On the other hand, people generate ideology to make sense of their alienated practice; to the extent that most people’s existence most of the time is within capitalist relations, they generate and adopt ideas to rationalize and make sense of this existence. Because that reality is itself contradictory, their ideas can both be incoherent and quite functional for them. The point here, though, is that no ‘battle of ideas’ will disabuse them of such ideas which are expressive of their reality. Only in relation to practical struggle, when the reified appearance of capitalist relations is exposed as vulnerable to human interference, are most people likely to adopt revolutionary ideas. On the other hand, leftist intellectuals attempt to be both coherent and critical of this society. It is in relation to such ‘critical ideas’ that, following Marx and the Situationists, we oppose revolutionary theory to revolutionary ideology.

[56] There is a key passage in Marx’s Capital that would seem at first to support Ticktin’s argument that the lack of normal market relations in the USSR meant that it did not generate the powerful ‘dull compulsion of everyday life’ that the worker experiences in the West:

"the advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labor, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the “natural laws of production”, i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them." (Capital, vol. 1, Chapter 28).

But the lines that immediately follow suggest a quite different way of grasping the Russian situation:

"It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to “regulate” wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation."

A lot of the strange features of the USSR vis-a-vis ‘normal’ capitalism become clear when one sees it as attempting to make the transition towards capitalism.

[57] The observation that there was a fundamental contradiction between the reality of the Soviet regime and what it said about itself is hardly new. The original title of The Russian Enigma by Anton Ciliga, which brilliantly combines an account of his personal experiences of the Stalinist regime and its camps with his reflections on the nature of its economic system, was Au Pays du Grand Mensonge: ‘In the Country of the Big Lie’.

[58] It is interesting to contrast the views of Ticktin with Debord on the Soviet lie.

Ticktin argues that, unlike the false consciousness of the Western bourgeoisie, the set of doctrines promoted by the Soviet elite doesn’t even partially correspond to reality and thus the system has no ideology. Ticktin’s motivation to deny that these falsehoods are an ideology is theoretical: ‘Systematic, conscious untruthfulness is a symptom of a system that is inherently unstable’ (Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, p. 18). His view that it is not a viable system leads him polemically to assert that it has no ideology; for something that is not a mode of production does not generate a coherent false consciousness.

Debord (Society of the Spectacle, Theses 102–111) similarly describes Soviet society as based on a lie that no one believes and which has thus to be enforced by the police. He also points at the way that its reliance on falsification of the past and present means that it suffers “the loss of the rational reference which is indispensable to the historical society, capitalism”, making it a poor imitation of the West in terms of industrial production (108). However Debord does not feel the need to say that, because it has become manifestly incoherent, Stalinist ideology is no longer ideology; rather, it is for him an extreme victory of ideology.

While it has a theoretical consistency, Ticktin’s polemical insistence that there was no ideology in the USSR imposes a very restricted sense on the notion of ideology. Essentially it limits the meaning of ideology to that false consciousness generated by a mode of production which partially grasps the reality of the world which that mode produces and which is thus functional to those identifying with that world. However, ideology can also infect the thought of those who see themselves as critical of and wishing to go beyond that mode of production. For example, the Marxism of the Second International, of which Leninism is essentially a variant, absorbed bourgeois conceptions of the relation of knowledge to practice, of the need for representation and hierarchical organization and of progress, which made it into a revolutionary ideology. Ticktin’s limited conception of ideology allows him to escape the questions of the relation of the Soviet Union’s ideology of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ to its origins in Leninism, and the ideological assumptions Trotskyism shares with Stalinism. Debord however, grasps the totalitarian falsehood of Soviet ideology as a dialectical development of the revolutionary ideology of Leninism. As he puts it: “As the coherence of the separate, the revolutionary ideology, of which Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression, governed the management of a reality that was resistant to it; with Stalinism, this ideology rediscovered its own incoherent essence. Ideology was no longer a weapon but an end in itself. But a lie which can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness” (105).

[59] On the basis of this dilemma for the Russian elite, Ticktin is able to provide a persuasive account of the postwar history of the USSR which in many respects is far superior to most attempts by state capitalist theorists to explain the crisis of the Soviet Union.

[60] See Part VI of Volume I of Capital.

[61] We shall take this point up in far more detail in ‘What was the USSR? Part IV’.

[62] Again, see ‘Decadence Part III’ in Aufheben 4 (Summer 1995).

[63] The German and Dutch Communist Lefts were theoretically and practically intertwined. Two of the most prominent theorists of the German Communist Workers Party — Pannekoek and Gorter — were Dutch. Exiled German Left activists often took refuge in Holland. In what follows we will generally use the term’ German Left to indicate the whole political current.

[64] ‘Trotsky’s theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state’,and ‘The theory of state capitalism from within Trotskyism’ in Aufheben 6,1997,and ‘Russia as a non mode of Production’ in Aufheben 7,1998.

[65] Surprisingly perhaps the most interesting and dynamic appropriation of the Communist Left has not been made in Germany or Italy but in France. After ’68 in particular a modem ‘ultra left’ tradition has emerged there in a way unlike other countries. Within this a different less ‘partyist’ appropriation of the Communist left has been made. The recently republished Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement (Dauve & Martin, Antagonism Press) is an example of this.

[66] A main way the Communist left is known in Britain is through the publications and activities of groups emerging in the early seventies, which claimed to defend the positions of the Communist Left. These groups on the surface appear to the uninitiated as Party oriented groups not so different from some of the smaller Trotskyist sects. In most other countries where it has a presence the Communist left has a similar type of existence

[67] The history and positions of Communist lefts that developed in some countries have been effectively destroyed, e.g. those of the Bulgarian left. The British communist left was represented by Sylvia Pankhursts group around the Workers Dreadnought (previously the Woman’s Dreadnought) and the Spur group in Glasgow of whom Guy Aldred was the leading spokesman. They largely following the German left on the Russian question so we will not treat them here.There is a good account of them in Mark Shipway’s Anti- Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain, 1917–45 (Macmillan, 1988)

[68] In Leninist mythology the clear sighted Lenin split with the Russian Social Democratic Party on the question of organization and by so doing created a line of revolutionary Marxism that foresaw and would be immune to the betrayal of revolution that both the Mensheviks and European social democrats would fall prey to. However, as both Debord and Dauve, has pointed out, Lenin was always a loyal Kautskyist — even when he accused his master of betrayal.

[69] Lenin’s clear line on this led to an alliance of the Bolsheviks with European left communist — the Zimmerwald left — this broke down because of Lenin’s refusal to work with those who rejected the right

[70] Bukharin is better known for the right wing positions he took in the twenties. Up to ’21 he was however a leading figure of the left of the party, in many ways closer to European Left communists than to Lenin’s very Russian perspectives.

[71] Lenin particularly scorned the position that Pyatakov painted of revolution: “We picture this process [the social revolution] as the united action of the proletarians of all [!] countries, who wipe out the frontiers of the bourgeois [!] state, who tear down the frontier posts [in addition to ‘wiping out the frontiers’?], who blow up [!] national unity and establish class unity.” {Lenin’s ‘comments’ } To which Lenin replies ‘The social revolution cannot be the united action of the proletarians of all countries for the simple reason that most of the countries and the majorities of the world’s population have not even reached, or have only just reached, the capitalist stage of development... Only the advanced countries of Western Europe and North America have matured for socialism. The social revolution can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements... in the undeveloped, backward and oppressed nations. “Lenin ‘The nascent trend of Imperialist Economism October 1916 p 50–52

[72] The Left Communists reason for changing their position from one of proposing revolutionary war to that of defensive revolutionary partizan war, in fact resides in the openness for Lenin’s arguments, when he pointed out that it would be a rather unrealistic to go for revolutionary in the face of massive war weariness and peasant desertion of the front this was a quite unrealistic position.

[73] Speech 28/7/18: CW vol.28, p29.

[74] 60 million people, half the industrial firms, three quarters of the steel mills and nearly all the coal mines were in this area.

[75] Theses on the Current Situation (1918), Critique, Glasgow,1977. Also in Daniels Documentary History of Communism. References are to these numbers.

[76] ‘On the Building of Socialism’ Kommunist no2,April 1918,in Daniels p 85.

[77] Trotsky’s support for militarization of labor is a classic example. See Terrorism and Communism.

[78] “The Tax in Kind (NEP)’ CW 32 pp.329–369 here he analyzes relation of petty producer capitalism to state capitalism in 1921. This text will be key to Bordiga’s understanding of the USSR

[79] In fact at some of the worst times in the civil war the Bolsheviks gave other socialists and anarchists more freedom. The changing relation to Makhno’s partizans being a case in point. See Ciliga in his The Russian Enigma p251

[80] Appeal of the workers truth Group in Daniels Documentary History of Communism p 221

[81] Luxemburg referring to the German SDP says ‘the troops of the old order, instead of intervening in the name of the ruling classes, intervene under the banner of a ‘social-democratic party.”’ The workers group were making the obvious and necessary extension of this critique of the SDP to the more radical Social Democracy that the Bolsheviks were turning out to represent.

[82] As they so eloquently put it: ‘why does Zinoviev offer Scheidman and Noske [social democrats responsible for defeating the German revolution] a ministerial seat instead of a gibbet.’

[83] Between 1890 and 1899, 450,000 were involved in strikes and lockouts; between 1900–04,475,000. In 1905 alone, 500,000.

[84] In 8/10/21

[85] In Workers Dreadnought Feb 24

[86] From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution,p 7

[87] This text was written by the GIK in 1934 and published in English by the APCF as the The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism.References are to these numbers.

[88] Fundamental principles of Communist Production and Distribution

[89] Pannekoek’s Workers Councils

[90] See Anti-Bolshevik Communism and Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie

[91] When a fusion was eventually forced through the PSI demoralized by fascism only comprised 2000 members confirming the Italian left argument that it was an exhausted tradition

[92] Bordiga,either imprisoned or under surveillance by the fascist police,withdrew from politics at this time. The Banner of the Italian Left was upheld by the fraction in exile in Belgium and France

[93] Quoted in Camatte’s Community and Communism in Russia,p 9–10

[94] See Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution (Apple & Mejer, 1990, Movement for Workers’ Councils).

[95] See Dauve ‘Leninism and the Ultra Left’ (Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement. Op. Cit.)

[96] One is not saying that communism can exist in one country or area before world revolution has generalized but that we can only say that revolution has triumphed there if a process of suppression of capitalist relations has begun.

[97] Camatte has attempted to synthesize the positive sides of both theories. By engaging in a detailed study of what Marx meant by the party’, he argued that this should not be identified with the traditional formal party associated with Leninism and social democracy. The ‘party’ was in no way something external to the working class introducing it to a communist consciousness and organization it was incapable of generating by itself. Rather, the ‘party’ should be understood as an expression of the class, its production of a communist consciousness of those people who identified with and tried to act for communism. Rather than in the Leninist vision where spontaneity and organization/consciousness are rigidly opposed Camatte returned to Marx’s understanding that the party is something spontaneously generated out of the class. It was by relativizing this Leninist notion of the party-form that Camatte could return to the notions of working class subjectivity of the German Left, whilst as the same time adopting the more holistic standpoint of the Italian Left. That is, he managed to overcome the dichotomy between the economic and the political, which had not only led to their mutual incomprehension, but more importantly in this context, to very different perception of the nature of Russia. It is by taking away the foundations on which the German and Italian Left based their theories of Russia, that Camatte’s discussion of the party-form did have an indirect relevance for left communist theories of the Russian Revolution. (Camatte 1961 The Origin and Function of the Party Form).

[98] Our introduction to the second article in Aufheben 7 was a response to the second group.

[99] The ICC for example, complained that in out treatment of the Italian Left we fail to mention the contribution of the particular branch with which they identify, namely the Left Communists of France who refused to join the International Communist Party formed by ‘Bordigists’ in Italy in 1943. As it happens we have read the article they refer to — ‘The Russian Experience: Private Property and Collective Property’ (in Internationlisme, 10, 1946, reprinted in International Review, 61, 1990) and do consider it quite good. Its insight that the form of ownership may change, but the content — past labor dominating living labor — remains is a basic one shared with many other theories of state capitalism. But it is only a starting point. Unfortunately we see no sign that the ICC has managed to advance from this sound beginning. In a way the article in question points back to the theoretical rigor and openness of Bilan (Italian Left group in the ‘30s) rather than forwards towards the present sclerotic organization which claims this heritage.

[100] Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR: A Marxist Theory by Neal Fernandez (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). We have found this book useful for its comprehensive overview of the debate; its treatment of the strengths and weaknesses of the different theories; and its identification of the key problems that must be faced by a theory of the USSR grounded in Marx’s critique of political economy. When it comes to the author’s own ‘new theory of bureaucratic capitalism’, however, we are not convinced — we touch on this in footnote 16 below.

[101] Indeed, when the foremost council-communist theorist, Paul Mattick, looked at the issue of value, his traditional Marxist assumptions along with his theoretical integrity led him actually to undermine the German Left’s theory of state capitalism by accepting that value did not really exist in the USSR.

[102] One state capitalist theory that accepted that ‘profit’ as it appeared on the surface of Soviet society was not profit in a Marxian sense was that developed by Raya Dunayevskaya. In pioneering work in the late 1930s early ‘40s, she undertook a functional analysis of the cycle of capital accumulation as it actually took place in the USSR. She saw that the role of the ‘turnover tax’ on consumer goods gave an entirely ‘fictitious profit’ to light industries, but this was “merely the medium through which the state, not the industry siphons off anything ‘extra’ it gave the worker by means of wages.” And this is “why this ‘profit’ attracts neither capital nor the individual agents of capital.” However, as she points out, even in classical capitalism, “the individual agent of capital has at no time realized directly the surplus value extracted in his particular factory. He has participated in the distribution of national surplus value, to the extent that his individual capital was able to exert pressure on this aggregate capital. This pressure in Russia is exerted, not through competition, but state planning.” (Dunayevskaya, ‘The Nature of the Russian Economy’ in The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (Chicago: News & Letters, 1992)). However, despite this recognition that in terms of ‘profit’ one had to see through the discourse of the Russian economists to the reality, she took their admission in 1943 that the ‘law of value’ did operate in the USSR at face value as, for her, an admission that it was state capitalist. She thus saw no reason to take theoretical analysis of the situation any further.

[103] Of course, the USSR was having a different kind of crisis based on difficulties, in the absence of unemployment, in imposing labor-discipline which led to more and more use of terror against both the working class and even managers. See the Ticktin-influenced history of this period by D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations 1928–1941 (London: Pluto, 1986).

[104] At the height of tripartite corporatism in the 1960s attempts were made by governments in Western Europe to co-ordinate investment plans of the major companies that dominated the national economy along with state investments and wage demands in order to maximize capital accumulation, This was known as indicative planning.

[105] One possible exception is Chattopadhyay’s The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (Westport CT: Praeger, 1994). In his analysis the specific capitalist development in the USSR (which he does not label state capitalist) was unable to effectively make the shift from extensive accumulation based on absolute surplus value to intensive accumulation based on relative surplus value and the real subordination of labor. To expand, it thus relied on drawing ever more workers and raw materials into production on the existing basis; it could not make the shift to the constant revolutionizing of the relations and forces of production that intensive accumulation demanded.

[106] An important issue for previous theories has been whether the USSR should be seen as ‘state capitalist’ or, as with Bordiga for example, simply as ‘capitalist’. We shall argue below for a reconsideration of the meaning of ‘state capitalism’ that makes this issue redundant.

[107] In the case of the NICs, this success has been relative. As recently seen with the Asian crisis, their development is still subsidiary to that of the more advanced capitalist countries.

[108] Penguin edition, p. 84.

[109] Geoffrey Kay, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 99.

[110] G. Kay, op. cit., p. 100.

[111] G. Kay, op. cit., p. 103.

[112] One of the most striking features of capitalist society is the prevalence of atomization. Of course this atomization of society arises directly from the predominance of the commodity-form and the reification of social relations that this gives rise to. As Ticktin notes, such atomization was characteristic of the USSR. However, because he denies the existence of the commodity-form in the USSR Ticktin has to go through all sorts of contortions to explain it.

[113] Grundrisse, pp. 196–197, Penguin edition.

[114] For this reason we cannot agree with Neal Fernandez’s assertion that ‘blat’ was itself a form of capitalist money. While an individual could be said to have ‘more’ or ‘less’ ‘blat’, it is not quantifiable and calculable in the discrete units necessary for it to play the role of money. Other attributes it lacks include universality and transferability. ‘Blat’ cannot play the impersonal dominating role which money as a ‘real abstraction’ is able to do. However, Fernandez has drawn attention to the role of this phenomenon, which expressed the constrained role of money in the USSR, part of the deformation of value. Blat played the role it did because proper money did not fully function.

[115] Of course, such reproduction may involve other social relations like those around gender, age and so on.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

(1992 - )

The journal Aufheben was first produced in the UK in Autumn 1992. Those involved had participated in a number of struggles together - the anti-poll tax movement, the campaign against the Gulf War - and wanted to develop theory in order to participate more effectively: to understand capital and ourselves as part of the proletariat so we could attack capital more effectively. We began this task with a reading group dedicated to Marx's Capital and Grundrisse. Our influences included the Italian autonomia movement of 1969-77, the situationists, and others who took Marx's work as a basic starting point and used it to develop the communist project beyond the anti-proletarian dogmatisms of Leninism (in all its varieties) and to reflect the current state of the class struggle. We also recognized the moment of truth in versions of class struggle anarchism, the German and Italian lefts and other tendencies. In developing proletarian theory we needed to go beyond all these past movements at... (From: LibCom.org/aufheben.)

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