The origins of Ticktin’s theory of the USSR

Introduction

In Part I we gave a lengthy treatment of what has probably been the best known critical theory of the Soviet Union: Leon Trotsky’s theory of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’. While critical of the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy, lack of freedom and workers’ democracy, Trotsky took the view that the formal property relations of the USSR — i.e. that the means of production were not private property but the property of a workers’ state — meant that the USSR could not be seen as being capitalist, but was instead a transitory regime caught between capitalism and socialism which had degenerated. It followed from this that, for Trotsky, despite all its faults and monstrous distortions, the Soviet Union was ultimately progressive. As such, the Soviet Union was a decisive advance over capitalism which, by preserving the proletarian gains of the October Revolution, had to be defended against the military and ideological attacks of the great capitalist powers.

However, as we saw, for Trotsky the Soviet Union’s predicament could not for last long. Either the Russian working class would rise up and reassert control over their state through a political revolution which would depose the bureaucracy, or else the bureaucracy would seek to preserve its precarious position of power by reintroducing private property relations and restoring capitalism in Russia. Either way, for Trotsky, the rather peculiar historical situation in which Russian society found itself, stuck half-way between capitalism and socialism, could only be a fleeting phenomena. Indeed, Trotsky believed that this situation would be resolved one way or another in the immediate aftermath of the second world war.

Yet, as we now know, Trotsky’s prediction that the Soviet Union would soon be either overthrown by a workers’ revolution or else revert back to capitalism with the bureaucracy converting itself into a new Russian bourgeoisie failed to come about. Instead the USSR persisted for another forty years rendering Trotsky’s theory increasingly untenable. As a consequence many Trotskyists were led to break from the orthodox Trotskyist position regarding Russia to argue that the USSR was state capitalist. In Britain the main debate on the nature of Russia arose between orthodox Trotskyism’s ‘degenerated workers’ state’ and the neo-Trotskyist version of state capitalism developed by Tony Cliff. As we pointed out in Part I, while the orthodox Trotskyist account obviously had big problems, this alternative theory of state capitalism had three vital weaknesses: 1) Cliff’s attempt to make the point of counter-revolution and the introduction of state capitalism coincide with Stalin’s first five year plan (and Trotsky’s exile); 2) his denial that the law of value operated within the USSR; and 3) his orthodox Marxist insistence that state capitalism was the highest stage of capitalism which implied that the USSR was more advanced than Western capitalism.[44]

As a result, throughout the postwar era, orthodox Trotskyists were able dogmatically to defend Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state; they were content that, while the rival state capitalist theory may appear more politically intuitive, their own was more theoretically coherent. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, many Trotskyists felt vindicated in that Trotsky’s predictions of the possible restoration of capitalism now seemed to have been proved correct, albeit rather belatedly.[45]

However, there have been a few more sophisticated Trotskyists who, in recognizing the inadequacies of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state, have sought to develop new conceptions of what the USSR was and how it came to collapse. One of the most prominent of these has been Hillel Ticktin.

Ticktin and the reconstruction of Trotskyism

By the 1970s, the chronic economic stagnation and gross economic inefficiencies of Brezhnev’s Russia had become widely recognized. Few ‘sovietologists’ were not now skeptical of the production figures pumped out by the Soviet authorities; and everyone was aware of the long queues for basic necessities and the economic absurdities that seemed to characterize the USSR.

Of course, Trotsky himself had argued that, in the absence of workers’ democracy, centralized state planning would lead to waste and economic inefficiency. Yet, for Trotsky, it had been clear that, despite such inefficiencies, bureaucratic planning would necessarily be superior to the anarchy of the market. Yet it was now becoming apparent that the gross inefficiencies and stagnation of the economy of the USSR were of such a scale compared with economic performance in the West that its economic and social system could no longer be considered as being superior to free market capitalism.

In response to these perceptions of the USSR, orthodox Trotskyists, while accepting the inefficiencies of bureaucratic planning, could only argue that the reports of the economic situation in the Soviet Union were exaggerated and obscured its real and lasting achievements. Yet it was a line that not all Trotskyists found easy to defend.

As an academic Marxist specializing in the field of Russian and East European studies, Ticktin could not ignore the critical analyzes of the Soviet Union being developed by both liberal and conservative ‘sovietologists’. In the face of the mounting evidence of the dire state of the Russian economy it was therefore perhaps not so easy for Ticktin to simply defend the standard Trotskyist line. As a result Ticktin came to reject the orthodox Trotskyist theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state and the notion that the Soviet Union was objectively progressive that this theory implied.

However, while he rejected the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state, Ticktin refused to accept the notion that the USSR was state capitalist. Immersed in the peculiarities of the Soviet Union, Ticktin maintained the orthodox Trotskyist position that state capitalist theories simply projected the categories of capitalism onto the USSR. Indeed, for Ticktin the failure of all Marxist theories of the Soviet Union was that they did not develop out of the empirical realities of the USSR. For Ticktin the task was to develop a Marxist theory of the USSR that was able to grasp the historical peculiarities of the Soviet Union without falling foul of the shallow empiricism of most bourgeois theories of the USSR.

However, in rejecting Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state Ticktin was obliged to undertake a major reevaluation of Trotsky. After all, alongside his theory of permanent revolution and uneven and combined development, Trotsky’s theory of the degenerated workers’ state had been seen as central to both Trotsky and Trotskyism. As Cliff’s adoption of a theory of state capitalism had shown, a rejection of the theory of a degenerated workers’ state could prove problematic for anyone who sought to maintain a consistent Trotskyist position. However, as we shall see, through both his reevaluation of Trotsky and the development of his theory of the USSR, Ticktin has been able to offer a reconstructed Trotskyism that, by freeing it from its critical support for the Soviet Union, has cut the umbilical cord with a declining Stalinism, providing the opportunity for a new lease of life for Leninism in the post-Stalinist era.[46]

Ticktin and Trotsky’s theory of the transitional epoch

For orthodox Trotskyism, the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state stood alongside both the theory of combined and uneven development and the theory of permanent revolution as one of the central pillars of Trotsky’s thought. For Ticktin, however, the key to understanding Trotsky’s ideas was the notion of the transitional epoch. Indeed, for Ticktin, the notion of the transitional epoch was the keystone that held the entire structure of Trotsky’s thought together, and it was only by fully grasping this notion that his various theories could be adequately understood.

Of course, the notion that capitalism had entered its final stage and was on the verge of giving way to socialism had been commonplace among Marxists at the beginning of this century. Indeed, it had been widely accepted by most leading theoreticians of the Second International that, with the emergence of monopoly capitalism in the 1870s, the era of classical capitalism studied by Marx had come to an end. As a result the contradictions between the socialization of production and the private appropriation of wealth were becoming ever more acute and could be only be resolved through the working class coming to power and creating a new socialist society.

Faced with the horrors and sheer barbarity of the first world war, many Marxists had come to the conclusion that capitalism had entered its final stage and was in decline. While nineteenth century capitalism, despite all its faults, had at least served to develop the forces of production at an unprecedented rate, capitalism now seemed to offer only chronic economic stagnation and total war. As capitalism entered its final stage the fundamental question could only be ‘war or revolution’, ‘socialism or barbarism’.[47]

Yet while many Marxists had come to the conclusion that the first world war heralded the era of the transition from capitalism to socialism, Ticktin argues that it was Trotsky who went furthest in drawing out both the theoretical and political implications of this notion of the transitional epoch. Thus, whereas most Marxists had seen the question of transition principally in terms of particular nation-states, Trotsky emphasized capitalism as a world system. For Trotsky, it was capitalism as a world system that, with the first world war, had entered the transitional epoch. From this global perspective there was not some predetermined line of capitalist development which each nation-state had to pass through before it reached the threshold of socialism. On the contrary the development of more backward economies was conditioned by the development of the more advanced nations.

It was to explain how the development of the backward nations of the world were radically reshaped by the existence of more advanced nations that Trotsky developed his theory of combined and uneven development. It was then, on the basis of this theory of combined and uneven development, that Trotsky could come to the conclusion that the contradictions of the transitional epoch would become most acute, not in the most advanced capitalist economies as most Marxists had assumed, but in the more backward nations such as Russia that had yet to make the full transition to capitalism. It was this conclusion that then formed the basis of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution in which Trotsky had argued that in a backward country such as Russia it would be necessary for any bourgeois revolution to develop at once into a proletarian revolution.

Thus, whereas most Marxists had assumed the revolution would break out in the most advanced capitalist nations and, by destroying imperialism, would spread to the rest of the world, Trotsky, through his notion of the transitional epoch, had come to the conclusion that the revolution was more likely to break out in the more backward nations. Yet Trotsky had insisted that any such proletarian revolution could only be successful if it served to spark proletarian revolution in the more advanced nations. Without the aid of revolutions in these more advanced nations any proletarian revolution in a backward country could only degenerate.

Hence Trotsky was later able to explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. The failure of the revolutionary movements that swept across Europe following the end of the first world war had left the Russian Revolution isolated. Trapped within its own economic and cultural backwardness and surrounded by hostile capitalist powers, the Russian workers’ state could only degenerate. With this then we have the basis of Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state.

Yet the importance of Trotsky’s notion of transitional epoch was not only that it allowed Trotsky to grasp the problems of transition on a world scale, but also that it implied the possibility that this transition could be a prolonged process. If proletarian revolutions were more likely at first to break out in less advanced countries it was possible that there could be several such revolutions before the contradictions within the more advanced nations reached such a point to ensure that such revolutionary outbreaks would lead to a world revolution. Further, as happened with the Russian Revolution, the isolation and subsequent degeneration of proletarian revolutions in the periphery could then serve to discredit and thereby retard the revolutionary process in the more advanced capitalist nations.

However, Ticktin argues that Trotsky failed to draw out such implications of his notion of the transitional epoch. As a result Trotsky severely underestimated the capacity of both social democracy and Stalinism in forestalling world revolution and the global transition to socialism. Armed with the hindsight of the postwar era, Ticktin has sought to overcome this failing in the thought of his great teacher.

For Ticktin then, the first world war indeed marked the beginning of the transitional epoch,[48] an epoch in which there can be seen a growing struggle between the law of value and the immanent law of planning. With the Russian Revolution, and the revolutionary wave that swept Europe from 1918–24, the first attempt was made to overthrow capitalism on a world scale. With the defeat of the revolutionary wave in Europe and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, capitalism found the means to prolong itself. In the more advanced capitalist nations, under the banner of social democracy, a combination of concessions to the working class and the nationalization of large sections of industry allowed capitalism to contain the sharpening social conflicts brought about by the heightening of its fundamental contradiction between the socialization of production and the private appropriation of wealth.

Yet these very means to prevent communism have only served to undermine capitalism in the longer term. Concessions to the working class, for example the development of a welfare state, and the nationalization of large sections of industry have served to restrict and, as Radical Chains put it, ‘partially suspend’ the operation of the law of value.[49] With its basic regulatory principle — the law of value — being progressively made non-operational, capitalism is ultimately doomed. For Ticktin, even the more recent attempts by Thatcher and ‘neo-liberalism’ to reverse social democracy and re-impose the law of value over the last two decades can only be short lived. The clearest expression of this is the huge growth of parasitical finance capital whose growth can ultimately only be at the expense of development truly productive industrial capital.

As for Russia, Ticktin accepts Trotsky’s position that the Russian Revolution overthrew capitalism and established a workers’ state, and that with the failure of the revolutionary wave the Russian workers’ state had degenerated. However, unlike Trotsky, Ticktin argues that with the triumph of Stalin in the 1930s the USSR ceased to be a workers’ state. With Stalin the bureaucratic elite had taken power. Yet, unable to move back to capitalism without confronting the power of the Russian working class, and unable and unwilling to move forward socialism since this would undermine the elite’s power and privileges, the USSR became stuck half-way between capitalism and socialism.

As a system that was nether fish nor foul — neither capitalism or socialism — the USSR was an unviable system. A system that could only preserve the gains of the October Revolution by petrifying them; and it was a system that could only preserve itself through the terror of the Gulag and the secret police.

Yet it was such a monstrous system that presented itself as being socialist and demanded the allegiance of large sections of the world’s working class. As such it came to discredit socialism, and, through the dominance of Stalinism, cripple the revolutionary working class movement throughout the world for more than five decades. Thus, although the USSR served to restrict the international operation of the law of value by removing millions from the world market, particularly following the formation of the Eastern bloc and the Chinese Revolution, it also served to prolong the transitional epoch and the survival of capitalism.

By drawing out Trotsky’s conception of the transitional epoch in this way, Tictkin attempted finally to cut the umbilical between Trotskyism and a declining Stalinism. Ticktin is thereby able to offer a reconstructed Trotskyism that is free to denounce unequivocally both Stalinism and the USSR. As we shall now see, in doing so Ticktin is led to both exalt Trotsky’s theoretical capacities and pinpoint his theoretical weaknesses.

Ticktin and the failure of Trotsky

Following Lenin’s death, and with the rise of Lenin’s personality cult, Trotsky had endeavored to play down the differences between himself and Lenin. As a consequence, orthodox Trotskyists, ever faithful to the word of Trotsky, had always sought to minimize the theoretical differences between Lenin and Trotsky. For them Trotsky was merely the true heir to Lenin.

However, by focusing on Trotsky’s key conception of the transitional epoch, Ticktin is able cast new light on the significance of Trotsky’s thought as a whole. For Ticktin, although he may well have been more politically adept than Trotsky, Lenin’s overriding concern with immediate Russian affairs constrained the development of his theoretical thought at crucial points. In contrast, for Ticktin, the sheer cosmopolitan breadth of Trotsky’s concerns in many respects placed Trotsky above Lenin with regards to theoretical analysis.

But raising the standing of Trotsky as a theorist only serves to underline an important question for Ticktin’s understanding of Trotsky. If Trotsky was so intellectually brilliant why did he persist in defending the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state long after lesser intellects had recognized that such a position was untenable? To answer this Ticktin puts forward several explanations.

First of all Ticktin argues that Trotsky made the mistake of regarding Stalin as a ‘centrist’.[50] Throughout the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) what Trotsky feared more than anything was the restoration of capitalism through the emergence of a new class of capitalist farmers and middlemen. For Trotsky at this time, Stalin, and the bureaucratic forces that he represented, was a bulwark against danger of capitalist restoration. He was a lesser of two evils. Thus Trotsky had always ended up deferring to Stalin rather than risk the triumph of the Right. It was this attitude towards Stalin as a centrist that was carried through in Trotsky’s perception of Stalin’s Russia throughout the 1930s.

While this immediate political orientation might explain the origin of Trotsky’s position with regard to Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s it does not explain why he persisted with it. To explain this Ticktin points to the circumstances Trotsky found himself in. Ticktin argues that with his exile from the USSR Trotsky found himself isolated. Being removed from the center of political and theoretical activity and dulled by ill health and old age the sharpness of Trotsky’s thought began to suffer. As a result, in the final few years of his life Trotsky could only cling to the positions that he had developed up as far as the early 1930s.

The decline of Trotsky’s thought was further compounded by the weakness of rival theories of the USSR with the Trotskyist movement. As we saw in Part I, Trotsky was easily able to shoot down the theory originally put forward by Bruno Rizzi, and later taken up by the minority faction within the American SWP, which argued that the USSR was a new mode of production that could be described as bureaucratic collectivism. The ease with which Trotsky was able to dismiss such rival theories of the nature of the USSR as being unMarxist meant that he was not obliged seriously to reconsider his own position on the Soviet Union.

Yet, as Ticktin recognizes, while such circumstantial explanations as old age, exile and lack of credible alternatives may have contributed to an understanding of why Trotsky failed to radically revise his theory of the nature of Stalin’s Russia they are far from constituting a sufficient explanation in themselves. For Ticktin there is a fundamental theoretical explanation for Trotsky’s failure to develop his theory of the USSR at this time which arises due Trotsky’s relation to Preobrazhensky.

For Ticktin, the fundamental obstacle which prevented Trotsky from developing his critique of the USSR is to be found in the very origins of this critique. As we saw in Part I, Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state originated from earlier criticisms of the Party leadership and the NEP that had been advanced by the Left Opposition during the 1920s. In advancing these criticisms, there had been a distinct division of labor. Trotsky, as the sole member of the Left Opposition within the Politburo, had concentrated on the broad political issues and detailed questions of policy. Preobrazhensky, on the other hand, had been left to set out the ‘economics’ which underlay these political and policy positions of the Left Opposition.

As we saw in Part I, Preobrazhensky had sought to develop a political economy for the period of the transition of Russia from capitalism to socialism in terms of the struggle between the two regulating mechanisms of capitalism and socialism that had been identified by the classical Marxism of the Second International. For the orthodox Marxism of the Second International, the basic regulating principle of capitalism was the blind operation of the ‘law of value’. In contrast, the basic regulating principle of socialism was to be conscious planning. Form this Preobrazhensky had argued that during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism these two principles of economic organization would necessary co-exist and as such would be in conflict with each other.

However, for Preobrazhensky, in the relatively backward conditions prevailing in Russia there was no guarantee that the principle of planning would prevail over the law of value on purely economic grounds. Hence, for Preobrazhensky, it was necessary for the proletarian state to actively intervene in order to accelerate accumulation in those sectors of the economy, such as state industry, where the principle of planning predominated at the expense of those sectors, such as peasant agriculture, where the law of value still held sway. It was this theory of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ which had underpinned the Left Opposition’s criticisms of the NEP and their advocacy of an alternative policy of rapid industrialization.

When Stalin finally abandoned the NEP in favor of centralized planning embodied in the five year plans many members of the Left Opposition, including Preobrazhensky himself, took the view that the Party leadership had finally, if rather belatedly, come round to their position of rapid industrialization. As a consequence, Preobrazhensky along with other former members of the Left Opposition fully embraced Stalin’s new turn and fell in line with leadership of the Party. Trotsky, on the other, maintained a far more critical attitude to Stalin’s new turn.

Of course, even if he had wanted to, Trotsky was in no position to fall in behind Stalin and the leadership of the Party. Trotsky was too much of an enemy and rival to Stalin for that. However, Trotsky’s broader political perspective allowed him to maintain and develop a critique of Stalin’s Russia. While Trotsky welcomed Stalin’s adoption of a policy of centralized planning and rapid industrialization he argued that it was too long delayed. The sudden zig-zags of policy from one extreme position to another were for Trotsky symptomatic of the bureaucratization of the state and Party and indicated the degeneration of Russia as a workers’ state.

Through such criticisms Trotsky came to formulate his theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. Yet while Trotsky was able to develop his critique of the new Stalinist regime in political terms, that is as the political domination of a distinct bureaucratic caste that had taken over the workers’ state, he failed to reconsider the political economy of Stalin’s Russia. In accordance with the old division of labor between himself and Preobrazhensky, Trotsky implicitly remained content with the political economy of transition that had been advanced in the 1920s by Preobrazhensky.

For Ticktin it was this failure to develop Preobrazhensky’s political economy of transition in the light of Stalin’s Russia that proved to be the Achilles’ heel of Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. Of course, given that Trotsky could at the time reasonably expect the USSR to be a short-lived phenomenon he could perhaps be excused from neglecting the long and arduous task of developing a political economy of the USSR. For Ticktin, his followers have had no such excuse. As we shall now see, for Ticktin the central task in developing Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union has been to develop a political economy of the USSR.

Ticktin and the political economy of the USSR

So, for Ticktin, the Achilles’ heel of Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state was his failure to develop a political economy of Stalinist Russia. Yet, at the same time, Ticktin rejected the notion that the USSR was in any way capitalist. For him, Trotsky had been correct in seeing the October revolution, and the subsequent nationalization of the means of production under a workers’ state, as a decisive break from capitalism. As such any attempt to develop a political economy of the USSR could not simply apply the categories developed by Marx in his critique of capitalism since the USSR had ceased to be capitalist. Instead it was necessary to develop a new political economy of the USSR as a specific social and economic system.

Ticktin began his attempt to develop such a political economy of the USSR in 1973 with an article entitled ‘Towards a political economy of the USSR’ which was published in the first issue of Critique. This was followed by a series of articles and polemics in subsequent issues of Critique and culminated, 19 years later, with his Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System. Although Ticktin’s work undoubtedly provides important insights into what the USSR was and the causes of its crisis and eventual collapse — and as such provides an important challenge to any alternative theory of the USSR — after all these years he fails to provide a systematic political economy of the USSR. As the subtitle to Origins of the Crisis in the USSR indicates, his attempt to develop a political economy of the USSR was overtaken by events and all we are left with is a series of essays which seek to link his various attempts to develop a political economy of the USSR with an explanation of the Soviet Union’s eventual demise.

As we shall argue, this failure to develop a systematic presentation of a political economy of the USSR was no accident. For us it was a failure rooted in his very premise of his analysis which he derives from Trotsky. Yet before considering such an argument we must first of all briefly review Ticktin’s attempt to develop a political economy of the USSR.

A Question of Method?

The task facing Ticktin of developing a Marxist political economy of the USSR was not as straightforward as it may seem. What is political economy? For Marx, political economy was the bourgeois science par excellence. It was the science that grew up with the capitalist mode of production in order to explain and justify it as a natural and objective social and economic system. When Marx came to write Capital he did not aim to write yet another treatise on political economy of capitalism — numerous bourgeois writers had done this already — but rather he sought to develop a critique of political economy.

However, even if we admit that in order to make his critique of political economy Marx had to develop and complete bourgeois political economy, the problem remains of how far can a political economy be constructed for a mode of production other than capitalism? After all it is only with the rise capitalism, where the social relations come to manifest themselves as relations between things, that the political economy as an objective science becomes fully possible. But this is not all. Ticktin is not merely seeking to develop a political economy for a mode of production other than capitalism but for system in transition from one mode of production to another — indeed for a system that Ticktin himself comes to conclude is a ‘non-mode of production’!

Unfortunately Ticktin not only side-steps all these preliminary questions, but he also fails to address the most important methodological questions of how to begin and how to proceed with his proposed ‘political economy’ of the USSR. Instead he adopts a rather heuristic approach, adopting various points of departure to see how far he can go. It is only when these reach a dead end that we find Ticktin appealing to questions of method. As a result we find a number of false starts that Ticktin then seeks to draw together. Let us begin by briefly examine some of these false starts.

Class

In Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, Ticktin begins with an analysis of the three main groups and classes that could be identified within the USSR: namely, the elite, the Intelligentsia and the working class. Through this analysis Ticktin is then able to develop a framework through which to understand the social and political forces lying behind the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika pursued in the final years of the USSR’s decline. Yet, despite the usefulness such class analysis may have in explaining certain political developments within the USSR, it does not itself amount to a ‘political economy of the USSR’. Indeed, if we take Marx’s Capital as a ‘model of a political economy’, as Ticktin surely does, then it is clear that class analysis must be a result of a political economy not its premise.[51]

Laws

If ‘class’ proves to be a nonstarter in developing a political economy of the USSR then a more promising starting point may appear to be an analysis of the fundamental laws through which it was regulated. Of course, as we have seen, this was the approach that had been pioneered by Preobrazhensky and adopted by Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the 1920s. Preobrazhensky had argued that the nature of the transition from capitalism to socialism had to be grasped in terms of the conflict between the two regulating mechanism of capitalism and socialism: that is between the law of value and the law of planning. Indeed, as we have also seen, one of Ticktin’s most important criticisms of Trotsky was his failure to develop Preobrazhensky’s political economy of the Soviet Union after the triumph of Stalin in the early 1930s.

It is not surprising then that we find Ticktin repeatedly returning to this line of approach in his various attempts to develop a political economy of the USSR. Ticktin proceeds by arguing that Preobrazhensky’s theory was correct for Russia up until the collectivization of agriculture and the first five year plan. Up until then there had existed a large market-oriented peasant agricultural sector alongside a state-owned and planned industrial sector (although even this was still based on quasi-autonomous enterprises run on a ‘profit and loss’ criteria). As such, the ‘law of planning’[52] and the law of value co-existed as distinct regulating mechanisms — although they both conflicted and conditioned each other through the relations both between and within the industrial and the agricultural sectors of the economy.

With the abolition of peasant agriculture through forced collectivization, and the introduction of comprehensive central planning geared towards the rapid industrialization of Russia, the two laws could no longer co-exist as distinct regulatory mechanisms that predominated in different sectors of the economy. The two laws ‘interpenetrated’ each other, preventing each other’s proper functioning. As a result there emerged under Stalin a system based neither on the law of value nor on the law of planning. Indeed, for Ticktin these laws degenerated, the law of planning giving rise to the ‘law of organization’ and the law of value giving rise to the ‘law of self-interest of the individual unit’.

Yet it soon becomes clear that as the number of laws in Ticktin’s analysis proliferate their explanatory power diminishes. In the Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, where he pursues this line of argument the furthest, Ticktin is eventually obliged to ask the question what he means by a ‘law’. He answers that a law is the movement between tow poles of a contradiction but he does not then go on consider the ground of these contradictions.

Waste

Perhaps Ticktin’s most promising point of departure is that of the problem of the endemic waste that was so apparent even for the least critical of observers of the USSR. This became most clearly evident in the stark contrast between the increasing amounts the Soviet economy was able to produce and the continued shortages of even the most basic consumer goods in the shops.

Following the rapid industrialization of the USSR under Stalin the Soviet Union could boast that it could rival any country in the world in terms of absolute levels of production of industrial products. This was particularly true for heavy and basic industries. Russia’s production of such products as coal, iron, steel, concrete and so forth had grown enormously in merely a few decades. Yet alongside such colossal advances in the quantity of goods produced, which had accompanied the startling transformation of Russia from a predominantly peasant society into an industrialized economy, the standard of living for most people had grown very slowly. Despite repeated attempts to give greater priority to the production in consumer industries from the 1950s onwards, the vast majority of the population continued to face acute shortages of basic consumer goods right up until the demise of the USSR.

So while the apologists of the USSR could triumphantly greet the publication of each record-breaking production figure, their critics merely pointed to the lengthy shopping queues and empty shops evident to any visitor to Russia. What then explained this huge gap between production and consumption? For Ticktin, as for many other theorists of the USSR, the reason clearly lay in the huge waste endemic to the Russian economic system.

Although Russian industry was able to produce in great quantities, much of this production was substandard. Indeed a significant proportion of what was produced was so substandard as to be useless. This problem of defective production became further compounded since, in an economy as integrated and self-contained as the USSR, the outputs of each industry in the industrial chain of production became the inputs of tools, machinery or raw materials for subsequent industries in the chain. Indeed. in many industries more labor had to be devoted to repairing defective tools, machinery and output than in actual production!

As a result, waste swallowed up ever increasing amounts of labor and resources. This, together with the great resistance to the introduction of new technology and production methods in existing factories, meant that huge amounts of labor and resources had to be invested in heavy industry in order to provide the inputs necessary to allow just a small increase in the output of consumer goods at the end of the industrial chain of production.

Taking this phenomenon of ‘waste’, Ticktin sought to find a point of departure for a political economy of the USSR analogous to that which is found in the opening chapter of Marx’s Capital. In Capital Marx begins with the immediate appearance of the capitalist mode of production in which wealth appears as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’. Marx then analyzed the individual commodity and found that it is composed of two contradictory aspects: exchange-value and use-value. By examining how this contradictory social form of the commodity is produced Marx was then able to develop a critique of all the categories of political economy.

Likewise, Ticktin sought to take as his starting point the immediate appearance of the Soviet economic system. However, for Ticktin, this economic system did not present itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. Indeed, for Ticktin, wealth did not assume the specific social form of the commodity as it does for capitalist societies.

Of course, as Bettelheim has pointed out, although all production is formally state owned actual production is devolved into competing units. These units of production, the enterprise and the various trusts, buy and sell products to each other as well as selling products to consumers. Therefore the market and commodities still persisted in the USSR. In response, Ticktin argues that such buying and selling was strictly subordinated to the central plan and were more like transfers of products rather than real sales. While money was also transferred as a result of these product transfers such transactions were simply a form of accounting with strict limits being placed on the amount of profits that could be accumulated as a result. Furthermore, the prices of products were not determined through the market but were set by the central plan. These prices were as a result administered prices and were therefore not a reflection of value. Products did not therefore assume the form of commodities nor did they have a value in the Marxist sense.

Hence, for Ticktin, the wealth did not present itself as an immense accumulation of commodities as it does under capitalism but rather as an immense accumulation of defective products.

So, for Ticktin, since products did not assume the form of commodities, the elementary contradiction of Soviet political economy could not be that between use-value and value, as it was within the capitalist mode of production. Instead, Ticktin argued that the elementary contradiction of the Soviet system presented itself as the contradiction between the potential use-value of the product and its real use-value. That is, the product was produced for the purpose of meeting a social need determined through the mediation of the bureaucracy’s ‘central plan’; as such, it assumed the ‘administered form’ of an intended or potential use-value. However, in general, the use-value of the product fell far short of the intended or potential use-value — it was defective. Thus as Ticktin concludes:

The waste in the USSR then emerges as the difference between what the product promises and what it is. The difference between the appearance of planning and socialism and the reality of a harsh bureaucratized administration shows itself in the product itself.

(Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, p. 134)

The question then arises as to how this contradiction emerged out of the process of production which produced such products.

For Marx the key to understanding the specific nature of any class society was to determine the precise way in which surplus-labor was extracted from direct producers. With the capitalist mode of production, the direct producers are dispossessed of both the means of production and the means of subsistence. With no means of supporting themselves on their own accord, the direct producers are obliged to sell their labor-power to the capitalist class which owns the means of production. However, despite how it may appear to each individual worker, in buying the labor-power of the workers the capitalists do not pay according to the amount of labor the workers perform, and thus the amount of value the workers create, but they pay the level of wages required to reproduce the labor-power of the workers as a whole. Since workers can create products with a value greater than the value they require to reproduce their own labor-power, the capitalists are able to extract surplus-labor in the form of the surplus-value of the product the workers produce.

Thus for Marx the key to understanding the essential nature of the capitalist mode of production was the sale of the worker’s labor-power and the consequent expropriation of surplus-labor in the specific social form of surplus-value by the class of capitalists. For Ticktin, however, the workers in the USSR did not sell their labor-power.[53]

Yet, although he denies that labor-power was sold in the USSR, Ticktin does not deny that the working class was dispossessed of the means of production. There is no question that Ticktin rejects any idea that the workers somehow owned their means of production due to the persistence of some form of ‘degenerated workers’ state’. Indeed, it is central to Ticktin’s argument that the workers alienate the product of their labor.

However, the dispossession of the direct producers of the means of production is not the only essential pre-condition for the sale of labor-power. The other all-important pre-condition of the capitalist mode of production is that there exists generalized commodity exchange. If, as Ticktin maintains, there was no generalized commodity exchange in the USSR — and thus, as he infers, neither value nor real money — how could labor-power itself assume the form of a commodity that could be sold?

Of course, Ticktin admits that workers were formally paid wages in the USSR, just as goods were bought and sold, but for him this did not amount to the real sale of labor-power. To understand why Ticktin thought this, it is necessary to look at his conception of the wage and money in the USSR.

Under capitalism the principal if not exclusive means of obtaining wealth is money. For the worker, money assumes the form of the wage. However, in the USSR, money, and therefore the wage, was far from being a sufficient or exclusive means of obtaining the worker’s needs. Other factors were necessary to obtain the goods and services the worker needed — such as time to wait in queues, connections and influence with well-placed people in the state or Party apparatus, and access to the black market. Such factors, together with the fact that a large proportion of the workers’ needs were provided for free or were highly subsidized — such as housing, child-care, and transport — meant that the wage was far less important to the Russian worker than to his or her Western counterpart. In fact it could be concluded that the wage was more like a pension than a real wage.

Under capitalism the wage appears to the individual worker as the price of their labor. The more that individual workers labor the more they are paid. As a consequence, the wage serves as a direct incentive for each individual worker to work for the capitalist.[54] In the USSR, the wage, being little more than a pension, was a far weaker incentive for the Soviet worker.

But not only was the wage an inadequate carrot, management lacked the stick of unemployment. Under capitalism the threat of the sack or redundancy is an important means through which management can discipline its workforce and ensure its control over production. In the USSR, however, the state guaranteed full employment. As a result, managers, facing chronic labor shortages, had little scope to use the threat of dismissals to discipline the work force.

Lacking both the carrot of money-wages and the stick of unemployment, management was unable to gain full control of the workers’ labor. From this Ticktin concludes that, although the workers may have been paid what at first sight appears as a wage, in reality they did not sell their labor-power since the workers retained a substantial control over the use of their labor. As the old British Rail workers’ adage had it: “management pretends to pay us and we pretend to work!”

However, although for Ticktin the workers in the USSR did not sell their labor-power, and therefore did not alienate their labor, Ticktin still argues that the workers alienated the product of their labor. Since the workers were alienated from the product of their labor they had no interest in it. Therefore the workers’ main concern in exercising their control over their own labor was to minimize it. On the other side, management, although taking possession of the final product of the labor process, lacked full control over the labor process that produced it. As a result, the elite lacked control over the production of the total product of the economy, and with this the production of surplus-product necessary to support itself.

It is with this that Ticktin locates the basis of the fundamental contradiction of the Soviet system. On the one side stood the demands of the elite for increased production necessary to secure the extraction of a surplus-product; on the other side, and in opposition to it, stood the negative control of the working class over the labor process which sought to minimize its labor. The resolution of this contradiction was found in defective production.

Through the imposition of the central plan, the elite sought to appropriate the products of the labor of the working class necessary both to maintain its own privileged position and for the expanded reproduction of the system as a whole. To ensure the extraction of a surplus-product that would be sufficient to meet its own privileged needs, and at the same time ensure the expansion of the system, the elite was obliged to set ambitious and ever-increasing production targets through the system of central planning.

However, the actual implementation of the central plan had to be devolved to the management of each individual enterprise. Faced with the ambitious production targets set out in the central plan on the one side and the power of the working class over the labor process on the other, the management of the enterprise were obliged to strike a compromise with its workers which in effect subverted the intentions of the plan while at the same time appearing to fulfill its specifications. To do this, management sought to meet the more verifiable criteria of the plan, which were usually its more quantifiable aspects, while surrendering the plan’s less verifiable qualitative criteria. As a consequence, quality was sacrificed for quantity, leading to the production of defective products.

Yet this was not all. In order to protect itself from the ever-increasing unrealizable demands of the central planners, the management of individual enterprises resorted to systematically misinforming the center concerning the actual conditions of production at the same time as hoarding workers and scarce resources. Without reliable information on the actual conditions of production, the production plans set out in the central plan became increasingly divorced from reality, which led to the further malfunctioning of the economic system which compounded defective production through the misallocation of resources.

Thus, for Ticktin, because the Russian workers did not sell their labor-power, although they alienated the product of their labor, the elite was unable fully to control the labor process. As a consequence the economic system was bedeviled by waste on a colossal scale to the point where it barely functioned. As neither capitalism nor socialism, the USSR was in effect a non-mode of production. As such, the crucial question was not how the USSR functioned as an economic system but how it was able to survive for so long. It was in addressing this problem that Ticktin came to analyze the crisis and disintegration of the USSR.

The question of commodity fetishism and ideology in the USSR

Despite the fact that the capitalist mode of production is based on class exploitation, capitalist society has yet to be torn apart and destroyed by class antagonisms. The reason for the persistence of capitalist society is that the capitalist mode of production gives rise to a powerful ideology that is rooted in its very material existence.

The basis of this ideology lies in commodity fetishism.[55] In a society based on generalized commodity exchange, the relations between people appear as a relation between things. As a result, social relations appear as something objective and natural. Furthermore, in so far as capitalism is able to present itself as a society of generalized commodity exchange, everyone appears as a commodity-owner/citizen. As such, everyone is as free and equal as everyone else to buy and sell. Thus it appears that the worker, at least in principle, is able to obtain a fair price for his labor, just as much as the capitalist is able to obtain a fair return on his capital and the landlord a fair rent on his land.

So capitalist society appears as a society which is not only natural but one in which everyone is free and equal. However, this ‘free market’ ideology is not simply propaganda. It arises out of the everyday experience of the capitalist mode of production in so far as it exists as a market economy. It is therefore an ideology that is rooted in the everyday reality of capitalism.[56] Of course, the existence of capitalism as a ‘market economy’ is only one side of the capitalist mode of production and the more superficial side at that. Nevertheless it provides a strong and coherent foundation for bourgeois ideology.

However, if, as Ticktin maintains, there was no commodity exchange in the USSR there could no basis for commodity fetishism. Furthermore, lacking any alternative to commodity fetishism which could obscure the exploitative nature of the system, there could be no basis for a coherent ideology in the USSR. Instead there was simply the ‘big lie’ which was officially propagated that the USSR was a socialist society.[57] But this was a lie which no one any longer really believed — although everyone was obliged to pretend that they did believe it.[58]

As a consequence, Ticktin argues that the nature of social relations were fully transparent in the USSR. With their privileged access to goods and services, everyone could see the privileged position of the elite and their exploitative and parasitical relation to the rest of society. At the same time, given the blatant waste and inefficiency of the system, no one had any illusions in the efficacy of ‘socialist planning’. Everyone recognized that the system was a mess and was run in the interests of a small minority that made up the elite of the state and Party bureaucracy.

But if the was no ideology in the USSR, what was it that served to hold this exploitative system together for more than half a century? Ticktin argues there were two factors that served to maintain the USSR for so long. First, there were the concessions made to the working class. The guarantee of full employment, free education and health care, cheap housing and transport and an egalitarian wage structure all served to bind the working class to the system. Second, and complementing the first, there was brutal police repression which, by suppressing the development of ideas and collective organization not sanctioned by the state, served to atomize the working class and prevent it from becoming a revolutionary class for-itself.

It was through this crude carrot-and-stick approach that the elite sought to maintain the system and their privileged place within it. However, it was an approach that was riven by contradictions and one that was ultimately unviable. As we have seen, it was these very concessions made to the working class, particularly that of full employment, which meant that the elite were unable to gain full control of the labor process and which in turn resulted in the gross inefficiency of the system. Unwilling to surrender their own privileged position, the Soviet elite were unable to move towards socialism. Therefore the elite’s only alternative to maintaining the grossly inefficient system of the USSR was to move towards capitalism by introducing the market. But such a move towards the market necessarily involved the introduction of mass unemployment and the withdrawal of the elite’s concessions to the working class.

The elite therefore faced a continual dilemma. On the one side it sought to move away from its inefficient economic system by introducing market reforms; but on the other side it feared that the introduction of such reforms would cause a revolutionary response in the Russian working class. Ticktin argues that it was this dilemma which underlay the history of the USSR following the death of Stalin and which explains the crisis that confronted Gorbachev and the final demise of the USSR.

Ticktin’s analysis of the history of the USSR and its final crisis and demise does not concern us here.[59] We now need to examine the problems of Ticktin’s ‘political economy’ of the USSR.