Conclusion

As stated in the introduction, any analysis of the Russian revolution and the society that emerged from it cannot be separated from a conception of what communism is. Indeed one way in which all the left communists, unlike Trotsky, could go beyond Second International Marxism, was by insisting that neither the transition to communism nor communism itself should in any way be identified with state-control of the means of production. Indeed nothing short of their proper socialization or communization would do. It was this perspective that allowed them to distance themselves from, and criticize Russia as being state capitalist or, as Bordiga put it, simply capitalist.

However, with regard to their specific answers to the question of what a genuine communization process would have consisted in, the situation was slightly more ambiguous. The Germans (and to some extent the Russians), in their focus on the economic sphere, ultimately ended up with a notion of communism consisting in workers’ self-management. The important differentiation between capitalism and communism was correctly seen to lie in workers overcoming their separation from the means of production. The idea was that only in the factory, only at the point of production could workers overcome the domination maintained by bourgeois politics, cease to act as isolated bourgeois individuals and act as a socialized force, as a class. This slipped into a factoryism which neglected the fact that the enterprise is a capitalist form par excellence and that if the class is united, there it is united as variable capital. It was this councilist approach that led them to work out rather mathematical accounting schemes[95] for how the transition to communism could work and elaborate schemes for how the councils could link up.

The problem with this self-management approach was of course that it seemed to imply that as long as the enterprises were managed by the workers themselves, it did not matter that capitalist social relations continued to exist. It is in this sense that the German Left never managed to make a full break from Second International Marxism’s identification with the development of the productive forces and with the working class as working class.

It was in this respect that the importance of the Italian Left came out. In emphasizing the ‘primacy of the political’, they could take a more social and holistic standpoint. Communism was not just about replacing the party with the councils, and state-control with workers control.[96] Communism, they argued, was not merely about workers managing their own exploitation, but about the abolition of wage labor, the enterprise form and all capitalist categories. The fundamental question was not so much that of ‘who manages?’ but about ‘what is managed?’

But whilst the German Left’s focus on the economic had led them into the self-management trap, one thing it did allow them to do was to emphasize the subjectivity of the working class as an agent of change. This notion of subjectivity was, if not entirely absent in the theory of the Italian Left, then reserved only for the party.

The absurdities involved in rejecting any notion of working class subjectivity became especially clear in the Italian Left’s assessment of Russia. There, they argued, communism could be represented in the correct political line of a ruling party managing a system of capitalist social relations — a ridiculously unmaterialist position — arguing that what mattered was not the social relations in a country, but the subjective intentions of those in power (a perfect justification for repression based on the notion that ‘it was for their own good they were massacred’). And it was in this respect that the Italian Left had not completely broken from the politicism/partyism of the Second International.

Indeed, it was the blind spots in each theory that led to their mutual incomprehension: whilst the Italian Left saw the Germans as nothing more than a Marxoid form of anarcho-syndicalism, the Germans in turn merely saw the Italians as a bunch of Leninists. But if the dogmatic sides of their respective theories merely served to push them further apart, it was ultimately the one-sidedness of their respective approaches that resulted in them not breaking entirely away from the dogmatism of the Second International. Whilst the Italian Left had arrived at a more adequate notion of the content of communism, it was the German Left that was to provide the form through which emancipation could be reached.

In different ways, both the German and Italian left communist currents managed to maintain a correct political perspective. While the German Left emphasized workers’ self-emancipation, the Italian Left provide a better angle on what communism would consist in. Yet, in terms of a ‘scientific’ account of the kind of society developing in the USSR, both fell down.[97]

On the one hand, the German Left slipped into a conception of ‘state capitalism’ that was not grounded in value. Without this essential category they tended, like Tony Cliff and the Trotskyists, to see the USSR as a ‘higher’, crisis-free type of economy. Bordiga’s theory, on the other hand, did not fall into the trap of seeing the USSR as a more advanced form of capitalism. Instead he recognized that Russia was in transition towards capitalism. As we shall see, this is an important insight into understanding the nature of the USSR.

But Bordiga did not really concern himself with value categories. He largely assumed that the obvious signs of capital accumulation must be based on commodities, money and wage-labor, all playing the same role as in the West. It is thus Mattick who exposed the issue more conscientiously. And if we are really to grasp the capitalist nature of the USSR, both before and since the fall of ‘communism’, we must, on the value question, provide a different answer than his. This will be explored in our final Part of this article in the next issue.