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On the Mechanism of the Extraction and Appropriation of Surplus Value in the Soviet Society

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On the Mechanism of the Extraction and Appropriation of Surplus Value in the Soviet Society On the Mechanism of the Extraction and Appropriation of Surplus Value in the Soviet Society Fatos Nano Candidate of Economic Sciences Taken from no. 3 of the Albanian edition of the magazine “Socio- Political Studies” Nearly three decades have passed from the time the Khrushchevites usurped power in the Soviet Union and launched an attack on a broad front against the victories of socialism achieved under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. The counter-revolutionary overthrow they brought about in the superstructure, the ideology and policy of the Soviet state could not fail to bring about, as it did, the disintegration of the economic base of the Soviet society. It opened the road to far-reaching processes which led to the overthrow of socialist relations of production and the restoration of capitalism in all fields. As the 8th Congress of the PLA pointed out, the strategy of Khrushchevite revisionism had “...as its main task to liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat, to undermine the foundations of socialist society, to set the Soviet Union on the capitalist road and turn it into an imperialist superpower. Now we can all see that great counter-revolutionary transformation which has occurred in the Soviet Union.”* * Enver Hoxha. Report to the 8th Congress of the PLA, “8 Nentori” Publishing House, Tirana 1981, p. 239, Eng. ed. 1. The Khrushchevite-Brezhnevite reforms and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet society The new revisionist bourgeoisie worked intensively for reorganizing the Soviet economy on capitalist bases, building and setting in motion a specific mechanism for the extraction and appropriation of surplus value, for the capitalist plunder and exploitation of the Soviet working people. This mechanism of exploitation of man by man assumed its form and content in the Soviet society in the process of the implementation of capitalist reforms at the base and superstructure, which they began with great vigour after the death of Stalin. The essential thing in these far-reaching capitalist transformations in the Soviet society was the radical change of the relations of production, the introduction of such a system of organization and management of the economy aimed only at ensuring maximum profit at all costs, vesting the state with the prerogatives of a collective capitalist body and establishing the rule of state monopoly capitalism in every field and to proportions unprecedented in the history of imperialism. At the turn of 1970 the capitalist reforms of the Soviet economy were operating in 90 per cent of the industrial enterprises which supplied 92 per cent of the total industrial production. In transport these reforms were accomplished in 1968 and in building they were introduced on a large scale over the period 1969-1970. Whereas the state agricultural sector was reformed at slower rates. In 1970 only one third of the “state farms”* were involved in this process. * Pravda. June 27. 1969, January, 25. 1970. and February 4, 1971. Through these reforms the Khrushchevites delivered a blow first at the fundamental theses of the Marxist- Leninist theory on commodity production and the operation of the law of value in socialism. The socialist production of goods was identified in theory and practice with the capitalist commodity production and, on this basis, the whole economic mechanism was reformed. Through the intermediary of the state, the means of production and the management of the economy were concentrated in the hands of the new bourgeoisie. Previous laws arid, practices with a socialist content were replaced with new ones, which gave the state and party bureaucracy complete freedom to express and achieve its capitalist interests and aspirations without impediment. Directors of various enterprises and institutions were vested with broad rights and powers to direct and manipulate production and distribution, to hire and fire workers, to divide up profits, and other competences which were used to ensure and broaden the privileges and increase the incomes of the castes in power at the expense of the working masses. Profit was placed at the foundation of all economic activity, as a regulator of production and distribution, as “the supreme and general criterion which characterizes the activity of the enterprise in the highest degree.”* The centralized economy was made to coexist with the market economy and the offer-demand capitalist mechanism was made, to a considerable degree, the regulator of the production – consumption relations. The state gradually lost control of the amount of work and consumption – the two main levers of socialist economy, and the Soviet economy found itself caught in the grip of contradictions between its bureaucratic centralism of the monopoly type and widespread economic liberalism at the base. Under the slogan of the “operational independence of enterprises” and “the elimination of the intermediate administrative links”, direct capitalist links were established between the units of production on the basis of the market mechanism. The transition to the buying and selling of the means of production, like any other commodity, turned them into fundamental capital, while the system of self-coverage and self- financing, the so-called complete self-supporting system based on narrow capitalist profitability in every link of the economy, was placed at the foundation of the new capitalist economic mechanism. Centralized state financing of capital investments and means of circulation was limited and gradually covered by means of decentralized sources and bank credits. The planned management of the economy has left its place in practice to the free operation of the economic laws and categories of the capitalist mode of production. * Pravda, November 21. 1965. The Khrushchevite economic reforms began with the buying and selling of the means of production as commodities. “With us”, the Soviet revisionist press wrote at the height of these reforms, “the equipment of enterprises with means of production is dealt with and done in the form of buying and selling.”* In 1971 the buying and selling of the means of production accounted for two thirds of all the goods turnover in the Soviet Union and, in 1974, 70 per cent of them were bought or sold by direct contracts between producer and consumer enterprises.** * Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, no. 43, 1965. ** Ekonomicheskiye Nauki, no. 11, 1971 and Voprosi Ekonomikii, no. 4. 1974. Under the new Constitution, which is typical of those of state capitalist enterprises, which came into effect on October 4, 1965, “The enterprise exercises the right to possession of the property under its operational control”, “the director of the enterprise may act on its behalf, dispose of the property and funds of the enterprise, employ and dismiss the staff”.* * Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, no. 43, 1965. The relations that were established in the Soviet society between the state and the capitalist managers of state or collective property objects, as juridical persons, are of the same type as the relations existing in monopoly capitalism of today between the private or collective owners of capital and the managers who administer the capitalist enterprise without being its owners. In the present-day Soviet Union the social- imperialist state has the rights of the monopoly owner of the main means of production, the land, the mines, the water resources, building lots, etc., realized in the form of rents, interest rates and taxation on productive funds which are leased to different groups of the bourgeoisie of city and countryside. These monopoly rights are materialized in the form of rent for fundamental capital, with each state enterprise contributing to the state budget an average of 15 per cent of the value of its production funds; in the rents and taxes on the collective forms of economy (collective farms, building construction cooperatives, communal services, etc.), or on the private forms of income from capitalist enterprises in agriculture (personal plots of the cooperative members), trade (the black market), services and crafts (the pursuit of professions for private profit), etc. In order to express these new capitalist relations between the state, the organizations and citizens in the period October 1, 1966 – July 1, 1967, in terms of value the general reform of wholesale prices was carried out, which brought about the average increase by 8 per cent of wholesale prices for all industry, which, in turn, was followed by new general price rises in 1969, 1974 and 1979.* At the foundation of the new system were placed “fluctuating prices” intended to achieve an “equilibrium between offer and demand” as “very important and effective means of regulating the social processes of reproduction”.** Thus, the processes of redistribution of the national income in the Soviet economy were placed on capitalist bases. Besides the fact that prices are fixed from above, broad margins are allowed to the state monopoly unions in the fluctuation of prices, which are “motivated” by “increases due to new products of higher quality and greater effectiveness”.*** So, high-priced goods, especially “new” products and assortments which, in fact, are the same as the “old” ones with slight modifications, continue to pour onto the capitalist Soviet market. The final aim of all this is to guarantee higher norms of profit. The Soviet press admits that “there is the danger that prices may continue to go up constantly, as the various economic units try to increase their income (profits) in the easiest
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