Critical Theories of the Class Nature of the Soviet Union: A Marxian Survey Kamran Nayeri University of California Survey Research Center 2538 Channing Way, #5100 Berkeley, California 94720-5100 U.S.A. Tel. 510-642-6566 [email protected] March 2006 An earlier draft of this paper was presented in a Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) session at the Allied Social Science Associations conference, held in San Diego, United Stated, January 3-5, 2004. Section 3 of this paper is extracted from a book review published in the Review of Radical Political Economics Vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 413-416 and is include here with permission from URPE. Critical Theories of the Class Nature of the Soviet Union: A Marxian Survey 1. Introduction The ongoing systemic crisis of world capitalist system and solutions being imposed by the employers and their governments not only generate resistance and struggle but also an active search for a better world, for which a critical study of the Soviet experience is an integral part. This essay is a Marxian survey of three prominent critical theories of the class nature of the Soviet Union. Attention will be focused on the internal logic of these theories, their explanatory power but especially on their potential contribution to the development of a Marxian theory of transition to socialism. In October 1917, the workers and peasants of Russia inaugurated their own government. The proletarian character of this government based on the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies could be easily discerned from the January 10th 1918 resolution of the Third Congress of the All-Russia Soviets where unprecedented political, economic, social and cultural rights of workers and peasants were recognized and the socialist direction of the new society proclaimed. The new socialist civilization, in keeping with Marx’s teachings, was to be built on a scale surpassing the best capitalist world could offer. However, internal and external difficulties soon engulfed the new Soviet regime, workers’ and peasants' organizations were undermined, and deep divisions emerged within the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. The character of the new Soviet society and state became a subject of contention. Marx’s theory of communism1 developed from his radical critique of the class society in general and the capitalist system in particular. Accordingly, in Marx’s communism production, allocation and appropriation are planned by the self-governing “associated producers” as the market and the state, and with them alienation and oppression, have withered away. Such society requires a high degree of development of the productive forces (technique and culture) to unfold each person’s individuality and support its rounded development as the cooperative wealth flow abundantly to allow “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” However, Marx who was hopeful to see the socialist revolution start in France, extend to Germany, and be finally settled in England, was a materialist and a realist. He fully expected the post-revolutionary society that would issue from a successful proletarian revolution “in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still [be] stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges (Marx 1875:85).” Thus, the theory of transition from capitalism to communism remained the central issue for which no ready made prescriptions were available. In September of 1917 in preparation for this transitional phase, Lenin wrote the State and Revolution. Contrary to the anarchists, Lenin argued that the working people need their own state to advance the revolutionary transformation of the society. Still, Lenin stressed 1 In Marx, socialism was the lower stage of communism. They were both terms for a new mode of production of “associated producers.” 1 that “The working people need the state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this suppression (Lenin 1917: 408).” Against Social Democratic theories that advocated state socialism, he emphasized that “the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately (Lenin 1917:407).” Using Marx and Engels’ guidelines generalized from the experience of the Paris Commune, Lenin proposed political and administrative measures to guard against the growth of a bureaucracy in the workers state. The workers state was to be built on the basis of class struggle mass organizations of the working people formed during the revolution in place of the shattered capitalist state machinery, including its bureaucracy. This brief background is sufficient to exclude the “really existing socialism” claim as a Marxian theory of the Soviet Union. This self-serving characterization of the Soviet Union as socialist or communist was prominent among both the Stalinists and anti- communist bourgeois ideologues. In April 4, 1936 issue of Pravda, for example, Stalinists boasted that: “In the Soviet Union the parasitical classes of capitalists, landlords and kulaks are completely liquidated, and thus is forever ended the exploitation of man by man. The whole national economy has become socialistic, and the growing Stakhanov movement is preparing the conditions for a transition from socialism to communism (cited in Trotsky 1937A:107-08).” From the perspectives of Marx and Lenin, the reality was the opposite of the Stalinist totalitarian regime that was being built through successive waves of purges, imprisonment and murder of tens of thousands of communist cadres, including the bulk of the central leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and, millions of workers and peasants. Thus, I limit this essay to critical theories of the Soviet Union. 2. Trotsky: a degenerated workers state Trotsky’s critical assessment of the class nature of Soviet Union evolved over two decades. Here, I focus attention on his later writings, in particular The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1937A). As most Marxist writings, this book is written in a polemical form, principally in response to the Stalinist claim that the Soviet Union has already achieve socialism (the lower stage of communism) and is heading for its final stage of development. It is important to recognize that the book is also partly written as a defense of the Russian revolution and its achievements still present in the Soviet Union, in the face of what Trotsky (correctly) predicated as the next imperialist world war. Of necessity, my account reflects a certain degree of simplification without, I hope, misrepresenting the main logic of his position. Trotsky begins with the presumption that the most essential achievement of the October revolution was the establishment of a workers state in Russia. The new state was founded on the basis of the proletarian revolution that nationalized the social means of production, distribution, finance, and international trade. On these bases, the Soviet Union was able to begin experimentation with central planning. 2 To assess the evolution of the Soviet society Trotsky begins with Marx’s emphasis on the material and cultural prerequisites for communism (Trotsky 1937A:45-46). This, he argues “is not exhausted by a consideration of property regardless of the achieved productivity of labor (ibid. 46-47).” The necessary level of labor productivity can only be determined relative to what has been achieved in the advanced capitalist countries. This is so, not only because the workers state needs to defend itself militarily, but more importantly, because of the prevalence of “bourgeois wants” in post-revolutionary society, which is a function of the conditions of the capitalist world economy (ibid. 57). Basing himself on Marx’s view that bourgeois norms of distribution will continue to prevail after the inauguration of the workers state, Lenin had argued that bourgeois norms of distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes a bourgeois state to enforce bourgeois law supporting such distribution. It follows that in the transition period “not only will bourgeois law survives for a certain time, but also even a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie! (Lenin 1917:476)” From this Trotsky concludes the dual nature of the state in the transition period: It is “socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; it is “bourgeois, insofar as it defends distribution of life’s goods…with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing there from (Trotsky 1937A:54).” Combining these theoretical considerations with the empirical phenomenon of the malignant growth of the bureaucracy and state and their rapid alienation from workers and peasants Trotsky draws a general conclusion: The tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangles the workers’ movement in capitalist countries, would everywhere show themselves even after a proletarian revolution…[T]he poorer the society which issues from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the forms assumed by bureaucratism, and the more dangerous would it become for socialist development (ibid 55). Thus, Trotsky reviews the Soviet experience: The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the workers only juridically. In reality, he is compelled to live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage. Those hopes which the worker formerly had placed in the party and the trade union, he transferred after the revolution to the state created by him. But the useful functioning of this implement turned to be limited by the level of technique and culture. In order to raise this level the new state resorted to the old methods of pressure upon muscles and nerves of the worker. There grew up a corps of slave divers. The management of the factory became super-bureaucratic. The workers lost all influence whatsoever upon the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory…In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer.