Why Russia isn’t Socialist (Pt. 2)

II. The October Revolution and the Russian Economy

The first measures that must be taken by the proletariat on taking power in a developed country, are those which aim to eliminate the capitalist characteristics of the economy. In bourgeois society, the essential commodity, and the very origin and basis of capital, is labour power as a commodity. The price of labour power, on the labour market, is expressed by a salary which is the money equivalent of the products necessary for the workers maintenance. However, even when labour power is paid at a correct value that enables the wage labourer to provide for his own and his family’s needs, the capitalist enterprise always gains a surplus from the sale of products. This surplus value or profit, this inexhaustible source of capital and prime mover of accumulation, is the economic foundation of the social power of the capitalist class.

With this established, it is evident that to be able to destroy capitalist exploitation, it is necessary to destroy the fundamental relationship that forms its basis, that is, the commodity character of labour power. This is possible only on one condition: the abolition of the form of remuneration known as wage labour. The means to achieve this end predicted by Marxism is the system of “labour vouchers”. We will look at in more detail later on.

We have already said in regard to such a system, despite the sarcastic remarks of “modern” philistines, that it is not the least bit utopian. Yet on reading Marx’s description, it becomes immediately apparent that it can only be realised in countries that have reached a sufficient degree of economic and technical development. In October 1917 however, such was not the case for proletarian Russia; on the one hand because the country was economically backward, and on the other because of the destruction caused by the civil war against the Whites and the struggle against foreign intervention.

Not only could the revolutionary Bolshevik power not address itself immediately to the fundamental task of the Socialist Revolution, i.e. abolishing capitalist relations of production, but on the contrary, first of all it had to develop them so as to be able to abolish them later on. The Russian proletariat had come to power under the impetus of a bourgeois revolution which the Russian bourgeoisie had been incapable of carrying through. The price the proletariat paid was to carry on its shoulders the heavy burden which historically devolves on the bourgeoisie: the primitive accumulation of capital.

Instead of abolishing the division of labour, based on the wage earning system, it was necessary for the proletariat to make best use of it in the form that it already existed in Russia. Far from wiping out the market, inseparable from remuneration in money for labour power, it brought it back to life. Rather than undertake the impossible tasks of socialising millions of farms, it was obliged to encourage small peasant production so as to be able to feed the towns. In a word, it had to persevere with holding the political power that would eventually destroy the capitalist economy, whilst at the same time, it was led by force of circumstances to accelerate the latter’s development!

Certain “extremists” would, retrospectively, consider this gamble as doomed to failure from the start. A bid for proletarian power in semi-feudal Russia could only – they say – lead eventually to national capitalism! But this ignores two key elements. On the one hand, the First World War caused the revolution to mature in every conceivable manner in Russia, and furnished a unique opportunity for the proletariat to reverse the relations of social forces on a world scale by taking advantage of the congenital incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to accomplish its own revolution. On the other hand, after the October insurrection and the social crisis provoked by the war in Germany, the hypothesis becomes possible through a revolution in that country. In this case, the coming to power of the German proletariat, by alleviating the economic tasks of the Bolsheviks, would have permitted the Bolsheviks to pass over the problem of accumulation of capital without risking, under one form or another, the restoration of capital’s political and social force.

For Lenin and for all the Bolsheviks – including Stalin before he theorised “Socialism in One Country” – the goal of the October Revolution was by no means the immediate transformation of the Russian economy in a Socialist sense. On the contrary, thousands of texts and speeches testify that the perspective of all Communists of the period consisted of making the power of the Soviets into a sort of progressive bastion of the world revolutionary struggle. Only if the revolution had reached the most developed European countries, where the fundamental first measures of Socialism were immediately realisable, would it have been possible to envisage their gradual realisation in Russia. Lenin emphasised this constantly with his formula: No victorious revolution in Germany – No Socialism in Russia! In order to hasten this victory, and to concentrate there all the forces of the international proletariat, and so as to free the soviet power from the ball and chain of having to restore Russian industrial production, it was ready to rent out to foreign capital the most important enterprises! This certainly gives a rather different impression to the image of a patriotic Lenin they are peddling nowadays! Lenin’s preoccupations were miles removed from the one who claimed after him, to have “made” Socialism in his country alone.

History, however, did not comply with the expectations of this generation of political giants. The Berlin Commune of 1919 was crushed, and the workers’ insurrections in central Europe were defeated. It was precisely these consecutive defeats of the International Revolution which forced the Bolsheviks to adopt a set of economic policies, which Stalinism would later consecrate with the label “Socialism” but which, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with it. In fact, measures like workers management of factories abandoned by their owners, the re-establishment of a certain level of internal trade, industrial planning and the substitution of the compulsory wheat requisitions with the tax in kind, all these were merely economic expedients, palliatives against misery and under-production. They were temporary measures in view of a recovery of the world proletarian struggle and no revolutionary of the day, worthy of the name, considered renouncing such measures.

The weakening and defeat of the international struggle was necessary in order that the greatest fraud in modern history be perpetrated. For which became expedient that all those who remained faithful to the positions of Lenin, in Russia and elsewhere, be massacred or deported: thus was consecrated as “Socialist”, the most backward and barbaric system for the exploitation of labour power every known.

Socialism abolishes the hierarchy of remuneration; the Bolsheviks were to stimulate the productivity of labour with high wages. Socialism reduces the length of the working day; the soviet power lengthened it. Socialism eliminates both money and the market; the Russian Communists gave free rein to internal trade. The Proletarian State had to accumulate capital in order to reconstruct the destroyed means of production and create new ones. In other words, the Russian proletariat had political power, but economically, it was wearing itself out keeping alive a backward country that was centuries behind.

The Bolsheviks were, however, quite aware of these necessities and contradiction. They were certain that there was one link only between the Russian proletariat and Socialism: The Communist International, directed entirely towards the proletarian struggle of Europe, Asia too.

III. Isolation and Defeat for the Russian Proletariat

Only a proletarian victory in the developed capitalist countries could help to shorten the misery and suffering of Soviet Russia, and avert the social dangers involved in reconstructing the economy. Lenin never said, or wrote, that it was possible to “make socialism” in backward Russia. He relied on the triumph of the workers’ revolution first in Germany and central Europe, then in Italy, France and England. Only with this revolution, and this revolution alone, did he hold out the possibility for a Russia of the future to be able to make its initial steps towards Socialism.

When Stalin and his cronies came to power and decreed, as though through royal edict, that Socialism was possible in Russia alone, they de facto destroyed the perspective of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. They broke the only link connecting the Russian proletariat to a possible future Socialism: separately the Russian party’s link with the European Communist Revolution.

The relations of production in Russia at that time, had (where it had been possible to go beyond the archaic stage of small production and natural economy) bourgeois foundations alone. On these foundations could develop only social strata that were eager to politically consolidate their economic advantages, and who were hostile to Socialism. These were especially the shopkeepers and small private capitalists who had had restored to them appreciable freedom of action by the NEP and the enormous peasant masses who had become fiercely conservative since being given land after the workers’ revolution.

If the revolution had succeeded in Germany, the soviet power would have been able to abide by the concessions already made to private capitalism and the Russian peasantry, and overcome all the social consequences, but to renounce the European Revolution, like Stalin, was to give free rein to capitalist relations in Russia, and to give the classes who would be the immediate beneficiaries supremacy over the proletariat. This section of the proletariat, in an extreme minority, decimated by the war against the whites, and bound by a crushing task of production had one weapon only against the speculators and the greed of the peasants: the hammer of the Soviet State. This State, however, could only remain proletarian in so far as it united with the International Proletariat against reactionary strata inside Russia. To decide that Russia was going to create “its” Socialism all by itself, was to abandon the Russian proletariat to the immense pressure of non-proletarian classes and to free Russian capitalism from all controls and restraints. What’s more, it was to transform the Russian State into an ordinary State. An ordinary State endeavouring to make Russia into a great bourgeois nation as quickly as possible.

This was the real meaning of Stalin’s “turning point” and of his formula “Socialism in one country”. In baptising unadulterated capitalism as “Socialist”, by bargaining with the reactionary mass of the Russian peasantry, by persecuting and slaughtering all revolutionaries who remained faithful to the perspectives of Lenin and to the interests of the Russian and international proletariat, Stalin was the maker of a veritable counter-revolution. However, although he accomplished this through the cruel terror of an absolute despot, he was not the initiator but the instrument.

Following the crushing of armed insurrections and the catastrophic tactical errors of the International, after the peasant raisings and the famines in Russia – defeat both on the internal and international levels – it became evident, around 1924, that the Communist Revolution in Europe was to be postponed indefinitely. From this moment, a terrible period hand to hand combat began for the Russian Proletariat with the other classes. These other classes, momentarily moved to enthusiasm for the anti-tsarist revolution, aspired henceforth to enjoy their conquest in the bourgeois way, i.e. they gave up the revolutionary perspective so as to establish “good relations” with the capitalist countries. Stalin was only the mouthpiece and the accomplisher of these aspirations.

But when we say “Russian proletariat”, we don’t mean the working masses themselves, who, afflicted by unemployment and famine, had the lifeblood squeezed out of them after their considerable effort and sacrifice, and who were incapable of political spontaneity. We refer to the Bolshevik Party, in which was condensed and concentrated the final revolutionary will of a political generation to which history no longer responded. It cannot be emphasised enough that the economic situation at the end of the civil was a terrible one, with the whole population wishing, at no matter what cost, for a return to security, bread and work. In all periods of revolutionary reflux, what triumphs is not revolutionary consciousness but the most trivial demagogy. It was all too easy under these circumstances for a few unscrupulous politicians to advocate before the hungry masses the necessity of a compromise with the capitalist West, and to stigmatise as the initiative of adventurers the grim determination of the Bolshevik minority to follow “Lenin’s line”, which consisted of subordinating Russian politics entirely to the overall strategy of the International Communist Revolution. Stalin, however – to whom the most refined progressive Western intellectuals prostrated themselves obscenely – never took the initiative, leaving to others the superhuman, and in the long run, impossible, task of reconciling the indispensable capitalist economic foundations with the retention of proletarian power.

Such an attitude made him available for the liquidation of the perspectives and raison d’être of Bolshevism.

This liquidation called for a blood-bath, certainly, but what bewilders the historian inclined towards the Russian Revolution, is that it developed within the Bolshevik Party, as if it were a matter of leadership struggles or a family feud, rather than a clash between two diametrically opposed historical perspectives. This “mystery”, we will proceed to explain in the next chapter.