Why Russia isn’t Socialist (Pt. 6)

VII. The False “Communism” of the Kolkhoz

The compromise with small production shouldn’t be attributed, as Stalin’s international band of servile adulators would have one believe, to the carefully weighed-up inspiration of a brilliant leader, but rather to the despotic requirements of particular political and economic conditions. These conditions can only be adequately analysed by returning to the previously mentioned discussion within the Bolshevik party on the agrarian question. We’ll see that Trotsky’s left gave priority to industrial development as the indispensable prior condition for putting agriculture on its feet, whilst Bukharin’s right prioritised capital accumulation by the rural middle classes.

It should be recalled of that debate the categorical difference which became apparent between the preoccupations of the left and the right of the party on the one hand, and those of the Stalinist centre on the other. The latter interested itself little in the respective reasonableness of the theses that it had to deal with; for it, being an expression of the Russian national State, what mattered was the ruthless elimination of the last phalanx of the party. Stalinism was acting already on its specific terrain: the abandonment of the struggle for the World Revolution, the stabilisation and consolidation of existing structures, and the transformation of the centre for the revolutionary direction of the World Proletariat into a mere, national State apparatus. Of Stalin’s intentions and ambitions, neither Bukharin nor Trotsky were yet fully aware. The importance of the decisions on which they were divided was of more importance to them than the sordid manoeuvrings of the “secretary general” for nothing was really viable if the International Revolution didn’t gain second wind. With this hope, their respective positions took on for their passionate defenders the nature of an “All or nothing” gamble, which engaged them in intransigence as opposed to conciliation. In Trotsky’s eyes, who saw salvation only in a thorough industrialisation, Bukharin – traitorously used and defended by Stalin – appeared to be defending the rich peasant. For Bukharin, prioritising industrialisation was full of undesirable bureaucratic consequences, and it seemed better that the accumulation of capital be confined to a rural bourgeoisie with which we would eventually “settle accounts”. The harshness of this conflict between the right and the left, equally committed to maintain the economic bases the least unfavourable to the dictatorship of the proletariat, hid from view the menace which weighed on the political base from the centre. Both would underestimate the counter-revolutionary danger that this represented.

In actual fact, it was entirely with political aims in view that Stalin supported the “Bukharin solution”. Linking it from them on to the liquidationist formula of “Socialism in one country”. On the other hand, the slogan “Peasants Enrich Yourself” hadn’t had the effect on the economic level counted on by the right. The middle peasant, instead of increasing his working capital as hoped for by Bukharin, instead increased his personal consumption. The production of grain collapsed to the point of giving rise once again to the spectre of famine in the towns.

In January 1928, the production of corn was 25% below that of the preceding year, showing a deficit of 2 million tons. The Stalinist direction of the party and State – uncontested since the 15th congress and excluding the left – reacted by sending armed contingents into the towns. Repression and confiscation of stocks alternated with peasant rebellions and massacres of workers dispatched by the party to the countryside. By April, the corn reserves are somehow or other restored, whilst the central leadership backs out, condemning the “excesses” it itself had ordered. Can it really be said – as one is given to believe by every foreign language catechism bearing the Stalinist imprimatur – that it was all a matter of a line of conduct sagely elaborated? In reality, the central committee acted through panic and the grossest possible empiricism. It didn’t set out, wrote Trotsky, with any particular political line, and adopted policies that were valid for only a few months at a time, not to mention years! In July, the central committee forbids all seizure of corn, whilst increasing the price. At the same time it leads a violent campaign against the kulaks who the right were accused of defending. Still in July – just a few months now separating us from the forced collectivisation that will follow – Stalin lays the blame on “those who think that individual exploitation has had its day”, who, he exclaims “have nothing in common with our party”! Although the first five year plan, adopted at the end of 1929, foresaw only 20% collectivisation of the land, and that only by 1933, the idea of the kolkhoz was taken up by the central committee, and propagated under the boastful slogan: “The introduction of Communism into agriculture”.

Attacked from April 1929, Bukharin capitulated in November under an avalanche of insults, slanders and threats of the purest Stalinist stamp. Then, in accordance with a concept of irresponsibility, which has since spread down to the very last cell of the national communist parties, it is the Right which becomes the scapegoat for the failure of the Bukharin formula. The clique which has ever been unable to take any decision which doesn’t involve repression, will emerge bedecked in haloes from the discovery of a “solution” which has nothing whatsoever to do with Socialism: a collection of co-operatives which, operating within the market system, will end up escaping from all State “control and accounting”, and which will display the economic insufficiencies of small production in con junction with the backward and reactionary mentality of the peasant.

During the second half of 1929 and throughout the following year, what the central committee will refer to as “dekulakisation” and “collectivisation” unfolds amidst incredible high-handedness, violence and confusion. It is apparent once again that political schemes prevail over economic initiative because of the threat of famine and unrest; it becomes a matter of turning the perennial hatred of the poor peasant against the middle peasant, and thus bypassing a difficult obstacle that endangers the very existence of the State.

In fact hardly any preparations are made for this “collectivisation” with only 7,000 tractors provided for everybody, whilst according to Stalin 250,000 are required! Then again, in order to incite the small producers to join the Kolkhoz, a grant of cattle is made to them. The result is that the ones already in their possession are then sold or eaten! The immediate consequences of the measures prove catastrophic, provoking in certain regions an armed rebellion of the peasants against the functionaries who collectivise everything right down to glasses and shoes!

By the time the Spring sowing comes around, the dread of civil war moves the government to condemn the “excesses” of collectivisation and to allow the peasant to leave the kolkhoz; this provokes a mass exodus reducing the number of kolkhozians by half. Trotsky was to observe “the film of collectivisation going in reverse”. In order that a new influx of peasants into the kolkhozes is possible, and to enable Stalin to conclude that “collectivisation is a success”, it will be necessary that he make considerable concessions, which will cancel out socially anything that is technically “collective” in the kolkhoz. But before looking at the content, it is important we explain the causes of collectivisation itself.

According to the opinion shared by Stalinists and their left adversaries alike, it was a response rendered necessary by the blackmail exercised on the Soviet power by the rich rural bourgeoisie (the kulaks) whose importance hadn’t stopped increasing since the revolution. The scarce documents at our disposal tend to show, on the contrary, the extension of production by the small and middle peasants, whose very existence considerably slowed up the indispensable condition for the progressive elimination of small production in the countryside – the devolvement of wage labour. Under these circumstances, collectivisation isn’t a “veering to the left” of Stalinism, a stray “socialist” impulse of the State bureaucracy, but is the only means available in the backward conditions of the Russian countryside, to impel – in an emergency and in response to a severe crisis – the general course of the economy towards capitalism.

In fact there are several reasons for thinking that Stalin embarked on this adventure because of the success of the grain requisitions that commenced in 1929, the favourable reports on the development of the co-operatives, and the conviction that the peasantry as a whole would be unable to put an effective resistance. For whatever reason, the determinism of facts, if not the statistical proof, is persuasive: the “kolkhoz-form” turns out to be the only one possible given the economic, social and political conditions that are the result of the irretrievable reflux of the International Revolution.

Any political solution in the end survives only in so far as it eliminates those solutions which lack the indispensable conditions. What is evident for revolutionary solutions is as true for counter-revolutionary ones. After the proletariat’s superhuman effort in Russia, capitalism was now unable to return to the “under-developed” vassal form which it had assumed under the tsars, neither could it be defeated by Socialism because the International Revolution had been defeated. The construction as an “intermediate solution” of a national capitalism – in other words an autonomous centre for the accumulation of capital in Russia – was possible under these conditions only by stabilising the immensely conservative social force represented by the Russian peasantry in the kolkhozes.

This particular road, which one could call “Russian capitalism mark 2” expresses the complicated dialectic of the social upheavals in the imperialist phase: The capitalist mode of production for the Russian economy of the time is revolutionary, but is made possible only by the victory of the world counter revolution. The proletarian elimination of the Russian bourgeoisie that had failed in its historic task achieved nothing less than the triumph of bourgeois relations of production! It is understandable that these contradictory events, forming an object of profound perplexity for an entire historic generation of revolutionaries, considerably complicates the nonetheless indispensable act of clarification. It is possible, however, to sum things up by going back to an old touchstone of Lenin’s formulated well before the victory of 1917, and which poses the fundamental alternatives for modern Russia; the proletariat for the revolution or the revolution for the proletariat? Stalinism is, in the final analysis, the realisation of the first part of the formula to the detriment of the second; thanks to the blood of the Russian proletariat, modern Russia founded its national State. What does it matter if the class to whom this task has historically been given is physically destroyed, if the relations of production which are installed, after several decades of upheaval are the relations proper to this class and guarantee its reappearance in the more or less distant future.

The social type of the kolkhozian form incarnates the long historic tradition which has been necessary for it to come about. As collective farm worker, the kolkhozian – who receives a fraction of the product proportional to his provision of work – is related to the wage-earners of industry. He will never be a wage-earner proper though, until a further evolution of unknown duration has taken place because of his plot of land. He isn’t propertyless, but an owner of means of production, even if reduced to two or three hectares of land, a few head of cattle and his own house. Under this last aspect, he appears similar to his counterpart in the west, the smallholder. But, as distinct from the latter, who is ruined by the usurer, the bank and the market fluctuations, he cannot be expropriated; the little that belongs to him is guaranteed by law. The kolkhozian is therefore the incarnation of the compromise between the ex-proletarian State and the small producers passed on in perpetuity.

The indispensable condition for Socialism is the concentration of capital. Whilst the confiscation by the proletariat of ultra-centralised forms like trusts, cartels and monopolies is possible because property and management have long since become dissociated in these institutions, when considering the myriad of kolkhozian micro-proprietors it becomes unthinkable other than at the expense of long periods of failure and defeat. Not only is this Socialist perspective totally excluded without a new revolution, but even the simple concentration of capital comes up against difficulties, to the extent in fact that today’s Russia endeavours to achieve it by going back to the start of a process already completed by the developed countries. This is the significance of the principles of competition, of profitability on which the Russian leaders probably depend to eliminate the non competitive kolkhozes and, in the long run, to transform their members into bone fide wage-earners. We will next examine the stages already completed within this long, drawn out process.

The rural collectivism of Russia isn’t Socialist, but Co-operative. Trapped within the laws of the market and the value of labour power, it shows all the contradictions of capitalist production without partaking of its revolutionary element which is the elimination of the small producer. But it has allowed the national State, firmly propped up on the “stable” peasantry, to realise at the expense of incalculable proletarian suffering, its primitive accumulation and achieve its only modern capitalist element: State industrialism.