Why Russia isn’t Socialist (Pt. 7)

VIII. All the Defects of Capitalist Agriculture with None of the Advantages

Socialism is, above all, the abolition of relations of exchange founded on value, and the destruction of their fundamental components: capital, wages and money. These categories the kolkhoz guarantees through the transformation of the small rural producers, whose social position it crystallises, partly thanks to remuneration in money (or in negotiable products) for their work on a co-operative farm and partly through allowing for the individual exploitation of plots of privately owned land and cattle, the produce of which can be sold on the open market. Far from being a kind of “Socialism”, the Kolkhoz is akin to the “self-management” systems which exist in certain of the newly independent underdeveloped countries; there, by usurping terminology in just the same way as their Russian forbears, such systems serve to conceal their role as historical stopgap between the archaic natural production preceding capitalism and the latter’s full development.

After having examined the political motivations for Russian “forced collectivisation”, and drawn attention to the support given to the Stalinist counter-revolution by the immense soviet peasantry, we must now show that it is by this path – a meandering one but with definite salient features – that an out and out national capitalism was founded on the ruins of the October Revolution.

The personality of the kolkhozian reflects well enough the economic and social impasse of a revolution that, within its national frontiers couldn’t bypass the stage of a bourgeois historical transformation. The kolkhoz, a transitional solution necessitated by the abandonment of the international revolutionary strategy, continues to represent the main obstacle to a rapid development of capitalism in Russia. It is an obstacle that certainly doesn’t denote the intransigent survival of an “archaic road” to Socialism as Trotskyists have maintained, despite all evidence to the contrary. In fact rather it demonstrates the heavy tribute paid by the proletariat to history when the counter-revolution, after having clearly broken with the perspective of Socialism, doesn’t even offer the creation of its most radical social and economic premises by way of compensation.

By revealing the backwardness and economic difficulties of present-day Russia, from which the politicians and economists of the west believe it is possible to deduce a “failure of Communism”, we wish instead to establish the real causes. This is not just in order to counter the Stalinist lies and the illusions of those who maintain the survival in Russia of “conquests for Socialism”, but rather to disprove critics who reproach Lenin with having imprudently taken the path of State capitalism. The kolkhoz is neither a “Socialist accomplishment”, or an expression of State capitalism. Its beneficiaries are peasants who supply to the collective fund a parcel of land and a certain number of cattle (if they were without them, the State provided them). The kolkhozian participates in the collective valorisation of all the plots, henceforth reunited, and of the herds thus constituted. As a result of this, he receives a part of the product proportional to the number of days set aside for work, meanwhile having at his disposal a plot of land and cattle, the products of which he can uses he pleases.

Through his circumstances as much as by his social psychology, the kolkhozian is as foreign to Socialism as the Kentish market gardener or the winegrower of a Co-operative in the South of France. The way his labour is remunerated in the collective farm is related to that of the wage labourer, but also to that of the small shareholder in the capitalist countries, for whilst he receives a part of the profit of the enterprise, the fact of his minuscule ownership confers on him a position identical to that of the peasant smallholder in the west. The “personality” in the rural society of the USSR who most approximates to proletarians in the capitalist west and susceptible to behaving as such, is the sovkhozian. But the sovkhos, or State enterprise represents only a tiny part of Russian agrarian production.

The kolkhoz, from whichever angle it is considered, is the most reactionary element both socially and economically in soviet society, not only because of the psychological conservatism of its members, but because of the burden it exerts on the only modern class: the proletariat. Indeed, one can easily see why it was that at the time of the last world war the Russian rural small producer – saved from famine and expropriation by the kolkhoz – didn’t begrudge his blood to defend, along with the Stalinist State, the guarantees of survival and stability that the latter granted him. However, it is necessary to consider the entire Russian economic and social structure to understand that this survival and this stability, in the final analysis, is due to the overexploitation of the proletariat. The mediocrity of conditions in the Russian countryside should not deceive us: the kolkhozian system, beyond the fundamental distortions that it accentuates in the capitalist nature of Russian relations of production, constitutes the main obstacle to a general rise in the standard of living.

Imposed by Stalinism’s political strategy, which ceased to link the destiny of the Russian State to that of the International Proletariat, the kolkhozian form has become quasi-ineradicable, to the extent that it can only be destroyed – as yearned for by present day soviet leaders – through competition from a more productive form. This though is highly unlikely, unless through a general subversion, in the short term. In this connection, some figures will go towards filing out these ideas: in Russia, the average yield of cereals despite increasing between 1913 to 1956 by 25% as compared to around 30% in the United States and Canada, is still manifestly insufficient given demographic growth. The peasant population is still very high, a reliable indicator of the feeble agricultural productivity, in 1956 it was 42% of the population as against 12% in the U.S.A. and 28% in France, and there is the frightful situation regarding livestock which, excepting a spectacular growth in pigbreeding (+63%) – diminished by about 20% from the level in 1913 for beef and dairy cattle.

This deficiency of the kolkhozian system resides not only in the inadequacy of its production, but also increasingly in its overall management. The Russian State selling tractors instead of hiring them to the kolkhozes lost the sole means of pressure at its disposal for laying down the production of indispensable foodstuff; which prior to the famous Khruschev reform, it had fixed in price and quantity. The original promoter of this reform was afterwards observed dashing around the Russian countryside and exhorting without success the kolkhozians to produce corn, instead of barley and oats which allow the considerably more lucrative rearing of pigs. Thus under Russian pseudosocialism, the appetite for lucre of the kolkhozian enterprises prevails over the pressing need to feed the allegedly in power “people”!

This doesn’t mean on the other hand that the lot of the kolkhozians themselves is a wonderful one. Quite the reverse in fact, for after deductions are made from the aggregate product of the kolkhoz (amongst which figure the same rubrics that govern all enterprises in the west, notably a rate of investment at a comparable level) there remains little to “divide” amongst its members. This fact, in constraining the kolkhozian to make up his inadequate “wage” by the sale of products from his personal plot, aggravates yet again the anarchy that is rampant in the provisioning of the population.

In reality, the feeble productivity of cereals (which is still the basis of the Russian diet) combines with the de facto independence of the kolkhoz and results in its tendency to produce not what is indispensable but what gives the best return, thereby decreasing the availability of foodstuffs on the official market and causing the price to climb in the “parallel” market. Thus the kolkhozian gains as much from selling the produce of his plot at market, as much as from his labour in the kolkhoz. To get an idea of the price which the urban wage earner must pay for his existence, we need only know that in 1938, three-quarters of the agricultural products put on the market came from individual plots, with less than a quarter provided by kolkhozes, and still today half of the total income of the kolkhozian is derived from the exploitation of his individual plot.

We lack space here to relate how it was that the “Khruschev reform” of the kolkhozes imposed itself on the soviet leadership (covered in our party work entitled “Dialogue with Stalin”) but it shows that the Russian economy – and particularly its Achilles’ heel, agriculture – obeys the inexorable laws of capitalism. The sole irrefutable criterion of Socialism is the triumph of use value over market value: not until this has become a reality can one affirm that production serves the needs of people and not capital. The pseudo-socialist agriculture of the USSR strikingly illustrates the opposite, that it is market laws and not the most fundamental needs of workers which determine qualitatively and quantitatively kolkhozian production.

Even the development of the Russian economy as a whole – which both permits at the same time necessitates access for Russia to the world economy – serves further to throw light on it’s contradictions. International competition requires that the costs of production are kept down, thus agricultural prices are lowered so as to enable salaried labour to be fed without having to pay out too much. This then results in one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, that since natural limitations exist in the agricultural sector on the turnover of capital, the latter is directed by preference towards industry. The growth of agricultural productivity, which, despite the above, western capitalism attains (thanks to the industrialisation of cultivation and the time-honoured expropriation of the small producer) is far more difficult for Russian capitalism, because of the heavily entrenched kolkhozian sector, which the soviet power endeavours to make successful merely by “selecting” profitable kolkhozes over unprofitable ones.

One can imagine the degree of exploitation imposed by this same soviet power on its industrial wage-earners in order to lower its costs of production, thereby compounding the endemic misery of the agricultural sector (due to the reasons we have just given with, the most barbarous exploitation of the workers, of whom we will speak in our next and final part.

Russian capitalism, like all youthful capitalisms, throws light in the clearest way on the contradictions of capitalism in general: for this reason, its international lackeys won’t be able to cover up the exploitative nature of so-called “Socialism in one country” and maintain indefinitely this superstition which disarms the proletariat, in every country in the world, before the bourgeoisie.

IX. The Reality of Russian Capitalism

Evidence for the exploitation of labour power doesn’t reside only in the fact that the class which works receives only a portion of the social product, whilst they who do nothing award themselves a fat slice from for their own personal consumption. Such an ’injustice’ doesn’t contain in itself the perspective of the possible and necessary disappearance of capitalism. What condemns the latter on the historical level is that it finds itself having to transform an ever increasing part of the social product into capital: a blind social force which survives only by exasperating more and more its own contradictions, the revolt by the class which is its main victim.

Denouncing the existence of this blind social force in allegedly “Socialist” Russia, isn’t therefore, as the Stalinists unconditionally assert, to “attack and defame Communism”, but to unmask its most infamous forgery. It is to orientate the instinctive hostility of workers as regards manifestations of capitalism, against its inner core and against its murderous categories: wages, money and competition. It is to demonstrate that the proletarian movement has been beaten because it capitulated, in Russia as elsewhere, before these features of capitalism.

Others have described much better than ourselves the ferocious exploitation of labour power in Russia. We will therefore limit ourselves to illustrating the causes with one of the most characteristic laws of capitalism: that of the increasing growth – as born out in all bourgeois countries – of the sector that produces capital goods (sector A), to the detriment of sector B which produces consumer goods.

Those who jeered at Hitler’s formula “Guns before butter” and who now imitate him with their “strike force”, were able to translate the dictum into Russian as follows: machines before shoes, heavy industry before light, and accumulation before consumption. Some figures will suffice to illustrate this. From 1913 to 1964, total Russian industrial production had been multiplied by a factor of 62. That of sector A by 141, and that of sector B by 20. Taking demographic growth between these dates into account, the capital goods sector increased by a factor of 113 times, whilst the consumer goods sector increased only 12 fold.

More important still are the social effects of this conflict between production and consumption in the USSR. The Russian economy can make up for the “backwardness” of light industry and cure its deficiencies, but it can no longer free itself from the contradiction that is inseparable from capitalism; accumulation of riches at one extreme and poverty at the other.

Already the engineer, the technician and the specialist have their villas on the Black Sea. But to the unskilled labourer, the Tartar, the Kyrgyz and the Kalmouk uprooted from their rural or natural existence, there remains only the same misery that is the lot of the Algerian and the Portuguese in France, or the southern immigrant in Italy. That this monstrous aspect of the “Russian model” of Socialism no longer shocks today’s workers is the most damning indictment of all that history will make against Stalinism, which reduces the terms “Socialism” and “capitalism” to being merely different labels for the same thing.

Seeing that labourers and workers accept piecework as being eternal, along with all the other aspects of competition between those who give their labour-power, it is easy for intellectuals and opportunists – who are convinced that the principal merit of the October Revolution is that Russia was brought out of economic backwardness – to equate socialism with accumulation of capital. The fact that the entire Third-World in revolt against imperialism in its turn makes this formula its own, demonstrates the full extent of the defeat of the proletarian movement, which destroyed not only the life force of the working class, but more serious still, affected its political consciousness. To follow this terrible “path to Socialism” is to condemn all proletarians of the world, each in their turn, to pass through the Calvary of horrors which is the mark of capitalism everywhere.

It suffices to see what it was like in Russia under Stalin. The five-year plans – which it is all too easy for the western intellectual who has never touched a tool in his life to admire – were literally a worker’s hell, a carnage of human energy. Even the most basic protection of the workers’ interests were suppressed, making the lot of the Russian wage earners – by the institution of “work passes” – the same as the French wage earners under the iron rod of the second empire. They humiliated the workers with the infamous methods of Stakhanovism; recruited labour under the blows of repression; wasted it usually in useless “projects”; called the fruits of bureaucratic negligence sabotage; and brought to trial in monstrous mediaeval trials those who were to be baptised “trotskists”. These “Stalinist excesses” were not due to the “specific conditions” of Russian “Socialism” as those who owe their sinecures to bureaucrats or politicians would have us believe, but to general universal conditions appropriate to the genesis of all capitalism. The primitive accumulation of English capital executed thousands of free peasants; that of Russian neo-capitalism transforms Russian citizens into political criminals, so as best to turn them into convicts: during the second world war, the chiefs of the NKVD (the political police) finding itself short of labour in the concentration camps, made this edifying self-criticism: we haven’t been vigilant enough in our political surveillance!

All these atrocities have been committed by burning incense to a false god, with the praises of Socialism sung, and sacrifices made to production! The post-war industrial growth kept up the pretence. According to Stalin, decadent capitalism was no longer capable of developing the productive forces. For the Western “Communists” ensconced in bourgeois governments of patriotic reconstruction, these words were gold dust, with strikes became “weapons of the Trusts” the proof of Socialism in the USSR was to be discovered in the ascending curve of the indices of Russian production, whilst in the capitalist West, they stagnated once again.

The illusion was to last exactly as long as it took for the Western economy to take off in a new direction. It is a constant in the history of capitalism that the rate of growth of production diminishes as capitalism gets older. This rate, markedly higher for the young Russian capitalism which started from virtually nothing, was bound eventually to assume its correct place behind those capitalisms; which although undoubtedly older, had been considerably rejuvenated by wartime destruction. If the annual rate of growth was really a criteria of Socialism, it would be necessary to admit that Federal Germany and Japan, whose volume of production gallops forward at a hallucinatory pace, are more Socialist than Russia! In reality, the average increase in production in Russia has progressed as follows: 22.6% from 1947-1951, 13.1% from 1951-1955, 9.1% from 1959 to 1965. This squeezing effect, which is verified in the history of all capitalisms, shows that the Russian economy missed out on none of its essential characteristics.

The Stalinist bluff as regards the irresistible march of Russian production was bound to be called after having served as a pretext for the liquidation of “the cold war” and the reconciliation of the Russians to the Americans. Not only the “miracles” of Soviet production, in spite of the fanfares of Khruschev, have failed to convince the latter of “the superiority of the Socialist system over the capitalist system” (not surprisingly!), but the promoter of “competition between different systems” had also to recognise the necessity that the Russians join the western school of technology.

The last veils concealing the reality of Russian capitalism are removed by the economist Lieberman with his keynotes: productivity of labour and profitability of enterprises. The phase of primitive accumulation of capital in the USSR is achieved: Russian production strives to find a way into the world market and is therefore contorting itself to meet all its demands. The market is a place where commodities come face to face. To say commodities is to say profit. Russian production is also production for profit. But this term must be taken in its Marxist sense – as surplus value destined to be converted into capital – and not in its vulgar formulation as “the bosses profit”.

Assuming this crass disguise, it was easy for the Stalinists to deny the existence of profit since private property in the means of production doesn’t exist in the USSR. As for their left adversaries who maintain that Russian labour power is exploited, they confine themselves for the most part within juridical and purely formal criteria, by invoking the existence of a “bureaucracy” which arbitrarily monopolises the national profit.

This explanation simply isn’t one. “Bureaucracy”, by-and-large has always appeared at definite moments in the genesis or evolution of all the important modes of production Well then, it is the nature of these modes of production which determines the roles and privileges of the bureaucracy and not the other way around. After all, the structures of modern capitalism, in their “traditional” as much as in their Russian expressions, tend to link up. The capitalism of Europe and America “bureaucratises” itself to the extent that, property and administration having been dissociated there for a long time, the function of the State becomes determinative and engenders a whole Mafia of “managers” and speculators who are the real masters of the economy; meanwhile, Russia, which is going through its’ “countdown” to “liberalisation”, relaxes State control of production and preaches the virtues of competition, commerce and free enterprise. This process in Russia isn’t linear though but is full of contradictions, for political and social reasons which we will certainly have cause to examine in the future.

Applied to the economic history of the USSR, the criteria put forward at the start of this article allow the genesis of Russian capitalism to be traced out. Wage labour and accumulation of capital are manifestly incompatible with Socialism. Imposed on the October Revolution by the economic backwardness of the country it meant Socialism was something for the future; but still, for socialism to really happen, capitalist measures could only be employed to satisfy the demands of social life in the USSR and must be strictly subordinate to the strategy of the international extension of the revolution.

With this strategy abandoned, “peaceful coexistence” translated itself into a struggle for the world market. Russia was to publicly proclaim the primacy in its economy of the universal categories of capitalism: competition and profit. Indeed, this has come about without the existence of a bourgeois ruling class for whom the bureaucracy, which in other respects is declining, deputises. But this class didn’t wish to live its underground existence for ever, hidden, almost clandestine, as it is still today. The political bagmen who conclude agreements in the foreign capitals act on its behalf just as much as the military which has subdued by terror any notion of emancipation by the “brother-parties” of central and Balkan Europe. Similarly, instruments of the future Russian bourgeoisie in the same measure are the diplomats who “help” the Arab countries and North Vietnam, and the tanks that police Czechoslovakia. Military oppressor rather than “valid” competitor, touter of forced labour rather than extorter of surplus value in the refined way of its western rivals, Russian capitalism, during half a century of Stalinism, has passed along a route marked by blood, violence, infamy and corruption – the royal road of all capitalism.

The lesson to be drawn can be summed up in a few sentences. The possibility of Socialism in the USSR was conditional on the victory of the Communist Revolution in Europe. The Stalinist deception, by assimilating present production relations to non-capitalist relations, erased any distinction, even the most basic, between capitalism and Socialism, ruining the only true weapon of the proletariat; its class programme.

The essence of this programme is the dictatorship of the proletariat on the political level, and the abolition of mercantile exchange founded on the exploitation of labour power on the economic level. Of these two conditions of Socialism, the October Revolution achieved only the first, powerless to maintain it for more than a few years whilst it was incapable – and its leaders knew it – of coming through to the second.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has died in the wake of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. The latter, by becoming an instrument of the Soviet State instead of being its master, rendered the international victory of the proletariat impossible, as it did the withering away of the State which forms such a fundamental postulate of Marxism. On the social level, meanwhile, the “democratic constitution of 1936” gave priority to the immense conservative mass of the Russian peasantry, on the economic level, the USSR definitively submitted itself to the law of value; to the mechanism of the accumulation of capital, the which, being irresistible forces, must, without the help of the International Revolution, result in the same defects and the same monstrosities reappearing in Russia as elsewhere.

From the moment when the inexorable logic of the facts become evident to even of the most incredulous, the denunciation of the infamies and contradictions of false Russian Socialism becomes the primary condition for the recovery of the International proletariat and its revolutionary objectives and for the rehabilitation, before the exploited of the entire world, of the fundamental principles of Communism.