Why Russia isn’t Socialist (Pt. 5)

VI. Socialism and Small Production

To begin with, we must indicate what is meant by the political phenomenon that we have designated as “Stalinist counter-revolution”; a task in this particular field, involving contradictions and difficulties which we won’t attempt to mask. For example, when we affirm on the one hand, that without the help of the international revolution, the Russian economy could only aspire to reach a capitalist development whilst on the other we say this capitalism is the work of Stalin, the difficult question arises; in what respects did the economic policies of Lenin differ from those of Stalin, and what right have we to speak of a counter-revolution when it carried on the work of the political forces that it had defeated?

As a matter of fact, we have already replied to this objection; the Russian economy freed from Czarism tended towards capitalism through sheer necessity, but it wasn’t on this terrain that the Bolsheviks intended to confront capital but on the international level, especially in the countries where the relations of production could be immediately destroyed by a victorious revolution. It remains however for us to specify what the Stalinist counter-revolution stood for as an orientation imprinted on the entire historical development of modern Russia; it is not just a matter of the final death-knell of any Socialist perspective in the long and short term, but more than that, of a mode of capitalist expansion that is far from being the most radical or energetic.

Let it first be well understood that all counter-revolution is political, that is it is expressed through the class in power changing, and not through the development of the productive forces being arrested: that would mean civilisation going backwards and modern history furnishes no examples of that happening. Indeed, whilst the restoration of 1815 restored the aristocracy to power in the European countries that had fended off the French Revolution, the extension of capitalism was not prevented subsequent to this revolution. In other words, it transformed the nobles into bankers or landed proprietors, but without leading the bourgeois into serfdom!

Similarly Stalinism, in sabotaging the International Revolution, didn’t try and go back on the result obtained by the downfall of Czarism i.e. generalisation of mercantile production, generalisation of capitalist economy. It is also true that this counter-revolution didn’t restore power to the overthrown classes, and this is the last, but not the least of the objections to which we must reply. For the moment we will restrict ourselves to making this observation: the crisis of colonialism in the last twenty years has confirmed that it is capitalism which emerges from any revolution breaking out in backward or semi-feudal countries when the World proletariat isn’t in combat (even if the bourgeois class isn’t physically present) whilst the State, in its capacity as economic agent, installs or maintains the capitalist relations of production.

The notion of the determining role of the State acting as a “hinge” between two successive modes of production is indispensable in order to fully understand the function that Lenin assigned to it in the October Revolution, as indeed it is in throwing light on the function it fulfilled under Stalin. The State, as conceived by Marxism, is an instrument of violence at the service of the ruling class, guaranteeing in a social order corresponding to a particular mode of production. This definition is just as valid for the proletarian State, but note well, with the difference that the latter form of State expresses the domination of the exploited classes over the exploiting class and not the other way round. Also it is doomed to wither away with the disappearance of the production relations which it intends to abolish. In this last respect, the Proletarian State, like all others, has only two means of intervention: to authorise or to forbid.

We have seen how the Russian Revolution because of its double nature: anti-feudal and anti-capitalist, could “jump” the economic stage corresponding to its first aspect, but not escape the accomplishment of its political content: it destroyed and rendered impossible all class domination founded on the accumulation of capital, but it wasn’t able to survive without tolerating, indeed encouraging, this accumulation. Its proletarian character therefore depended on a potentiality more than an actuality: its Socialism was more a state of intention than a material possibility.

In these conditions, and starting from when the defeat of the European Communist Revolution was undeniable, on what basis can one assess the “threshold” when the State ceases to have anything to do with the revolutionary function of the proletariat? This threshold, on the political level, is easy to define; it has been overstepped when Stalinism openly renounces the requirement for future Russian Socialism: the International Revolution. On the economic and social level though, the only solid criteria is that which derives from the function of the State given above: the Soviet State ceased to be proletarian when it was deprived of all means of forbidding the transitory economic forms which is had been forced earlier to authorise.

If legally speaking, this impotence only manifests itself officially with the 1936 constitution – which by establishing democratic equality between peasants and workers, puts the seal on the crushing of the proletariat under the weight of the immense Russian peasantry – on the economic and social level, it appears mainly in the major upheaval brought about in agricultural structures. Stalinist propaganda, backed up by the entire international intelligentsia, makes out that the “collectivisation” and “dekulakisation” of the thirties have realised the second of the two Russian revolutions; the Communist one contained in the October Revolution. This boastful announcement – which could be made only by totally distorting all Marxist criteria – collapses in the face of the following observation; the organisation of agricultural production, a burden for modern Russia, has not only not reached the socialist level, but it drags along at a stage well below that of all developed capitalist countries. Let it suffice to point to the endemic shortage of basic necessities in Russia, rendering it necessary, even today, for wheat to be imported into a country which used to be one of the foremost producers of this cereal in the world.

In opposition to the widespread “extremist” view, according to which the defeat of Socialism in Russia was due to a monstrous State capitalism, it is necessary to describe the form of production to which the proletarian power in that country finally capitulated. It is sufficient to refer to Lenin to learn about this “Enemy No 1 of Socialism” referred to constantly in his speeches and writings, and to notice how this enemy held fast before all the reforms and changes occurring in the USSR. In the text previously cited, the author of “The Tax in Kind” enumerates the five types of Russian economy:
     1) Natural economy: i.e. patriarchal production, almost totally consumed by its producers.
     2) Small commodity production: “this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain”.
     3) Private capitalism: whose rebirth goes back to the N.E.P.
     4) State capitalism: i.e. grain monopoly and national accounting of production, which the proletarian power strives to accomplish in the face of a multitude of difficulties.
     5) Socialism: On this last point, Lenin is crystal clear; it is, he says nothing but a “legal opportunity” of the proletarian State. An opportunity that could only become an immediate reality if the Russian revolution, as Lenin sharply reminded Bukharin on another occasion, had inherited the historic results from a “completed Imperialism” from “a system in which everything was in submission to finance capital” and in which “it remained only to decapitate it to leave everything else in the hands of the proletariat”.

This evidently wasn’t the case in Russia, and it is for this reason that, in Lenin’s outline, the struggle unfolds not between State capitalism – still at the stage of a tendency and efforts to create it – and Socialism – which is mere “legal opportunity” founded on the nature of the party in power, but in the economy, where small production dominates.

“It is not State capitalism that is at war with Socialism” Lenin emphasises, “but the petty-bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against State-capitalism and Socialism”.

The outcome of this struggle one can measure today in the condition of Russian agriculture, which far from having eliminated small production, has eternalised it under the falsely “collective” appearance of the kolkhos. We will look later at the economic content and the social influence of this type of Co-operative which differs hardly at all from those in the capitalist countries of the west. We would merely like to point out that the party of the Russian proletariat did not perish through the advent of “new forms”, “unforeseen” by Marxism, nor because of the colossal termite mound of bureaucrats, previously nurtured in the bosom of the working class. It was vanquished entirely by the historic conditions of Russian society which, it was aware from the beginning it could not overcome without the help of the European Communist Revolution.

The most serious of the Stalinist falsifications is to have declared that in such conditions, Socialism had been “constructed”. This lie had been denounced by Lenin earlier on at the time of the NEP:

“The Building of Communist society just by of Communists is a childish idea and we have never expressed it; Communists are only a drop in the people’s ocean”.

“It is a matter of creating it with the hand of others” he added. In other words, of allowing the non-proletarian classes to modernise their productive techniques, with the use of modern machinery, thus realising the conditions for Socialism but not realising Socialism itself. These conditions can be known by no other name than capitalism.

The development of capitalism equals the elimination of small production, but the Russian Communists would try to bring this about in the Communist, not the bourgeois manner, by saving the existence and the working capacity of the small producer, whilst uprooting him from his derisory “property”; a slavery worse even than serfdom. It was in the “agrarian communes” that the Bolsheviks would strive to group the peasants together on the basis of a collective exploitation and redistribution, without individual property, without wage labour…, they failed, as later would Bukharin’s plan based on the hope of an increase in the working capital of the middle peasant.

The solution which succeeded was Stalin’s forced collectivisation. The most appalling, most barbaric, most reactionary way conceivable. Appalling, because it engendered quasi-apocalyptic violence, barbaric, because accompanied by an immense destruction of resources, notably the destruction of cattle from which Russia is still suffering 40 years later. The most reactionary because it stabilised – differing from western capitalism which eliminated it – the small producer in an inefficient, ideologically backward system. The kolkhosniks, in whom is combined traditional rural egoism and the greed of the country worker is a good symbol of the triumph of the peasantry over the proletariat, masked by the braggadocio of “Socialism in one country”.