TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Purpose of the Present Work
1.The Principal Indices of Industrial growth
2.Comparative Estimates of These Achievements
3.Production Per Capita of the Population
II. -- ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE ZIGZAGS OF THE LEADERSHIP
1."Military Communism", "The New Economic Policy"
(NEP) and the Course toward the Kulak
2.A Sharp Turn: "the Five-Year Plan in Four Years" and "Complete
Collectivization"
III. -- SOCIALISM AND THE STATE
1.The Transitional Regime
2.Program and Reality
3.The Dual Character of the Workers' State
4."Generalized Want" and the Gendarme
5.The "Complete Triumph of Socialism"
and the "Reinforcement of the Dictatorship"
V. -- THE STRUGGLE FOR THE PRODUCTIVITY OF LABOR
1.Money and Plan
2."Socialist" Inflation
3.The Rehabilitation of the Ruble
4.The Stakhanov Movement
1.Why Stalin Triumphed
2.The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party
3.The Social Roots of Thermidor
VI. -- THE GROWTH OF INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL ANTAGONISMS
1.Want, Luxury and Speculation
2.The Differentiation of the Proletariat
3.Social Contradictions in the Collective Village
4.The Social Physiognomy of the Ruling Stratum
VII. -- FAMILY, YOUTH AND CULTURE
1.Thermidor in the Family
2.The Struggle against the Youth
3.Nationality and Culture
VIII. -- FOREIGN POLICY AND THE ARMY
1.From "World Revolution" to Status Quo
2.The League of Nations and the Communist International
3.The Red Army and Its Doctrines
4.The Abolition of the Militia and the Restoration of Officers' Ranks
5.The Soviet Union in a War
IX. -- SOCIAL RELATIONS IN THE SOCIAL UNION
1.State Capitalism?
2.Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class?
3.The Question of the Character of the Soviet Union Not Yet Decided by History
X. -- THE SOVIET UNION IN THE MIRROR OF THE NEW CONSTITUTION
1.Work "According to Ability" and Personal Property
2.The Soviets and Democracy
3.Democracy and the Party
XI. -- WHITHER THE SOVIET UNION?
1.Bonapartism as a Regime of Crisis
2.The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with "the Class Enemy"
3.The Inevitability of a New Revolution
APPENDIX: "SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY"
1.The "Friends" of the Soviet Union
The Purpose of the Present Work
The bourgeois world at first tried to pretend not to notice the economic successes of
the soviet regime -- the experimental
proof, that is, of the practicability of socialist methods. The learned economists of
capital still often try to maintain a deeply
cogitative silence about the unprecedented tempo of Russia's industrial development, or
confine themselves to remarks about an
extreme "exploitation of the peasantry". They are missing a wonderful
opportunity to explain why the brutal exploitation of the
peasants in China, for instance, or Japan, or India, never produced an industrial tempo
remotely approaching that of the Soviet
Union.
Facts win out, however, in the end. The bookstalls of all civilized countries are now
loaded with books about the Soviet Union.
It is no wonder; such prodigies are rare. The literature dictated by blind reactionary
hatred is fast dwindling. A noticeable
proportion o the newest works on the Soviet Union adopt a favorable, if not even a
rapturous, tone. As a sign of the improving
international reputation of the parvenu state, this abundance of pro-soviet literature can
only be welcomed. Moreover, it is
incomparably better to idealize the Soviet Union than fascist Italy. The reader, however,
would seek in vain on the pages of this
literature for a scientific appraisal of what is actually taking place in the land of the
October revolution.
The writings of the "friends of the Soviet Union" fall into three principal categories:
A dilettante journalism, reportage with a more or less "left" slant, makes up the principal mass of their articles and books.
Alongside it, although more pretentious, stand the productions of a humanitarian, lyric and pacifistical "communism".
Third comes economic schematization, in the spirit of the old-German Hatheder-Sozializmus.
Louis Fischer and Duranty are sufficiently well-known representatives of the first
type. The late Barbusse and Romain Rolland
represent the category of "humanitarian" friends. It is not accidental that
before ever coming over to Stalin the former wrote a life
of Christ and the latter a biography of Ghandi. And finally, the conservatively pedantic
socialism has found its most authoritative
representation in the indefatigable Fabian couple, Beatrice and Sidney Webb.
What unifies these three categories, despite their differences, is a kowtowing before
accomplished fact, and a partiality for
sedative generalizations. To revolt against their own capitalism was beyond these writers.
They are the more ready, therefore, to
take their stand upon a foreign revolution which has already ebbed back into its channels.
Before the October revolution, and
for a number of years after, no one of these people, nor any of their spiritual forebears,
gave a thought to the question how
socialism would arrive in the world. That makes it easy for them to recognize as socialism
what we have in the Soviet Union.
This gives them not only the aspect of progressive men, in step with the epoch, but even a
certain moral stability. And at the
same time it commits them to absolutely nothing. This kind of contemplative, optimistic,
nd anything but destructive, literature,
which sees all unpleasantness in the past, has a very quieting effect on the nerves of the
reader and therefore finds a ready
market. Thus there is quietly coming into being an international school which might be
described as Bolshevism for the
Cultured Bourgeoisie, or more concisely, Socialism for the Radical Tourists.
We shall not enter into a polemic with the productions of this school, since they offer
no serious grounds for polemic. Questions
end for them where they really only begin. The purpose of the present investigation is to
estimate correctly what is, in order the
better to understand what is coming to be. We shall dwell upon the past only so far as
that helps us to see the future. Our book
will be critical. Whoever worships the accomplished fact is incapable of preparing the
future.
The process of economic and cultural development in the Soviet Union has already passed
through several stages, but has by no means arrived at an inner equilibrium. If you
remember that the task of socialism is to create a classless society based upon
solidarity and the harmonious satisfaction of all needs, there is not yet, in this
fundamental sense, a hint of socialism in the Soviet
Union. To be sure, the contradictions of soviet society are deeply different from the
contradictions of capitalism. But they are
nevertheless very tense. They find their expression in material and cultural inequalities,
governmental repressions, political
groupings, and the struggle of factions. Police repression hushes up and distorts a
political struggle, but does not eliminate it. The
thoughts which are forbidden exercise an influence on the governmental policy at every
step, fertilizing or blocking it. In these
circumstances, an analysis of the development of the Soviet Union cannot for a minute
neglect to consider those ideas and
slogans under which a stifled but passionate political struggle is being waged throughout
the country. History here merges
directly with living politics.
The safe-and-sane "left" philistines love to tell us that in criticising the
Soviet Union we must be extremely cautious lest we injure
the process of socialist construction. We, for our part, are far from regarding the Soviet
state as so shaky a structure. The
enemies of The Soviet Union are far better informed about it than its real friends, the
workers of all countries. In the general
staffs of the imperialist governments an accurate account is kept of the pluses and
minuses of the Soviet Union, and not only on
the basis of public reports. The enemy can, unfortunately, take advantage of the weak side
of the workers' state, but never of a
criticism of those tendencies which they themselves consider its favorable features. The
hostility to criticism of the majority of the
official "friends" really conceals a fear not of the fragility of the Soviet
Union, but of the fragility of their own sympathy with it.
We shall tranquilly disregard all fears and warnings of this kind. It is facts and not
illusions that decide. We intend the face and
not the mask.
POSTSCRIPT
This book was completed and sent to the publishers before the "terrorist"
conspiracy trial of Moscow was announced.
Naturally, therefore, the proceedings at the trial could not be evaluated in its pages.
Its indication of the historic logic of this
"terrorist" trial, and its advance exposure of the fact that its mystery is
deliberate mystification, is so much the more significant.
Chapter 1
WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED
1.The principal indices of industrial growth
2.Comparative estimates of these achievements
3.Production per capita of the population
1.
The Principal Indices of Industrial Growth
Owing to the insignificance of the Russian bourgeoisie, the democratic tasks of
backward Russia -- such as liquidation of the
monarchy and the semi-feudal slavery of the peasants -- could be achieved only through a
dictatorship of the proletariat. The
proletariat, however, having seized the power at the head of the peasant masses, could not
stop at the achievement of these
democratic tasks. The bourgeois revolution was directly bound up with the first stages of
a socialist revolution. That fact was not
accidental. The history of recent decades very clearly shows that, in the conditions of
capitalist decline, backward countries are
unable to attain that level which the old centers of capitalism have attained. Having
themselves arrived in a blind alley, the highly
civilized nations block the road of proletarian revolution, not because her economy was
the first to become ripe for a socialist
change, but because she could not develop further on a capitalist basis. Socialization of
the means of production had become a
necessary condition for bringing the country out of barbarism. That is the law of combined
development for backward
countries. Entering upon the socialist revolution as "the weakest link in the
capitalist chain" (Lenin), the former empire of the
tzars is even now, in the 19th year after the revolution, still confronted with the task
of "catching up with and outstripping" --
consequently in the first place catching up with -- Europe and America. She has, that is,
to solve those problems of technique
and productivity which were long ago solved by capitalism in the advanced countries.
Could it indeed be otherwise? The overthrow of the old ruling classes did not achieve,
but only completely revealed, the task: to
rise from barbarism to culture. At the same time, by concentrating the means of production
in the hands of the state, the
revolution made it possible to apply new and incomparably more effective industrial
methods. Only thanks to a planned directive
was it possible in so brief a span to restore what had been destroyed by the imperialist
and civil wars, to create gigantic new
enterprises, to introduce new kinds of production and establish new branches of industry.
The extraordinary tardiness in the development of the international revolution, upon
whose prompt aid the leaders of the
Bolshevik party had counted, created immense difficulties for the Soviet Union, but also
revealed its inner powers and
resources. However, a correct appraisal of the results achieved -- their grandeur as well
as their inadequacy -- is possible only
with the help of an international scale of measurement. This book will be a historic and
sociological interpretation of the process,
not a piling up of statistical illustrations. Nevertheless, in the interests of the
further discussion, it is necessary to take as a point
of departure certain important mathematical data.
The vast scope of industrialization in the Soviet Union, as against a background of
stagnation and decline in almost the whole
capitalist world, appears unanswerably in the following gross indices. Industrial
production in Germany, thanks solely to feverish
war preparations, is now returning to the level of 1929. Production in Great Britain,
holding to the apron strings of
protectionism, has raised itself 3 or 4 per cent during these six years. Industrial
production in the United States has declined
approximately 25 per cent; in France, more than 30 per cent. First place among capitalist
countries is occupied by Japan, who
is furiously arming herself and robbing her neighbors. Her production has risen almost 40
per cent! But even this exceptional
index fades before the dynamic of development in the Soviet Union. Her industrial
production has increased during this same
period approximately 3 1/2 times, or 250 per cent. The heavy industries have have
increased their production during the last
decade (1925 to 1935) more than 10 times. In the first year of the five-year plan (1928 to
1929), capital investments amounted
to 5.4 billion rubles; for 1936, 32 billion are indicated.
If in view of the instability of the ruble as a unit of measurement, we lay aside money
estimates, we arrive at another unit which is
absolutely unquestionable. In December 1913, the Don basin produced 2,275,000 tons of
coal; in December 1935, 7,125,000
tons. During the last three years the production of iron has doubled. The production of
steel and of the rolling mills has increased
almost 2 1/2 times. The output of oil, coal and iron has increased from 3 to 3 1/2 times
the pre-war figure. In 1920, when the
first plan of electrification was drawn up, there were 10 district power stations in the
country with a total power production of
253,000 kilowatts. In 1935, there were already 95 of these stations with a total power of
4,345,000 kilowatts. In 1925, the
Soviet Union stood 11th in the production of electro-energy; in 1935, it was second only
to Germany and the United States. In
the production of coal, the Soviet Union has moved forward from 10th to 4th place. In
steel, from 6th to 3rd place. In the
production of tractors, to the 1st place in the world. This also is true of the production
of sugar.
Gigantic achievement in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an
extraordinary growth of the old industrial
cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase of the numbers of workers, a rise in
cultural level and cultural demands --
such are the indubitable results of the October revolution, in which the prophets of the
old world tried to see the grave of human
civilization. With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over.
Socialism has demonstrated its right to
victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth
part of the earth's surface -- not in the
language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the
Soviet Union, as a result of internal
difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership, were to collapse -- which we
firmly hope will not happen -- there
would remain an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a
proletarian revolution a backward country
has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.
This also ends the quarrel with the reformists in the workers' movement.
Can we compare for one moment their mouselike
fussing with the titanic work accomplished by this people aroused to a new life by
revolution? If in 1918 the Social-Democrats
of Germany had employed the power imposed upon them by the workers for a socialist
revolution, and not for the rescue of
capitalism, it is easy to see on the basis of the Russian experience what unconquerable
economic power would be possessed
today by a socialist bloc of Central and Eastern Europe and a considerable part of Asia.
The peoples of the world will pay for
the historic crime of reformism with new wars and revolutions.
2.
Comparative Estimate Of These Achievements
The dynamic coefficients of Soviet industry are unexampled. But they are still far from
decisive. The Soviet Union is uplifting
itself from a terrible low level, while the capitalist countries are slipping down from a
very high one. The correlation of forces at
the present moment is determined not by the rate of growth, but by contrasting the entire
power of the two camps as expressed
in material accumulations, technique, culture and, above all, the productivity of human
labor. When we approach the matter
from this statistical point of view, the situation changes at once, and to the extreme
disadvantage of the Soviet Union.
The question formulated by Lenin -- Who shall prevail? -- is a question of the
correlation of forces between the Soviet Union
and the world revolutionary proletariat on the one hand, and on the other international
capital and the hostile forces within the
Union. The economic successes of the Soviet Union make it possible for her to fortify
herself, advance, arm herself, and, when
necessary, retreat and wait -- in a word, hold out. But in its essence the question, Who
shall prevail -- not only as a military, but
still more as an economic question -- confronts the Soviet Union on a world scale.
Military intervention is a danger. The
intervention of cheap goods in the baggage trains of a capitalist army would be an
incomparably greater one. The victory of the
proletariat in one of the Western countries would, of course, immediately and radically
alter the correlation of forces. But so
long as the Soviet Union remains isolated, and, worse than that, so long as the European
proletariat suffers reverses and
continues to fall back, the strength of the Soviet structure is measured in the last
analysis by the productivity of labor. And that,
under a market economy, expresses itself in production costs and prices. The difference
between domestic prices and prices in
the world market is one of the chief means of measuring this correlation of forces. The
Soviet statisticians, however, are
forbidden even to approach that question. The reason is that, notwithstanding its
condition of stagnation and rot, capitalism is
still far ahead in the matter of technique, organization and labor skill.
The traditional backwardness of agriculture in the Soviet Union is well enough known.
In no branch of it has progress been
made that can in the remotest degree bear comparison with the progress in industry.
"We are still way behind the capitalist countries in the beet
crop," complains Molotov, for example, at the end of 1935.
"In 1934 we reaped from one hectare [approximately 2 1/2 acres] 82
hundredweight; in 1935, in the Ukraine with an
extraordinary harvest 131 hundredweight. In Czechoslovakia and Germany,
they reap about 250 hundredweight, in
France, over 300 per hectare."
Molotov's complaint could be extended to every branch of agriculture -- textile as well
as grain growing, and especially to
stockbreeding. The proper rotation of crops, selection of seeds, fertilization, the
tractors, combines, blooded stock farms -- all
these are preparing a truly gigantic revolution in socialized agriculture. But it is just
in this most conservative realm that the
revolution demands time. Meanwhile, notwithstanding collectivization, the problem still is
to approach the higher models of the
capitalist West, handicapped though it is with the small-farm system.
The struggle to raise the productivity of labor in industry runs in two channels:
adoption of an advanced technique and better use
of labor power. What made it possible to establish gigantic factories of the most modern
type in the space of a few years was,
on the one hand, the existence in the West of a high capitalist technique, on the other,
the domestic regime of planned economy.
In this sphere foreign achievements are in process assimilation. The fact that Soviet
industry, as also the equipping of the Red
Army, has developed at a forced tempo, contains enormous potential advantages. The
industries had not been compelled to
drag along an antiquated implementation as in England and France. The army has not been
condemned to carry an
old-fashioned equipment. But this same feverish growth has also had its negative side.
There is no correspondence between the
different elements of industry; men lag behind technique; the leadership is not equal to
its tasks. Altogether this expresses itself in
extremely high production costs and poor quality of product.
"Our works," writes the head of the oil industry,
"possess the same equipment as the American. But the organization of
the drilling lags; the men are not sufficiently skilled." The
numerous breakdown, he explains are a result of "carelessness,
lack of skill and lack of technical supervision".
Molotov complains:
"We are extremely backward in organization of the building
industry.... It is carried on for the most part in old ways with
an abominable use of tools and mechanisms."
Such confessions are scattered throughout the Soviet press. The new technique is still
far from giving the results produced in its
capitalist fatherlands.
The wholesale success of the heavy industries is a gigantic conquest. On that
foundation alone it is possible to build. However,
the test of modern industry is the production of delicate mechanisms which demand both
technical and general culture. In this
sphere the backwardness of the Soviet Union is still great.
Undoubtedly the most important successes, both quantitative and qualitative , have been
achieved in the war industries. The
army and fleet are the most influential clients, and the most fastidious customers.
Nevertheless in a series of their public speeches
the heads of the War Department, among them Voroshilov, complain unceasingly: "We are
not always fully satisfied with the
quality of the products which you give us for the Red Army." It is not hard to sense
the anxiety which these cautious words
conceal.
The products of machine manufacture, says the head of the heavy industries in an
official report, "must be good quality and
unfortunately are not". And again: "machines with us are expensive." As
always the speaker refrains from giving accurate
comparative data in relation to world production.
The tractor is the pride of Soviet industry. But the coefficient of effective use of
the tractors is very low. During the last industrial
year, it was necessary to subject 18 per cent of the tractors to capital repairs. A
considerable number of them, moreover, got
out of order again at the very height of the tilling season. According to certain
calculations, the machine and tractor stations will
cover expenses only with a harvest of 20 to 22 hundredweight of grain per hectare. At
present, when the average harvest is less
than half of that, the state is compelled to disburse billions to meet the deficit.
Things are still worse in the sphere of auto transport. In America a truck travels 60-
to 80-, or even 100,000 kilometer a year;
in the Soviet Union only 20,000 -- that is, a third or a fourth as much. Out of every 100
machines, only 55 are working; the rest
are undergoing repairs or awaiting them. The cost of repairs is double the cost of all the
new machines put out. It is no wonder
that the state accounting office reports: "Auto transport is nothing but a heavy
burden on the cost of production."
The increase of carrying power of the railroads is accompanied, according to the
president of the Council of People's
Commissars, "by innumerable wrecks and breakdowns". The fundamental cause is the
same: low skill of labor inherited from the
past. The struggle to keep the switches in neat condition is becoming in its way a heroic
exploit, about which prize switchgirls
make reports in the Kremlin to the highest circles of power. Water transport,
notwithstanding the progress of recent years, is far
behind that of the railroads. Periodically the newspapers are speckled with communications
about "the abominable operation of
marine transport", "extremely low quality of ship repairs", etc.
In the light industries, conditions are even less favorable than in the heavy. A unique
law of Soviet industry may be formulated
thus: commodities are as a general rule worse the nearer they stand to the mass consumer.
In the textile industry, according to
Pravda, "there is a shamefully large percentage of defective goods, poverty of
selection, predominance of low grades".
Complaints of the bad quality of articles of wide consumption appear periodically in the
press: "clumsy ironware"; "ugly furniture,
badly put together and carelessly finished"; "you can't find decent
buttons"; "the system of social food supply works absolutely
unsatisfactorily". And so on endlessly.
To characterize industrial progress by quantitative indices alone, without considering
quality, is almost like describing a man's
physique by his height and disregarding his chest measurements. Moreover, to judge
correctly the dynamic of Soviet industry, it
is necessary, along with qualitative corrections, to have always in mind the fact that
swift progress in some branches is
accompanied by backwardness in others. The creation of gigantic automobile factories is
paid for in the scarcity and bad
maintenance of the highways. "The dilapidation of our roads is extraordinary. On our
most important highway -- Moscow to
Yaroslavl -- automobiles can make only 10 kilometers [6 miles] an hour." (Izvestia)
The president of the State Planning
Commission asserts that the country still maintains "the tradition of pristine
roadlessness".
Municipal economy is in a similar condition. New industrial towns arise in a brief
span; at the same time dozens of old towns are
running to seed. The capitals and industrial centers are growing and adorning themselves;
expensive theatres and clubs are
springing up in various parts of the country; but the dearth of living quarters is
unbearable. Dwelling houses remains as a rule
uncared for. "We build badly and at great expense. Our houses are being used up and
not restored. We repair little and badly."
(Izvestia)
The entire Soviet economy consists of such disproportions. Within certain limits they
are inevitable, since it had been and
remains necessary to begin the advance with the most important branches. Nevertheless the
backwardness of certain branches
greatly decreases the useful operation operation of others. From the standpoint of an
ideal planning directive, which would
guarantee not the maximum tempo in separate branches, but the optimum result in economy as
a whole, the statistical coefficient
of growth would be lower in the first period, but economy as a whole, and particularly the
consumer, would be the gainer. In the
long run the general industrial dynamic would also gain.
In the official statistics, the production and repair of automobiles is
added in with the total of industrial production. From the
standpoint of economic efficiency, it would be proper to subtract, not add. This
observation applies to many other branches of
industry. For that reason, all total estimates in rubles have only a relative value. It is
not certain what a ruble is. It is not always
certain what hides behind it -- the construction of a machine, or its premature breakdown.
If, according to an estimate in
"stable" rubles, the total production of the big industries has increased by
comparison with the pre-war level 6 times, the actual
output of oil, coal and iron measured in tons will have increased 3 to 3 1/2 times. The
fundamental cause of this divergence of
indices lies in the fact that Soviet industry has created a series of new branches unknown
to tzarist Russia, but a supplementary
cause is to be found in the tendentious manipulation of statistics. It is well known that
every bureaucracy has an organic need to
doll-up the facts.
3.
Production Per Capita of the Population
The average individual productivity of labor in the Soviet Union is still very low. In
the best metal foundry, according to the
acknowledgment of its director, the output of iron and steel per individual worker is a
third as much as the average output of
American foundries. A comparison of average figures in both countries would probably give
a ratio of 1 to 5, or worse. In these
circumstances the announcement that blast furnaces are used "better" in the
Soviet Union than in capitalist countries remains
meaningless. The function of technique is to economize human labor and nothing else. In
the timber and building industries things
are even less favorable than in the metal industry. To each worker in the quarries in the
United States falls 5,000 tons a year, in
the Soviet Union 500 tons -- that is, 1/10 as much. Such crying differences are explained
not only by a lack of skilled workers,
but still more by bad organization of the work. The bureaucracy spurs on the workers with
all its might, but is unable to make a
proper use of labor power. In agriculture things are still less favorable, of course, than
in industry. To the low productivity of
labor corresponds a low national income, and consequently a low standard of life for the
masses of the people.
When they assert that in volume of industrial production the Soviet Union in 1936 will
occupy the 1st place in Europe -- of itself
this progress is gigantic! -- they leave out of consideration not only the quality and
production cost of the goods, but also the
size of the population. The general level of development of a country, however, and
especially the living standard of the masses
can be defined, at least in rough figures, only by dividing the products by the number of
consumers. Let us try to carry out this
simple arithmetical operation.
The importance of railroad transport for economy culture and military ends needs no
demonstration. The Soviet Union has
83,000 kilometres of railroads, as against 58,000 in Germany, 63,000 in France, 417,000 in
the United States. This means that
for every 10,000 people in Germany there are 8.9 kilometres of railroad, in France 15.2,
in the United States 33.1, and in the
Soviet Union 5.0. Thus, according to railroad indices, the Soviet Union continues to
occupy one of the lowest places in the
civilized world. The merchant fleet, which has tripled in the last five years, stands now
approximately on a par with that of
Denmark and Spain. To these facts we must add the still extremely low figure for paved
highways. In the Soviet Union 0.6
automobiles were put out for every 1,000 inhabitants. In Great Britain, about 8 (in 1934),
in France about 4.5, in the United
States 23 (as against 36.5 in 1928). At the same time in the relative number of horses
(about 1 horse to each 10 or 11 citizens)
the Soviet Union, despite the extreme backwardness of its railroad, water and auto
transport, does not surpass either France or
the United States, while remaining far behind them in the quality of the stock.
In the sphere of heavy industry, which has attained the most outstanding successes, the
comparative indices still remain
unfavorable. The coal output in the Soviet Union for 1935 was about 0.7 tons per person;
in Great Britain, almost 5 tons; in the
United States, almost 3 tons (as against 5.4 tons in 1913); in Germany, about 2 tons.
Steel: in the Soviet Union, about 67
kilograms [kg = 2 1/5 lbs. ap.] per person, in the United States about 250 kilograms, etc.
About the same proportions in pig
and rolled iron. In the Soviet Union, 153 kilowatt hours of electric power was produced
per person in 1935, in Great Britain
(1934) 443, in France 363, in Germany 472.
In the light industries, the per capita indices are as a general rule still lower. Of
woolen fabric in 1935, less than 1/2 metre per
person, or 8 to 10 times less than in the United States or Great Britain. Woolen cloth is
accessible only to privileged Soviet
citizens. For the masses cotton print, of which about 16 metres per person was
manufactured, still has to do for winter clothes.
The production of shoes in the Soviet Union now amounts to about one-half pair per person,
in Germany more than a pair, in
France a pair and a half, in the United States about three pairs. And this leaves aside
the quality index, which would still further
lower the comparison. We may take it for granted that in bourgeois countries the
percentage of people who have several pairs
of shoes is considerably higher than in the Soviet Union. But unfortunately the Soviet
Union also still stands among the first in
percentage of barefoot people.
Approximately the same correlation, in part still less favorable, prevails in the
production of foodstuffs. Notwithstanding Russia's
indubitable progress in recent years, conserves, sausages, cheese, to say nothing of
pastry and confections, are still completely
inaccessible to the fundamental mass of the population. Even in the matter of dairy
products things are not favorable. In France
and the United States, there is approximately one cow for every five people, in Germany
one for every six, in the Soviet Union
one for every eight. But when it comes to giving milk, two Soviet cows must be counted
approximately as one. Only in the
production of grainbearing grasses, especially rye, and also in potatoes, does the Soviet
Union, computing by population,
considerably surpass the majority of European countries and the United States. But rye
bread and potatoes as the predominant
food of the population -- that is the classic symbol of poverty.
The consumption of paper is one of the chief indices of culture. In 1935, the Soviet
Union produced less than 4 kg. per person,
the United States over 34 (as against 48 in 1928), and Germany 47 kg. Whereas the United
States consumes 12 pencils a year
per inhabitant, the Soviet Union consumers only 4, and those 4 are of such poor quality
that their useful work does not exceed
that of one good pencil, or at the outside two. The newspapers frequently complain that
the lack of primers, paper, and pencils
paralyzes the work of the schools. It is o wonder that the liquidation of illiteracy,
indicated for the 10th anniversary of the
October revolution, is still far from accomplished.
The problem can be similarly illumined by starting from more general considerations.
The national income per person in the
Soviet Union is considerably less than in the West. And since capital investment consumes
about 25 to 30 per cent --
incomparably more than anywhere else -- the total amount consumed by the popular mass
cannot but be considerably lower
than in the advanced capitalist countries.
To be sure, in the Soviet Union there are no possessing classes, whose extravagance is
balanced by an under-consumption of
the popular mass. However, the weight of this corrective is not so great as might appear
at first glance. The fundamental evil of
the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however
disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that
in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private
ownership of the means of production, thus
condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay. In the matter of luxuries, the
bourgeoisie, of course, has a monopoly of
consumption. But in things of prime necessity, the toiling masses constitute the
overwhelming majority of consumers. We shall
see later, moreover, that although the Soviet Union has no possessing class in the proper
sense of the word, still she has very
privileged commanding strata of the population, who appropriate the lion's share in the
sphere of consumption. And so if there is
a lower per capita production of things of prime necessity in the Soviet Union than in the
advanced capitalist countries, that does
mean that the standard of living of the Soviet masses still falls below the capitalist
level.
The historic responsibility for this situation lies, of course, upon Russia's black and
heavy past, her heritage of darkness and
poverty. There was no other way out upon the road of progress except through the overthrow
of capitalism. To convince
yourself of this, it is only necessary to cast a glance at the Baltic countries and
Poland, once the most advanced parts of the
tzar's empire, and now hardly emerging from the morass. The undying service of the Soviet
regime lies in its intense and
successful struggle with Russia's thousand-year-old backwardness. But a correct estimate
of what has been attained is the first
condition for further progress.
The Soviet regime is passing through a preparatory stage, importing,
borrowing and appropriating the technical and cultural
conquests of the West. The comparative coefficients of production and consumption testify
that this preparatory stage is far
from finished. Even under the improbably condition of a continuing complete capitalist
standstill, it must still occupy a whole
historic period. That is a first extremely important conclusion which we shall have need
of in our further investigation.
Chapter 2
ECONOMIC GROWTH
AND THE ZIGZAGS OF THE LEADERSHIP
1."Military Communism", the "New Economic
Policy" (NEP) and the Course Toward the Kulak
2.A sharp turn: "The Five Year Plan in four years" and
"Complete collectivization"
1.
"Military Communism", the "New Economic Policy" (NEP)
and the Course Toward the Kulak
The line of development of the Soviet economy is far from an uninterrupted and evenly
rising curve. In the first 18 years of the
new regime you can clearly distinguish several stages marked by sharp crises. A short
outline of the economic history of the
Soviet Union in connection with the policy of the government is absolutely necessary both
for diagnosis and prognosis.
The first three years after the revolution were a period of overt and cruel civil war.
Economic life was wholly subjected to the
needs of the front. Cultural life lurked in corners and was characterized by a bold range
of creative thought, above all the
personal thought of Lenin, with an extraordinary scarcity of material means. That was the
period of so-called "military
communism" (1918-21), which forms a heroic parallel to the "military
socialism" of the capitalist countries. The economic
problems of the Soviet government in those years came down chiefly to supporting the war
industries, and using the scanty
resources left from the past for military purposes and to keep the city population alive.
Military communism was, in essence, the
systematic regimentation of consumption in a besieged fortress.
It is necessary to acknowledge, however, that in its original conception it pursued
broader aims. The Soviet government hoped
and strove to develop these methods of regimentation directly into a system of planned
economy in distribution as well as
production. In other words, from "military communism" it hoped gradually, but
without destroying the system, to arrive at
genuine communism. The program of the Bolshevik party adopted in March 1919 said:
"In the sphere of distribution the present task of the Soviet
Government is unwaveringly to continue on a planned,
organized and state-wide scale to replace trade by the distribution of
products."
Reality, however, came into increasing conflict with the program of "military
communism". Production continually declined, and
not only because of the quenching of the stimulus of personal interest among the
producers. The city demanded grain and raw
materials from the rural districts, giving nothing in exchange except varicolored pieces
of paper, named, according to ancient
memory, money. And the muzhik buried his stores in the ground. The government sent out
armed workers' detachments for
grain. The muzhik cut down his sowings. Industrial production of steel fell from 4.2
million tons to 183,000 tons -- that is, to
1/23 of what it had been. The total harvest of grain decreased from 801 million
hundredweight to 503 million in 1922. That was
a year of terrible hunger. Foreign trade at the same time plunged from 2.9 billion rubles
to 30 million. The collapse of the
productive forces surpassed anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country,
and the government with it, were at
the very edge of the abyss.
The utopian hopes of the epoch of military communism came in later for a cruel, and in
many respects just, criticism. The
theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave
out of account the fact that all calculations
at that time were based on the hope of an early victory of the revolution in the West. It
was considered self-evident that the
victorious German proletariat would supply Soviet Russia, on credit against future food
and raw materials, not only with
machines and articles of manufacture, but also with tens of thousands of highly skilled
workers, engineers and organizers. And
there is no doubt that if the proletarian revolution had triumphed in Germany -- a thing
that was prevented solely and exclusively
by the Social Democrats -- the economic development of the Soviet Union as well as of
Germany would have advanced with
such gigantic strides that the fate of Europe and the world would today have been
incomparably more auspicious. It can be said
with certainty, however, that even in that happy event it would still have been necessary
to renounce the direct state distribution
of products in favor of the methods of commerce.
Lenin explained the necessity of restoring the market by the existence in the country
of millions of isolated peasant enterprises,
unaccustomed to define their economic relations with the outside world except through
trade. Trade circulation would establish
a "connection", as it was called, between the peasant and the nationalized
industries. The theoretical formula for this
"connection" is very simple: industry should supply the rural districts with
necessary goods at such prices as would enable the
state to forego forcible collection of the products of peasant labor.
To mend economic relations with the rural districts was undoubtedly the most critical
and urgent task of the NEP. A brief
experiment showed, however, that industry itself, in spite of its socialized character,
had need of the methods of money payment
worked out by capitalism. A planned economy cannot rest merely on intellectual data. The
play of supply and demand remains
for a long period a necessary material basis and indispensable corrective.
The market, legalized by the NEP, began, with the help of an organized currency, to do
its work. As early as 1923, thanks to
an initial stimulus from the rural districts, industry began to revive. And moreover it
immediately hit a high tempo. It is sufficient
to say that production doubled in 1922 and 1923, and by 1926 had already reached the
pre-war level -- that is, had grown
more than five times its size in 1921. At the same time, although at a much more modest
tempo, the harvests were increasing.
Beginning with the critical year 1923, the disagreements observed earlier in the ruling
party on the relation between industry and
agriculture began to grow sharp. In a country which had completely exhausted its stores
and reserves, industry could not
develop except by borrowing grain and raw material from the peasants. Too heavy
"forced loans" of products, however, would
destroy the stimulus to labor. Not believing in the future prosperity, the peasant would
answer the grain expeditions from the city
by a sowing strike. Too light collections, on the other hand, threatened a standstill. Not
receiving industrial products, the
peasants would turn to industrial labor to satisfy their own needs, and revive the old
home crafts. The disagreements in the party
began about the question how much to take from the villages for industry, in order to
hasten the period of dynamic equilibrium
between them. The dispute was immediately complicated by the question of the social
structure of the village itself.
In the spring of 1923, at a congress of the party, a representative of the "Left
Opposition" -- not yet, however, known by that
name -- demonstrated the divergence of industrial and agricultural prices in the form of
an ominous diagram. This phenomenon
was then first called "the scissors", a term which has since become almost
international. If the further lagging of industry -- said
the speaker -- continues to open these scissors, then a break between city and country is
inevitable.
The peasants made a sharp distinction between the democratic and agrarian revolution
which the Bolshevik party had carried
through, and its policy directed toward laying the foundations of socialism. The
expropriation of the landlords and the state lands
brought the peasants upwards of half a billion gold rubles a year. In prices of state
products, however, the peasants were paying
out a much larger sum. So long as the net result of the two revolutions, democratic and
socialistic, bound together by the firm
know of October, reduced itself for the peasantry to a loss of hundreds of millions, a
union of the two classes remained dubious.
The scattered character of the peasant economy, inherited from the past, was aggravated
by the results of the October
revolution. The number of independent farms rose during the subsequent decade from 16 to
25 million, which naturally
strengthened the purely consummatory character of the majority of peasant enterprises.
That was one of the causes of the lack
of agricultural products.
A small commodity economy inevitably produces exploiters. In proportion as the villages
recovered, the differentiation within
the peasant mass began to grow. This development fell into the old well-trodden ruts. The
growth of the kulak [well-off peasant,
employing labor] far outstripped the general growth of agriculture. The policy of the
government under the slogan "face to the
country" was actually a turning of its face to the kulak. Agricultural taxes fell
upon the poor far more heavily than upon the well
to do, who moreover skimmed the cream of the state credits. The surplus grain, chiefly in
possession of the upper strata of the
village, was used to enslave the poor and for speculative selling to the bourgeois
elements of the cities. Bukharin, the theoretician
of the ruling faction at that time, tossed t the peasantry his famous slogan, "Get
rich!" In the language of theory that was
supposed to mean a gradual growing of the kulaks into socialism. In practice it meant the
enrichment of the minority at the
expense of the overwhelming majority.
Captive to its own policy, the government was compelled to retreat step by step before
the demands of a rural petty
bourgeoisie. In 1925 the hiring of labor power and the renting of land were legalized for
agriculture. The peasantry was
becoming polarized between the small capitalist on one side and the hired hand on the
other. At the same time, lacking industrial
commodities, the state was crowded out of the rural market. Between the kulak and the
petty home craftsman there appeared,
as though from under the earth, the middleman. The state enterprises themselves, in search
of raw material, were more and
more compelled to deal with the private trader. The rising tide of capitalism was visible
everywhere. Thinking people saw plainly
that a revolution in the forms of property does not solve the problem of socialism, but
only raises it.
In 1925, when the course toward the kulak was in full swing, Stalin began to prepare
for the denationalization of the land. To a
question asked at his suggestion by a Soviet journalist: "Would it not be expedient
in the interest of agriculture to deed over to
each peasant for 10 years the parcel of land tilled by him?", Stalin answered:
"Yes, and ever for 40 years." The People's
Commissar of Agriculture of Georgia, upon Stalin's own initiative, introduced the draft of
a law denationalizing the land. The aim
was to give the farmer confidence in his own future. While this was going on, in the
spring of 1926, almost 60 per cent of the
grain destined for sale was in the hands of 6 per cent of the peasant proprietors! The
state lacked grain not only for foreign
trade, but even for domestic needs. The insignificance of exports made it necessary to
forego bringing in articles of manufacture,
and cut down to the limit the import of machinery and raw materials.
Retarding industrialization and striking a blow at the general mass of the peasants,
this policy of banking on the well-to-do
farmer revealed unequivocally inside of two years, 1924-26, its political consequences. It
brought about an extraordinary
increase of self-consciousness in the petty bourgeoisie of both city and village, a
capture by them of many of the lower Soviets,
an increase of the power and self-confidence of the bureaucracy, a growing pressure upon
the workers, and the complete
suppression of party and Soviet democracy. The growth of the kulaks alarmed two eminent
members of the ruling group,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were, significantly, presidents of the Soviets of the two chief
proletarian centers, Leningrad and
Moscow. But the provinces, and still more the bureaucracy, stood firm for Stalin. The
course toward the well-to-do farmer won
out. In 1926, Zinoviev and Kamenev with their adherents joined the Opposition of 1923 (the
"Trotskyists").
Of course "in principle" the ruling group did not even then renounce the
collectivization of agriculture. They merely put it off a
few decades in their perspective. The future People's Commissar of Agriculture, Yakovlev,
wrote in 1927 that,
although the socialist reconstruction of the village can be
accomplished only through collectivization, still "this obviously
cannot be done in one, two or three years, and maybe not in one
decade". "The collective farms and communes," he
continued, "... are now, and will for a long time undoubtedly
remain, only small islands in a sea of individual peasant
holdings."
And in truth at that period only 8 per cent of the peasant families belonged to the collectives.
The struggle in the party about the so-called "general line", which had come
to the surface in 1923, became especially intense
and passionate in 1926. In its extended platform, which took up all the problems of
industry and economy, the Left Opposition
wrote:
"The party ought to resist and crush all tendencies directed to
the annulment or undermining of the nationalization of land,
one of the pillars of the proletarian dictatorship."
On that question, the Opposition gained the day; direct attempts against
nationalization were abandoned. but the problem, of
course, involved more than forms of property in land.
"To the growth of individual farming [fermerstvo] in the
country we must oppose a swifter growth of the collective farms.
It is necessary systematically year by year to set aside a considerable
sum to aid the poor peasants organized in
collectives. The whole work of the co-operatives ought to be imbued
with the purpose of converting small production
into a vast collectivized production."
But this broad program of collectivization was stubbornly regarded as utopian for the
coming years. During the preparations for
the 15th Party Congress, whose task was to expel the Left Opposition, Molotov, the future
president of the Soviet of People's
Commissars, said repeatedly:
"We not slip down (!) into poor peasants illusions about the
collectivization of the broad peasant masses. In the present
circumstances it is no longer possible."
It was then, according to the calendar, the end of 1927. So far was the ruling group at
that time from its own future policy
toward the peasants!
Those same years (1923-28) were passed in a struggle of the ruling coalition, Stalin,
Molotov, Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin
(Zinoviev and Kamenev went over to the Opposition in the beginning of 1926), against the
advocates of "super-industrialization"
and planned leadership. The future historian will re-establish with no small surprise the
moods of spiteful disbelief in bold
economic initiative with which the government of the socialist state was wholly imbued. An
acceleration of the tempo of
industrialization took place empirically, under impulses from without, with a crude
smashing of all calculations and an
extraordinary increase of overhead expenses. The demand for a five-year plan, when
advanced by the Opposition in 1923, was
met with mockery in the spirit of the petty bourgeois who fears "a leap into the
unknown". As late as April 1927, Stalin asserted
at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee that to attempt to build the Dnieperstroy
hydro-electric station would be the
same thing for us as for a muzhik to buy a gramophone instead of a cow. This winged
aphorism summed up the whole program.
It is worth nothing that during those years the bourgeois press of the whole world, and
the social-democratic press after it,
repeated with sympathy the official attribution to the "Left Opposition" of
industrial romanticism.
Amid the noise of party discussions the peasants were replying to the lack of
industrial goods with a more and more stubborn
strike. They would not take their grain to market, nor increase their sowings, The right
wing (Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin), who
were setting the tone at that period, demanded a broader scope for capitalist tendencies
in the village through a raising of the
price of grain, even at the cost of a lowered tempo in industry. The sole possible way out
under such a policy would have been
to import articles of manufacture in exchange for exported agricultural raw materials. But
this would have meant to form a
"connection" not between peasant economy and the socialist industries, but
between the kulak and world capitalism. It was not
worth while to make the October revolution for that.
"To accelerate industrialization," answered the
representatives of the Opposition at the party conference of 1926, "in
particular by way of increased taxation on the kulak, will produce a
large mass of goods and lower market prices, and
this will be to the advantage both of the worker and of the majority of
the peasants... Face to the village does not mean
turn your back to industry; it means industry to the village. For the
'face' of the state, if it does not include industry, is of
no use to the village."
In answer Stalin thundered against the "fantastic plans" of the Opposition.
Industry must not "rush ahead, breaking away from
agriculture and abandoning the tempo of accumulation in our country." The party
decisions continued to repeat these maxims of
passive accommodation to the well-off upper circles of the peasantry. The 15th Party
Congress, meeting in December 1927 for
the final smashing of the "super-industrializers", gave warning of the
"danger of a too great involvement of state capital in big
construction". The ruling faction at that time still refused to see any other
dangers.
In the economic year 1927-28, the so-called restoration period in which industry worked
chiefly with pre-revolutionary
machinery, and agriculture with the old tools, was coming to an end. For any further
advance independent industrial construction
on a large scale was necessary. It was impossible to lead any further gropingly and
without plan.
The hypothetic possibilities of socialist industrialization had been analyzed by the
Opposition as early as 1923-25. their general
conclusion was that, after exhausting the equipment inherited from the bourgeoisie, the
Soviet industries might, on the basis of
socialist accumulation, achieve a rhythm of growth wholly impossible under capitalism. The
leaders of the ruling faction openly
ridiculed our cautious coefficients in the vicinity of 15 to 18 per cent as the fantastic
music of an unknown future. This
constituted at that time the essence of the struggle against "Trotskyism".
The first official draft of the five-year-plan, prepared at last in 1927, was
completely saturated with the spirit of stingy tinkering.
The growth of industrial production was projected with a tempo declining yearly from 9 to
4 per cent. Consumption per person
was to increase during the whole five years 12 per cent! The incredible timidity of
thought in this first plan comes out clearly in
the fact that the state budget at the end of the five years was to constitute in all 16
per cent of the national income, whereas the
budget of tzarist Russia, which had no intention of creating a socialist society,
swallowed 18 per cent! It is perhaps worth adding
that the engineers and economists who drew up this plan were some years later severely
judged and punished by law as
conscious sabotagers acting under the direction of foreign powers. The accused might have
answered, had they dared, that their
planning work corresponded perfectly to the "general line" of the Politburo at
that time and was carried out under its orders.
The struggle of the tendencies was now translated into arithmetical language. "To
prevent on the 10th anniversary of the
October revolution such a piddling and completely pessimistic plan," said the
platform of the Opposition, "means in reality to
work against socialism." A year later, the Politburo adopted a new five-year plan
with an average yearly increase of production
amounting to 9 per cent. The actual course of the development, however, revealed a
stubborn tendency to approach the
coefficients of the "super-industrializers". After another year, when the
governmental policy had radically changed, the State
Planning Commission drew up a third five-year- plan, whose rate of growth came far nearer
than could have been expected to
the hypothetical prognosis made by the Opposition in 1923.
The real history of the economic policy of the Soviet Union, as we thus
see, is very different from the official legend.
Unfortunately, such pious investigators as the Webbs pay not the slightest attention to
this.
2.
A Sharp Turn: "Five-year Plan in Four Years" and "Complete
Collectivization"
Irresoluteness before the individual peasant enterprises, distrust of large plans,
defense of a minimum tempo, neglect of
international problems -- all this taken together formed the essence of the theory of
"socialism in one country", first put forward
by Stalin in the autumn of 1924 after the defeat of the proletariat in Germany. Not to
hurry with industrialization, not to quarrel
with the muzhik, not to count on world revolution, and above all to protect the power of
the party bureaucracy from criticism!
The differentiation of the peasantry was denounced as an intervention of the Opposition.
The above-mentioned Yakovlev
dismissed the Central Statistical Bureau whose records gave the kulak a greater place than
was satisfactory to the authorities,
while the leaders tranquilly asserted that the goods famine was out-living itself, that
"a peaceful tempo in economic development
was at hand", that the grain collections would in the future be carried on more
"evenly", etc. The strengthened kulak carried with
him the middle peasant and subjected the cities to a grain blockade. In January 1928 the
working class stood face-to-face with
the shadow of an advancing famine. History knows how to play spiteful jokes. In that very
month, when the kulaks were taking
the revolution by the throat, the representatives of the Left Opposition were thrown into
prison or banished to different parts of
Siberia in punishment for their "panic" before the specter of the kulak.
The government tried to pretend that the grain strike was caused by the naked hostility
of the kulak (where did he come from?)
to the socialist state -- that is, by ordinary political motives. But the kulak is little
inclined to that kind of "idealism". If he hid his
grain, it was because the bargain offered him was unprofitable. For the very same reason
he managed to bring under his
influence wide sections of the peasantry. Mere repressions against kulak sabotage were
obviously inadequate. It was necessary
to change the policy. Even yet, however, no little time was spent in vacillation.
Rykov, then still head of the government, announced in July 1928:
"To develop individual farms is... the chief task of the party."
And Stalin seconded him:
"There are people who think that individual farms have
exhausted their usefulness, that we should not support them....
These people have nothing in common with the line of our party."
Less than a year later, the line of the party had nothing in common with these words.
The dawn of "complete collectivization"
was on the horizon.
The new orientation was arrived at just as empirically as the preceding, and by way of
a hidden struggle within the governmental
bloc.
"The groups of the right and center are united by a general
hostility to the Opposition" -- thus the platform of the Left
gave warning a year before -- "and the cutting off of the latter
will inevitably accelerate the coming struggle between these
two."
And so it happened. The leaders of the disintegrating bloc would not for anything, of
course, admit that this prognosis of the left
wing, like many others, had come true. As late as the 19th of October, 1918, Stalin
announced publicly:
"It is time to stop gossiping about the existence of a Right
deviation and a conciliatory attitude towards it in the Politburo
of our Central Committee."
Both groups at that time were feeling out the party machine. The repressed party was
living on dark rumors and guesses. But
just in a few months the official press, with its usual freedom from embarrassment,
announced that the head of the government,
Rykov, "had speculated on the economic difficulties of the Soviet power"; that
the head of the Communist International,
Bukharin, was "a conducting wire of bourgeois-liberal influences"; that Tomsky,
president of the all-Russian Central Council of
Trade Unions, was nothing but a miserable trade-unionist. All three, Rykov, Bukharin and
Tomsky, were member of the
Politburo. Whereas the whole preceding struggle against the Left Opposition had taken its
weapons from the right groups,
Bukharin was now able, without sinning against the truth, to accuse Stalin of using in his
struggle with the Right a part of the
condemned Left Opposition platform.
In one way or another the change was made. The slogan "Get rich!", together
with the theory of the kulak's growing painlessly
into socialism, was belatedly, but all the more decisively, condemned. Industrialization
was put upon the order of the day.
Self-satisfied quietism was replaced by a panic of haste. The half-forgotten slogan of
Lenin, "catch up with and outstrip", was
filled out with the words, "in the shortest possible time". The minimalist
five-year plan, already confirmed in principle by a
congress of the party, gave place to a new plan, the fundamental elements of which were
borrowed in toto from the platform of
the shattered Left Opposition. Dnieperstroy, only yesterday likened to a gramophone, today
occupied the center of attention.
After the first new successes the slogan was advanced: "Achieve the five-year plan
in four years." The startled empires now
decided that everything was possible. Opportunism, as has often happened in history,
turned into its opposite, adventurism.
Whereas from 1923 to 1928 the Politburo had been ready to accept Bukharin's philosophy of
a "tortoise tempo", it now lightly
jumped from a 20 to a 30 per cent yearly growth, trying to convert every partial and
temporary achievement into a norm, and
losing sight of the conditioning interrelation of the different branches of industry. The
financial holes in the plan were stopped up
with printed paper. During the years of the first plan the number of bank notes in
circulation rose from 1.7 billion to 5.5, and by
the beginning of the second five-year plan had reached 8.4 billion rubles. The bureaucracy
not only freed itself from the political
control of the masses, upon whom this forced industrialization was laying an unbearable
burden, but also from the automatic
control exercised by the chervonetz [theoretical par = $5]. The currency system, put on a
solid basis at the beginning of the
NEP, was now again shaken to its roots.
The chief danger, however, and that not only for the fulfillment of th plan but for the
regime itself, appeared from the side of the
peasants.
On the 15th of February, 1928, the population of the country learned with surprise from
an editorial in Pravda that the villages
looked not at all the way they had been portrayed up to that moment by the authorities,
but on the contrary very much as the
expelled Left Opposition had presented them. The press which only yesterday had been
denying the existence of the kulaks,
today, on a signal from above, discovered them not only in the villages, but in the party
itself. It was revealed that the communist
nuclei were frequently dominated by rich peasants possessing complicated machinery,
employing hired labor, concealing from
the government hundreds and thousands of poods of grain, and implacably denouncing the
"Trotskyist" policy. The newspapers
vied with each other in printing sensational exposures of how kulaks in the position of
local were denying admission to the party
to poor peasants and hired hands. All the old criteria were turned upside down; minuses
and pluses changed places.
In order to feed the cities, it was necessary immediately to take from the kulak the
daily bread. This could be achieved only by
force. The expropriation of the grain reserve reserve, and that not only of the kulak but
of the middle peasant, was called, in the
official language, "extraordinary measures". This phrase is supposed to mean
that tomorrow everything will fall back into the old
rut. But the peasants did not believe fine words, and they were right. The violent
seizures of grain deprived the well-off peasants
of their motive to increased sowings. The hired hands and the poor peasant found
themselves without work. Agriculture again
arrived in a blind alley, and with it the state. It was necessary at any cost to reform
the "general line".
Stalin and Molotov, still giving individual farming the chief place, began to emphasize
the necessity of a swifter development of
the soviet and collective farms. But since the bitter need of food did not permit a
cessation of military expenditures into the
country, the program of promoting individual farms was left hanging in the air. It was
necessary to "slip down" to collectivization.
The temporary "extraordinary measures" for the collection of grain developed
unexpectedly into a program of "liquidation of the
kulaks as a class". From the shower of contradictory commands, more copious than food
rations, it became evident that on the
peasant question the government had not only no five-year plan, but not even a five
months' program.
According to the new plan, drawn up under the spur of a food crisis, collective farms
were at the end of five years to comprise
about 20 per cent of the peasant holdings. This program -- whose immensity will be clear
when you consider that during the
preceding 10 years collectivization had affected less than 1 per cent of the country --
was nevertheless by the middle of the five
years left far behind. In November 1929, Stalin, abandoning his own vacillations,
announced the end of individual farming. The
peasants, he said, are entering the collective farms "in whole villages, counties and
even provinces". Yakovlev, who two years
before had insisted that the collectives would for many years remain only "islands in
a sea of peasant holdings", now received an
order as People's Commissar of Agriculture to "liquidate the kulaks as a class",
and establish complete collectivization at the
"earliest possible date". In the year 1929, the proportion of collective farms
rose from 1.7 per cent to 3.9 per cent. In 1930 it
rose to 23.6, in 1931 to 52.7, in 1932 to 61.5 per cent.
At the present time hardly anybody would be foolish enough to repeat the twaddle of
liberals to the effect that collectivization as
a whole was accomplished by naked force. In former historic epochs the peasants in their
struggle for land have at one time
raised an insurrection against the landlords, at another sent a stream of colonizers into
untilled regions, at still another rushed into
all kinds of sects which promised to reward the muzhik with heaven's vacancies for his
narrow quarters on earth. Now, after the
expropriation of the great estates and the extreme parcellation of land, the union of
these small parcels into big tracts had
become a question of life and death for the peasants, for agriculture, and for society as
a whole.
The problem, however, is far from settled by these general historic considerations. The
real possibilities of collectivization are
determined, not by the depth of the impasse in the villages and not by the administrative
energy of the government, but primarily
by the existing productive resources -- that is, the ability of the industries to furnish
large-scale agriculture with the requisite
machinery. These material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were set up with
an equipment suitable in the main only
for small-scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivization took
the character of an economic adventure.
Caught unawares by the radicalism of its own shift of policy, the government did not
and could not make even an elementary
political preparation for the new course. Not only the peasant masses, but even the local
organs of power, were ignorant of
what was being demanded of them. The peasants were heated white hot by rumors that their
cattle and property were to be
seized by the state. This rumor, too, was not so far from the truth. Actually realizing
their own former caricature of the Left
Opposition, the bureaucracy "robbed the villages". Collectivization appeared to
the peasant primarily in the form of an
expropriation of all his belongings. They collectivized not only horses, cows, sheep,
pigs, but even new-born chickens. They
"dekulakized", as one foreign observer wrote, "down to the felt shoes,
which they dragged from the feet of little children." As a
result there was an epidemic selling of cattle for a song by the peasants, or a slaughter
of cattle for meat and hides.
In January 1930, at a Moscow congress, a member of the Central Committee, Andreyev,
drew a two-sided picture of
collectivization:
On the one side he asserted that a collective movement powerfully
developing throughout the whole country "will now
destroy upon its road each and every obstacle"; on the other, a
predatory sale by the peasants of their own implements,
stock and even seeds before entering the collectives "is assuming
positively menacing proportions".
However contradictory those two generalizations may be, they show correctly from
opposite sides the epidemic character of
collectivization as a measure of despair. "Complete collectivization", wrote the
same foreign critic, "plunged the national
economy into a condition of ruin almost without precedent, as though a three years' war
had passed over."
Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms, which yesterday had been the sole motive
force of agriculture -- weak like an old
farmer's nag, but nevertheless forces -- the bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture
by the commands of 2,000 collective
farm administrative offices, lacking technical equipment, agronomic knowledge and the
support of the peasants themselves. The
dire consequences of this adventurism soon followed, and they lasted for a number of
years. The total harvest of grain, which
had risen in 1930 to 835 million hundredweight, fell in the next two years below 700
million. The difference does not seem
catastrophic in itself, but it meant a loss of just that quantity of grain needed to keep
the towns even at their customary hunger
norm. In technical culture, the results were still worse. On the eve of collectivization
the production of sugar had reached almost
100 million poods [1 pood = ap. 36 lbs.], and at the height of complete collectivization
it had fallen, owing to a lack of beets, to
48 million poods -- that is, to half what it had been. But the most devastating hurricane
hit the animal kingdom. The number of
horses fell 55 per cent -- from 34.6 million in 1929 to 15.6 million in 1934. The number
of horned cattle fell from 30.7 million to
19.5 million -- that is, 40 per cent. The number of pigs, 55 per cent; sheep, 66 per cent.
The destruction of people -- by
hunger, cold, epidemics and measures of repression -- is unfortunately less accurately
tabulated than the slaughter of stock, but
it also mounts up to millions. The blame for these sacrifices lies not upon
collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling
methods with which it was carried through. The bureaucracy foresaw nothing. Even the
constitutions of the collectives, which
made an attempt to bind up the personal interests of the peasants with the welfare of the
farm, were not published until after the
unhappy villages had been thus cruelly laid waste.
The forced character of this new course arose from the necessity of finding some
salvation from the consequences of the policy
of 1923-28. But even so, collectivization could and should have assumed a more reasonable
tempo and more deliberated
forms. having in its hands both the power and the industries, the bureaucracy could have
regulated the process without carrying
the nation to the edge of disaster. They could have, and should have, adopted tempos
better corresponding to the material and
moral resources of the country.
"Under favorable circumstances, external and external,"
wrote the emigre organ of the "Left Opposition" in 1930, "the
material- technical conditions of agriculture can in the course of some
10 of 15 years be transformed to the bottom, and
provide the productive basis for collectivization. However, during the
intervening years there would be time to overthrow
the Soviet power more than once."
This warning was not exaggerated. Never before had the breath of destruction hung so
directly above the territory of the
October revolution, as in the years of complete collectivization. Discontent, distrust,
bitterness, were corroding the country. The
disturbance of the currency, the mounting up of stable, "conventional", and free
market prices, the transition from a similacrum of
trade between the state and the peasants to a grain, meat and milk levy, the
life-and-death struggle with mass plunderings of the
collective property and mass concealment of these plunderings, the purely military
mobilization of the party for the struggle
against kulak sabotage (after the "liquidation" of the kulaks as a class)
together with this a return to food cards and hunger
rations, and finally a restoration of the passport system -- all these measures revived
throughout the country the atmosphere of
the seemingly so long ended civil war.
The supply to the factories of food and raw materials grew worse from season to season.
Unbearable working conditions
caused a migration of labor power, malingering, careless work, breakdown of machines, a
high percentage of trashy products
and general low quality. The average productivity of labor declined 11.7 per cent in 1931.
According to an incidental
acknowledgement of Molotov, printed in the whole Soviet press, industrial production in
1932 rose only 8.5 per cent, instead of
the 36 per cent indicated by the year's plan. To be sure, the world was informed soon
after this that the five-year plan had been
fulfilled in four years and three months. But that means only that the cynicism of the
bureaucracy in its manipulations of statistics
and public opinion is without limit. That, however, is not the chief thing. Not the fate
of the five-year plan, but the fate of the
regime was at stake.
The regime survived.
But that is the merit of the regime itself, which had put down deep roots in the
popular soil. It is in no less degree due to
favorable external circumstances. In those years of economic chaos and civil was in the
villages, the Soviet Union was
essentially paralyzed in the face of a foreign enemy. The discontent of the peasantry
swept through the army. Mistrust and
vacillation demoralized the bureaucratic machine, and the commanding cadres. A blow either
from the East or West at that
period might have had fatal consequences.
Fortunately, the first years of a crisis in trade and industry had created
throughout the capitalist world moods of bewildered
watchful waiting. Nobody was ready for war; nobody dared attempt it. Moreover, in no one
of the hostile countries was there
an adequate realization of the acuteness of these social convulsions which where shaking
the land of soviets under the roar of the
official music in honor of the "general line".
* * *
In spite of its brevity, our historic outline shows, we hope, how far removed the
actual development of the workers' state has
been from an idyllic picture of the gradual and steady piling up of successes. From the
crises of the past we shall later on derive
important indications for the future. But, besides that, a historic glance at the economic
policy of the Soviet government and its
zigzags has seemed to us necessary in order to destroy that artificially inculcated
individualistic fetishism which finds the sources
of success, both real and pretended, in the extraordinary quality of the leadership, and
not in the conditions of socialized
property created by the revolution.
The objective superiority of the new social regime reveals itself, too, of course, in
the methods of the leaders. But these methods
reflect equally the economic and cultural backwardness of the country, and the
petty-bourgeois provincial conditions in which
the ruling cadres were formed.
It would be the crudest mistake to infer from this that the policy of the Soviet
leaders is of third-rate importance. There is no
other government in the world in whose hands the fate of the whole country is concentrated
to such a degree. The successes
and failures of an individual capitalist depend, not wholly of course, but to a very
considerable and sometimes decisive degree,
upon his personal qualities. Mutatis mutandis, the Soviet government occupies in relation
to the whole economic system the
position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise. The centralized
character of the national economy converts
the state power into a factor of enormous significance. But for that very reason the
policy of the government must be judged, not by summarized results, not by naked
statistical data, but by the specific role which conscious foresight and planned
leadership have played in achieving these results.
The zigzags of the governmental course have reflected not only the objective
contradictions of the situation, but also the
inadequate ability of the leaders to understand these contradictions in season and react
prophylactically against them. It is not
easy to express mistakes of the leadership in bookkeeper's magnitudes, but our schematic
exposition of the history of these
zigzags permits the conclusion that they have imposed upon the Soviet economy an immense
burden of overhead expenses.
It remains of course incomprehensible -- at least with a rational approach to history
-- how and why a faction the least rich of all
in ideas, and the most burdened with mistakes, should have gained the upper hand over all
other groups, and concentrated an
unlimited power in its hands. Our further analysis will give us a key to this problem too.
We shall see, at the same time, how the
bureaucratic methods of autocratic leadership are coming into sharper and sharper conflict
with the demands of economy and
culture, and with what inevitable necessity new crises and disturbances arise in the
development of the Soviet Union.
However, before taking up the dual role of the "socialist"
bureaucracy, we must answer the question: What is the net result of
the preceding successes? Is socialism really achieved in the Soviet Union? Or, more
cautiously: Do the present economic and
cultural achievements constitute a guarantee against the danger of capitalist restoration
-- just as bourgeois society at a certain
stage of its development became insured by its own successes against a restoration of
serfdom and feudalism?
Chapter 3
SOCIALISM AND THE STATE
1.The transitional regime
2.Program and reality
3.The dual character of the workers' state
4."Generalized want" and the gendarme
5.The "Complete triumph of socialism" and the "Reinforcement
of the dictatorship"
Is it true, as the official authorities assert, that socialism is already realized in
the Soviet Union? And if not, have the achieved
successes at least made sure of its realization within the national boundaries, regardless
of the course of events in the rest of the
world? The preceding critical appraisal of the chief indices of the Soviet economy ought
to give us the point of departure for a
correct answer to this question, but we shall require also certain preliminary theoretical
points of reference.
Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of
progress, and constructs the communist
program upon the dynamic of the productive forces. If you conceive that some cosmic
catastrophe is going to destroy our
planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist
perspective along with much else. Except for this
as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest scientific ground for
setting any limit in advance to our technical
productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress,
and that alone, by the way, makes it
irreconcilably opposed to religion.
The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic
powers of man that productive labor,
having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life's
goods, existing in continual abundance, will
not demand -- as it does not now in any well-off family or "decent"
boardinghouse -- any control except that of education, habit
and social opinion. Speaking frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider
such a really modest perspective
"utopian".
Capitalism prepared the conditions and forces for a social revolution: technique,
science and the proletariat. The communist
structure cannot, however, immediately replace the bourgeois society. The material and
cultural inheritance from the past is
wholly inadequate for that. In its first steps the workers' state cannot yet permit
everyone to work "according to his abilities" --
that is, as much as he can and wishes to -- nor can it reward everyone "according to
his needs", regardless of the work he does.
In order to increase the productive forces, it is necessary to resort to the customary
norms of wage payment -- that is, to the
distribution of life's goods in proportion to the quantity and quality of individual
labor.
Marx named this first stage of the new society "the lowest stage of
communism", in distinction from the highest, where together
with the last phantoms of want material inequality will disappear. In this sense socialism
and communism are frequently
contrasted as the lower and higher stages of the new society. "We have not yet, of
course, complete communism," reads the
present official Soviet doctrine, "but we have already achieved socialism -- that is,
the lowest stage of communism." In proof of
this, they adduce the dominance of the state trusts in industry, the collective farms in
agriculture, the state and co-operative
enterprises in commerce. At first glance this gives a complete correspondence with the a
priori -- and therefore hypothetical --
scheme of Marx. But it is exactly for the Marxist that this question is not exhausted by a
consideration of forms of property
regardless of the achieved productivity of labor. By the lowest stage of communism Marx
meant, at any rate, a society which
from the very beginning stands higher in its economic development than the most advanced
capitalism. Theoretically such a
conception is flawless, for taken on a world scale communism, even in its first incipient
stage, means a higher level of
development that that of bourgeois society. Moreover, Marx expected that the Frenchman
would begin the social revolution,
the German continue it, the Englishman finish it; and as to the Russian, Marx left him far
in the rear. But this conceptual order
was upset by the facts. Whoever tries now mechanically to apply the universal historic
conception of Marx to the particular case
of the Soviet Union at the given stage of its development, will be entangled at once in
hopeless contradictions.
Russia was not the strongest, but the weakest link in the chain of capitalism. The
present Soviet Union does not stand above the
world level of economy, but is only trying to catch up to the capitalist countries. If
Marx called that society which was to be
formed upon the basis of a socialization of the productive forces of the most advanced
capitalism of its epoch, the lowest stage
of communism, then this designation obviously does not apply to the Soviet Union, which is
still today considerably poorer in
technique, culture and the good things of life than the capitalist countries. It would be
truer, therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its contradictoriness, not a
socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism.
There is not an ounce of pedantry in this concern for terminological accuracy. The
strength and stability of regimes are
determined in the long run by the relative productivity of their labor. A socialist
economy possessing a technique superior to that
of capitalism would really be guaranteed in its socialist development for sure -- so to
speak, automatically -- a thing which
unfortunately it is still quite impossible to say about the Soviet economy.
A majority of the vulgar defenders of the Soviet Union as it is are
inclined to reason approximately thus: Even though you
concede that the present Soviet regime is not yet socialistic, a further development of
the productive forces on the present
foundations must sooner or later lead to the complete triumph of socialism. Hence only the
factor of time is uncertain. And it is
worth while making a fuss about that? However triumphant such an argument seems at first
glance, it is in fact extremely
superficial. Time is by no means a secondary factor when historic processes are in
question. It is far more dangerous to confuse
the present and the future tenses in politics than in grammar. Evolution is far from
consisting, as vulgar evolutionists of the Webb
type imagine, in a steady accumulation and continual "improvement" of that which
exists. It has its transitions of quantity into
quality, its crises, leaps and backward lapses. It is exactly because the Soviet Union is
as yet far from having attained the first
stage of socialism, as a balanced system of production and distribution, that is
development does not proceed harmoniously, but
in contradictions. Economic contradictions produce social antagonisms, which in turn
develop their own logic, not awaiting the
further growth of the productive forces. We have just seen how true this was in the case
of the kulak who did not wish to
"grow" evolutionarily into socialism, and who, to the surprise of the
bureaucracy and its ideologues, demanded a new and
supplementary revolution. Will the bureaucracy itself, in whose hands the power and wealth
are concentrated, wish to grow
more peacefully into socialism? As to this, doubts are certainly permissible. In any case,
it would be imprudent to take the word
of the bureaucracy for it. It is impossible at present to answer finally and irrevocably
the question in what direction the economic
contradictions and social antagonisms of Soviet society will develop in the course of the
next three, five or 10 years. The
outcome depends upon a struggle of living social forces -- not on a national scale,
either, but on an international scale. At every
new stage, therefore, a concrete analysis is necessary of actual relations and tendencies
in their connection and continual
interaction. We shall now see the importance of such an analysis in the case of the state.
Lenin, following Marx and Engels, saw the first distinguishing features of the
proletarian revolution in the fact that, having
expropriated the exploiters, it would abolish the necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus
raised above society -- and above all, a
police and standing army.
"The proletariat needs a state -- this all the opportunists can
tell you," wrote Lenin in 1917, two months before the seizure
of power, "but they, the opportunists, forget to add that the
proletariat needs only a dying state -- that is, a state
constructed in such a way that it immediately begins to die away and
cannot help dying away."
This criticism was directed at the time against reformist socialists of the type of the
Russian mensheviks, British Fabians, etc. It
now attacks with redoubled force the Soviet idolators with their cult of a bureaucratic
state which has not the slightest intention
of "dying away".
The social demand for a bureaucracy arise in all those situations where sharp
antagonisms need to be "softened", "adjusted",
"regulated" (always in the interests of the privileged, the possessors, and
always to the advantage of the bureaucracy itself).
Throughout all bourgeois revolutions, therefore, no matter how democratic, there has
occurred a reinforcement and perfecting
of the bureaucratic apparatus.
"Officialdom and the standing army -- " writes Lenin,
"that is a 'parasite' on the body of bourgeois society, a parasite
created by the inner contradictions which tear this society, yet
nothing but a parasite stopping up the living pores."
Beginning with 1917 -- that is, from the moment when the conquest of power confronted
the party as a practical problem --
Lenin was continually occupied with the thought of liquidating this "parasite".
After the overthrow of the exploiting classes -- he
repeats and explains in every chapter of State and Revolution -- the proletariat will
shatter the old bureaucratic machine and
create its own apparatus out of employees and workers. And it will take measures against
their turning into bureaucrats --
"measures analyzed in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only
election but recall at any time; (2) payment no higher than
the wages of a worker; (3) immediate transition to a regime in which
all will fulfill the functions of control and supervision
so that all may for a time become 'bureaucrats', and therefore nobody
can become a bureaucrat."
You must not think that Lenin was talking about the problems of a decade. No, this was
the first step with which "we should
and must begin upon achieving a proletarian revolution".
This same bold view of the state in a proletarian dictatorship found finished
expression a year and a half after the conquest of
power in the program of the Bolshevik party, including its section on the army. A strong
state, but without mandarins; armed
power, but without the Samurai! It is not the tasks of defense which create a military and
state bureaucracy, but the class
structure of society carried over into the organization of defense. The army is only a
copy of the social relations. The struggle
against foreign danger necessitates, of course, in the workers' state as in others, a
specialized military technical organization, but
in no case a privileged officer caste. The party program demands a replacement of the
standing army by an armed people.
The regime of proletarian dictatorship from its very beginning thus ceases to be a
"state" in the old sense of the word -- a special
apparatus, that is, for holding in subjection the majority of the people. The material
power, together with the weapons, goes
over directly and immediately into the hands of the workers' organizations such as the
soviets. The state as a bureaucratic
apparatus begins to die away the first day of the proletarian dictatorship. Such is the
voice of the party program -- not voided to
this day. Strange: it sounds like a spectral voice from the mausoleum.
However you may interpret the nature of the present Soviet state, on thing
is indubitable: at the end of its second decade of
existence, it has not only not died away, but not begun to "die away". Worse
than that, it has grown into a hitherto unheard of
apparatus of compulsion. The bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place
to the masses, but has turned into an
uncontrolled force dominating the masses. The army not only has not been replaced by an
armed people, but has given birth to
a privileged officers' caste, crowned with marshals, while the people, "the armed
bearers of the dictatorship", are now forbidden
in the Soviet Union to carry even nonexplosive weapons. With the utmost stretch of fancy
it would be difficult to imagine a
contrast more striking than that which exists between the scheme of the workers' state
according to Marx, Engels and Lenin,
and the actual state now headed by Stalin. While continuing to publish the works of Lenin
(to be sure, with excerpts and
distortions by the censor), the present leaders of the Soviet Union and their ideological
representatives do not even raise the
question of the causes of such a crying divergence between program and reality. We will
try to do this for them.
3.
The Dual Character of the Workers' State
The proletarian dictatorship is just a bridge between the bourgeois and the socialist
society. In its very essence, therefore, it
bears a temporary character. An incidental but very essential task of the state which
realizes the dictatorship consists in
preparing for its own dissolution. The degree of the realization of this
"incidental" task is, to some extent, a measure of its
success in the fulfillment of its fundamental mission: the construction of a society
without classes and without material
contradictions. Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
In his famous polemic against Duhring, Engels wrote:
"When, together with class domination and the struggle for
individual existence created by the present anarchy in
production, those conflicts and excesses which result from this
struggle disappear, from that time on there will be nothing
to suppress, and there will be no need for a special instrument of
suppression, the state."
The philistine considers the gendarme an eternal institution. In reality, the gendarme
will bridle mankind only until man shall
thoroughly bridle nature. In order that the state shall disappear, "class domination
and the struggle for individual existence" must
disappear. Engels joins these two conditions together, for in the perspective of changing
social regimes a few decades amount to
nothing. But the thing looks different to those generations who bear the weight of a
revolution. It is true that capitalist anarchy
creates the struggle of each against all, but the trouble is that a socialization of the
means of production does not yet
automatically remove the "struggle for individual existence". That is the nub of
the question!
A socialized state even in America, on the basis of the most advanced capitalism, could
not immediately provide everyone with
as much as he needs, and would therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much
as possible. The duty of the
stimulator in these circumstances naturally falls to the state, which in its turn cannot
but resort, with various changes and
mitigations, to the method of labor payment worked out by capitalism. It was in this sense
that Marx wrote in 1875:
"Bourgeois law... is inevitable in the first phase of the
communist society, in that form in which it issues after long labor
pains from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the
economic structure and the cultural development of
society conditioned by that structure."
In explaining these remarkable lines, Lenin adds:
"Bourgeois law in relation to the distribution of the objects
of consumption assumes, of course, inevitably a bourgeois
state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of compelling
observance of its norms. It follows (we are still
quoting Lenin) that under Communism not only will bourgeois law survive
for a certain time, but also even a bourgeois
state without the bourgeoisie!"
This highly significant conclusion, completely ignored by the present official
theoreticians, has a decisive significance for the
understanding of the nature of the Soviet state -- or more accurately, for a first
approach to such understanding. Insofar as the
state which assumes the task of socialist transformation is compelled to defend inequality
-- that is, the material privileges of a
minority -- by methods of compulsion, insofar does it also remain a "bourgeois"
state, even though without a bourgeoisie. These
words contain neither praise nor blame; they name things with their real name.
The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the growth of material power, ought
to serve socialist aims -- but only in the
last analysis. The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character:
socialistic, insofar as it defends social
property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life's
goods is carried out with a capitalistic
measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom. Such a contradictory
characterization may horrify the dogmatists
and scholastics; we can only offer them our condolences.
The final physiognomy of the workers' state ought to be determined by the changing relations between its bourgeois and socialist tendencies. The triumph of the latter ought ipso facto to signify the final liquidation of the gendarme -- that is, the dissolving of the state in a self-governing society. From this alone it is sufficiently clear how immeasurably significant is the problem of Soviet bureaucratism, both in itself and as a system!
It is because Lenin, in accord with his whole intellectual temper, gave an extremely
sharpened expression to the conception of
Marx, that he revealed the source of the future difficulties, his own among them, although
he did not himself succeed in carrying
his analysis through to the end. "A bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie"
proved inconsistent with genuine Soviet democracy.
The dual function of the state could not but affect its structure. Experience revealed
what theory was unable clearly to foresee. If
for the defense of socialized property against bourgeois counterrevolution a "state
of armed workers" was fully adequate, it was
a very different matter to regulate inequalities in the sphere of consumption. Those
deprived of property are not inclined to
create and defend it. The majority cannot concern itself with the privileges of the
minority. For the defense of "bourgeois law"
the workers' state was compelled to create a "bourgeois" type of instrument --
that is, the same old gendarme, although in a new
uniform.
We have thus taken the first step toward understanding the fundamental contradictions
between Bolshevik program and Soviet
reality. If the state does not die away, but grows more and more despotic, if the
plenipotentiaries of the working class become
bureaucratized, and the bureaucracy rises above the new society, this is not for some
secondary reasons like the psychological
relics of the past, etc., but is a result of the iron necessity to give birth to and
support a privileged minority so long as it is
impossible to guarantee genuine equality.
The tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangles the workers' movement in
capitalist countries, would everywhere show
themselves even after a proletarian revolution. But it is perfectly obvious that the
poorer the society which issues from a
revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the expression of this "law",
the more crude would be the forms assumed by
bureaucratism, and the more dangerous would it become for socialist development. The
Soviet state is prevented not only from
dying away, but even from freeing itself of the bureaucratic parasite, not by the
"relics" of former ruling classes, as declares the
naked police doctrine of Stalin, for those relics are powerless in themselves. It is
prevented by immeasurably mightier factors,
such as material want, cultural backwardness and the resulting dominance of
"bourgeois law" in what most immediately and
sharply touches every human being, the business of insuring his personal existence.
4.
"Generalized Want" and the Gendarme
Two years before the Communist Manifesto, young Marx wrote:
"A development of the productive forces is the absolutely
necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without
it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities
begins again, and that means that all the old crap must
revive."
This thought Marx never directly developed, and for no accidental reason: he never
foresaw a proletarian revolution in a
backward country. Lenin also never dwelt upon it, and this too was not accidental. He did
not foresee so prolonged an isolation
of the Soviet state. Nevertheless, the citation, merely an abstract construction with
Marx, an inference from the opposite,
provides an indispensable theoretical key to the wholly concrete difficulties and
sicknesses of the Soviet regime. On the historic
basis of destitution, aggravated by the destructions of the imperialist and civil wars,
the "struggle for individual existence" not
only did not disappear the day after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and not only did
not abate in the succeeding years, but,
on the contrary, assumed at times an unheard-of ferocity. Need we recall that certain
regions of the country have twice gone to
the point of cannibalism?
The distance separating tzarist Russia from the West can really be appreciated only
now. In the most favorable conditions --
that is, in the absence of inner disturbances and external catastrophes -- it would
require several more five-year periods before
the Soviet Union could fully assimilate those economic and educative achievements upon
which the first-born nations of
capitalist civilization have expended centuries. The application of socialist methods for
the solution of pre-socialist problems --
that is the very essence of the present economic and cultural work in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union, to be sure, even now excels in productive forces the most advanced
countries of the epoch of Marx. But in
the first place, in the historic rivalry of two regimes, it is not so much a question of
absolutely as of relative levels: the Soviet
economy opposes the capitalism of Hitler, Baldwin, and Roosevelt, not Bismarck,
Palmerston, or Abraham Lincoln. And in the
second place, the very scope of human demands changes fundamentally with the growth of
world technique. The
contemporaries of Marx knew nothing of automobiles, radios, moving pictures, aeroplanes. A
socialist society, however, is
unthinkable without the free enjoyment of these goods.
"The lowest stage of Communism", to employ the term of Marx, begins at that
level to which the most advanced capitalism has
drawn near. The real program of the coming Soviet five-year plan, however, is to
"catch up with Europe and America". The
construction of a network of autoroads and asphalt highways in the measureless spaces of
the Soviet Union will require much
more time and material than to transplant automobile factories from America, or even to
acquire their technique. How many
years are needed in order to make it possible for every Soviet citizen to use an
automobile in any direction he chooses, refilling
his gas tank without difficulty en route? In barbarian society the rider and the
pedestrian constituted two classes. The automobile
differentiates society no less than the saddle horse. So long as even a modest
"Ford" remains the privilege of a minority, there
survive all the relations and customs proper to a bourgeois society. And together with
them there remains the guardian of
inequality, the state.
Basing himself wholly upon the Marxian theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
Lenin did not succeed, as we have said,
either in his chief work dedicated to this question (State and Revolution), or in the
program of the party, in drawing all the
necessary conclusions as to the character of the state from the economic backwardness and
isolatedness of the country.
Explaining the revival of bureaucratism by the unfamiliarity of the masses with
administration and by the special difficulties
resulting from the war, the program prescribes merely political measures for the
overcoming of "bureaucratic distortions":
elections and recall at any time of all plenipotentiaries, abolition of material
privileges, active control by the masses, etc. It was
assumed that along this road the bureaucrat, from being a boss, would turn into a simple
and moreover temporary technical
agent, and the state would gradually and imperceptibly disappear from the scene.
This obvious underestimation of impending difficulties is explained by the fact that
the program was based wholly upon an
international perspective. "The October revolution in Russia has realized the
dictatorship of the proletariat.... The era of world
proletarian communist revolution has begun." These were the introductory lines of the
program. Their authors not only did not
set themselves the aim of constructing "socialism in a single country" -- this
idea had not entered anybody's head then, and least
of all Stalin's -- but they also did not touch the question as to what character the
Soviet state would assume, if compelled for as
long as two decades to solve in isolation those economic and cultural problems which
advanced capitalism had solved so long
ago.
The post-war revolutionary crisis did not lead to the victory of socialism in Europe.
The social democrats rescued the
bourgeoisie. That period, which to Lenin and his colleagues looked like a short
"breathing spell", has stretched out to a whole
historical epoch. The contradictory social structure of the Soviet Union, and the
ultra-bureaucratic character of its state, are the
direct consequences of this unique and "unforeseen" historical pause, which has
at the same time led in the capitalist countries to
fascism or the pre-fascist reaction.
While the first attempt to create a state cleansed of bureaucratism fell foul, in the
first place, of the unfamiliarity of the masses
with self-government, the lack of qualified workers devoted to socialism, etc., it very
soon after these immediate difficulties
encountered others more profound. That reduction of the state to functions of 'accounting
and control", with a continual
narrowing of the functions of compulsion, demanded by the party program, assumed at least
a relative condition of general
contentment. Just this necessary condition was lacking. No help came from the West. The
power of the democratic Soviets
proved cramping, even unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate those
privileged groups whose existence
was necessary for defense, for industry, for technique, and science. In this decidedly not
"socialistic" operation, taking from 10
and giving to one, these crystallized out and developed a powerful caste of specialists in
distribution.
How and why is it, however, that the enormous economic successes of the
recent period have led not to a mitigation, but on the
contrary to a sharpening, of inequalities, and at the same time to a further growth of
bureaucratism, such that from being a
"distortion", it has now become a system of administration? Before attempting to
answer this question, let us hear how the
authoritative leaders of the Soviet bureaucracy look upon their own regime.
5.
The "Complete Triumph of Socialism" and the "Reinforcement
of the Dictatorship"
There have been several announcements during recent years of the "complete
triumph" of socialism in the Soviet Union --
taking especially categorical forms in connection with the "liquidation of the kulaks
as a class". On January 30, 1931, Pravda,
interpreting a speech of Stalin, said: "During the second five-year period, the last
relics of capitalist elements in our economy
will be liquidated." (Italics ours.) From the point of view of this perspective, the
state ought conclusively to die away during the
same period, for where the "last relics" of capitalism are liquidated the state
has nothing to do.
"The Soviet power," says the program of the Bolshevik
party on this subject, "openly recognizes the inevitability of the
class character of every state, so long as the division of society into
classes, and therewith all state power, has not
completely disappeared."
However, when certain incautious Moscow theoreticians attempted, from the liquidation
of the "last relics" of capitalism taken
on faith, to infer they dying away of the state, the bureaucracy immediately declared such
theories "counterrevolutionary".
Where lies the theoretical mistake of the bureaucracy -- in the basic premise or the
conclusion? In the one and the other. To the
first announcement of "complete triumph", the Left Opposition answered: You must
not limit yourself to the socio-juridical form
of relations which are unripe, contradictory, in agriculture still very unstable,
abstracting from the fundamental criterion: level of
the productive forces. Juridical forms themselves have an essentially different social
content in dependence upon the height of
the technical level. "Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the
cultural level conditioned by it." (Marx) Soviet
forms of property on a basis of the most modern achievement of American technique
transplanted into all branches of economic
life -- that would indeed be the first stage of socialism. Soviet forms with a low
productivity of labor mean only a transitional
regime whose destiny history has not yet finally weighed.
"Is it not monstrous?" -- we wrote in March 1932. "The country can not
get out of a famine of goods. There is a stoppage of
supplies at every step. Children lack milk. But the official oracles announce: 'The
country has entered into the period of
socialism!' Would it be possible more viciously to compromise the name of socialism?"
Karl Radek, now a prominent publicist
[TRANSLATOR NOTE -- written before the arrest of Karl Radek in August 1936 on charges of a
terroristic conspiracy
against the Soviet leaders] of the ruling Soviet circles, parried these remarks in the
German liberal paper, Berliner Tageblatt, in a
special issue devoted to the Soviet Union (May 1932), in the following words which deserve
to be immortal:
"Milk is a product of cows and not of socialism, and you would
have actually to confuse socialism with the image of a
country where rivers flow milk, in order not to understand that a
country can rise for a time to a higher level of
development without any considerable rise in the material situation of
the popular masses."
These lines were written when a horrible famine was raging in the country.
Socialism is a structure of planned to the end of the best satisfaction of human needs;
otherwise it does not deserve the name of
socialism. If cows are socialized, but there are too few of them, or they have too meagre
udders, then conflicts arise out of the
inadequate supply of milk -- conflicts between city and country, between collectives and
individual peasants, between different
state of the proletariat, between the whole toiling mass and bureaucracy. It was in fact
the socialization of the cows which led to
their mass extermination by the peasants. Social conflicts created by want can in their
turn lead to a resurrection of "all the old
crap". Such was, in essence, our answer.
The 7th Congress of the Communist International, in a resolution of August 29, 1935,
solemnly affirmed that in the sum total of
the successes of the nationalized industries, the achievement of collectivization, the
crowding out of capitalist elements and the
liquidation of the kulaks as a class, "the final and irrevocable triumph of socialism
and the all-sided reinforcement of the state of
the proletarian dictatorship, is achieved in the Soviet Union." With all its
categorical tone, this testimony of the Communist
International is wholly self-contradictory. If socialism has "finally and
irrevocably" triumphed, not as a principle but as a living
social regime, then a renewed "reinforcement" of the dictatorship is obvious
nonsense. And on the contrary, if the reinforcement
of the dictatorship is evoked by the real demands of the regime, that means that the
triumph of socialism is still remote. Not only
a Marxist, but any realistic political thinker, ought to understand that the very
necessity of "reinforcing" the dictatorship -- that is,
governmental repression -- testifies not to the triumph of a classless harmony, but to the
growth of new social antagonisms.
What lies at the bottom of all this? Lack of the means of subsistence from the low
productivity of labor.
Lenin once characterized socialism as "the Soviet power plus
electrification". That epigram, whose one-sidedness was due to
the propaganda aims of the moment, assumed at least as a minimum starting point the
capitalist level of electrification. At present
in the Soviet Union there is 1/3rd as much electrical energy per head of the population as
in the advanced countries. If you take
into consideration that the soviets have given place in the meantime to a political
machine that is independent of the masses, the
Communist International has nothing left but to declare that socialism is bureaucratic
power plus 1/3rd of the capitalist
electrification. Such a definition would be photographically accurate, but for socialism
it is not quite enough! In a speech to the
Stakhanovists in November 1935, Stalin, obedient to the empirical aims of the conference,
unexpectedly announced:
"Why can and should and necessarily will socialism conquer the
capitalist system of economy? Because it can give... a
higher productivity of labor."
Incidentally rejecting the resolution of the Communist International adopted three
months before upon the same question, and
also his own oft-repeated announcements, Stalin here speaks of the "triumph" of
socialism in the future tense. Socialism will
conquer the capitalist system, he says, when it surpasses it in the productivity of labor.
Not only the tenses of the verbs but the
social criteria change, as we see, from moment to moment. It is certainly not easy for the
Soviet citizen to keep up with the
"general line".
Finally, on March 1, 1936, in a conversation with Roy Howard, Stalin offered a new definition of the Soviet regime:
"That social organization which we have created may be called a
Soviet socialist organization, still not wholly completed,
but at root a socialist organization of society."
In this purposely vague definition there are almost as many contradictions
as there are words. The social organization is called
"Soviet socialist", but the Soviets are a form of state, and socialism is a
social regime. These d