Who Were The Soviet Ruling Class?
The Bureaucratic Collectivist/State Capitalist theory says that a new ruling class emerged in the Soviet Union. This class ruled not by ownership, but by control of the meansof production. If this theory were true then by the time the USSR collapsed such a class should have consolidated itself like all such classes and castes by passing on this control to its children. If true then the Godfather of this class should have been the child of some high ranking bureuacrat. What in fact was Mikhail Gorbachev's background.
Ooops his parents were poor peasants, as Wikipedia sets out.
A similar Google Search or look at the backgrounds of the Soviet Politburo shows a similar lack of conformity of the facts to the theory.
As I said in my blog before The Nature of the Soviet State A Marxist analysis differs from a Sibjectivist analysis in that a Marxist analysis begins with the facts, not with what might be.
- Arthur Bough's blog
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer-friendly version
So I must ask, Arthur...
Is is a great tragedy that the USSR no longer exists? Could the USSR have gone on indefinitely, as it was? Was the Soviet economy, with its abundant defects, innately superior to capitalism?
My position is no, it is not a great tragedy that the USSR no longer exists, that it could not have continued its existence for much longer than it did, and that the Soviet economic system was not superior to capitalism -- capitalism has its own form of economic rationality but the Soviet system essentially lacked one. So, if -- IF -- the USSR was a workers' state, then it was not only deformed, but DEFECTIVE, and we need shed no tears over its demise.
Deformed and Defective yes, But Still Historically Superior
The Soviet Union was a deformed workers state, and its economy was defective because of that. Defective for a number of reasons. Neither Marx, nor even Lenin or Trotsky or any other Marxist of merit at the beginning of the twentieth century believed that it was possible to go straight to a planned economy. Trotsky's proposals for planning in the 1920's were in fact quite modest.
Although, the Marxists and those Paretians that argued with Mises and others over the question of economic calculation proved that such economic calculation is theoretically possible within the context of a planned economy, what is theoretically possible, and what is possible in practice are two different things. Mises was wrong because the capitalist market does not operate as a perfect calculating mechanism either, but Lange and th others were only right at the expense of postulating an economy in which the planning decisions could be decisively arrived at, and that implied some all-knowing central planning agency.
The USSR faced a fairly straightforward economic conttradiction. It was an undeveloped economy with a large peasantry, and relatively small working class. 80% of people worked on the land. In those condiitons developing a comprehensive plan of production was an absurdity. NEP demonstrated how quickly the economy could grow if the market was allowed to function, but NEP and the market meant the growth of private capitalist forces. When those forces in the form of the Kulaks attempted to assert themselves the state responded in the only way such a state could.
The choice was simple allow the economy to develop by the most rational method i.e. the market in which case the classes whose social power is based on Capital will re-emerge and ultimately so will capitalism, or close down the market. But the market had to be replaced by something. And indeed without state oppression the market kept erupting through the back door, any way.
The only answer short of a return to capitalism was to replace private ownership which was the basis of those market forces with collectivisation, and state ownership of industry.
The rational answer the path that could have led towards socialism was of course that previously set out by Marx. That is that industry could have been owned directly by its workers as co-operatives. All of those workers could have developed their own enterprise level plans of production, and increasingly integrated them with the plans of their suppliers and customers, and with other enterprises. The poor peasantry could have been encouraged to collectivise though in he conditions of Russia its uncertain whether such encouragement would have worked.
That couldn't happen for two reasons. Firstly, the working class did not have the level of class consciousness required for them to have run these enterprises as co-operatives, and to have brought about their increasing integration. The working class was young, most of them peasants recently recruited from the cuntryside and retaining that individualistic ideology of the peasant. Secondly, the ideology of Leninism -let alone Stalinism that grew out of it - was one in which it was the state that must have ownership that workers would not develop the necessary class conscioussness for some time after the revolution to enable them to run such factories, and that direct ownership by the workers would lead to them operating as capitalist enterprises merely under workers control.
The last point is of course entirely valid. Co-operatives run by workers operating in a marekt would operate as capitalist enterprises. As Marx points out in the quote from Capital I have given above such co-operatives reproduce within them all the aspects of capitalism. Such co-operatives can only form the kind of transitional form towards socialism that Marx refers to if the workers that run them are increasingly convinced that just as co-operation in their own enterprise is more efficient, co-operation with other enterprises is even more efficient and lays the basis for their improved condition.
There was no guarantee that the Russian workers were going to accept that. Their main concern was for a quiet life, and for something approaching a decent standard of living.
The defectiveness of the economy grew out of that. Lack of control over their own production, and an attempt to plan an economy rather than that planning developing gradually over time organically as different parts of that economy develop the method and technique to integrate their activities.
BUt despite that defectiveness the Soviet mode of production was still historically superior to capitalism. Its possible to question some of the claims of economic growth, its possible to question the claims about Stakhanovite workers, but the facts speak for themselves. In the 1930's its clear if you read Nove for instance that living standards did rise rapidly. And the extent to which this economy during this period was dynamic can be assessed from two facts.
In WWI Russia could not even produce the rifles it required for its troops. Its productive capacity was such that there was no way it could have competed with germany. IN fact it hadn't even been able to compete with Japan in 1905. In the intervening period the Russian working class had been decimated. Some of that was due to the Civil War, a lot of it was due to the after effects of the World War and because due to conditions in the cities millions of workers simply went back to their villages. Russia also lost important territory for its economy under Brest-Litovsk. Yet despite that, and despite the mismanagement of the Stalinists the Soviet economy was able to outproduce Nazi Germany, one of the most dynamic capitalist economies of the time. Not only was it able to outproduce, but it did so in very short order. Soviet spending on Defence and armaments throughout the 1930's was tiny. Only from 1939 did such expenditure increase. And espite losing 25% of its territory to Germany including much of its productive capacity, and agricultural capacity it was able to relocate production, and in short order outproduce Germany to the extent that it could not only roll back the German army, but could have rolled over most of Western Europe had it chose to do so at the time. That arms production could not have been achieved without all of the other production an economy needs to achieve it, and to answer Clive's point earlier it could not have been achieved unless Russian workers believed that they and soemthing to defend. Remember it was similar condiitons in WWI that led the soldiers, workers and peasants to go back home and kick out the Tsar.
In 1917 Russia was a semi-medieval country on the brink of collapse and break up. In the space of just 30 years it had become the world's second superpower. I think that is unprecedented. But more than that. In WWII Russia had lost 25% of its territory to Germany, which even when it got it back had been totally devastated. Large chunks of its industrial and agricultural capacity. It had lost getting on for 30 million people civilians and armed forces. Put that into context. When the twin towers were attacked a couple of thousand people died, very little of the US infrastructure was touched but the Stock market went into a nosedive. Imagine hundreds of twin towers attacks every day for 5 years, but with US agriculture and industrial capacity destroyed and think what that would do to the US economy even today. By comparison the US lost none of its industrial or agricultural capacity during WWII, it lost very few troops even.
Yet when Khrushchev threatened to outproduce the US the US had every reason at the time to believe he might do it, after all the USSR already had more scientists, better educational facilities, and was way ahead in the space race. That kind of transformation in the space of 30 years is not something that can be attributed to simply state capitalism, and if that kind of performance can be achieved by an economy that is defective, imagine what could have been achieved had those defects not existed.
And those defects could have been corrected, the deformation of the state could have been remedied. But the condition for that was that the Soviet working class needed to attain a sufficient level of class conscioussness to bring about those changes. As Marxists we believe that cannot happen spontaneously. The objective conditions establish the material basis for those ideas to develop, but an ideological struggle is required to develop those ideas, and to implant them firmly in the minds of the working class. Inside the USSR that could not happen. It could have only happened if the international Labour Movement had in the meantime developed, if the working class at least in Europe had develope such a level of class conscioussness, if in place of the hegemony of bourgeois ideas, including those reflected in the main workers organisations the Trade Unions, and Social Democratic parties, Marxist ideas had continued to develop at the pace they were doing at the beginning of the twentieth century.
But that had not happened. In part it had not happened because the workers movement had been divided by the sectarianism of Leninism. The main body of Marxists separating themselves off from the rest of the movement into Leninist vanguard parties leaving the rest of the working class at the mercy of the Social Democratic leaders who were now more free to move increasingly rightwards, and taking the mass of thre workers they were linked to with them. Then the Leninist vanguard parties divided themselves as all such sectarian organisations have always done. First into Stalinism and Trotskyism with the Stalinists held together by the centripetal force of Moscow, whilst the Trotskyists splintered into an ever greater number of less and less relevant sects.
In part it also occurred because the world went into a long wave decline from around 1914-20 from which it only emerged in 1949. During such declines revolutionary ideas, and the combativity of the working class are always set back. By the same token from 1949 onwards the working class became more militant, and Marxist ideas once again became popular unfortunately they did so in the Bowdlerised Stalinist and Trotskyist versions. We are fortunate that the world has just come out of a similar decline between 1974 and 1999, and is on a new upswing. It will be up to Marxists to take advantage of it.
The failure in the end of the USSR was not a failure of the mode of production it established based upon collectivised and nationalised property, it was the failure of Marxists on an international scale to build a movement that could have infused the Russian working class with the ideas that would have made it possible for them to have controlled that mode of production, and to have constructed a healthy workers state upon it.
Arthur Bough
Trotsky Speaks
In two clear articles, “The Class Nature of the Soviet State”, and “The Workers State & The Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism”, Trotsky sets out a Marxist analysis of the State, and contrasts this to the “idealist”, “subjectivist”, “moralist” and “Kantian” analysis of those that starting from a distaste of what they saw tried to present the USSR not as a Workers State, but as some for of state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism or some form of state which was neither bourgeois nor proletarian. In these writings he answers most of the arguments of those that today have collapsed into the same bourgeois subjectivism.
As Trotsky points out the path to socialism is not mapped out in some textbook. The road by which it will be achieved will be heterogenous. Only idealists can have a view of socialism as being possible by some pure route, and will always find themselves disoriented when the actual historical events contradict their schemas. Necessarily when they come into contact with a reality that does not fit their idealised view this disorientation will cause them to “turn their backs” on such societies. In doing so Trotsky points out,
“Every political tendency that waves its hand hopelessly at the Soviet Union, under the pretext of its "nonproletarian" character, runs the risk of becoming the passive instrument of imperialism. And from our standpoint, of course, the tragic possibility is not excluded that the first workers' state, weakened by its bureaucracy, will fall under the joint blows of its internal and external enemies. But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade.”
With the looming death of Castro and the question of how Marxists should defend the workers state in Cuba, as well as a resurgent Stalinism in Russia itself as the Putin state has begun to roll back privatisation using Gazprom as a vehicle to increase the State’s role in the economy together with administrative and gangster tactics against the oligarchs (a process similar to the attacks on the Kulaks by Stalin), and with the phenomena in China of a Stalinist state presiding over a dynamic market sector within an economy still dominated by centralised control and state owned enterprises, these questions are still relevant today.
“Such enticing reasoning is constructed not upon a materialistic analysis of the process as it develops in reality but upon pure idealistic schemas, upon Kantian norms. Certain noble "friends" of the revolution have provided themselves with a very radiant conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they are completely prostrated in the face of the fact that the real dictatorship with all its heritage of class barbarism, with all its internal contradictions, with the mistakes and crimes of the leadership, fails entirely to resemble that sleek image that they have provided. Disillusioned in their most beautiful emotions, they turn their backs to the Soviet Union.
Where and in what books can one find a faultless prescription for a proletarian dictatorship? The dictatorship of a class does not mean by a long shot that its entire mass always participates in the management of the state. This we have seen, first of all, in the case of the propertied classes. The nobility ruled through the monarchy before which the noble stood on his knees. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie took on comparatively developed democratic forms only under the conditions of capitalist upswing when the ruling class had nothing to fear. Before our own eyes, democracy has been supplanted in Germany by Hitler's autocracy, with all the traditional bourgeois parties smashed to smithereens. Today, the German bourgeoisie does not rule directly; politically it is placed under complete subjection to Hitler and his bands. Nevertheless, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie remains inviolate in Germany, because all the conditions of its social hegemony have been preserved and strengthened. By expropriating the bourgeoisie politically, Hitler saved it, even if temporarily, from economic expropriation. The fact that the bourgeoisie was compelled to resort to the fascist regime testifies to the fact that its hegemony was endangered but not at all that it had fallen.
Anticipating our subsequent arguments, our opponents will hasten to rebut: although the bourgeoisie, as an exploiting minority, can also preserve its hegemony by means of a fascist dictatorship, the proletariat building a socialist society must manage its government itself, directly drawing ever-wider masses of the people into the task of government. In its general form, this argument is undebatable, but in the given case it merely means that the present Soviet dictatorship is a sick dictatorship. The frightful difficulties of socialist construction in an isolated and backward country coupled with the false policies of the leadership—which, in the last analysis, also reflects the pressure of backwardness and isolation—have led to the result that the bureaucracy has expropriated the proletariat politically in order to guard its social conquests with its own methods. The anatomy of society is determined by its economic relations. So long as the forms of property that have been created by the October Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class.
Dissertations upon "the dictatorship of the bureaucracy over the proletariat" without a much deeper analysis, that is, without a clear explanation of the social roots and the class limits of bureaucratic domination, boil down merely to high-faluting democratic phrases so extremely popular among the Mensheviks. One need not doubt that the overwhelming majority of Soviet workers are dissatisfied with the bureaucracy and that a considerable section, by no means the worst, hates it. However, it is not simply due to repression that this dissatisfaction does not assume violent mass forms; the workers fear that they will clear the field for the class enemy if they overthrow the bureaucracy. The interrelations between the bureaucracy and the class are really much more complex than they appear to be to the frothy "democrats."”
“Bureaucracy and the Ruling Class
There is, however, also another theory concerning the "nonproletarian" character of the Soviet state, much more ingenious, much more cautious, but not any more serious. The French Social Democrat Lucien Laurat, Blum's colleague and Souvarine's teacher, has written a booklet defending the view that the Soviet society, being neither proletarian nor bourgeois, represents an absolutely new type of class organization, because the bureaucracy not only rules over the proletariat politically but also exploits it economically, devouring that surplus value that hitherto fell to the lot of the bourgeoisie. Laurat invests his revelations with the weighty formulas of Das Kapital and, in this manner, gives an appearance of profundity to his superficial and purely descriptive "sociology." The compilator is obviously unaware that his entire theory had been formulated, only with much more fire and splendor, over thirty years ago by the Russo- Polish revolutionist Makhaisky, who was superior to his French vulgarizer in that he awaited neither the October Revolution nor the Stalinist bureaucracy in order to define "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as a scaffold for the commanding posts of an exploiting bureaucracy. But even Makhaisky did not suck his theory out of his thumb; he only "deepened" sociologically and economically the anarchistic prejudices against state socialism. Makhaisky, by the way, also utilized Marx's formulas but in a manner much more consistent than Laurat's; according to Makhaisky, the author of Das Kapital covered up, with malice aforethought, in his formulas of reproduction (volume II), that portion of surplus value that would be devoured by the socialist intelligentsia (the bureaucracy).
In our own time, a "theory" of this kind, but without an exposure of Marx the exploiter, was defended by Myasnikov, who proclaimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union had been supplanted by the hegemony of a new class: the social bureaucracy. In all probability, Laurat borrowed his theory, directly or indirectly, precisely from Myasnikov, investing it only with a pedantically "learned" air. For completeness' sake, it should also be added that Laurat has assimilated all the mistakes (and only the mistakes) of Rosa Luxemburg, among them even those that she herself had renounced.
Let us, however, examine more closely the "theory" itself. The class has an exceptionally important and, moreover, a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of the national income alone, but by its independent role in the general structure of the economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundation of society. Each class (the feudal nobility, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat) works out its own special forms of property. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule. The existence of a bureaucracy, in all its variety of forms and differences in specific weight, characterizes every class regime. Its power is of a reflected character. The bureaucracy is indissolubly bound up with a ruling economic class, feeding itself upon the social roots of the latter, maintaining itself and falling together with it.
Class Exploitation and Social Parasitism
Laurat will say that he "does not object" to the bureaucracy being paid for its labor insofar as it fulfills the necessary political, economic and cultural functions; but what is involved is its uncontrolled appropriation of an absolutely disproportionate part of the national income; precisely in this sense does it appear as the "exploiting class." This argument, based on indubitable facts, does not, however, change the social physiognomy of the bureaucracy.
Always and in every regime, the bureaucracy devours no small portion of surplus value. It might not be uninteresting, for example, to compute what portion of the national income is devoured by the fascist locusts in Italy or Germany! But this fact, of no small importance by itself, is entirely insufficient to transform the fascist bureaucracy into an independent ruling class. It is the hireling of the bourgeoisie. True, this hireling straddles the boss's neck, tears from his mouth at times the juiciest pieces, and spits on his bald spot besides. Say what you will, a most inconvenient hireling! But, nevertheless, only a hireling. The bourgeoisie abides him because without him, it and its regime would absolutely go to the dogs.
Mutatis mutandis [changing what should be changed], what has been said above can be applied to the Stalinist bureaucracy as well. It devours, wastes and embezzles a considerable portion of the national income. Its management costs the proletariat very dearly. In the Soviet society, it occupies an extremely privileged position not only in the sense of having political and administrative prerogatives but also in the sense of possessing enormous material advantages. Still, the biggest apartments, the juiciest steaks and even Rolls Royces are not enough to transform the bureaucracy into an independent ruling class.
Inequality, moreover such crying inequality, would, of course, be absolutely impossible in a socialist society. But contrary to official and semiofficial lies, the present Soviet regime is not socialist but transitional. It still bears within it the monstrous heritage of capitalism, social inequality in particular, not only between the bureaucracy and the proletariat but also within the bureaucracy itself and within the proletariat. At the given stage, inequality still remains, within certain limits, the bourgeois instrument of socialist progress; differential wages, bonuses, etc., are used as stimuli for emulation.
While it explains the inequality, the transitional character of the present system in no way justifies those monstrous, open and secret privileges that have been arrogated to themselves by the uncontrolled leaders of the bureaucracy. The Left Opposition did not await the revelation of Urbahns, Laurat, Souvarine and Simone Weil, [3] etc., before announcing that the bureaucracy in all its manifestations is pulling apart the moral tie rods of Soviet society, engendering an acute and a lawful dissatisfaction among the masses and preparing the ground for great dangers. Nevertheless, the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a "class," but from those property relations that have been created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (and this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale. During the Middle Ages, the clergy constituted a class or an estate, insofar as its rule depended upon a specific system of land property and forced labor. The present- day church constitutes not an exploiting class but a parasitic corporation. It would be silly to actually speak of the American clergy as a special ruling class; yet, it is indubitable that the priests of the different colors and denominations devour in the United States a big portion of the surplus value. In its traits of parasitism, the bureaucracy, as well as the clergy, is similar to the lumpen proletariat, which likewise does not represent, as is well known, an independent "class."”
The Class Nature of the Soviet State
“"But can such a state be called a workers’ state?"—thus speak the indignant voices of moralists, idealists and “revolutionary” snobs. Others a bit more cautious express themselves as follows, “Perhaps this is a workers’ state, in the last analysis, but there has not been left in it a vestige of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We have here a degenerated workers’ state under the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.”
We see no reason whatever to resume this argumentation as a whole. All that has to be said on this score has been said in the literature and in the official documents of our tendency. No one has attempted to refute, correct or supplement the position of the Bolshevik-Leninists on this most important question.
We shall here limit ourselves solely to the question whether the factual dictatorship of the bureaucracy may be called the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The terminological difficulty here arises from the fact that the term dictatorship is used sometimes in a restricted, political sense and, at other times, in a more profound, sociological sense. We speak of the “dictatorship of Mussolini” and, at the same time, declare that fascism is only the instrument of finance capital. Which is correct? Both are correct, but on different planes. It is incontestable that the entire executive power is concentrated in Mussolini’s hands. But it is no less true that the entire actual content of the state activity is dictated by the interests of finance capital. The social domination of a class (its dictatorship) may find extremely diverse political forms. This is attested by the entire history of the bourgeoisie, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
The experience of the Soviet Union is already adequate for the extension of this very same sociological law—with all the necessary changes—to the dictatorship of the proletariat as well. In the interim between the conquest of power and the dissolution of the workers’ state within the socialist society, the forms and methods of proletarian rule may change sharply, depending upon the course of the class struggle, internally and externally.
Thus, the present-day domination of Stalin in no way resembles the Soviet rule during the initial years of the revolution. The substitution of one regime for the other occurred not at a single stroke but through a series of measures, by means of a number of minor civil wars waged by the bureaucracy against the proletarian vanguard. In the last historical analysis, Soviet democracy was blown up by the pressure of social contradictions. Exploiting the latter, the bureaucracy wrested the power from the hands of mass organizations. In this sense we may speak about the dictatorship of the bureaucracy and even about the personal dictatorship of Stalin. But this usurpation was made possible and can maintain itself only because the social content of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy is determined by those productive relations that were created by the proletarian revolution . In this sense we may say with complete justification that the dictatorship of the proletariat found its distorted but indubitable expression in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.”
The Workers State & The Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism
Arthur Bough
Western Marxism & the USSR: Evaluating the Debates
"Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. Evaluating the Debates 1917-2006" by Marcel van der Linden is available at:
http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/papers.htm
He gives strong arguments against Trotsky's positions, as well as against the "state capitalist" and "new class society" interpretations. He doesn't investigate the Ticktin "non-mode of production" idea very thoroughly, though.
Thanks
Thanks for that Red I'll check it out. But now in trouble for not going fown for dinner.
Arthur Bough
Reply To Red
Red,
I have read the article you referred to above. I am providing a hyperlink to it below for comrades that might want to read it, as I had difficulty at first finding it.
Western marxism and the USSR
As you might expect I agreed with the arguments against the state capitalist and bureuacratic collectivist arguments as they are some of the arguments I have put forward against these theories myself. I agree with the assessment made by van der Linden that these theories are in fact anti-Marxist.
As you also might expect I did not agree with the arguments against Trotsky's position. For the reasons I have given previously I do not agree with the Degenerated Workers State label for the simple reason that I do not beleive that the USSR was ever a healthy workers state to have degenerated from. Trotsky had to beleive that,a nd so did the orthodox Trotskyists because they wanted to defend Leninism. For my part I bleieve that much as a premature capitalist revolution in Britain brought into existence a deformed bourgeois state udner Cromwell, a premature political revolution in Russia brought into existence a deformed workers state.
Trotsky himself referring to Lenin describes the state created after the revolution as a workers state with bureuacratic deformations.
But I do not agree with van der Linden's criticism of the idea that the USSR was a workers state. In relation to the criticism that the bureaucracy held its position only temporarily the simple answer is what does temporarily mean. Surely it simply means until such time as either the working class is strong enough to carry through a political revolution, or until such time as the bouregoisie carry through a counter-revolution. Moreoever, the argument is rather like that of the two men who were discussing the definition of a Scotsman. One says to the other "All Scotsmen wear kilts." The other replies, "I saw Jock McTavish the other day, and he wasn't wearing a kilt". Then he can't be a Scotsman retorts the first. The fact that a workers state existed for longer with a parasitic bureuacracy than had been envisaged no more refutes the idea that this was a workers state than does the fact that capitalism has lasted longer than most Marxists anticipated fundamentally change our assement of capitalism.
I am not sure what point he is making in relation to the separation of production and distribution. It is clear that even within the context of a healthy workers state or of socialism there will be those that do not take part in the process of production, but who take part in the distribution of goods produced.
The idea that Trotsky did not assign a role to the bureuacracy in the production process is clearly false. He did, but just as Marx recognised the growing importance of a layer of supervisors and technicians within the functioning of capitalism such a recognition of this role did not lead him to assign to this group the role of a ruling class. Nor is the comment by Marx about the increasing need for such a supervisory function the greater the opposition between owner of the means of production and the worker an argument that because the function of supervision was great a separate class of owners must have existed. It is a non sequitur. A great opposition between owner and worker requires a high degree of supervision, but a high degreee of supervision cannot be used to infer a high degree of opposition between owner and worker exists or that owner and worker are not in fact identical. The more heavily it is raining the more likely I am to carry an umbrella. But the fact that I am carrying an umbrella does not likewise mean it is raining heavily, or even at all.
The final argument is not justified either for reasons I have given before. In Nazi Germany the Nazis made decisions about the economy they diverted resources for war production, they gave subsidies and diverted work to industries that employed labour intensive methods etc. Did this "control" mean that the Nazis ormed a ruling class? No. In the end the actions of the Nazis were limited by the fact that the relations of production were capitalist, that the basic laws of capitalist production continued to operate within the economy, and so the "control" exercised by the Nazis was limited within those confines. Had the Nazis liquidated the capitalist class, nationalised all property, and begun to plan the economy then those restrictions of a capitalist economy would no longer have been constraints upon their actions. But as Trotsky points out that would not happen for the simple reason that the Nazis unlike the Stalinists existed solely to preserve capitalist economic and social relations against the working class, and were inextricably linked to the capitalist class.
In the same way although the Stalinists exercised a degree of control over the economy the limits of that control were set by the nature of the economic and social relations as being based upon nationalised and collectivised property, and the at least partial replacement of market relations by planning, a transformatoin which of its nature required the liquidation of the old exploiting classes. Just as Marx describes the capitalist class as being merely the embodiment in human form of Capital so the Stalinist bureuacracy represented the embodiment in human form of socialised relations of production in the specific conditions of Russia. The control that the capitalist can exert is defined by the laws of Capital, the control that the working class as ruling class will be able to exert will be defined by the law of value as it expresses itself within a planned, socialised economy, and the Stalinist bureuacracy was similarly restricted as the representative of that working class thrust into power by the objective conditions.
In short I do not find the arguments against Trotsky strong at all. In fact Trotsky dealt with most of them himself back in the 1930's in the dispute with the Burnhamites.
Arthur Bough
Arthur...
... your point about Gorbachev is silly. In fact, studies suggested that social mobility was slightly lower (ie fewer children of poor peasants making good) in the USSR than in Western capitalism.
But in any case, surely the class nature of any given society is not determined fundamentally by non-fluidity between classes, but by the structures of production. The 'American dream' is precisely that anyone from any background can make it to the top. Obviously as a description of society in general it is an ideological fiction; but has enough purchase on reality to be believed by millions of people. The Hollywood studio elite, for instance - all right, not the 'godfathers' of the US ruling class (Marlon Brando notwithstanding), but wealthy members of it - were pretty much entirely poverty stricken immigrants making their fortunes. Just as one small example.
And the Hollywood dream strikes me as less of an ideological fiction than the notion that the working class was the ruling class in the USSR... because of 'property relations'. And how don't see how noting a glaringly obvious empirical fact - that the working class had absolutely no power, in any but the most religious sense, in the USSR - is 'subjective'. Rather, the reverse I would say.
Reply To Clive
I agree that the class nature of a state is determined by the structures of production i.e. relationship to the means of production. But the state capitalist/bureuacratic collectivist argument tries to get round the Marxist objection of the requirement for ownership by replacing it with the concept of control. But for a class to form on the basis of control rather than ownership it must effectively pass on this right of control as oppsed to the right of ownership. The only way to do that is if the society is rigid, and lacks any social mobility into this ruling class. As Mary Macaulay puts it it is hard to describe a new ruling class as existing when the members of that class are continually being recuited from within the loest ranks of society, and that was the case in the USSR as both Macaulay argues, and as I have linked to in Fitazpatrick's book in my other post on this.
I don't know which studies you are referring to stating that social mobility was lower in the USSR than in the West. Macaulay certainly argues precisely the opposite case, and a look at the top Soviet officials shows a high proportion not just Gorbachev coming from such low levels. The idea of high social mobility in the US is a myth. It was true in the early 19th century just as it has been true of virtually every industrialising economy. But by the late 19th century the US had already entered "The Gilded Age". I was arguing with some US Libertarians on this about a year ago, and virtually every instance of a so called rags to riches story they put up tunred out in fact to be a story of some individual that came from at least a middle class background. A simple Google search shows the backgrounds of people like Edison, Ford etc.
And today the US and Britain come low down the social mobility ladder compared to Nordic countries in particular as this Economist article demonstrates.
Economist
This report by the Sutton Trust gives an even more detailed analysis.
Sutton Trust Report on Intergenerational Mobility in US and Europe
The fact that the working class did not have political power in the USSR does not at all mean that socially it was not the ruling class. That precisely is the difference between an objective assessment, and one that is subjective i.e. one that looks at one aspect i.e. political power, and does not locate that within the the objective economic and social relations that lie behind it. One ignores the gruesome realities of the political superstructure and looks behind it to the objective conditions on which it stands, the other is transfixed by the gruesomeness of the political superstructure, and then tries to develop a theory to explain the economic relations on which it stands, ignoring the fact that this theory continually comes into contradiction with the facts.
Arthur Bough
Ruling class
Surely the working class can only be the ruling class if it has political power. Otherwise its 'rule' is entirely metaphysical. Unlike propertied classes it cannot hold power through 'ownership'. There is no meaningful distinction between ownership and control where the working class is concerned.
Not At All
That's not necesary at all. The capitalist class were the ruling class by the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th century. They were such because the eonomic and social relations in the country had by that time been so revolutionised that the capitalist class was dominant. But it did not at that point have political power, that still remained with the feudal Landlord class. That only change with the political revolution carried through by the bourgeoisie manifested in the 1832 reform Act, and the repeal of the Corn laws.
In fact such has been the process in nearly all such social transformations. That is the basis of Marxism. The method of production changes as a result of changes in the technology and technique available to society. As a result of those changes new classes are created. From within those new classes a new dynamic social force is created. The more the method of production on which such a class develops the stronger becomes the social position of the class that is based upon it. Eventually, those economic changes make that class the socially dominant class, and some time after that this class demands that its economic dominance be reflected also in its political rule, and uses its new social power to achieve that end.
The exceptions to that are as I have set out elsewhere where the economic relations have been accomplished in one country e.g. Britain, and consequently force old ruling classes elesewhere to adopt the same method of production.
In the case of the USSR the working class achieved social domination thereby establishing the social Dictatorship of the Proletariat as the result of the liquidation of the other exploiting classes by the Leninist/Stalinist state apparatus, and the transformation of economic and social relations by that state. But because the working class in Russia had never achieved the necessary level of class consciousness to have undertaken this social transformation itself, because that transformation was undertaken above its head by the Leninist/Stalinist state apparatus, and because of all the other tragedies that were to befall that working class, its social and economic position was always weak from the beginning. It was never able to consolidate that economic and social power as the capitalist class had done, in order to assert itself politically.
Consequently, a similar history occurred as when a similarly weak ruling class found itself dependent upon a state apparatus in France. A Bonapartist state was able to rise up above civil society. But the limitations of such a state are determined by the class Dictatorship in France a capitalist class Dictatorship, in the USSR a proletarian one, and by the dynamic of the economic relations within the society that give rise to that Dictatorship. In France the Bonapartist state pursued its own interests, but in a context constrained by the needs of capitalist economic relations. In the USSR the Stalinist state pursued its own interests, but in a context constrained by the dynamic of nationalised and collectivised property, and the replacement of market forces by attempts to plan production and ocnsumption.
Clearly, the working class can hold power though ownership as Marx indicated in the quote I have given previously from Capital. But which I will repeat because it is the clearest indication of how Marx saw the process of socialist transformation, and just how significantly it differs from that of Lenin.
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises. into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.” (emphasis added)
He goes on,
“The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production. It is this ambiguous nature, which endows the principal spokesmen of credit from Law to Isaac Pereire with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.”
(Capital Vol III pp441-2)
It is quite clear where Marx speaks of this transition to a new mode of production that Marx envisages the working class taking hold of the means of production by means of the use of credit to establish co-operative enterprises and to buy up the stock of Joint Stock companies turning themselves as he puts it into both workers and capitalists combined in the one person, and thereby eliminating that class contradiction. No such process would be necessary of course were Marx's vision of socialist transformation that put forward in the name of Lenin - though I'm not sure that he would actually accept what is put forward in his name - that of first a political revolution to seize state power, only then followed by a transformation of property relations.
In Marx's view, and the view I share the social revolution takes place as workers take back for themselves that ownership of the means of production here and now, not waiting for some socialist millenia, and the more of those means of production they take back, the more powerful their social position becomes, and the more these social relations are mirrored by the development of new forms of workers democracy based upon those new property relations, as workers running co-operative factories etsablish their own democratic forms to do so, and to integrate with other co-operative activities.
In short the working class becomes the ruling class at the point it has taken back sufficient of the means of production into its own hands through the use of credit, and other financial resources such as Pension Funds etc., and has conscioulsy begun to operate those means of production co-operatively, and has begun to develop its own plans of production across these enterpises, in the same way that it plans production inside them. At that point the working class needs to move from this state of class cosnciousness to the take over of politial power. Before this condition arises the capitalist class were try to resist, just as the feudal ruling class tried to resist the icnreasing social power of the capitalist class. Certainly, they will try to prevent the working class assuming political control. That will require a political revolution to consolidate the working class's political domination the ferocity of that revolution will depend upon the degree of the working class's social and economic domination at that point. Marx beleived that in Britain it might even be possible to effect through purely Parliamentary means. It would certainly require less violence than was required in the Civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution.
Arthur Bough
Rule
I am not at all persuaded by the assertion that co-operatives within capitalism are remotely analogous to a crushing all-powerful state in which, far from participating in collective control, as in a co-op, the working class is mercilessly and collectively exploited by the state.
My point was that socialist revolution, or the working class becoming the ruling class, is fundamentally unlike the process whereby the bourgeoisie did, so analogies with the bourgeois revolution, or Bonarpartism, are false.
But My Point Is The Opposite
But I gave the example of Co-ops to refute the idea that workers cannot become socially dominant through ownership of property. Marx clearly believes they can, and so do I. More importantly, whilst Marx's concept of socialist revolution, and the one I share with him is based precisely upon that development of workers ownership of the means of production, and is, therefore, analogous to the method by which the bourgeoisie became socially dominant, you apparently continue to see socialist revolution not as something resulting from this change in economic and social relations undertaken by the working class itself directly, but as only being possible after some catastrophic politcal revolution on the Bolshevik model, which then uses state power to transform economic and social relations.
I was not at all suggesting that co-ops could be considered as the same as some all-poweful state. I was suggesting that the former model of socialist transformation is far more likely to avoid the establishment of an all-poweful state that has an exploitative relationship with the working class than is the latter.
As I beleive that this formaer model of socialist transformation as outlined by Marx is analogous to the method by which the bourgeoisie became dominant I believe that the other concepts such as Bonaprtism to remain valid.
Arthur Bough
Class in the USSR?
Although I would not disagree with the basic point about social mobility in the USSR being less dynamic than under capitalism, I would not see this as proving the bureaucracy as being a seperate class.
When compared to the working class, the soviet bureaucracy had seperate interests, for sure, but within its period of existance (a few decades in total) it would not seem possible for this fluid social formation to take on all the charachteristics of a fully formed class.
This would seem to go beyond being just an academic question as it is something that has divided socialists since 1917 itself. A freak form of society and unsupportagble yes, but a 'new' form of class society - I don't really think so.
Where Are These Studies?
Burokevicius, Gumbaridze, Gorbachev, Gurenko, Dzasokhov, Ivashko, Karimov, Luchinsky, Masaliyev, Makhkamov, Movsisyan, Mutalibov, Nazarbayev, Niyazov, Polozkov, Prokofyev, Rubiks, Semyonova, Sillari, Ye. Sokolov, Stroyev, Frolov, Shenin and Yanayev elected members of the Politburo at the Central Committee plenum 1990.
Source Wikipedia
Politburo 1990
At least two of these grew up in Soviet state orphanages. The backgrounds of the rest do not fit the bill of people that came from families that were high ranking Soviet bureaucrats or members of some new ruling class. At best they appear to have been doctors or similar workers.
As Macaulay says if entry into the bureaucracy through educational achievement is to be seen as the main basis of the reproduction of a new ruling class then the prime candidate for this new ruling class would in fact be not the bureaucracy itself, but the intelligentsia. Yet it was from within the ranks of this intelligentsia that probably most opposition to the regime came, in the form of samizdat papers, and the works of prominent dissidents. Moreover, as Macaulay points out educational achievement did not necessarily mean a career within the bureaucracy. It was equally if not more likely that such educated children would themselves enter a career in one of the Academies, or in education, or the Arts.
But in any case as Macaulay points out, and as the details of the Politburo – where if there was going to be any indication of a new class reproducing itself would be the first place it would be manifested – and it is only in the Politburo where the condition of “controlling” the social surplus can be said to exist in any meaningful sense – demonstrate, the idea of a self perpetuating new bureaucratic class simply is refuted.
And as Macaulay puts it in relation to this new class being broader than this small group, “These are taken to be the “controllers” of production,, the functionaries of the State who prevent the working class from exerting political and economic control. The trouble with this is that it is difficult to see the sense in which this ‘bureaucracy’ does stand in a specific relationship to the means of production – that the relationship of the industrial minister, official of the local soviet, and enterprise director have anything in common one with another – or the sense in which the majority can be said to ‘control’ the means of production. If one uses the ‘relationship to the means of production’ criterion, it is difficult to distinguish anything more than the very small ruling circles. If one drops that criterion and simply uses ‘bureaucracy’ in its usual sense of administrative officials paid by the State, one ends up with an enormous category ranging from accountants in enterprises and head teachers to secretariat and ministerial officials. But any definition that produces a category which includes the privileged leading personnel and the lower ranks of the administrative or industrial apparatus runs into the problem of specifying the common aim of such a ‘class.’”
Mary Macaulay “Politics and the Soviet Union” pp314-5)
As Macaulay points out some within such a group actually fared worse materially than the members of other alternative privileged groups.
Because they bases themselves on an objective analysis, a materialist analysis Marxists can fairly easily set out the criteria for belonging to say the capitalist class or the working class. There may be disputes at the margin as to whether this or that individual is a capitalist or a petit-bourgeois, but they are at the margin. The problem is for those that propose the new class theories is that they never specify who the members of this new class are. They cannot do so because they cannot specify the criteria that has to be fulfilled to belong to this new class. Once they specify any criteria it turns out that the reality of the USSR was different from the reality that would have been required for any such class to exist.
I have heard reference in the above posts to studies claiming that mobility in the USSR was lower to in the West, but so far no one has provided details of these studies. The facts are that the highest ranks of the USSR were drawn from children of working class and poor peasant backgrounds. Entry into the lower ranks of the ‘bureaucracy’ from children from poor backgrounds is likely to be even more evident.
Macaulay comments,
“And indeed the twenties, thirties and forties were a time of rapid social mobility. Those young men of the thirties who survived the Stalin period and since his death have occupied the commanding posts in society come predominantly from poor backgrounds. To them this feature of Soviet society is very important.” (p309)
As Alec Nove has pointed out in his writings, critiques of the USSR from the Trotskyist or New Left have always suffered from a desire to distance itself and stand in opposition to Stalinism – understandably so – and a consequent bias against an objective assessment of the reality of the economic and social relations existing within that society. The two positions adopted by the ‘orthodox’ and Schactmanite Trotskyists are easily identified as stemming from a common desire to cling to Leninist orthodoxy.
The Leninist orthodoxy is that the working class cannot achieve class consciousness within capitalism. It will remain dominated by bourgeois ideology up to the moment of the revolution, and beyond. Only when the economic and social relations have been changed will that consciousness be free to develop. Consequently, a chicken and egg situation is set up. Workers cannot achieve socialist consciousness prior to socialist economic and social relations being established. Those relations cannot be established without capitalism being overthrown. What to do. A revolutionary party must carry through the revolution waiting for a situation in which the working class revolts against the existing system, due to some crisis. The revolutionary party seizes power destroys the bourgeois state, and erects a workers state in its place, and then uses that state power to crush the exploiting classes transforming economic and social relations, and thereby subsequently the class consciousness of the working class.
The consequence of that in the USSR was of course – and is likely to be in any future similar political revolution – that the revolutionary party finds itself increasingly separated from the class in whose name it has carried through the revolution. Acts and ideas within that class that do not conform with the Party’s vision of how socialist construction should proceed have to be opposed to prevent capitalist restoration. A Stalinist state is erected.
A contradiction now arises. On the one hand the application of Leninist ideas on the Party and the construction of socialism lead to Stalinism, but the Totskyists want to retain Leninism whilst rejecting Stalinism. Stalinism has then to be distanced from Leninism. So various concepts such as Stalin being an insignificant figure are put forward – despite the fact that he became General Secretary, and that prior to Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917, he was the Bolshevik leader in Russia, was appointed by Lenin as advisor on nationalities etc. The degeneration/counter-revolution springs from Stalin’s bosom almost miraculously as soon as Lenin is dead.
For the orthodox Trostkyists that want to maintain the fiction that the USSR was a healthy workers state that degenerated after Lenin died the workers state theory has to be defended on the basis that the fundamentals of that state established by Lenin remain intact, and all that is required is for some natural progression towards socialism that will eradicate the degeneration caused by the actions of Stalinism. Increasingly, that also means defending the actions of the Stalinists themselves as being progressive.
For the Schactmanites this becomes an obvious fiction, but the question remains how to square the circle of retention of Leninist ideas on the Party and socialist construction, and the reality of the USSR. Answer, simply call Stalinism a counter-revolution physically, historically and ideologically remove it as being at all connected to Leninism, and the workers movement. Describe the social system over which it rules as something other than what it is, connect it to capitalism.
Both have to deny reality.
The fact is that the USSR was never a healthy workers state. It came into existence prematurely, and like many premature births was deformed from the beginning. It was rather like the bourgeois state established by Cromwell. There too the English bourgeoisie was immature. Its social domination tenuous at best, and reliant upon the peasantry and other social classes. A period of dual power persisted for a long time until the crisis erupted with the Civil War. Cromwell because of the New Model Army secured victory, just as Lenin and his superior tactics won in 1917. But the immaturity of the class in whose name the victory had been won soon manifested itself, in the need for the Cromwellian state to rise up and take control, establishing a deformed bourgeois state. A state which carried through many measures necessary for the development of capitalist economic relations, such as the unifying of the nation state, and which were probably one of the reasons that capitalism was able to develop more quickly in Britain than it did in other countries.
But the deformed nature of that state, and the immaturity of the bourgeoisie meant that state was short lived. The restoration saw the bourgeoisie hand power back to the old ruling class. Members of that class that had been expropriated had their lands and titles restored to them, and some of the bourgeois reforms were turned back. Only once the bourgeoisie had undertaken a real social revolution did it become capable of asserting itself as the new ruling class, and subsequently of gaining for itself political power. The real bourgeois revolutionaries in that process were not Cromwell, or even Cobden and Bright in Britain or Danton and Robespierre in France. They were Boulton and Watt, Wedgwood and Brindley. They were the people that revolutionised the means of production and established through the Industrial revolution the economic and social power of the bourgeoisie. The real proletarian revolutionaries will be those that enable the working class to carry through by their own hands a similar transformation. Only then will the working class develop the necessary class consciousness to seize political power from the bourgeoisie.
Arthur Bough
What then?
That may be true. But holding therefore that the working class was the ruling class seems deeply, deeply unsatisfactory.
Actually, though, I'm not sure I really see why a ruling class has to last for a very long time to qualify as such. A 'historically legitimate' one, maybe. But why can't you have very short-lived class societies?
An elite?
Hillel Ticktin argues that there was no ruling class within the Stalinist system. Control over the extraction of surplus product was almost completely restricted by a negative control that atomized workers have over the labor process. This manifests itself in absenteeism, sabotage, alcoholism and defective products. Moreover, the ruling group is also atomized. Members live in constant fear of losing their privileges and cannot pass them on to their children with any certainty. They are therefore insufficiently stable to form a collectivity. If they are prevented from forming a collectivity, then they can't form a class.
Despite its unfortunate sociological connotations, "elite" has the advantage of suggesting that the ruling group is unstable and incoherent. Ticktin defines it as "those people who have some limited control over the surplus product." He argues that the attempt by the elite to escape the threat of its abolition motivates its members to aspire to achieving the stability, continuity and coherence of a class. This drives them to shift the system towards market forces.
The state
One question begged by the Ticktin analysis which I've never seen adequately answered, is: if there is no ruling class, what is the nature of the state? Workers' state theory argues - preposterously and in clear conflict with the facts of history (and of the states' demise) - that the state in some way defended the interests of the working class. If there is no ruling class at all... what was the state?
Not My Workers State Theory
Clive why does a workers state theory have to argue that the state defends the interests of workers? All that a workers state theory has to argue is that the state is forced to act in particular ways because of the set of economic and social relations within the society. The capitalist state does not act necessarily to defend the interests of each capitalist, group of capitalists or even, in the short term, capitalists as a class. It is forced to act in a way which is determined by capitalist economic relations. The state is not a conspiracy. In fact, as marx points out the state necesarily separates itself from Civil Society and unless checked by the ruling class will increasingly act in its own interests. The classic case being Bonapartism. But the extent to which it can act in its own interests is always constrained by the economic and social relations within the given society. The Bonapartist state in France was forced to act in particular ways even in trying to look after its own interests because of the fact that France was a capitalist country. The British state even whilst the Landlord Class retained political power was forced to act in ways which were constrained by the fact that Britian was a capitalist country. The Soviet state was constrained by the fact that the economic relations in the Soviet Union were based on state and collectivised property, and the replacement of the market.
That does not at all mean necessarily acting in the interests of workers, but in ways constrained by the type of economic relations that were established, and which were characterised by the liquidation of all other social classes. The Nazi state did not necesarily act in the interests of capitalists. It did act in the interest of maintaining in the longer term capitalist economic relations.
Your question to the Ticktinites is valid, but the answer has to be that the state was a workers state based on a social Dictatorship of the working class following the liquidation of other social classes. For the reasons outlined previously at length and outlined by others above no new class arose in the USSR.
Arthur Bough
Interests
If it is a workers' state, *surely* it means the working class is the ruling class and the state is acting in some form in working class interests. Otherwise it seems to me to be an exercise in Platonism. To say it is 'constrained' by certain economic relations is simply a circular argument: what are those relations?
It could not be more obvious that here was an extremely powerful (in the sense of repressive) state apparatus, which defended the interests of a bureaucracy, which controlled the surplus product. The working class was exploited (in a way very similar to under capitalism, broadly speaking).
If the working class were in any sense the ruling class, even in the metaphysical sense workers' state theory suggests, you would have expected workers to resist the 'restoration' of capitalism (or whatever phrase you prefer which describes the events of 1989). They did not. In many cases they went on strike in their millions against the 'workers' state' (and in opposition to its 'economic relations' and in favour of the market). This is certainly not Trotsky's expectation: he thought the only thing preventing the bureaucracy from restoring capitalism was 'fear of the workers'.
The workers' state theory, summed up, is that the 'constraining' social relations were post capitalist. How? And if that were remotely true, how could those social relations have collapsed in the way they did?
Yes and No
The class nature of a state is determined by which class is the socially dominant class, and that is different from who rules poltiically. Lenin makes clear for instance in his critique of the Narodniks that the state in Tsarist Russia in the 1890's was a Capitalist state. That despite the fact that political power still quite visibly resided with Tsarism not with the bourgeoisie. It was a capitalist state because the dominant economic relations in Russia were capitalist - which the Narodniks denied - and consequentrly determined the way in which the state had to act. Tsarist politcal rule merely deformed the nature of the state as a capitalist state.
It is not necessary then for such a state to be seen as directly acting in the interests of the working class. What it is required to do - just as the capitaloist state under Tsarism was forced to do - is to act in a way which defends and promotes those economic relations which make the working class the ruling class i.e. it has to act to suppress other exploiting classes, it has to defend nationalised property, it has to attempt to replace market relations with planned relations.
A look at the Soviet State shows it avctually did do those things even though it did them in a very bureuacratic manner. It was forced on occasions to make retreats from some of them - Lenin introduced NEP - Stalin allowed peasants to keep and sell more of their produce from the collective farms during the 1930's after food shortages had lessened etc., but by and large such moves were tactical, forced on the state by the need to respond to reality. Right up until the last the planners in GOSPLAN - and I mean the people who really did the work, the people who in this country would be PCS members, and hardly fulfil the picture of a blood sucking new class - beleived that they could resolve all the problems of economimc planning with just a few better algorithms, better market research, better consumer panels etc.
The state drew its legitimacy from working class social rule, and the ideology of socialism. That is why the Stalinists made such much of trying to inisist on historical continuity. A ruling class does not need to do that because its legitimacy derives from its ownership and ocntrol of the means of production, and the normal operation of the mode of production which automaticallly reproduces it as the ruling class. It is why the Stalinists were forced to adopt measures such as the huge resources spent on Health and Education way beyond what was required for the efficient functioning of an exploitative class based economimc system.
You say that the working class was exploited in a way similar to udner capitalism, and in a related point later you ask how the economic and social relations were different from those under capitalism. A very simple example refutes your argument. Central to the functioning of Capitalism is that labour-power is sold as a commodity. Indeed unless it is done so the necessary social relation that is Capital cannot exist, surplus value cannot be created and Capital cannot be accumulated. In order that labour-power is sold as a commodity Marx lays great stress upon the requirement for a reserve army of labour. But in the USSR far from developing such a reserve army of labour in order to put downward pressure on wages so as to maximise profits, labour was hoarded by enterprises. Workers were kept on the books at levels that no capitalist enterprise would countenance. The degree of this over-employment was demonstrated after the collapse of the USSR and the reintroduction of capitalism. Or a look at China paints a similar picture. In China 70% of labour is employed in the State Owned Enterprises, but these enterprises produce only a fraction of China's wealth.
Why was this. Some of it is explained by the lunacy of state planning which led entrprise managers to hoard labour, but the more important reason is the need for legitimacy. If mass unemploy,ment had been allowed to develop the the claim that the state was acting in the interests of workers would have been unsustainable. The state would have lost its legitimacy and the working class would have sooner or later overthrown the Stalinist control of the state.
The concept of control of the social surplus is also subjectivist. Marx makes the point in respect of capitalism that it could quite easily continue without capitalists. He demonstrates how the social fucntion of the capitalist had already been replaced by that of the professional manager. He was not concerned with the subjective i.e. with the personalities involved but with the material conditions and processes that were at work. In many ways for Marx the individuals and even classes are merely instruments of the historical process. So the fact that the Capitalist class has control of the social surplus is less relevant for Marx than the laws which determine how that surplus must be used. True the capitalist could choose to use his particular surplus for consumption, but if he does so then less is available for productive investment, and the less he invests the less profitable his business, the more he increases his chances of ceasing to be a capitalist. Real control of the surplus lies not with individuals but with the economic laws which determine how much of it must be accumulated.
The argument the workers didn't defend state property is I think very weak. You may just as well point to the fact that lots of workers vote Tory. And for a Marxist I find it a very odd comment. It reminds me of the discussions I have had with Libertarians who use the same argument to suggest that the reason capitalism works is because workers are happy to sell their labour-power in return for someone else taking the risks. There is of course a similar event in history, and one appropriate.
Lenin's concept of the revolutionary party drew on the example of Cromwell's New Model Army. After he had seized power Cromwell used this Army to crush the Left-Wing opposition of the Levellers in the same way that the Bolsheviks crushed opposition from the Russian workers when the Workers Democracy threatened Bolshevik political control. After the period of Cromwell's Protectorate which advanced the cause of the increasingly dominant capitalist class, that class decided as a result of the experience not to continue with that experiment or even to push forward with a more decisive bourgeois democratic rule, but instead to hand power back to the old feudal class in the form of Charles II.
It is little wonder that Russian workers similarly after the horror of the political rule of Stalinism, with no international Labour Movement of any standing with any clear set of alternative ideas to offer it, and with an economy in dissarray due to bad management by Stalinism saw a return to capitalism as its best bet. Its the same decision that thousands of property owners make every day when they decide to give up their own small business in order to go to work for some bigger business that offers them higher wages and better conditions than they can pay themselves.
How could these social relations have collpased so quickly? Why does the fact that these relations were new mean that they should have been more enduring than older social relations? Surely the reverse is the case. New life forms are always more fragile than established ones.
Arthur Bough
A couple of questions
For Lawrie: What do you see as "all the charachteristics of a fully formed class"?
For US Red: Are you seriously suggesting the ruling stratum in Stalinist societies did not form a 'collectivity'? Who did control the surplus product in the USSR?
social class
Firstly I do not hold that the USSR was a workers' state of any kind whatsoever.
Secondly, it seems to me that stalinism represented a chaotic state formation that leaned on the legacy of 1917 and exploitation of the WC as the basis of its existance. Stalinism was not capitalism and it was not socialism either, but seems to have driven into its own dead time limited dead end. There may have been the possibilty for the bureaucracy to develop into a class of sorts-however the brief period of its existance would seem to have been spent administering chaos, out of which came its own demise. Much of the neo-capitalists and the political elite in modern Russia seem to have some background in the old bureaucracy.
Yes this is confusing. The important question I suppose is what is a class? What does it do? Im off for a run and will think about it again!
Reply To Bruce
Surely the requirements of a fully formed class are that first it is reproduced naturally as a result of the economic relations within the particular society. The feudal class were reproduced through primogeniture. The peasants by similar transfer of land, and limited opportunity to accumulate wealth and land. The capitalist class is reproduced through inheritance of private property i.e. ownership of Capital, whereas the working class is reproduced because of a denial of ownership of such Capital, and hte need to sell labour-power to live. These social relations are reproduced naturally with no requirement of force to prevent movement from one class to another (See Engels "Anti-Duhring).
Secondly, that the individuals in such classes are brought together in such a way that they have shared experiences and objective interests. They form a class for themselves.
Thirdly, in the case of a ruling class that it is capable of moving forward from these objective shared interests to formulate them into a set of ideas that promote those interests.
On the first the Soviet bureuacracy was not reproduced in this way. It was continually recreated with new personnel, often dragged from the lowest levels of society. On the second the bureuacracy did not qualify either. The bureuacracy - whatever that actually means because the SC and BC collectivists never specifiy who themembers of this new class actually were - was an amorphous group with many conflicting interests, and frequently looking over its shoulder for fear of the possibility of losing its position.
On the third it also fails, and one of the reasons for the continual changes in direction of the Stalinists was precisely the inability to formulate a set of such ideas, and a replacement of such with attempts to borrow ideas from others, and to impleent them in a typically bureuacratic manner.
The question to Red then is only capable of answer if you specify who you mean by "ruling stratum". If you mean the people who ultimately could dictate where resources could be directed then this comes down literally to a handful of people. Once you go beyond that requirement then you begin to draw in groups of people all of whom have conflicting interests. As for who controlled the surplus product the answer is clearly that the state ultimately controlled it, but then the question comes back full circle as to whose state is it. I would point to the fact that an inordinate amount of resources went on things such as healthcare, and education, went on keeping workers in jobs long after any economic rationality for such had gone - the extent of which was demonstrated once the workers state collapsed and capitalist relations were restored creating mass unemployment and workers forced to savenge for food from dustbins etc. - as a reflection of the fact that despite the fact that the bureuacracy attempted to use its position to look after its own interests it was constrained by the objective economic and social relations.
Arthur Bough
The elite had limited control over the surplus product
As to the class nature of the USSR -- I gather that Ticktin would say that the atomization of both the elite and the workers was so total that it could have no clear class nature, and that this is part of the reason why it was non-viable and doomed to collapse. The same goes for all the other Stalinist states which is why they're evolving towards becoming capitalist states.
The funny thing is...
every far left current -- every last one -- that has defined itself as both anti-Stalinist AND ANTI-LENINIST has stated that the Soviet Union was NOT a workers' state. Some claimed it never was, some claimed that it ceased to be so once the political apparatus became completely unreformable.
That all these anti-Leninist revolutionary tendencies -- council communists, autonomist, etc. -- all of them rejecting "What is to be Done" type formulations -- oppose the idea that the USSR was a workers' state is, I think, not an accident. Arthur is the only person I've ever seen who is anti-Leninist but thinks that the USSR was a workers' state. Unlike the orthodox Trotskyists, he acknowledges that the USSR's economy was thoroughly defective -- and yet, this economy must have in some sense been a "workers' economy," innately better than capitalism, because it was state-owned by the "workers' state." Very strange.
Not Strange At All
Its not strange at all. Had I been a Leveller I would have been completely hostile to Cromwell's dictatorship, would have argued in favour of a true democracy etc. Such criticism would not in any way have blinded me to the fact that the Cromwellian state was a bourgeois state, albeit a premature and deformed one. It would not have blinded me to the fact that objectively the economic relations on which it had arisen, and which had created the infant bourgeoisie, capitalist farmers like Cromwell himself, the burghers and small townspeople was innately superior to the feudal economic relations it was replacing.
That is the difference between a Marxist analysis based upon those objective criteria and a subjective assessment which tries to make judegments of motives derived from status, and differences in income etc.
Arthur Bough