The Fate of Boris Yeltsin
By Sean Matgamna
"The revolution... made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack’s horse", wrote Leon Trotsky, describing the start of the Russian Revolution of February 1917.
Women workers persuaded the Tsar's Cossack soldiers not to fire on the rebellious people on the streets, and in the course of doing it crawled under the bellies of the soldiers' horses to get to them.
The Russian revolution of August 1991 advanced to victory over the Stalinist system not by working class women crawling under the bellies of horses, but by Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic within the USSR federation, jumping up, outside the Russian parliament, on to one of the tanks put on the streets to make a Stalinist counter-revolutionary coup, and, by a brave speech, rallying the Moscow workers against the coup.
It was a brave speech and a heroic stand, even though Yeltsin was probably drunk when he made it.
The organisers of the attempted Stalinist coup intended to again fix the Stalinist totalitarian noose tightly around the neck of the peoples of the USSR - to restore a variant of the Stalinist political system that had unravelled in the previous two or three years.
An attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev and other rulers of the Stalinist system to reform it drastically from above had unleashed uncontrollable forces "below", not only in Russia but throughout the Russian empire and in Eastern Europe. The ruling "Communist Party", the cartel of the bureaucratic ruling class, lost the monopoly of initiative and of political power on which its rule depended. The attempted coup, backed by the CPSU, was an attempt to restore that monopoly.
Had the coup succeeded, then the USSR would probably have evolved as China has, unleashing capitalist and market forces presided over by a still-powerful authoritarian state, with the "Communist Party" retaining its political monopolies. The failure of the coup ended all such prospects in Russia.
Yeltsin's leadership of the anti-coup forces in Moscow helped prevent a "Chinese" development.
Yeltsin had spent his life as part of the Stalinist ruling elite, then fell out with the reforming Stalinist tsar, Gorbachev, and quit the Communist Party. As the old political monopoly, under which only ruling-party "candidates" could stand in "elections", disintegrated, Yeltsin emerged in June 1991 as the elected leader of the Russian republic within the USSR federation.
Yeltsin confronted both the coup-makers and the reforming CPSU boss, Mikhail Gorbacehv, with an electoral legitimacy and therefore with democratic credentials they could not match.
It was the decisive moment. The failed coup and the manner of its defeat accelerated developments from that point, and broke the back of USSR Stalinism.
The roughly parallel event in 1917 was when the Bolshevik-led soviets organised the defeat of the military revolt led by General Kornilov in September 1917 and in doing so strengthened themselves enormously against the Kerensky regime, which had no democratic credentials. That event presaged the October Revolution.
In the days after the attempted coup, Yeltsin and his friends acted as the revolutionaries they were. Ruthlessly they banned the CPSU and divested it of its economic assets. Revolutionaries - but bourgeois revolutionaries, against the Stalinist bureaucratic-collectivist system.
Their bourgeois social character was quickly apparent. The so-called oligarchs emerged - men possessing fabulous wealth which they had seized from the disintegrating Stalinist state as it broke up. Under Yeltsin's rule was licensed an orgy of looting of state property - what should have been public property, but in fact had been the collective property of the bureaucracy, whose "ownership" of state power gave them the real ownership of the economy and society.
Though no-one asked them about whether state property should be looted, the Russian working class supported the bourgeois revolution that broke the back of the Russian Stalinist state. So did socialists like ourselves. From afar, we advocated that the working class should seize power and create a democratic socialist system.
But after six decades in the darkness of Stalinist totalitarianism, the workers had not had a chance to educate themselves politically, think things through, organise themselves in political parties, and prepare themselves to replace the bureaucracy with working-class rule.
The Stalinist regime all through its existence had repressed independent working-class activity with especial severity
The workers lived in a social world where "trade unions" were not trade unions but agencies by which the bureaucratic bosses controlled them in the factory. In a world in which "socialism" was the vile hypocrisy of a ruling class with immense economic and social privileges. A world in which there had been no freedom of speech, press, assembly, organisation, or political competition.
The working class was entirely unready to play a politically independent role. That was the great tragedy.
It ensured that for a long time economic and social chaos followed the collapse of Stalinism. In the 1991 revolution the working class played a big role in action, but, politically, only a subordinate, follower role, behind the intellectuals and former Stalinist politicians who wanted to make a bourgeois anti-Stalinist revolution.
That was true in the East European Stalinist states, too. In Poland, the working-class movement Solidarnosc was the spinal column of the Polish nation moving to throw off national oppression and the Stalinist social system which the USSR had imposed. The role of the workers in the fall of the USSR and of East European Stalinism had much in common with the role of the ancestors of the modern working class, the sans-culottes in Paris, in 1789 and after, who acted as the vanguard of what was, despite their aspirations and expectations, a bourgeois revolution.
In Eastern Europe, and Poland, and Russia, the workers aspired to liberty and prosperity - and, after their experience of counterfeit totalitarian Stalinist "socialism", they identified liberty and prosperity with West European capitalism.
The condition to which Stalinism had reduced the working class at the point when it itself was collapsing is - all in all, and not for a moment forgetting the oppressions and slaughters, the slave-labour camps and the systematic oppression of the "free" workers in the factories - the single most clear-cut evidence of the utterly reactionary role of Stalinism in history.
Leon Trotsky, the leader with Lenin both of the workers' revolution in October 1917 and of the working-class communist resistance to the Stalinist counter-revolution which subverted and destroyed that revolution, had written in 1938 that the Stalinist bureaucracy would soon split into two basic factions. He called them the factions of Reiss and of Butenko. Ignace Reiss was an old communist, who had remained a communist trapped inside the Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus; he declared himself for the working-class revolution against Stalinism and for the Trotskyist movement. (He was almost immediately murdered by the Stalinist secret police in Switzerland). Fedor Butenko was a now-forgotten functionary who went over to the Italian fascists.
Trotsky's idea that the bureaucracy, or sections of it, would go over to capitalism proved entirely correct, if not in his time-frame, then in the long run. But his time-scale for the collapse of Stalinism was wrong by half a century. In terms of the political forces at large in it, the world in which the USSR collapsed, was a very different place from the one Trotsky lived in. In 1991 there was no "faction of Reiss" in the bureaucracy. It was to bourgeois democracy, sort of, that the decisive segment of the bureaucracy went over, not fascism.
And, after another half-century of Stalinism, not only was there no segment of the bureaucracy that was for "Reiss" - a working-class socialist revolution against Stalinism - but the tradition of the three great Russian Revolutions of the early 20th century - 1905, February 1917, October 1917 - had been annihilated in the working class itself.
Nothing is as senseless as the nostalgia for the USSR that still exists in areas of the kitsch-left. That system was an utterly reactionary historical blind alley.
The most alive segment of the bureaucracy, that which organised the bourgeois revolution against Stalinism, was led by neither the faction of Reiss, nor that of Butenko, but by "the faction of" a brave drunken buffoon - the "Faction of Yeltsin".
That was appropriate — History's grimly malicious joke — to their enterprise of making a bourgeois-democratic revolution in conditions where, in contrast to those in which the great bourgeois revolutions in the past, the Dutch, English and French, had been made, socialism was, in terms of material conditions, possible.
In Berthold Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle a drunken wastrel finds himself unexpectedly raised by confused rebels to be a judge - and behaves well, making wise, humane, and socialist-minded judgements. Real life is more complicated. The drunken renegade Stalinist bureaucrat Boris Yeltsin, who as a result of the chaotic breakdown of the Stalinist system, found himself raised to supreme power, became not the chief servant of the the people but the chief bandit, the tool and stooge and figurehead of the looting oligarchs.
And yet, looting and economic self-aggrandisement of some people at the expense of others is always a central aspect of bourgeois revolutions, even when those revolutions also perform good, historically necessary, and ultimately progressive work.
The capitalists of the Northern States of the USA who made the "Second American Revolution" in the form of a fierce civil war against the Southern slave states, and who did free the slaves, also, while doing that, and immediately after, looted the conquered South and the public lands all over the USA. And while the Second American Revolution freed the slaves, it left them for the ensuing century enserfed sharecroppers and racial helots.
Some of the Jacobin leaders in the French revolution, Danton for instance, were corrupt; others, in the new political conditions after the fall of Jacobinism, became notoriously and ravenously corrupt. In the English bourgeois revolution, the Parliamentarians and Cromwell financed their armies by selling vast tracts of Irish land and then, with the King's bloody head triumphantly held up before a vast crowd of spectators in Whitehall, set out to reconquer that land and extirpate the people living on it. Karl Marx judged that the English Republic had been fatally undermined by that.
Such things are in the nature of bourgeois revolutions. To say that is not to justify or excuse, only to understand and put in historical perspective. The looting of what should have been transformed from Stalinist state property to public property in a democratic socialist system was a price that the working class of the USSR paid for the political condition that Stalinism had after over 60 years reduced them to.
The bourgeois revolution which Yeltsin personified in 1991, and for a brief heroic period led, did, amidst all the chaos and horrors, open an era in which the peoples - the oppressed nations of the USSR, as well as the Russian people - gained rights and freedom they had never had before, except for the early years of the revolution of 1917. The Russian people retain comparatively great freedom - measured against what they had under Stalinism - even under Yeltsin's authoritarian successor Putin.
These are condition in which the Russian working class will clarify itself politically and prepare itself to create a socialist Russia.
Progress here has been less than we hoped in 1991? Indeed. Progress was impossible under the system which Yeltsin helped overthrow. Yeltsin himself, his role, his leadership, are both the proof and measure of that.
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Counter-Revolutionaries
Yeltsin was not a revolutionary, but a counter-revolutionary pushing on a truly decrepit door. The extent of that counter-revolution has been witnessed in the period following it. Seen not just in the rise of the oloigarchs who stole the workers property, assisted by the loans for shares programme of Anatole Chubais, but more significantly in the hundreds of thousands of workers thrown out of their jobs, people forced into starvation, into eating from rubbish bins, and thereby demonstrating the progressive nature of the underlying property relations that were overthrown even after 70 years of Stalinist maladminstration.
Trotsky in his History of the revolution mnakes the point that for a Revolution to succeed it is not necessary for the majority of the people to actively join it, only that they do not actively oppose it. Such indeed was the case in 1917 when many of the workers left the Cities and their terrible conditions during the Civil War to return to their villages, leaving the Bolsheviks to win the Civil War with the aid of a Peasant War undertaken by a largely Peasant Army.
In 1991, as in the so called Orange revolution and other such "Revolutions" of recent years that the CIA have admitted funding to the extent of millions of dollars, the Revolution was not one led by workers, and certainly was not in workers interests. It was a middle class led revolution, almost certainly with Western backing. That it should succeed so easily is not just a testament to the appalling nature of Stalinism, but also to the failure of Marxism in general to have been able in the last 80 years to have provided the Russian workers with a more attractive, more achievable alternative worth fighting for. To say that no progress was possible in the USSR prior to Yeltsin is thoroughly defeatist. Its true that in the absence of any progress by Western Marxists in particular to have made any progress in the last 80 years, indeed to have succeeded in isolating themselves further and further from the working class, progress for the workers in Russia would be difficult with no alternative to look to for their salvation, yet as the workers struggles in East Germany, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, and in Poland demonstrated certainly not impossible. That such a conclusion can be arrived at, that a collapse into seeing the victory of enemy class forces as a victory should occur, is simply a sign of the curent depression and defeatism inflicting the Marxist Movement, and its descent in respect of the Trotskyist movement into pre-Marxist petit-bouregois socialism in particular.
The extent to which that counter revolution has failed is not just that in Putin's newly oil rich Russia the working class - actually unlike the working class in China - has seen virtually no improvement in its economic condition, whilst the durability of nationalised property forms has been demonstrated by the extent to which Putin has pulled enterprises and large areas of the economy back under State control, whilst western businessmen complain that state officials simply do not undertsand the concepts of competition, and private enterprise having imbued the idea of planning and state control. The failure of the counter-revolution is not only demonstrated by the fact of Putin's increasingly authoritarian state, but by the large numbers of Russian's who now proclaim that favoured form of government would be Dictatorship.
Perhaps, the most revealing thing on the news today was the BBC News 24 correspondent in Russia who reported on the remarks of Russians. Those that spoke English generally spoke favourably of Yeltsin, she said. But of those that only spoke Russian - more likely to be the more working class repondents - there was only scorn, and the sentiment "Good Riddance".
Arthur Bough
Counter revolution against what?
It is nonsensical to describe Yeltsin as a "counter revolutionary" since the so-called Soviet Union had no "revolutionary" or "progressive" character to it whatsoever.
Arthur, you mischaracterise the property relations of the USSR. They were not some sort of half-way to socialism, something inherently progressive but "maladministered" (as you put it). It will not do just to say that the nationalised economy suffered from "maladministration" - the problem was not that it was badly run (much as it was) but that workers had absolutely no control over the means of production, since they were run by and for the bureaucracy.
There is no continuity between the property relations of 1917 and those of 1987. Workers had no influence over, or participation in, any aspect of social, political or economic life in the USSR after the first four or five years following the revolution. The state taking control of private property is not inherently progressive - the USSR not only lacked direct workers' control of production and distribution, but also lacked any democratic control over the state administering the nationalised industries.
Yes, 1989-91 was a series of bourgeois revolutions. But was it really so much better before? Do we "defend" the Berlin wall just because the bourgeoisie were against it? In truth, the economy Yeltsin et al overturned was remarkably similar to a capitalist one - throughout "Soviet" rule the vast majority of workers were on piece rates, there was extensive private property (particularly in agriculture), bureaucrats enjoyed significant privileges and Western slush funds, and wage labour always existed. Endless speed-ups, wage cuts and increases in hours meant a system of exploitation far worse than that meted out in even the most hollow bourgeois-democratic society.
It was a section of the bureaucracy themselves who gave up on inefficient Stalinist economics and carried through the "shock therapy" - look where Yeltsin came from! It wouldn't have done much good for the working class to demand that the bureaucracy not do this.
Of course, Yeltsin was no friend of the working class, and the economic situation of many workers is worse. But how can you pick sides between Stalinism and the free market - what good did it do the millions in the Gulags in the '30s and '40s that the bureaucrats saw the advantages of a "socialist" front for their class society? What good for the millions of dead, the nations crushed by the Great Russian bureaucracy, the workers who went without food for not meeting quotas, that the apparatchiks owned the means of production collectively - as a class - rather than as private individuals? It is not "defeatist" to see nothing good about such an appalling social order, no more than it is "defeatist" to think that there isn't much socialist about National Socialism.
Arthur's folksy invocation of working-class people loyal to the Stalinist past is daft apologetics for the most murderous régime in human history (OK, possibly bested by Maoist China). It is therefore particularly laughable that he postures like some leftist by claiming that "Marxism" had nothing to say, and indeed criticising the Bolsheviks (having recently made a fuss on this website about the lack of democracy in the workers' councils in 1917). The whole point is that there was nothing socialistic or Marxist about the "Soviet" régime - it was built on the back of a counter-revolution, the re-emergence of the Tsarist bureaucracy and military caste and the collapse of the workers' councils. Stalin's forced collectivisations and nationalisations in the early '30s did not push the legacy of the revolution forward - the death knell of the gains of 1917 had already passed.
Yeltsin didn't give a fuck about Russian workers, and ideological free-market reforms have hurt the Russian working class. But can you seriously choose "inherently progressive" Stalinism over the "authoritarian Putin"? Personally, I'm against class society, so I wouldn't pick either...
Against A Deformed Workers State
Dave,
You write,
“It is nonsensical to describe Yeltsin as a "counter revolutionary" since the so-called Soviet Union had no "revolutionary" or "progressive" character to it whatsoever.”
You might be right that it would be wrong to characterise Yeltsin as a counter-revolutionary if the assumption you make were valid. Unfortunately, your argument falls precisely because it is conditional upon the assumption you make. Your first have to demonstrate the validity of your assumption for your argument to retain its logic. So far none of the proponents of a new class whether it be a state capitalist class or some esoteric bureuacratic collectivist class have been able to demonstrate the validity of such an assumption in accordance with the basic tenets of marxism. Not only have they been unable to demonstrate that a new unknown Mode of production existed in the USSR, but they have continually and signally failed to even define who this new class were, or exactly how it was automatically reproduced. For good reason they never define the new class’ members, because when they do try to attempt some definition its found that the proposed composition falls apart on contact with reality. I have pointed to the most obvious fact that even at its later stages the higher reaches of the state and party bureuacracy for instance were drawn not from the children of bureuacrats, but largely from poor backgrounds peasants, workers, and in a number of cases of the Politburo children brought up in State Orphanages. As mary Macaulay has pointed out it is a very strange ruling, exploiting class which has to renew itself each generation by drawing in new members drawn largely from the lowest ranks of society.
“Arthur, you mischaracterise the property relations of the USSR. They were not some sort of half-way to socialism, something inherently progressive but "maladministered" (as you put it).”
Who mentioned socialism, half-way or not. Why would nationalised property realtions in the USSR have to be half-way, quarter way or any other distance towards socialism to be progressive, any more than say the NHS, or other nationalised industries in the UK. To define property relations as progressive or not in the way you do here is totally alien to Marxism. It is the method of petit-bouregois economic romanticism, subjectivism, not objective Marxism. Marx was well aware of the terrible rapacious nature of capitalism in its inception, which indeed depressed the standard of living of the first capitalists let alone workers. It did not prevent him recognising its historical, objectively progressive nature.
“It will not do just to say that the nationalised economy suffered from "maladministration" - the problem was not that it was badly run (much as it was) but that workers had absolutely no control over the means of production, since they were run by and for the bureaucracy.”
I did not characterise the property relations in that way. I said that it was a sign of the still inherently progressive nature of those relations that despite the maladministration of the Stalinists, it still kept millions of workers in employment, still provided a grotesquely meagre living for people, that capitalism immediately took away on its restoration. And yes of course it was because workers did not control the means of production that the bureuacracy was able to usurp that function. But that usurpation does not change the underlying historically progressive nature of the property form, any more than the usurpation of that function by the bureuacracy in the NHS, or other Public Bodies changes their progressive nature vis a vis private ownership. And yes the burueacracy used its control in part to cater for its own needs, but the huge numbers of workers retained in enterprises way beyond what was ration for any kind of exploiting class to maintain that wanted to maximise its control of surplus value, or surplus product, demonstrated the limits within which even the totalitarian bureuacracy could function, just as did its need to retain some semblance of a link to the working class which formed the social base of the property relations, and the state by its retaining even in mangle form of Marxist ideology, its necessity to retain its links with workers internationally by supporting various liberation struggles, albeit in its own bureuacratic method. Such too was its inability to erect any system of laws, and morals on these property relations consistent with class rule, and its need unknown with any other exploiting class, to mask its privileges through the use of special laws, special shops etc. rather than simply reproducing itself through the accumulation of wealth as every other exploiting class in history has done.
“There is no continuity between the property relations of 1917 and those of 1987. Workers had no influence over, or participation in, any aspect of social, political or economic life in the USSR after the first four or five years following the revolution. The state taking control of private property is not inherently progressive - the USSR not only lacked direct workers' control of production and distribution, but also lacked any democratic control over the state administering the nationalised industries.”
Why do you say after the first four or five years. They had no such control from the beginning. As for the state taking over private property not being inherently progressive I disagree. I agree with Marx and Engels that it is. In fact I agree with marx that even more developed forms of private property such as the Joint Stock Company, the Cartel or Trust are more progressive inherently and historically than earlier less developed forms. As Marx points out state ownership is the logical cocnlusion of that process. As Engels points out in Anti-Duhring it is not progressive in the sense that people adopting a subjective or moral approach such as that you are using here would mean. These forms can in fact be more oppressive to workers, more restrictive towards consumers through the use of their monopolistic position etc. – a look at the NHS and nationalised industries in Britain demonstrates that point – but as Engels points out they are historically progressive because not only are they a natural extension of that process of development of the productive forces to a higher level of socialisation, but also because they point the way to the future organisation of production, they demonstrate to workers that society can be run without private capitalists, that production can be controlled rather than subject to the vagaries of the market.
Yes there was no democratic workers control over production, but that required a political revolution to transform that situation not a social revolution. There were no other exploiting classes to be overthrown, no different property forms to replace. Yes there was no democratic control, but nor is there democratic control of the NHS, yet most socialists would argue it is progressive compared to private Health Care, again not because it provides a better service etc. but because it points the way to the future. And of course the AWL defends the NHS despite the lack of such democratic control. In fact in the case of the NHS the AWL does not even mention any requirement for democratic workers control as being important for its defence. Indeed, you seem happy to defend its current form and thereby the gross maladminstration of it by the NHS bureuacracy, instead choosing to criticise the easier target of the Blair Government - which certainly should be criticised for some of its proposals and reforms, but not the financial crisis which is almost entirely the fault of the NHS bureuacracy.
“Yes, 1989-91 was a series of bourgeois revolutions. But was it really so much better before?”
But as I have argued above what does “better” mean. Its an entirely subjective as opposed to objective term. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution living standards for workers, let alone for those peasants turned into workers collapsed. The average life expectancy for such workers dropped to less than half of what it was in the early 18th century, and in fact Marx cites statistics showing that things were worse than for ordinary people 400 years earlier. So was Capitalism “better”. Clearly, the Sismondists, the petit-bouregois socialists that based their approach on the same subjective analysis that you do here, on things that look the same, without any concern for content, which is fundamental to a Marxist analysis, came to the conclusion you do, that things were worse. They argued as the AWL does in its where we stand section that capitalism created poverty – which stands in total opposition to the views of Marx, Engels, and Lenin – and argued for it to be limited or for some return to a golden age. At the end of the 19th century the Narodniks adopted the same method of analysis, and arrived at the same conclusion. A hundred years later you have done the same, but now you use that method in your analysis not of capitalism, but of post-capitalist societies. Lenin in referring to such people, whilst proclaiming that many of them were committed and serious socialists, at the same time was forced to define the poltics they arrived at by this anti-Marxist method as reactionaries.
“Do we "defend" the Berlin wall just because the bourgeoisie were against it?”
Isn’t this just a silly argument? Don’t we defend things because they are objectively, historically progressive irrespective of what the bouregoisie are in favour of or against, like the NHS for instance?
“and wage labour always existed”
So what how do you expect workers to get paid for work in any transitional economy. You seem again here to suggest some kind of utopianism, a Proudhonist vision that almost immeiately after the revolution, the market, wage labour, competition, wage differentials etc. will magically dissappear. No serious Marxist has ever believed that. More imnportantly, what did not exist in the USSR was Capital, or Labour-Power sold as a Commodity. And side by side with it, what did not exist on the scale it does in Capitalist society was a Reserve Army of Labour.
“Endless speed-ups, wage cuts and increases in hours meant a system of exploitation far worse than that meted out in even the most hollow bourgeois-democratic society.”
Actually, as Ticktin and others like Nove et al who have made a serious detailed study of work relations in the USSR concluded the picture is probably far different. There were certainly some atrocious working conditions, but there is little point in speed-up when the workers simply sabotage production, and when in any case there is excessive labour sitting on the enterprises books. The picture is actually of machines bought from the West having to be slowed down, made less technically efficient, because of the inability, and sometimes refusal of workers to operate them at their proper speed and efficiency. By contrast, one of the biggest causes of the increwase in productivity during the 1930’s was the effect of workers becoming far more skilled, and educated as educational and industrial training facilities expanded massively raising dramatically the education and skills of peasants being recruited into the cities.
But as I have pointed out above this focus on “exploitation” of the workers etc. tells us actually nothing about the objective nature of the property relations, any more than those same methods of analysis could tell you in the late 18th century early 19th century anything about the progressive nature of capitalism. It is a purely subjective method of analysis totally alien to the Marxist method.
“It was a section of the bureaucracy themselves who gave up on inefficient Stalinist economics and carried through the "shock therapy" - look where Yeltsin came from! It wouldn't have done much good for the working class to demand that the bureaucracy not do this.”
Why ever not! What a thoroughly defeatist attitude. Was there no point in the East german workers demanding that, or the Hungarian workers in 1956, or the Polich workers who for a time appeared to be raising Transitional Demands. Of course, there was a reason to do that. For one thing many of the millions of bureuacrats who you believe formed a new class had living standards no better than ordinary workers, they were the statisticians, and other workers who in this country would be members of PCS. There was certainly a point in appealing to them, and more than appealing, demanding, and beyond organising to control.
I understand why you come to that conclusion. After 80 years of Stalinism, 80 years in which Marxism has become further distanced from the working class, particularly over the last 30 years or so of defeats in th West for the working class, it is understandable to come to the conclusion that everything is hopeless for the foreseeable future. It is what led petit-bouregois socialists in the past to put their faith in other class forces to achieve their immediate aims. Its what leads you to look to the bouregoisie to provide a solution in Kosova, to hold the ring in Iraq, its what leads you not to bother even raising the demand for workers control over the NHS. The idea that the working class is central to the historical process remains central on the talismans, but in practice the idea that faith only in the working class can be the guide to action is put to one side. Indeed, it has never been different for leninists, the difference is that for Lenin it was the Leninist Party that substituted for the class, now with those organisations numbering in tens of members another vehicle for the historic process has to be found either the democratic bourgeoisie for the Shachtmanites, or some “anti-imperialist” force for the other sects.
“Of course, Yeltsin was no friend of the working class, and the economic situation of many workers is worse. But how can you pick sides between Stalinism and the free market - what good did it do the millions in the Gulags in the '30s and '40s that the bureaucrats saw the advantages of a "socialist" front for their class society?”
But aren’t you the people that talk about the “Third Camp”? Why on earth should I choose between your choice of Yeltsin and his western backers, and the orthodox Trotskyists lining up with the Stalinists? Like Trotsky I am quite able to discern between the property relations, and the bureuacrats that had control of them, just as I am able to discern the difference between underlying capitalist property relations in a modern capitalist economy, and the bureaucrats that have day to day control over those means of production at the level of individual enterprises, and the level of the state. The fact that modern capitalist companies frequently experience occurrences of corruption like Enron or TYCO where the controlling bureuacrats rip off the company and its sharehodlers for their own private gain does not cause me to yearn for some golden age of private equity ownership or family ownership of firms. Nor does the rampant bureuacracy and inefficiency of the NHS its infereior service compared to private healthcare cause me to say, “well may as well not bother opposing privatisation then.” On the contrary it causes me to argue unlike the AWL that the problems of the NHS can only be dealt with by workers control and ownership of the Health Industry.
“What good for the millions of dead, the nations crushed by the Great Russian bureaucracy, the workers who went without food for not meeting quotas, that the apparatchiks owned the means of production collectively - as a class - rather than as private individuals? It is not "defeatist" to see nothing good about such an appalling social order, no more than it is "defeatist" to think that there isn't much socialist about National Socialism.”
Again I suggest you read Marx, Capital Vol I. Read the appalling things that capitalism in its infancy did to people. The killing off of millions of people by the most appalling living and working condiitons, read his account or Engels in the Condition of the Working Class, of how several generations of workers were killed off in the time that normally would have seen the death of just one. If we adopted your subjectivist approach we would have lined up with the feudalists against this terrible destructive and reactionary system.
“Arthur's folksy invocation of working-class people loyal to the Stalinist past is daft apologetics for the most murderous régime in human history (OK, possibly bested by Maoist China).”
Where did I do that? I did no such thing. I quoted the BBC News report that cited ordinary Russian people who simply voiced scorn against Yeltsin. That they should have such scorn for Yeltsin does not at all mean that they need view a return to Stalin as some better alternative. Still less does it suggest that if they did I would agree with them! I made the point that the result has not been a flowering of bourgeois democracy but the increasingly authoritarian regime of Putin, coupled with significant numbers saying their favoured form of government would be a Dictatorship. But far from welcoming that I referred to it precisely in order to point to the fact that such sentiments demonstrate the extent of the failure of Marxists to provide any credible alternative, and to the failure of Yeltsin’s counter-revolution. In other words the exact opposite of the sentiments you attribute to me.
“It is therefore particularly laughable that he postures like some leftist by claiming that "Marxism" had nothing to say, and indeed criticising the Bolsheviks (having recently made a fuss on this website about the lack of democracy in the workers' councils in 1917).”
I don’t understand these comments at all. They don’t seem to hang together in a way that makes sense. I did not say Marxism had nothing to say. I said that the reason workers in the USSR had nowhere else to turn was because of the failure of Western Marxists. Is that true? It is undoubtedly true. In fact it is precisely the argument made by Lenin and Trotsky in relation to the future of the Revolution i.e. without a revolution in the West the Revolution in the USSR would ultimately be doomed. Have Western marxists failed to develop an alternative pole of attraction that they could credibly place in front of Russian workers let aline carry through their own revolution? Well if not I would like to see this credible alternative. Did I criticise the Bolsheviks. No. I pointed to the facts of the revolution, actually as given by Trotsky himself, as opposed to the fairy tales that Trotskyists often try to put about. And yes that applies to the Workers Councils in 1917, also taken from Trotsky’s words. Does that undermine the significance of the 1917 Revolution? No not at all. But as trotsky said we should tell the truth, we cannot understand the significance of that Revolution let alone, what went wrong unless we do tell the truth rather than fairy tales. The Soviets were what they were just as Strike Committees, and Support Committees are – fighting organs of the working class, trying to have your heroes wearing white hats at all hours of the day, and on each occasion by trying to paint a picture of things that only allows for the very best interpretation in the best of all possible worlds is simply silly, and un-Marxist. As Lenin used to say “If you want to make omellettes you have to be prepared to break eggs.”
“The whole point is that there was nothing socialistic or Marxist about the "Soviet" régime - it was built on the back of a counter-revolution, the re-emergence of the Tsarist bureaucracy and military caste and the collapse of the workers' councils. Stalin's forced collectivisations and nationalisations in the early '30s did not push the legacy of the revolution forward - the death knell of the gains of 1917 had already passed.”
What you are describing is a change of political rule, not a change of social relations. History has known many such periods where not only has a bureuacratic elite been able to exert political control through the state apparatus over a society where the ruling social class is weak – a situation that can arise for a variety of reasons – but also situations where the social dictatorship belongs to one class whilst the political control rests with a different class e.g. the Tsarist state was a capitalist state, yet political rule continued to rest in the hands of the old aristocratic class. Again your analysis is based on this superfical view of a society rather than udnerstanding the fundamental material conditions of production, the social relations which are the staryting point for a Marxist analysis.
“Yeltsin didn't give a fuck about Russian workers, and ideological free-market reforms have hurt the Russian working class. But can you seriously choose "inherently progressive" Stalinism over the "authoritarian Putin"? Personally, I'm against class society, so I wouldn't pick either...”
No of course I wouldn’t choose Stalinism. I would choose to defend the nationalised property, and the elements of planning, and I would point out that in order to defend those historically progressive forms it was necessary for the workers to take control of them, and probably in the interim direct ownership too. I would argue that Stalinism was a road block in the way of achieving that. In fact I would argue in exactly the same way that I do in respect of the NHS. What surprises me is that given that choice the AWL decided to support Yeltsin and his western backers.
Arthur Bough
confused.com
The problem, Arthur, is that your argument (this part) is based on the premise that Stalinist property relations are "historically progressive" much like early capitalism was in relation to feudalism. They are in no way akin. Stalinist economies not only allowed even harsher exploitation of workers than in the bourgeois-democratic capitalist countries, but were also much less efficient and collapsed under the weight of their own bureaucracy - indeed, precisely the reason why the ruling class in China is converting the economy is that it has realised that private enterprise is more productive and profitable. Indeed, I would level the charge at your argument that the decline in workers' living standards in some Eastern bloc states is not proof that capitalism is less "progressive" - clearly, almost all former Eastern bloc states have seen vast economic development.
Capitalism allowed a huge development of the productive forces compared to feudal economy. Yes, the USSR saw huge economic growth in the 1930s, but only given a very low base and vast untapped resources. Economic planning was incredibly haphazard - Cliff's book on State Capitalism in Russia, if nothing else, is a mine on statistics on random price increases... even basic goods like nuts and bolts would see 1000% price rises after 10 years of no change, causing chaos in supplies for many industries.
Capitalist development is a necessary stage of development of the productive forces. I would be interested to see if Arthur thinks anything similar goes for national economic planning - almost all Western economies practised heavy state interventionism in the middle of the 20th century, but none still do this. Even if you think that running the economy on a war footing was necessary to drive it forward - in terms of developing productive forces, surely such ideas have had their day?
As is widely known, the difference between bureaucratic or authoritarian élites ruling in previous class societies, and in the USSR, is that while the bourgeoisie can carry out production, investment, trading etc. even under more reactionary political orders, the working class cannot exercise economic control without political power. Workers cannot accrue domination over the means of production under any other social form, much as workers' councils cannot control the economy if they have no political authority!
However, I do not think that the bureaucracy of the USSR is a meaningful "new class" or historical phenomenon which represents an alternative to capitalism. As is shown by the nationalisation of most of the economy in Eastern bloc states from above, and then the ruling parties' and politicians' own initiative to marketise and privatise in the early 1990s, there is no fundamental difference in the class character of a state monopoly in a capitalist country or one in the Eastern bloc. The majority-nationalised economies of Syria, Libya etc. in the '70s, and indeed the changes in China, represent this continuum.
Finally Arthur, there is a difference between workers attempting to take power (Hungary '56) and them "demanding" that the bureaucracy not break up the USSR and its heroic property relations. You waver significantly between hinting at workers' democratic control, and then "defending" the exploitative relations which exist as they are as some sort of "transitional" [! - calling for no change] stage.
The real "defeatism" is deciding that workers cannot take power, so just need to line up behind people like those who carried out the August 1991 coup in order to "defend" nationalised industry. The real demands to be put forward are those of democratic control, or, better, for workers to actually take power into their own hands. Siding with one part of the bureaucratic administrators of the economy against another is pointless.
Clearing Up Your Confusion
Dave,
“The problem, Arthur, is that your argument (this part) is based on the premise that Stalinist property relations are "historically progressive" much like early capitalism was in relation to feudalism. They are in no way akin. Stalinist economies not only allowed even harsher exploitation of workers than in the bourgeois-democratic capitalist countries, but were also much less efficient and collapsed under the weight of their own bureaucracy.”
But in that they are precisely akin. Read Capital! Early Capitalism imposed huge exploitation on workers compared to what they experienced under feudalism, and much harsher too. That’s why life expectancy plummeted. In some ways in its earliest variants it was not more efficient either. The British textile industry for instance even in 1800 when it had the benefit of machine industry was less competitive than the Indian textile industry that was still based on the village commune. At that time the Indian industry controlled 25% of the world market. Earlier attempts to get capitalism started in various countries also failed because of a similar weight of state bureuacratism that weighed heavily on the producers. Even in Britain, Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" rails in unmistakeable terms against the drain on the producers of the unproductive sections of society, the clergy, the politicians, and the state bureuacracy of all kinds. In many ways the development of capitalism in Britain was fortuitous because of historical circumstance. Had it not been for the huge amount of Primitive Capital accumulation that British merchant capitalists acquired through the slave trade for instance it is not at all certain that capitalism could have simply developed as a result of an extension of internal markets in the face of opposition from the ruling feudal class. There is nothing teleological in Marx’s analysis. His theory is not a theory about why Capitalism was inevitable, it is a theory explaining why it did develop. And despite all of those same features that Capitalism shared with the economic system developing in the USSR Marx was still able to recognise within it the progressive kernel, the POTENTIAL, for a new impetus to human development.
“Capitalism allowed a huge development of the productive forces compared to feudal economy.”
But only after a copnsiderable period of development. Capitalism began to develop in the fifteenth century. Its not until the end of the 18th century that we can say it has become the dominant economic system, and then only in England – it is not until the second half of the 19th century that it takes for most of Europe to catch up. And recent studies show in fact that output during the first half of the 18th century was in fact much higher than had formerly been calculated – not to mention that domestic production is always underestimated because it isn’t marketed – in England, and that consequently the rise in output attributed to the end of the 18th century was much lower. It is really only with the advent of steam power that production really took off. Moreover, as I have said above there are a number of attempts to create capitalism that failed for very similar reasons to the limitation of the expansion of productive forces in Russia i.e. a weak capitalist class, a poweful state bureuacracy able to leach of the productive class, and hereby limit the potential for accumulation.
“Yes, the USSR saw huge economic growth in the 1930s, but only given a very low base and vast untapped resources. Economic planning was incredibly haphazard - Cliff's book on State Capitalism in Russia, if nothing else, is a mine on statistics on random price increases... even basic goods like nuts and bolts would see 1000% price rises after 10 years of no change, causing chaos in supplies for many industries.”
But the very low base was a handicap not a help. It meant that accumulation was far more difficult. Add in the huge losses suffered by the USSR in WWII, and the fact that such a country could rise from being neo-medieval to the world’s second superpower – and in some fields surpassing the US – in the space of just 30 years is truly remarkable. For instance, in WWII the USSR lost 30 million people most of them of working age. It lost 25% of its agricultural and industrial capacity in the most important areas. By contrast the US lost just 300,000 people. Not only did it lose none of its agricultural and productive capacity, but by entering the war half way through it had had the benefit of supplying armaments to both sides, and strengthening its economy considerably. Now if we add in to that equation the considerable waste of resources that the management of this economy experienced as a result of Stalinism – and I would say a premature attempt to plan an economy in detail when as yet we do not have adequate tools to do so - as opposed to it being democratically controlled by the workers the extent of the progressive nature of the underlying property relations is obvious.
“Capitalist development is a necessary stage of development of the productive forces. I would be interested to see if Arthur thinks anything similar goes for national economic planning - almost all Western economies practised heavy state interventionism in the middle of the 20th century, but none still do this. Even if you think that running the economy on a war footing was necessary to drive it forward - in terms of developing productive forces, surely such ideas have had their day?”
Are you joking??? What do you think is the function of the MPC, the Fed, and all the other Central Banks. Then three is the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and a multiplicity of other International Planning bodies. There is the fact that in virtually every developed capitalist state around 40-50 of GDP is accounted for by Government spending, or other state activity. In fact where at one time the state only used to intervene when there was a possibility of a serious economic recession in recent years the state has intervened even at the threat of a serious stock market decline. In the US it was known as the Greenspan Put. At the end of 1999 every Central Bank in the world put out huge amounts of liquidity as a safety measure against the possibility of some calamity arising from the Millenium Bug. In Japan the central Bank for more than a decade kept interest rates at zero to try to get people to borrow money to spend. It has also simply printed truck loads of Yen for the purpose of keeping its currency low, and of buying dollars – basically lending to the US – so that the US could keep buying Japanese goods. NO STATE INTERVENTION! Without it western capitalism would have collpased 3 decades ago.
But more. Planning. Not only is planning and state intervention done by the state, but it is the routine method of operation for large – and even medium – private businesses. Every large enterprise works on the basis of Plans that take in Consumer Research, demographic forecasts and so on. In fact many of them use techniques originally developed in the USSR decades ago. The difference is the Soviet Planners were developing a science that at the time no one knew anything about. Western business planners have simply been able to avoid most of the mistakes.
“As is widely known, the difference between bureaucratic or authoritarian élites ruling in previous class societies, and in the USSR, is that while the bourgeoisie can carry out production, investment, trading etc. even under more reactionary political orders, the working class cannot exercise economic control without political power. Workers cannot accrue domination over the means of production under any other social form, much as workers' councils cannot control the economy if they have no political authority!”
That all depends. Ultimately, the bourgeoisie wsa able to break free of the chains that the aristocracy bound it with in Britain. But there was no absolute historical law which said it had to. Capitalism developed in Holland much earlier than Britain yet failed to take off as it did in Britain. Capitalism first developed in and around Venice, yet was crushed by the rapaciousness of the ruling Princes. Ultimately, the bouregoisie as much as the workingc lass could only guarantee the reproduction of capitalism by acquiring political control. There were good reasons why other classes and a state burueacracy should allow capitalist development and accumulation in order not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. But the same applies to a state bureuacracy in a workers state. And in both the internal dynamic of the mode of production determines the limits within which those other classes, and more precisely the state can operate. The dynamic of the mode of production itself is a controlling agent albeit one that is more or less deformed by the nature of the political control of the state.
“However, I do not think that the bureaucracy of the USSR is a meaningful "new class" or historical phenomenon which represents an alternative to capitalism. As is shown by the nationalisation of most of the economy in Eastern bloc states from above, and then the ruling parties' and politicians' own initiative to marketise and privatise in the early 1990s, there is no fundamental difference in the class character of a state monopoly in a capitalist country or one in the Eastern bloc. The majority-nationalised economies of Syria, Libya etc. in the '70s, and indeed the changes in China, represent this continuum.”
Er other than the existence of a ruling capitalist class in the one that controls the state through its social dictatorship, and the liquidation of such classes in the eastern bloc. Reading Trotsky and his analysis of Nazism in Germany on that point you might find instructive.
“Finally Arthur, there is a difference between workers attempting to take power (Hungary '56) and them "demanding" that the bureaucracy not break up the USSR and its heroic property relations. You waver significantly between hinting at workers' democratic control, and then "defending" the exploitative relations which exist as they are as some sort of "transitional" [! - calling for no change] stage.”
Dave, could you show me in my post above or anywhere else where I have actually called for workers to defend the status quo in the USSR or anywhere else. The whole point of my reference to east germany, Hungary, Poland etc. was to point to those struggles as THE alternative to just accepting the status quo, or as you did looking to alien class forces to provide a solution. But in all of those instances the pre-requisite to moving forward was to demand a defence of the nationalised property – though personally I believe that workers will have to assume direct ownership of the means of production in order to avoid the economic (and therefore political) power of the state overwhelming them prior to the development of socialism – and to move through that defence to workers control of production, and of society. In none of those cases did the way forward from Stalin towards workers control run backwards through a return to capitalism vuia a capitalist counter-revolution against those property forms as you supported in the USSR.
Nowhere have I “hinted” at workers democratic control. On the contrary I have spelled it out in large letters as being the basic necessity not just in the USSR and other deformed workers states, but here and now in Britain in relation to the NHS etc. Its unfortunate that in relation to the NHS the AWL does not even have the temerity to even go as far as “hinting” at the need for workers control to resolve its problems let alone, openly demanding it as I do. Indeed, not only do I call for workers control, but workers direct ownership too, because I have no desire to place such immense economic power in the hands of a state and its bureuacrats whether they are employed by a capitalist state or a workers state. And further I see such ownership and control as in fact far more important to the developemtn of working class conscioussness, and the road to socailism than the fetish for “planning” which at the current stage of our economic and social development can only be accomplished in a very limited number fields, and has to develop organically and voluntarily from the botom up, rather than being imposed from the top down as the leninist model proposes.
“The real "defeatism" is deciding that workers cannot take power, so just need to line up behind people like those who carried out the August 1991 coup in order to "defend" nationalised industry. The real demands to be put forward are those of democratic control, or, better, for workers to actually take power into their own hands. Siding with one part of the bureaucratic administrators of the economy against another is pointless.”
I agree which is why at no time here or anywhere else have I suggested that is what workers should have done or should do in future. It is why I argued and argue for workers to take ownership and control of the means of production for themselves, to take ownership and control of their estates and communities here and now rather than to place there faith in some other authority to provide for them. But if you believe that now then I am all the more amazed that rather than calling for that in the USSR then you called on them to support Yeltsin and his bouregois backers, it is why I am amazed that in respect of the NHS you simply call for it to be defended on the basis of its existing state-capitalist, inefficient, bureuacratic form rather than calling for it to be brought under patients and workers control along with the rest of the Health Industry.
Arthur Bough
Early Capitalism
There is just one more point about early Capitalism and its role in relation to production. Early Capital was almost exclusively Usurer's and Merchant Capital. Both of them rather than being a force revolutionising production were in fact a huge drag on production.
Usury was such a problem that it was outlawed. Marx in Capital quotes the words in several places of Martin Luther who reflected the feelings of the time that not just the Usurer's but also the Merchants were the lowest of the low, an evil afflicting society that was worse than the highwayman or the robber baron.
In Britain and throughout Europe laws were set limiting interest rates. The role of the Merchant Capitalist was no better. Throughout the Mediterranean where capitalism first began Merchant capitalists drove the peasant producers down into the dirt, by forcing low prices on them for their products to the extent that the peasants were unable even to cover their own cost of reproducing themselves. Their role as the outriders of colonialism was no better.
But without those Merchants and Money Capitalists there would have been no primitive Capital Accumulation, and consequently no development of manufacture, and then industrial capitalism.
But it should also be remembered that even when this last truly revolutionising aspect of capitalism finally got under way, even in Britain where it was able to have first mover advantage it took capitalism 70 to 80 years even to return workers living standrads to where they had been before the process began. Marx relates that even as late as the last third of the 18th century capitalists were unable to make decent profits because workers that still had a tie to the land were able to provide for themselves, and only needed to work for 3 days a week for a capitalist to live. The lack of supply of workers kept wages high, and profits low. Often the Capitalist had a lower standard of living than the worker. It is only with the forced eviction of the peasantry from the land through particularly the General Enclosure Act that this situation changes,a nd millions of landless workers are forced into the towns. From that pointa huge Reserve Army of Labour is created, labour-power in excess supply sees wages plummet, and now rather than working 3 days a week workers are forced into working 7 days a week 18 hours a day and more, including children. As Marx relates slavery was introduced through the selling of people from workhouses in the South sent up on barges to the mills in the North where capitalists had simply killed off their workers through overwork, and atrocious working and living conditions. Those without work could be put in chains, branded with an "S" for slave, and put to work by whoever took them. That law was still in existence at the end of the 19th century. It was not until after the middle of the 19th century that living standards for ordinary workers returned to what they were before the Industrial Revolution, but now they were working nearly twice as long to achieve it, and in much worse conditions.
Yet still Marx rcognised the historically progressive nature of this terrrible system. But then Marx didn't base his analysis on subjectivism and moralism.
Arthur Bough
Whose Property?
I often see comments, there are no doubt many of them here in various articles, bemoaning the fact that the Russian oligarchs ripped off the property of the Russian workers. The various scams of the yeltsin period, the loans for shares scheme of Chubais etc. so many ways of depriving the workers of their property.
But how can you beleive that is possible? If this property had long since ceased being the workers' property, and was in fact the property of the state-capitalist or bureuacratic class owned via their state then it was surely their property that was being stolen by the oligarchs, and nothing for us to fret about!
Arthur Bough
Class Confusion
An example of the confusion Bureacratic Collectivists get themselves into, and the reason they usually shy away from any precise details of who the new ruling class were is given in this snippet here from Sean.
“They struck heavy blows at the so-called "Communist Party", which had backed the coup. This 17 million-strong cartel of the old bureaucratic ruling class was banned.”
Why We Should Support the Banning of the CPSU
What we have here is acrude equation of the “bureuacracy” as candidate for this new ruling class, and the “Party”. But, of course anyone that has studied the USSR knows this is nonsense. The Party and the bureaucracy, quite simply are not interchangeable terms. Mary McAuley in “Politics and the Soviet Union” gives details of party membership in Machine-Construction in Leningrad for 1965.
Unskilled Manual 3.7%
Semi-skilled clerical 7.8%
Semi-skilled manual 12.2%
Skilled manual 16.2%
Highly skilled craftsmen 23.4%
Lower Administrative 19.6%
Specialists 19.8%
Management,supervisory
(excl. directors, shop and dept heads) 54.4%
True the last figure is high as you would expect ebcause its unlikely you would get one of these top jobs without being a party member, but it is equally and abundantly clear that the term Party and bureuacracy are not at all interchangeable. But in any case if the determining factor of this new class were “control” of the means of production the vast majority of these people could not be part of it, because they had no such control. Ordinary Party members had no say in decision making. If that were the determinant of this new class then it would in Party terms be restricted to the Politburo which was the only Party body which had ultimate control of those decisions on the allocation of resources.
But as McAuley points out none of the other potential candidates for this new class fit the bill either. The Intelligentsia, which actually had more chance of its children following in its footsteps, than did the vast majority of ordinary Party members or even state bureuacrats cannot be considered a candidate for a new class on Marxist terms, and it certainly had no control over the means of production. The “bureuacracy” which is the term usually banded about by state-capitalists and bureuacratic collectivists fares no better for the simnple reason that one of the crucial requirements for a class to exist even in itself let alone for itself, is some shared set of interrests. But as McAuley points out the “burueacracy” not only did not stand in any specific relationship to the means of production, had no shared set of interests, but in fact had CONFLICTING interests. In fact it is difficult to see how many of the members of this heterogenous mass could even be said to control the means of production, a point also made by Ticktin. Many of them led a throroughly perilous life – particularly under Stalin – having to meet rather than set targets, and all the time threatened at least with the sack, if not the firing squad!
McAuley’s article “Political Change Since Stalin” in Critique No.2 is also useful reading for those that want to obtain more than a superficial understanding of relations in the USSR.
Arthur Bough
state capitalism
A further reason for rejecting the state capitalist understanding of the USSR/former workers states/centrally planned economies is the role of the collapse of Stalinism in explaining globalisation.
The addition of these economies to world capitalism increased the size of the world market by around a third; the transformation of the means of production inherited (stolen) from the former Stalinist states, radically lowered the organic composition of capital world wide; the destruction of the bi-polar world opened up the semi-colonies to radical exploitation by the imperialists.
Together this lead to the surge in world capitalist profitability and explains why all the crisis-mongering of the left has been so wrong for the last decade.
Crisis-Mongering
I'm not sure that I would agree with your analysuis entirely. Had workers in Eastern Europe carreid through a political revolution to gain political control over the state a number of things are likely.
1) They would almost certainly have had to restore the market in large measure. Lenin believed that NEP would probably have to last for 25 years, and like all Marxists at the time beleived that planning could only be introduced in line with the capacity to actually increase social productivity by doing so. TRotsky argued for Marxists to learn to understand how the Stock Market worked because in order to replace the market its first necessary to properly udnerstand it, use, control it, and then replace it. A major problem in the Stalinist States was indeed bureuacratic control, but the simplistic answer given by most TRotskyists of "democratic plannin" simply demosntrates that they have neither understood the real economic problems of planning, and have not studied the "concrete" problems that arose in these societies.
2. Given the low standard of living in these socieites, and the impossibility of moving forward either on that front, and more importantly on the front of developing the society in the direction of socialism it would have been necessary to integrate the economies far more into the world economy than they were. This had been Lenin's hope - the reason he tried to get foreign large capitalist enterprises to invest in Russia - and was his main argument that the Revolution was doomed otherwise. It is the real economic argument against "Socialism in One Country".
3. If such an economy with a large market sector was not to become just state-capitalist then the role of the state - even one democratically controlled by the working class - could not be one of centralised property owner. As Marx points out in all societies the State has a dynamic towards independecne from Civil Society - See "The Philosophy of Right" - and placing centralised economic power in its hands can only ensure that dynamic becomes unstoppable. Only societies where the ruling class has dominant social power, and controls the state through a thousand golden threads of contact can avoid that. It would have been necessary then not just for the means of production to be state owned udner workers control, but for the means of production in most cases to have been directly owned and controlled by the workers themselves, and from there to move towards a voluntary co-operation and integration of business plans between enterprises, and communities, and consumers.
Even without, then the counter-revolution of Yeltsin returning workers property to the capitalst class such a process may well have had the effect of lowering the organic composition of Capital globally as a large quantity of unproductive labour rapidly became productive, and as in the case of China these workers produced large amounts of consumer goods destined for Western Markets, thereby also lowering the Value of Labour Power in these economies - without the disinflationary effect of goods imported from China consumer inflation in the West would have rocketed, and wages would have to have risen, or there would have been a huge crisis as Capital attempted to shift the burden of a falling rate of profit on to the backs of the working class, in a far more drastic way than it has done.
Western Capitalism has avoided that crisis to a large extent - though I think Mandel's description of the Crisis which really ran from 1974 into the 1980's as the "Second Slump" is apt - because of huge state intervention, because Monopoly Capitalism has been forced to adopt many of the techniques of socialism, and because the development in the last 20 years of China and other Asian economies, and to some extent the availabuility of cheap East European labour in the last decade or so, has enabled that state intervention to give a strong counter-cyclical boost without the concomitant inflationary pressures which previous bouts of Keynesianism had. The cost for the US has been effectively to mortgage its future to China.
In part these developments explain why the crisis so often foretold by the left did not materialise in the last decade, but the more significant reason is that the real period of crisis had already past. The Kondratiev Long Wave that began in 1949 rose until the lat 60's-early 70's marked by the increasing social conflict of the period - just as the last one was marked by the social conflict of 1917, and the early 20's - with 1974 marking the watershed, and the beginning of the downswing, and defeats for the working class of the 1980's. But the emergence of China and other Asian economies in the 90's, the shortages of raw materials, and conflicts over sources of those materials, together with their dramatic rise in prices in the late 90's and through to today, are characteristic of the Spring upturn in the Kondratiev cycle. That crises can still occur during this period is true, the cycle is usually marked by a blow-off of debt - which could be seen as the Russian, Asian and Latin American debt crises of the late 90's, but the majority of debt is now that of the US and UK. Its possible, especially considering the role played by derivatives in financing this debt on world capital markets, that this debt blow-off has still to occur with potentially disastrous effects for capitalism. Yet the fact is that worldwide there is now a glut of savings - mostly in China, Asia, and the raw material producing nations - again typical of this phase of the K-cycle, with as Marx describes it money becoming plentiful as economic activity increases, and credit being accepted readily in place of cash.
On this basis we are nearly 20 years away from the kind of social conflicts seen in 1917-27, and 1968-79. The period ahead is one of comparatively easy gains for the working class - provided of course, it is united, organised, and understands the line of march.
Arthur Bough
Business Planning
One of the last attempts of Soviet Planners to make production fit consumption needs was to create loads of consumer panels in an attempt to get knowledge of what consumers wanted. It necessarily failed.
But western businesses have learned from the approach.
Glynn Davis comments in respect of TESCO,
"From day one Tesco knew that the scheme would provide a whole lot more than simply allowing people to collect loyalty points to reduce their shopping bill. In fact this was never the point of the exercise because the point-accrual mechanism was simply the carrot to customers that would get them to dig out their loyalty cards whenever they visited a Tesco store, thereby enabling Tesco to collect data on them.
But as other retailers launched their own loyalty
programmes they soon recognised that collecting data is
one thing but making sense of it and transforming it into customer intelligence is a completely different matter.
It was an inability to overcome this problem that
prompted Sainsbury’s (yes it did ultimately launch a
loyalty card despite David Sainsbury), Safeway,
Somerfield, Asda and Waitrose to abandon their schemes
one-by-one.
Just consider that even when Clubcard had a mere five
million cardholders, during a three-month trial of the
scheme, Tesco had to deal with 50 million shopping trips that comprised 50 billion purchased items. What made the analysis of this data mountain possible was the decision by Dunnhumby to only analyse 10% of the data and then apply the findings back to the other 90%. It realised that even a 10% sample could give 90% accuracy whereas the massively more complex and expensive task of analysing a much larger percentage of data might only deliver 95% certainty so it came to the conclusion that crunching any more than 10% of the numbers was simply not worth the cost or effort.
So powerful were the findings from this trial period that the then Tesco boss Ian MacLaurin said: “You know more about my customers in three months than I know in 30 years.”
Davis writes for the Grocer Magazine as well as RetailWeek and several newspapers.
Arthur Bough
Marxism v Political Alchemy
I was recently skimming through Robin Blackburn’s reader from the 1970’s – “Ideology in Social Science”. The three main articles I was interested in were those by C.B. Macpherson, “Post-Liberal Democracy?”, J.H. Westergaard, “The Myth of Classlessness”, and Blackburn’s own, “The New Capitalism”. All deal, in different ways, with the idea of some new type of post-capitalist society, each providing, what still remain as, some of the best critiques of such ideas.
As Blackburn points out, those that put forward the post-capitalist thesis, in respect of the West, fall essentially into two camps. On the one hand, for the originators of the idea such as Burnham, and for those like Mises and Hayek, the idea of some post-capitalist society was in fact a form of apologism. Capitalism itself had become pretty indefensible. What better then than to simply characterise actual capitalism as not capitalism at all, but some form of post-capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism. And, for such writers, this post-capitalist, Bureaucratic Collectivist system could be seen not just in the USSR and in Nazi Germany, but also in New Deal America, and the tendency towards corporatism in most of the developed world. From their standpoint, such Bureaucratic Collectivism was completely bad, the complete opposite of the Liberal Capitalism they viewed as the pure ideal type of the 19th century, it was in Hayek’s words, “The Road to Serfdom”. But for later writers such as Anthony Crosland, and, later, people like Ralf Dahrendorf, this tendency towards bureuacratism, of the professional manager, a convergence of all systems East and West towards such a technocratic, meritocracy was not at all bad. On the contrary, it reflected a new post-capitalism in which all of the rough edges of capitalism would be removed as a result of a new culture, of these new professional managers no longer tied to the need to maximise profits as with old style capitalism, but free to engage with other goals such as concern for the employee, the community, the environment etc.
In the three articles above, these ideas are systematically dismantled, not just through logical argument, but through detailed examination of empirical data, something, which as Blackburn points out, is rarely produced by the proponents of these Bureaucratic Collectivist theories, but who largely rely on superficiality, and assertion. What struck me was how much, in fact, the argument against the Bureaucratic Collectivist arguments, relating to post-capitalism in the West, though, also applied to those arguments applied to the USSR etc. Whereas, for Burnham, and particularly for Mises and Hayek, the aim was to distance the indefensible, actual capitalism from their pure, perfect model of Liberal Capitalism, so for Burnham and later Bureaucratic Collectivists and State Capitalists there seems to be a similar desire, a need to say look anything described as “Worker” or “Worker’s”, like “Worker’s State” can never be anything less than perfection; ergo anything not perfect cannot be a real worker’s state.
Blackburn makes a good point in relation to the idea that the control of capitalist enterprises by bureaucrats represented something significantly new and different from capitalism. He says, in what ways did this control lead to different decisions and outcomes than had the businesses instead been run by their owners or democratically by shareholders. He concludes, if anything, more closely to the needs of the market.
But it seemed to me that it would be useful to apply the same criteria to the USSR. In what way would decisions have differed, outcomes changed, had workers democratically controlled the state from the 1920’s onwards. I am talking here not about if Trotskyists had controlled the state, but actual real ordinary workers! If it had truly been a democratic WORKERS’ state.
a) “Socialism in One Country”.
In fact, the likelihood is that had the USSR been a democratic workers state in the 1920’s, a dynamic towards “Socialism in One Country” is even more likely. If we consider the actual economic conditions of this working class, it is not hard to believe that it would look first to achieving some relief from its chronic condition as its first priority. That it would be prepared to make concessions and compromises, where necessary, with imperialism can hardly be doubted. Lenin, himself, in accepting the need for the Brest-Litovsk Peace, had argued that it was vital to hang on to power in the USSR even if they had to pull back to a small enclave in the Urals. Lenin was not only prepared to compromise with foreign capital by allowing them in to exploit the ample Russian labour, but saw it as an important way of developing the economy.
The idea that the term “worker” or “worker’s” when used as a prefix is some kind of Philosopher’s Stone which purifies everything it touches belongs in the toolkit of the political Alchemist, not the Marxist. Just because Trotskyists believe that “International Socialism” and “solidarity” were the revolutionary alternative to “Socialism in One Country” does not at all mean that workers themselves, left to their own devices would agree with them, rather than looking to their own pressing immediate needs and interests. It is yet another example of Leninists substituting themselves and their ideas for the real working class. The cure for such ideas is given by reality. It was organised workers, by a democratic decision, who marched from the Docks in support of Enoch Powell, who backed Ian Paisley in the UWC strike. I’m sure this experience is not exceptional either. In Stoke on two of the most heavily working class estates, Tenants Associations last year complained that they had no BNP candidates to support. This year they did, and they won.
b) Industrialisation and the Smytchka.
Some people have argued, I think Martin Thomas has made this case, which is effectively teleological, that State Capitalism became inevitable because it is the only means by which backward societies in the 20th century could industrialise. It is functionalism. The fact that the most effective industrialisations in the last century did not arise through state capitalism rather undermines the idea, but the basic premise – the need for industrialisation through mobilisation of a social surplus – is a useful starting point for comparing the actual course of events with the choices that would have presented themselves to a democratic workers state.
a. Industrialisation can only occur by mobilising a social surplus for the accumulation of industrial “Capital”.
b. In pre-industrial societies the only sector from which this surplus can be extracted is the agricultural sector i.e. the peasantry. The alternative is through the investment of foreign capital.
c. A necessary conflict arises between working-class and peasantry.
Lenin recognised that the smytchka – the alliance between working class and peasantry – could not last long. The peasantry represented a nascent bourgeoisie – not just the kulaks. The smytchka was needed because:
i. The Civil War was largely a Peasant War fought by a Peasant Army against the remnants of feudal society.
ii. Bolshevik power rested largely on control of that army
iii. The rural population accounted for 80% of the population, the workers were mostly peasants recently arrived in the towns – and after 1918 many of them, anyway had returned to their villages to escape the famine in the cities
iv. Without food the army would have mutinied against them, and workers couldn’t work.
But, for all that, Lenin knew, eventually, the working class would have to defeat the peasantry. And the basic economic fact remains that democratic or bureaucratic workers state, workers could only accumulate the necessary resources for industrialisation by squeezing the peasants. The peasants would resist, and some form of Civil War, to subdue the peasantry, would have been required – after all that is the point of a class dictatorship. Whether workers would have been more or less brutal in achieving that end than was Stalin’s campaign to that end – and also it has to be said to transfer economic resources from the peasantry to the workers living standards – is impossible to say.
c) The Alienation of Labour and Problems of Planning.
There is an assumption that democratic planning by workers would have removed all of the idiocies of the bureaucratic Stalinist model. One of the reasons cited is that by making workers controllers as well as owners of the means of production the alienation of labour would be overcome, an alienation, which explains workers actions within the Stalinist system.
But this oft repeated assertion seems hard to justify. The most obvious reason is that, whilst the alienation of labour does not exist for the direct producer, this relationship does not automatically arise for the worker in ANY society in which the object of his labour is consumed not by himself or his family, or even anyone he knows, but by some anonymous other. That this anonymous other acquires this thing for consumption via some method of democratic planning rather than bureaucratic planning or the market, cannot in and of itself create a relationship between producer and consumer, they continue to be related not by any human connection one to another, but only through the mediation of things – things which remain objects of labour, production for one, consumption for the other.
In order for this relationship to change, it is not the immediate economic relationship which needs to change, but the subjective ideas existing in men’s minds, built up on those productive relations, which must change. But this is no more than saying that workers must cease being simply workers, but must become fully class conscious, socialists, must no longer view themselves as individual workers – or even workers at all – but as integral parts of society, the development of which is indistinguishable from their own individual development. But that is not something any Marxist has believed can occur any time soon after a political revolution and prior to the transformation of property relations. Lenin certainly didn’t. He believed it would take several generations.
The distance between the participation of the individual worker in decision-making and the ultimate decision made is simply too great, short of such a radical transformation of consciousness, and culture, for the worker to selflessly identify themselves and their immediate interests with the overall interests of society, and the decisions arrived at at a societal level.
Again that Trotskyists, as Leninists, cannot perceive of the possibility, of a democratic workers state in which the individual workers do not act accordingly, simply reflects the inability to separate out the Party and Class, to conceive of a democratic workers state which is not one in their own image, and is again to treat “worker’s” as a Philosopher’s Stone purifying any state to which it is prefixed.
But the reality is that without some controlling mechanism such as a competitive market or some set of determined targets, workers in any particular enterprise have no reason to act selflessly short of the necessary transformation of human beings into the New Man. In short, all of the issues, which confronted the Stalinist planners, are as likely to confront planners in a democratically planned economy. The manager of a plant under democratic workers control is likely for a quiet life to readily accede to the requests of its workers to work less hard for their wages – and given the harsh conditions in Russia, who could blame workers for such a demand. But acceding to wishes of all workers likewise to work less hard will result in less production, less accumulation, less consumption goods available, whatever the previous democratic votes of those same workers for more accumulation, more consumption goods i.e. a demand for someone else to work harder. Its like if you ask people if they would like to see fewer cars on the road. Yes they all proclaim as long as its not theirs.
Inevitably, if the determination remains to retain a planned economy, rather than a return to the market, as the solution to this problem, the question then arises how to ensure that the individual desires of consumers, aggregated into a plan are matched by the outputs of those consumers as workers. The only possible means of achieving this within the confines of a planning system is through the establishment of output targets disaggregated to the level of individual enterprises. Within that context, discipline within the enterprise can be applied to individual workers by their work colleagues, but given everything we know about the actual problems experienced with planning systems, and with targets (including the use of targets in the West) there is absolutely no reason to believe that the same kind of lunacies experienced under Stalinism would not re-occur.
No sooner does one enterprise experience difficulties in supply, then, in order to avoid penalties itself for not meeting its own targets, it finds ways around the target. If its steel deliveries are short it might for instance use thinner steel sheets than it should to stretch out its supplies, and so on. Look at what happens in our own society. I know of a number of instances within Local Government where statistics were simply made up to comply with Government targets. There are reports of teachers helping kids cheat with SAT’s in order to meet targets for schools.
Blackburn asks if the Managerial Revolution has caused the basic dynamic of capitalism to be changed, to be different than it otherwise would have been. He argues that clearly it hasn’t. Its just a more mature form. We can certainly look at the examples of CEO pay, and see such bureaucrats paying themselves huge amounts, and thereby leaching off the owners of these companies. But in comparison to the dividends and capital gains of the owners this is just small change. Moreover, every society has had similar bureaucracies, and all of them have leached off society to obtain higher than average standards of living.
Whilst a democratic workers state in the USSR would not have required the excesses of Stalin’s purges – other than something similar against the peasantry – would not have acted to oppress workers as Stalin’s did – though its possible some powerful groups of workers, say those organised in the biggest, most organised, most concentrated centres may have used their power in that way, just as now more powerful groups of workers win better pay and conditions for themselves, whilst weaker groups get left behind – and workers as a class certainly would have to suppress the peasantry to extract the surplus required for industrialisation, in many ways the actual development of productive relations would not have been much different than it was. The determining factor was the objective conditions in which the state existed, the attempt to plan a backward society in detail, with a small and backward working class, not the subjective factor of the political control by Stalinism.
Even in terms of income inequality it is more than likely that the more powerful groups of workers would simply have voted themselves higher wages, and used their industrial, economic, and political muscle to back it up. The need to achieve ever more complex targets within a complex and failing planning environment would have also given bureaucrats and technocrats a privileged position even if they remained under the control of workers, just as is the case with bureaucrats under the control of capitalists in the West. The immediate economic concerns of workers, especially workers as economically deprived as those in Russia, would have led to an overwhelming desire to address those economic needs rather than sum altruistic concern with the plight of workers elsewhere in the world, certainly not to have made the huge transfers of resources out of the country to assist Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam etc. or the various liberation struggles that Stalinism undertook. To that extent we might conclude as Blackburn did in relation to Capitalism that the function of the bureaucracy under the actual objective conditions was to if anything closer approximate a Workers State than would have been the case had real life, workers been making democratic decisions under those same conditions.
Socialism cannot be built from the top down via a transformation of property relations following a Leninist Political Revolution. It can only be built on the basis of a fully class-conscious working class deliberately constructing such a society. But that consciousness can only develop slowly on the basis of changed objective relations of production. The social revolution is not a single event, but a process which goes on over time within the bosom of the old society – capitalism grew for 400 years within capitalism before it matured sufficiently to burst out – a revolution which sees not just the further socialisation of production, but the growing economic and social power of the working class, as it takes back into its own direct ownership and control the means of production, and democratic control of other aspects of its life, its communities etc. It is on that basis that the working class constructs its social dictatorship, and in so doing, and with the guidance of the Workers Party, transforms its consciousness, its culture, and the dominant ideas and culture of society. Only then when the state itself has become infused with those ideas, and that culture, when it has become tied to the working class, is the process culminated by the single act of political revolution to establish complete political control by the working class over what will by then have become its state.
Arthur Bough