What about Russia? Theories of the Soviet Union [Archive]

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6th March 2012, 08:30

Since these question pop up every now and again, I thought I'd make a new thread for this.

Was the Soviet Union state-capitalist? Was it a degenerated workers state? Was it something else? Was the ruling bureaucracy a class? Was it safe to be part of this ruling elite? Was there planning? Was there money (as in, a universal equivalent)? Was it a rational system? Were people indoctrinated by Stalinist propaganda? Was a political workers opposition possible against the system?

To these and more questions independent socialist Hillel Ticktin gave a lecture last year at the Communist University. The introduction basically runs from 5:45 to 59:00 (if you want to skip his anti-Stalin rage in the first few minutes ;) ). He himself lived in the Soviet Union for some time and for that reason has some first hand experience. He is also the editor of the Critique journal, which started in the 1970's and predicted the mechanics of the end of the Soviet Union with some accuracy long before anyone else did.

So, take a seat, grab some popcorn and enjoy!

29505740

Volcanicity

7th March 2012, 19:41

daft punk

9th March 2012, 20:45

daft punk

9th March 2012, 20:55

Was it safe? Probably not except for a few around Stalin. Even then they never knew. Stalin sent his buddy Molotov's wife off to the Gulag. She had been a friend of Stalin's wife who topped herself (some say Stalin shot her) after seeing her friends disappear one by one, even though this was well before the main purge. Bizarrely, or maybe not when you consider the stories coming out of Russia, Polina (Molotov's wife) came out of the labour camp, and feinted when she heard Uncle Joe had snuffed it. She is even said to have remained a Stalinist the rest of her life. She was sent to the labour camp for pro-Jewish activities.

Veovis

9th March 2012, 21:01

Well, without watching the video, I will say the USSR was a degenerated workers state. And the bureaucracy was an elite caste, not a class.

A workers state = planned economy √

Dictatorship by bureaucratic elite = degenerated √

Elite did not own means of production = class X

ditto = caste √

A workers' state isn't just a planned economy - it would be a state controlled by, or at least accountable to the working class, which the Soviet Union wasn't, even in a 'degenerated' sense.

daft punk

9th March 2012, 21:07

A workers' state isn't just a planned economy - it would be a state controlled by, or at least accountable to the working class, which the Soviet Union wasn't, even in a 'degenerated' sense.

ah, yes, that is another way you can use the term workers state. Well I agree it wasn't that, there was a bloody political counter-revolution obviously between the two.

However the bottom line is that the economy was not privately owned, was publicly owned, and crucially planned, albeit in a crappy bureaucratic way, and so was a step forward from capitalism.

It wasn't a cake, but it was a bag of flour. All it needed was an egg. A democratic egg. A bag of flour is closer to a cake than nothing. Am I making any sense? Maybe I should ditch the analogies.

10th March 2012, 14:32

Well, without watching the video...

Then please don't reply with uninformed views. You may of course disagree with the video in the OP, but you cannot engage with it if you don't even watch it.

Edit:
Ticktin replies specifically to the claims you make regarding it being a degenerated workers state, planning, etc. So, it is worth a watch if you want to engage.

10th March 2012, 14:45

daft punk

10th March 2012, 15:50

Then please don't reply with uninformed views.

my views are not uninformed

You may of course disagree with the video in the OP, but you cannot engage with it if you don't even watch it.

I engaged with the questions asked in the OP.

Edit:
Ticktin replies specifically to the claims you make regarding it being a degenerated workers state, planning, etc. So, it is worth a watch if you want to engage.

too long

10th March 2012, 15:55

my views are not uninformed

I engaged with the questions asked in the OP.

too long

The point is that you didn't engage with the video in the OP. Therefore your posts are uninformed and off topic.

daft punk

10th March 2012, 15:59

http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/leftunity/ch6.html

The Theory of State Capitalism

daft punk

10th March 2012, 16:07

well, the intro is good anyway.

Deicide

10th March 2012, 16:30

Thanks, this is interesting, I'm staying in tonight, so I've now got something to watch! Unfortunately, I don't think a single Stalinist will watch this, it'll burst the anti-reality comfort bubble they're encased in. If only one Stalinist could be turned into a communist..

GoddessCleoLover

10th March 2012, 17:14

Thanks to Q for starting this thread and to Durdles for his highly informative link. Tikhtin is obviously a sincere and educated Marxist economist and his theories certainly deserve thoughtful consideration. Durdles' link contains another thoughtful analysis that even in areas that diverge from Tikhtin acknowledge that Tikhtin has advanced and deepened out understanding of the political economy of the Soviet Union. These analyses deserve thoughtful consideration over a period of time. Tikhtin's observations with regard to the Soviet workers' alienation of their labor product and how it resulted in a "non mode of production" seems to me an excellent description of the functioning of the Soviet economy and a valuable contribution to the analysis of the Soviet political economy.

Deicide

10th March 2012, 17:57

I just found an interesting article by Ticktin. He inspects the nature of Stalinism and its effects on the wider world, so it's quite relevant to this thread.

CAPITALIST CRISIS

It is generally accepted that the capitalist class agreed of the end of World War II to adopt a concessionary strategy of growth and full employment in the developed countries. It is usually known as the Bretton Woods agreements. This was combined with a welfare state, whose dimensions differed according to the particular country. This was a deliberate concession predicated in the first instance on the defeat of fascism. which was itself an inchoate and irrational response to a capitalism under threat of disintegration or overthrow. Capitalist instability can also be contained for a time, through repression and the period during the two world wars saw wave after wave of repression in the developed countries most particularly incentral and eastern EuropeWhile the post-war period may be regarded as a period when the capitalist class had to concede, inreality it was also a period when such concessions could be made without any danger to capitalism itself unlike the period after the Russian Revolution. The Nazis had destroyed the most powerfulworking class in the world and Stalinism had destroyed the impetus of the Russian Revolution.

Furthermore Stalinism prevented the working class from taking revolutionary action, mostparticularly in Europe. The immediate danger from the world working class was contained, but theunderlying threat of the Russian Revolution remained. It had become built into the epoch itself, inspite of Stalinism.The resulting concessions made in the post-war period were spectacularly successful and provided aperiod of social democratic calm in western Europe. The standard of living of the workers inwestern Europe and the United States rose very considerably until the late 60s and early 70s. By1968 the conditions which made the concessions viable had begun to evaporate. The working classwas no longer disciplined by the history of the great depression, fascism and the world war.Stalinism was declining fast in its ability to control the working class and social democracy couldno longer deliver what was required. Above all a capitalism without a reserve army of labour cannotcontrol the class. Still less can it do so when much of the economy is nationalised and politicised sobreaking commodity fetishism.Workers were demanding control and greater democracy in the workplace, as well as higher wages.

It became clear that the capitalist class could only revert to its former form to maintain control. Itreturned to finance capital. Some argue that there was a downturn in the rate of profit through wagerises and others argue that arise in the organic composition of capital was responsible. The capitalistclass clearly needed to change the terms of its relations with the working class, whatever theimmediate reason.Throughout, the major condition for the growth strategy was the cold war and the series ofsecondary hot wars that erupted - Korea and Vietnam were the two biggest. Wars permitted thewest to invest heavily, in the military sector and so create demand, particularly for the producergoods sector. It raised the rate of profit, in large part through the exaggerated prices charged to thestate, and it increased overall demand for goods including consumer goods. Taxation and the issueof government debt provided the funding, and it was generally supported by the public who took theview that the USSR was a menace to the 'free world'.

Stalinism therefore, stabilised capitalism in three ways: firstly by providing the cold war with whichcapitalism could accumulate beyond its previous limits; secondly by controlling the working classthrough its communist parties; and thirdly through its responsibility for the creation of the anti-communist ideology, given the monstrosity of its operation.

Full - http://www.scribd.com/doc/58096467/Capitalist-Crisis-by-Hillel-Ticktin

JoeySteel

10th March 2012, 18:13

lmao, communists 'provided the cold war' and were responsible for 'creating anti-communism'

this Ticktin asshole is really doing the capitalists job for them eh. pathetic:thumbdown:

daft punk

10th March 2012, 18:42

If only one Stalinist could be turned into a communist..

Maybe there are one or two specimens capable of independent thought (mutations perhaps). Even fascists can be turned. However I would say they are an endangered species, incapable of evolving, bit like the panda. Only a lot less cute.

Q. Please can you sum up the video in a paragraph. You can't expect everyone to watch it for an hour! Maybe if it is convincing I might wanna watch it.

As far as I'm concerned the USSR was a degenerated workers state because all it needed was a POLITICAL REVOLUTION.

Brosa Luxemburg

11th March 2012, 03:39

My theory was that the Soviet Union was a coordinator society in which it was out of the capitalist world and had a different system than capitalism but was not socialist either. What I mean by coordinator is that a the economy and society had a top-down structure in which those at the bottom took orders from the top (the bottom being workers, peasants, etc.) yet there weren't individual firms acting against each other for profits (usually) and surpluses were put to use for social services and military spending (although this last one also happened a lot in the capitalist world too). This is just a broad overview of the Soviet Union's system and history. There are different periods in it's history were it was more socialist, more state capitalist, more deformed workers state, and more coordinator. I feel the overall analysis shows it was usually a coordinator society.
Even with this somewhat negative analysis, the Soviet Union (and most other "communist" nations for that matter) did develop a system outside of the capitalist world and these systems did bring great benefits to the people of those societies that didn't exist in the societies before. Russia was a Tsarist Autocracy with a more or less feudalistic system, Cuba was an American protectorate and client state under the butcher Batista, Romania was a outright right-wing fascist dictatorship with ties to Italy and Nazi Germany, etc. These societies increased human betterment and freedoms without destroying any that didn't exist in the previous regimes (barring Cambodia and other obvious examples). While we can still be critical of the authoritarian structures (such as suppression of dissent, intolerance of criticism, etc.) that existed in these societies, we can also praise them for their accomplishments......and that is the end of my little rant! :D

WALL OF TEXT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:laugh:

14th March 2012, 17:25

Thanks for posting this,I haven't had time to watch it yet so I can't comment on the content.

Does Ticktin advance on his theory's that are are given a critique of here (http://www.libcom.org/library/what-was-ussr-part-2-hillel-ticktin-aufheben)?

I've read the critique and it didn't really impress to be honest. It remains mostly at the level of claims, instead of explaining the critique, and where it does go more indepth it doesn't really convince. Despite that, it explains Ticktin's argument pretty well. Some comments:

A question of method?

The task facing Ticktin of developing a Marxist political economy of the USSR was not as straightforward as it may seem. What is political economy? For Marx, political economy was the bourgeois science par excellence. It was the science that grew up with the capitalist mode of production in order to explain and justify it as a natural and objective social and economic system. When Marx came to write Capital he did not aim to write yet another treatise on political economy of capitalism - numerous bourgeois writers had done this already - but rather he sought to develop a critique of political economy.

However, even if we admit that in order to make his critique of political economy Marx had to develop and complete bourgeois political economy, the problem remains of how far can a political economy be constructed for a mode of production other than capitalism? After all it is only with the rise capitalism, where the social relations come to manifest themselves as relations between things, that the political economy as an objective science becomes fully possible. But this is not all. Ticktin is not merely seeking to develop a political economy for a mode of production other than capitalism but for system in transition from one mode of production to another - indeed for a system that Ticktin himself comes to conclude is a 'non-mode of production'!

Unfortunately Ticktin not only side-steps all these preliminary questions, but he also fails to address the most important methodological questions of how to begin and how to proceed with his proposed 'political economy' of the USSR. Instead he adopts a rather heuristic approach, adopting various points of departure to see how far he can go. It is only when these reach a dead end that we find Ticktin appealing to questions of method. As a result we find a number of false starts that Ticktin then seeks to draw together. Let us begin by briefly examine some of these false starts.

[snip]

As we have already noted, Ticktin not only fails to present a systematic presentation of a 'political economy of the USSR', he also fails to clarify his methodological approach. As a result, Ticktin is able to escape from addressing some important logical questions regarding the categories of his political economy.

Although he attacks state capitalist theories for projecting categories of capitalism onto the Soviet Union, Ticktin himself has to admit that many categories of bourgeois political economy appeared to persist in the USSR. Categories such as 'money', 'prices', 'wages' and even 'profits'. In capitalism these categories are forms that express a real content even though they may obscure or deviate from this content. As such they are not merely illusions but are real. Ticktin, however, fails to specify how he understands the relation between the essential relations of the political economy of the USSR and how these relations make their appearance, and is therefore unable to clarify the ontological status of such apparent forms as 'money', 'prices', 'wages' and 'profits'. Indeed, in his efforts to deny the capitalist nature of the USSR, Ticktin is pushed to the point where he has to imply that such categories are simply relics of capitalism, empty husks that have no real content. But, of course, if they have no real content, if they are purely nominal, how is that they continue to persist? This failure to address fully the question of form and content becomes most apparent with the all important example of the wage and the sale of labour-power.

This is perhaps a fair claim, although I'm not familiar enough with Ticktin to fully confirm or deny this point. The question of method surely is an important one of course.

But what is then the positive claim? What, in the authors' opinion is a valid method? We read: "Indeed, if we take Marx's Capital as a 'model of a political economy', as Ticktin surely does, then it is clear that class analysis must be a result of a political economy not its premise". But it doesn't get deeper than that.

Of course, as Bettelheim has pointed out, although all production is formally state owned actual production is devolved into competing units. These units of production, the enterprise and the various trusts, buy and sell products to each other as well as selling products to consumers. Therefore the market and commodities still persisted in the USSR. In response, Ticktin argues that such buying and selling was strictly subordinated to the central plan and were more like transfers of products rather than real sales. While money was also transferred as a result of these product transfers such transactions were simply a form of accounting with strict limits being placed on the amount of profits that could be accumulated as a result. Furthermore, the prices of products were not determined through the market but were set by the central plan. These prices were as a result administered prices and were therefore not a reflection of value. Products did not therefore assume the form of commodities nor did they have a value in the Marxist sense.

Despite that the argument is omitted that Ticktin makes (for example in the video) that market reforms were reintroduced from the 1960's onwards, due to the logic of the bureaucratic system; I think Ticktin's argument as portrayed in this quote is also actually providing a better explanatory model than the (unfounded) claim that is attributed to some Bettelheim (unsourced).

Under capitalism the principal if not exclusive means of obtaining wealth is money. For the worker, money assumes the form of the wage. However, in the USSR, money, and therefore the wage, was far from being a sufficient or exclusive means of obtaining the worker's needs. Other factors were necessary to obtain the goods and services the worker needed - such as time to wait in queues, connections and influence with well-placed people in the state or Party apparatus, and access to the black market. Such factors, together with the fact that a large proportion of the workers' needs were provided for free or were highly subsidized - such as housing, child-care, and transport - meant that the wage was far less important to the Russian worker than to his or her Western counterpart. In fact it could be concluded that the wage was more like a pension than a real wage.
This misses a rather important point, which is that workers got most life necessities via their boss, instead of shopping in supermarkets (which is why most supermarkets were so empty most of the time, they acted more meant as a supplement). I'll try and find a source on this as, so far, I've only heard about this from older comrades.

Yet, in denying the capitalist nature of the USSR, Ticktin also argues that the working class did not sell its labour-power in the USSR because labour-power did not exist as a commodity. But then again, as Ticktin fails to recognize, labour-power does not exist immediately as a commodity under capitalism either. A commodity is some thing that is alienable and separable from its owner which is produced for sale. However, labour-power is not produced primarily for sale, although the capitalist may regard it as such, but for its own sake. It is after all simply the potential living activity of the worker and is reproduced along with the worker herself: and as such it also inseparable from the worker.

[snip]

However, we would argue that the essence of capitalism is not the operation of the 'law of value' as such but value as alienated labour and its consequent self-expansion as capital. In this case, it is the alienation of labour through the sale of labour-power that is essential.21 The operation of the 'law of value' through the sale of commodities on the market is then seen as merely a mode of appearance of the essential relations of value and capital.

I disagree about this critique. The core of the alienation under capitalism is exactly because labour power is commodified and operates according to the law of value. Apparently this is further explained in part 4 of the article, which I have not read yet.

Second, Ticktin fails to grasp the reified character of the categories of political economy. As a consequence, he fails to see how labour-power, for example, is not simply given but constituted through class struggle. For Ticktin, there is the 'movement of the categories and the movement of class struggle' as if they were two externally related movements. As a result, as soon as the working class becomes powerful enough to restrict the logic of capital - for example in imposing control over the capitalist's use of labour-power - then Ticktin must see a decisive shift away from capitalism. Ticktin is led to restrict capitalism in its pure and unadulterated form to a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century.
This claim cannot be checked, as it is not explained and unsourced (there is a reference, but only to another article of Aufheben and it is not explained in the reference if we can find an explanation there).

For Ticktin, in the true tradition of orthodox Marxism, socialism is essentially the nationalization of production and exchange combined with democratic state planning.
Again, while I'm glad to believe this to be the case, this is unsourced. Also, it flows from Ticktin's own argument that the USSR was not a planned economy, so I don't really see the point being made here.

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

16th March 2012, 07:56

Maybe there are one or two specimens capable of independent thought (mutations perhaps). Even fascists can be turned. However I would say they are an endangered species, incapable of evolving, bit like the panda. Only a lot less cute.

Q. Please can you sum up the video in a paragraph. You can't expect everyone to watch it for an hour! Maybe if it is convincing I might wanna watch it.

As far as I'm concerned the USSR was a degenerated workers state because all it needed was a POLITICAL REVOLUTION.

Would a "Political Revolution" have changed the relation of the workers to their production?

daft punk

16th March 2012, 21:43

Would a "Political Revolution" have changed the relation of the workers to their production?

Well, not as such. A political revolution is just regime change at the top, to get rid of the Stalinist dictatorship and replace it with democracy. The workers already had a planned economy so not much needed changing on that front. But they would have been a lot more involved in planning it it had been democratic. Changing the relationship of the workers to production is a social revolution, ie getting rid of private ownership of companies, that had already been done.

25th March 2012, 14:48

Would a "Political Revolution" have changed the relation of the workers to their production?

Good question and source of controversy. I'll give my opinion here based on a post I made earlier in another discussion:

While the slogan of a political revolution had some sway in the 1920's, it became increasingly problematic from the 1930's onwards. The notion is closely linked to the analysis that the Soviet Union was a "degenerated workers state". But this is a slippery formulation because when do things become so "degenerated" as to become something qualitatively different?

This analysis bases itself on the view that there was: a. some sort of planning, despite it being bureaucratically performed and b. that there was no private property and, thus, in the absence of it being capitalist it had to be something better and a basis for a workers state.

What then logically had to occur, following this analysis, was a political revolution, where the bureaucrats were ousted from power by a revolutionary working class movement, so things could become democratically planned again.

This analysis however is problematic on many levels. First of all, there was little genuine planning in these countries, in the sense of rationally planning for human need. In fact, most "plans" were amended on a monthly basis, to reach new targets. I would therefore prefer the term "target economy", as this expresses the bureaucratic nature the best. This is what bureaucracies do: Set arbitrary targets and zigzag when things do not succeed. This is however not what a planned economy is about, far from it.

Second, the definition of a workers state as having nationalised everything might (and often did) lead in the far left in capitalist countries to a weakening of the political fight for working class hegemony via the "battle for democracy". Instead, the demands became to nationalise the top such and such "under workers control". This despite the fact that workers "control" within the capitalist context always leads to class collaborationist schemes that are dominated by the trade union bureaucracy, in the service of capital. This, in turn, often led to far left groups and organisations submitting themselves to trade union bureaucrats and many other kinds of problems one could encapsulate simply as opportunism.

In fact, I'll quote a little from Engels (and go on a slight detour from the original topic), where he attacks (a draft version of) the Erfurt Program exactly on these grounds:

II. Political Demands

The political demands of the draft have one great fault. It lacks precisely what should have been said. If all the 10 demands were granted we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved. As regards the rights being granted to the people and their representatives, the imperial constitution is, strictly speaking, a copy of the Prussian constitution of 1850, a constitution whose articles are extremely reactionary and give the government all the real power, while the chambers are not even allowed to reject taxes; a constitution, which proved during the period of the conflict that the government could do anything it liked with it. The rights of the Reichstag are the same as those of the Prussian chamber and this is why Liebknecht called this Reichstag the fig-leaf of absolutism. It is an obvious absurdity to wish “to transform all the instruments of labour into common property” on the basis of this constitution and the system of small states sanctioned by it, on the basis of the “union” between Prussia and Reuss-Greiz-Schleiz-Lobenstein, in which one has as many square miles as the other has square inches.

To touch on that is dangerous, however. Nevertheless, somehow or other, the thing has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown precisely at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining ground in a large section of the Social-Democratic press. Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, or recalling all manner of over-hasty pronouncements made during the reign of that law, they now want the party to find the present legal order in Germany adequate for putting through all party demands by peaceful means. These are attempts to convince oneself and the party that “present-day society is developing towards socialism” without asking oneself whether it does not thereby just as necessarily outgrow the old social order and whether it will not have to burst this old shell by force, as a crab breaks its shell, and also whether in Germany, in addition, it will not have to smash the fetters of the still semi-absolutist, and moreover indescribably confused political order. One can conceive that the old society may develop peacefully into the new one in countries where the representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way: in democratic republics such as France and the U.S.A., in monarchies such as Britain, where the imminent abdication of the dynasty in return for financial compensation is discussed in the press daily and where this dynasty is powerless against the people. But in Germany where the government is almost omnipotent and the Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real power, to advocate such a thing in Germany, when, moreover, there is no need to do so, means removing the fig-leaf from absolutism and becoming oneself a screen for its nakedness.

In the long run such a policy can only lead one’s own party astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed? Must there be a repetition of what happened with protective tariffs, which were declared to be a matter of concern only to the bourgeoisie, not affecting the interests of the workers in the least, that is, a matter on which everyone could vote as he wished? Are not many people now going to the opposite extreme and are they not, in contrast to the bourgeoisie, who have become addicted to protective tariffs, rehashing the economic distortions of Cobden and Bright and preaching them as the purest socialism — the purest Manchesterism? This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be “honestly” meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and “honest” opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!

Which are these ticklish, but very significant points?

First. If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor, as Miquel. It would seem that from a legal point of view it is inadvisable to include the demand for a republic directly in the programme, although this was possible even under Louis Phillippe in France, and is now in Italy. But the fact that in Germany it is not permitted to advance even a republican party programme openly, proves how totally mistaken is the belief that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy, peaceful way.

However, the question of the republic could possibly be passed by. What, however, in my opinion should and could be included is the demand for the concentration of all political power in the hands of the people’s representatives. That would suffice for the time being if it is impossible to go any further.

Second. The reconstitution of Germany. On the one hand, the system of small states must be abolished — just try to revolutionise society while there are the Bavarian-Württemberg reservation rights — and the map of present-day Thuringia, for example, is such a sorry sight. On the other hand, Prussia must cease to exist and must be broken up into self-governing provinces for the specific Prussianism to stop weighing on Germany. The system of small states and Prussianism are the two sides of the antithesis now gripping Germany in a vice, in which one side must always serve as the excuse and justification for the existence of the other.

What should take its place? In my view, the proletariat can only use the form of the one and indivisible republic. In the gigantic territory of the United States, the federal republic is still, on the whole, a necessity, although in the Eastern states it is already becoming a hindrance. It would be a step forward in Britain where the two islands are peopled by four nations and in spite of a single Parliament three different systems of legislation already exist side by side. In little Switzerland, it has long been a hindrance, tolerable only because Switzerland is content to be a purely passive member of the European state system. For Germany, federalisation on the Swiss model would be an enormous step backward. Two points distinguish a union state from a completely unified state: first, that each member state, each canton, has its own civil and criminal legislative and judicial system, and, second, that alongside a popular chamber there is also a federal chamber in which each canton, whether large or small, votes as such. The first we have luckily overcome and we shall not be so childish as to reintroduce it, the second we have in the Bundesrat and we could do very well without it, since our “federal state” generally constitutes a transition to a unified state. The revolution of 1866 and 1870 must not be reversed from above but supplemented and improved by a movement from below.

So, then, a unified republic. But not in the sense of the present French Republic, which is nothing but the Empire established in 1799’ without the Emperor. From 1792 to 1799 each French department, each commune, enjoyed complete self-government on the American model, and this is what we too must have. How self-government is to be organised and how we can manage without a bureaucracy has been shown to us by America and the First French Republic, and is being shown even today by Australia, Canada and the other English colonies. And a provincial and communal self-government of this type is far freer than, for instance, Swiss federalism, under which, it is true, the canton is very independent in relation to the federation, but is also independent in relation to the district and the commune. The cantonal governments appoint the district governors and prefects, which is unknown in English speaking countries and which we want to abolish here as resolutely in the future as the Prussian Landräte and Regicrungsräte.

Probably few of these points should be included in the programme. I mention them also mainly to describe the system in Germany where such matters cannot be discussed openly, and to emphasise the self-deception of those who wish to transform such a system in a legal way into communist society. Further, to remind the party executive that there are other important political questions besides direct legislation by the people and the gratuitous administration of justice without which we can also ultimately get by. In the generally unstable conditions these questions may become urgent at any time and what will happen then if they have not been discussed by us beforehand and no agreement has been reached on them?

However, what can be included in the programme and can, at least indirectly, serve as a hint of what may not be said directly is the following demand:

“Complete self-government in the provinces, districts and communes through officials elected by universal suffrage. The abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.”

Whether or not it is possible to formulate other programme demands in connection with the points discussed above, I am less able to judge here than you can over there. But it would be desirable to debate these questions within the party before it is too late.
(Emphasis by me)

Summary: Engels critiqued the draft 1891 program of the SPD on the grounds that it exactly lacked the most important political demand of all: The conquest of political power of the proletariat and the need to destroy the bourgeois state in that process, by democratising it, removing all vestiges of top-down absolutism. These days I would go further than Engels, but the point stands: Merely demanding nationalisation of the top such-and-such by the existing state will merely mean that "workers control" is a figleaf to capitalist hegemony.

Thus, what we should demand is proletarian political hegemony: An end to the bourgeois "rule of law" which has codified private property; workers militias as opposed to the police and military apparatuses; a justice system that is thoroughly democratised; the abolition of the fundamentally undemocratic election system and replaced by a demarchic system (that is: "democracy" before it was given a bourgeois definition, the "rule of the poor" as Plato phrased it) and more of such demands where the working class can rule as a class-collective.

Furthermore: Such revolution cannot happen on a national scale. Engels didn't really dig it out in this way, but his call for the indivisible republic stands today, for example as in the form of a European Democratic Republic. Calling for nationalisations on a national scale might work under exceptional circumstances (such as the 1950-1970 period), but comes at the cost of binding the working class to the national state, as opposed to forming it as a global class for itself. Such "radical Keynesian" policies will not work in this day and age anymore either, but I'll stop here with this detour.

[/detour]

Back ontopic: What then of the USSR? Personally I think Hillel Ticktin provides the best explanatory model that is available as he in essence tries to put the USSR under a new analysis of political economy. One which can be summed up by the USSR being a "non-mode of production", a "non-society" where no one believed in this form of "socialism" and which merely continued to exist for so long by the fact it had such an all-pervasive bureaucratic apparatus that controlled every single aspect of human lives.

Ticktin then from this takes a conclusion few other Trotskyists would dare take with him: The fall of the Soviet Union was historically a good thing, despite the huge fall in living standards and the near-complete breakdown of society after its collapse, as it taught people to think for themselves again which was completely impossible under the Stalinist regime. Thus a political revolution was utterly impossible.

This in turn leaves a new light on our current situation (something which Ticktin does not conclude by the way): If the USSR was in essence a counter-revolutionary project since, say, the 1930's onwards and since the "official communist" movement was so closely allied with Stalinism and, later, with its close brother Maoism, then that does explain the current dire state of the working class movement in the West and other parts of the globe.

In a nutshell: Since the 1930's the working class was led by "communists" that were not communists at all - but apologists for a counterrevolutionary system (that is nothing to say about their own intentions I need to stress, many of these militants were quite sincere of course) and on the other by social-democrats that were no longer social-democrats but instead fully incorporated into capitalism - then it stands for reason that when the USSR collapsed and, with it, the workers movement based on that historical context, that the workers movement had a "bubble" of development collapse that existed for about 70 years. To try and recover from such a crash indeed does take quite some time and it should not surprise anyone really that only know, 20+ years after the collapse of the USSR, we see new traces of workers organizing themselves as a class.

The far left however still needs to recover in many aspects. The current sect littered landscape is really an inheritance of this collapse. One could state that we're currently back in the situation of before 1860-80, before the era of mass organisations of the working class as a class. And this is then exactly defining our current strategy: What we need is a strategy of unity, of radical democracy, of building our class in opposition to the state as opposed to submitting to it, a strategy that fights against any and all traces of bureaucratic control that have prevented such developments for such a long time. For this we need, first of all, a paradigm shift on the left itself. Thus, the fight for radical democracy - the right to disagree - starts within the left.

Rafiq

25th March 2012, 15:11

How seriously am I supposed to take a man who said Mao massacred 45 million people and Stalin was responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths?

daft punk

25th March 2012, 16:34

How seriously am I supposed to take a man who said Mao massacred 45 million people and Stalin was responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths?

How many tens of millions of deaths do you think Mao and Stalin were responsible for?

Stalin killed a few million in the 1930s and at the end of WW2 He caused the famines in Russia which killed millions. He caused millions of deaths in China even before 1948. He caused WW2, sorta, by doing nothing to stop the Nazis taking power. He made sure socialism never took over the world. He helped cause China to become Stalinist even though he supported the other side, lol. And 45 million did die in China as a result of Stalinist methods. It all adds up.

"State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html

Nice.

Omsk

25th March 2012, 16:47

Stalin killed a few million in the 1930s and at the end of WW2 He caused the famines in Russia which killed millions. He caused millions of deaths in China even before 1948. He caused WW2, sorta, by doing nothing to stop the Nazis taking power. He made sure socialism never took over the world. He helped cause China to become Stalinist even though he supported the other side, lol. And 45 million did die in China as a result of Stalinist methods. It all adds up.

And he killed Trotskyyyyy my herooo bwuahuhhsighh.

No,seriously,"he caused WW2" - that type of right-wing demagogy is something i didn't even expect from you.What was he suposed to do?Remove the Nazis with his magical powers?? He caused the famines in russia after WW2?What? Millions didn't die in the '47 famine,and you flush away the Nazi destruction of the USSR and the bad years and the dorought.

He made sure socialism never took over the world? What is this,this is ridiculous.

Such an un-Marxist,un-historical 'view' that my head is spinning.

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

19th April 2012, 06:44

Good question and source of controversy. I'll give my opinion here based on a post I made earlier in another discussion:

While the slogan of a political revolution had some sway in the 1920's, it became increasingly problematic from the 1930's onwards. The notion is closely linked to the analysis that the Soviet Union was a "degenerated workers state". But this is a slippery formulation because when do things become so "degenerated" as to become something qualitatively different?

This analysis bases itself on the view that there was: a. some sort of planning, despite it being bureaucratically performed and b. that there was no private property and, thus, in the absence of it being capitalist it had to be something better and a basis for a workers state.

What then logically had to occur, following this analysis, was a political revolution, where the bureaucrats were ousted from power by a revolutionary working class movement, so things could become democratically planned again.

This analysis however is problematic on many levels. First of all, there was little genuine planning in these countries, in the sense of rationally planning for human need. In fact, most "plans" were amended on a monthly basis, to reach new targets. I would therefore prefer the term "target economy", as this expresses the bureaucratic nature the best. This is what bureaucracies do: Set arbitrary targets and zigzag when things do not succeed. This is however not what a planned economy is about, far from it.

Second, the definition of a workers state as having nationalised everything might (and often did) lead in the far left in capitalist countries to a weakening of the political fight for working class hegemony via the "battle for democracy". Instead, the demands became to nationalise the top such and such "under workers control". This despite the fact that workers "control" within the capitalist context always leads to class collaborationist schemes that are dominated by the trade union bureaucracy, in the service of capital. This, in turn, often led to far left groups and organisations submitting themselves to trade union bureaucrats and many other kinds of problems one could encapsulate simply as opportunism.

In fact, I'll quote a little from Engels (and go on a slight detour from the original topic), where he attacks (a draft version of) the Erfurt Program exactly on these grounds:

(Emphasis by me)

Summary: Engels critiqued the draft 1891 program of the SPD on the grounds that it exactly lacked the most important political demand of all: The conquest of political power of the proletariat and the need to destroy the bourgeois state in that process, by democratising it, removing all vestiges of top-down absolutism. These days I would go further than Engels, but the point stands: Merely demanding nationalisation of the top such-and-such by the existing state will merely mean that "workers control" is a figleaf to capitalist hegemony.

Thus, what we should demand is proletarian political hegemony: An end to the bourgeois "rule of law" which has codified private property; workers militias as opposed to the police and military apparatuses; a justice system that is thoroughly democratised; the abolition of the fundamentally undemocratic election system and replaced by a demarchic system (that is: "democracy" before it was given a bourgeois definition, the "rule of the poor" as Plato phrased it) and more of such demands where the working class can rule as a class-collective.

Furthermore: Such revolution cannot happen on a national scale. Engels didn't really dig it out in this way, but his call for the indivisible republic stands today, for example as in the form of a European Democratic Republic. Calling for nationalisations on a national scale might work under exceptional circumstances (such as the 1950-1970 period), but comes at the cost of binding the working class to the national state, as opposed to forming it as a global class for itself. Such "radical Keynesian" policies will not work in this day and age anymore either, but I'll stop here with this detour.

[/detour]

Back ontopic: What then of the USSR? Personally I think Hillel Ticktin provides the best explanatory model that is available as he in essence tries to put the USSR under a new analysis of political economy. One which can be summed up by the USSR being a "non-mode of production", a "non-society" where no one believed in this form of "socialism" and which merely continued to exist for so long by the fact it had such an all-pervasive bureaucratic apparatus that controlled every single aspect of human lives.

Ticktin then from this takes a conclusion few other Trotskyists would dare take with him: The fall of the Soviet Union was historically a good thing, despite the huge fall in living standards and the near-complete breakdown of society after its collapse, as it taught people to think for themselves again which was completely impossible under the Stalinist regime. Thus a political revolution was utterly impossible.

This in turn leaves a new light on our current situation (something which Ticktin does not conclude by the way): If the USSR was in essence a counter-revolutionary project since, say, the 1930's onwards and since the "official communist" movement was so closely allied with Stalinism and, later, with its close brother Maoism, then that does explain the current dire state of the working class movement in the West and other parts of the globe.

In a nutshell: Since the 1930's the working class was led by "communists" that were not communists at all - but apologists for a counterrevolutionary system (that is nothing to say about their own intentions I need to stress, many of these militants were quite sincere of course) and on the other by social-democrats that were no longer social-democrats but instead fully incorporated into capitalism - then it stands for reason that when the USSR collapsed and, with it, the workers movement based on that historical context, that the workers movement had a "bubble" of development collapse that existed for about 70 years. To try and recover from such a crash indeed does take quite some time and it should not surprise anyone really that only know, 20+ years after the collapse of the USSR, we see new traces of workers organizing themselves as a class.

The far left however still needs to recover in many aspects. The current sect littered landscape is really an inheritance of this collapse. One could state that we're currently back in the situation of before 1860-80, before the era of mass organisations of the working class as a class. And this is then exactly defining our current strategy: What we need is a strategy of unity, of radical democracy, of building our class in opposition to the state as opposed to submitting to it, a strategy that fights against any and all traces of bureaucratic control that have prevented such developments for such a long time. For this we need, first of all, a paradigm shift on the left itself. Thus, the fight for radical democracy - the right to disagree - starts within the left.

Thank you for your reply. I can not help but notice though that many Trotskyists tend to debate the issue of power instead of everyday relation of workers at their workplace to their production; whether or not they take over the social role of capitalists in the production process or not. I will quote it again because it is imo an important part of understanding marxism:

"they [the workers] themselves appropriate this surplus either of the product or labor" Marx

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

16th September 2012, 05:58

I have been giving this some thought. If we say that the USSR was not a socialist workers state and not capitalist, that is nothing. I think if take a non-reductionist point of view and we look not only at the Soviet Union, but East Germany, Vietnam, North Korea, Romania, Angola, Cuba and every other one party state where collective ownership was tried in the name of the people; we see that there is a pattern. The countries all turn into anti-egalitarian places that get only with very much difficulty support on the left. What these absolutely varying and different countries all had in common (besides GDR and Romania) was foreign invasion, attack, embargoes and constant disputes with imperialist countries.

These were countries that in their vast majority had socialist/communist leaders that were of high intelligence, varying personalities and definitely not all 'communist thugs that ride on the backs of popular uprisings to grab power' (Chomsky). They had a common trait, that of invasion. This meant they needed to have a strong state. At the end, the USSR had 35% of its GDP in paying its military sector. Albania had even higher costs (according to Pano), and once the trade partners of the socialist countries were overthrown, the embargo from the United States and Europe implemented, the rest of the economy simply had failing resources to provide for the real economy and that was the end of that.

It was Socialism. It was definitely not the end goal of socialism, but one cannot deny that socialism was tried on a very large scale in the 20th century. These were distortions of what we would like socialism to be, but denying that they were real attempts at (underdeveloped) socialism is ludicrous, if not a disgrace to the countless of people who fought and died for socialism. Socialism in the west, or advanced capitalist countries, will most likely have more freedoms to develop at a certain stage as the economies are already largely developed. But the transitional phase of a worker controlled economy, Socialism, should be distinguished from the end goal of communism. In regards to the development of socialism, we should not hold on to dogmas of "real" or "not real" socialism. We should though remember that the end goal is egalitarian socialism, and always seek to implement democratic control of workers over their surplus where possible. Or at least make open that this is our goal as to not cause confusion to the "realness" or validity of our Socialism. So long there is the need for a workers' state, there will not yet be complete egalitarianism.