Marxist Comrade Hiroyoshi Hayashi [Archive]

Ã±Ã¡ngara

7th April 2015, 01:38

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The Stalinist System
(The Internal "Evolution" Towards "Liberalization")

Written by Hiroyoshi Hayashi (1972)
http://www.mcg-j.org/english/e-theory/sc/stasys-1.html

Notes on "Torotsukizumu" (Trotskyism) and the Soviet State capitalism

However, Trotsky and the Fourth International were satisfied to simply describe the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state", and Stalinists as a "degenerated caste of workers". This ambiguous and compromised definition was in striking contrast to what could be called their bitterly emotional accusation of Stalin and the Stalinists. Trotsky's criticism of Stalin was emotional and moralistic, not historical. As a result, he was unable to correctly define the essence of Stalin's rule, and instead glorified the USSR as a "workers' state". Even after all trace of the Soviet Union as a workers' state had substantially disappeared, Trotsky obstinately stuck to this view on the grounds that the means of production were "nationalized". In reality, his dogma was not very different from the Stalinists' views of "socialism".
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The question of whether value or the law of value exists under socialism led to a worldwide debate in the forties. This debate ultimately came down to the question of how to evaluate the Soviet socio-economic system. The Stalinists justified this system with the excuse that value=money relations in the Soviet Union were "essentially different" from that of bourgeois society and represented "something totally new". Unable to explain why commodities were produced in a society whose means of production had shifted to "socialistic ownership", they were forced to come up with the strange theory of "higher" and "lower" forms of ownership. Social democrats and intellectuals, on the other hand, made various objections to this official Soviet view, but they also considered the nationalization of the means of production, not the question of commodity production, to be the most essential factor in determining socialism, and therefore concluded that the Soviet Union was in fact socialist because the means of production were nationalized. (This is essentially close to the view of Trotsky.) Only Raya Dunayevskaya, the American New Leftist, opposed the view of the USSR as socialism, and argued that the acceptance of the law of value represented an acceptance of capitalist exploitation. She criticized the apologists of the USSR, but could not make a clear conceptual distinction between commodity production and capitalist production and was unable to explain their relationship.
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We do not moralistically denounce the state capitalist exploitation of the peasants. It is clear that under the Stalinist system, peasants were severely exploited, along with the some ten million workers who are said to have been sent to forced labor camps. Still, it was only by means of this severe exploitation that the Soviet state was able to accumulate capital for heavy industrialization. This was the application of the theory of “socialistic primitive accumulation” proposed by the Trotskyists (Preobrazhensky) in the 1920’s, but of course the essence of this was not “socialistic” at all. State capital, not socialist relations, was formed by means of this exploitation. Furthermore, by “allocating” this to state-owned industries, the thorough top-down industrialization of the Soviet economy was advanced. Both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists were wrong to call state capitalist accumulation “socialistic”, but still their theory corresponded to the internal demands of national economic development in Russia. This is why the Trotskyist economist Preobrazhensky’s theory of “socialist primitive accumulation” could theoretically anticipate the Stalinist system, and was in fact put into practice by Stalin himself.
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Trotskyists, on one hand are unable to evaluate the “self-movement” of the national development in the USSR and China, and are spreading the undialectical dogma that the USSR and China cannot help being capitalist because of the pressure of global capitalism. On the other hand, they insist that the world was already completely ripe for socialism in the early twentieth century. On the basis of this dogma, they claim that had proletarian revolution been victorious in Western Europe, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China would not have existed, and socialism could have been directly achieved in the Soviet Union and China. However, the premise that the world was mature for socialism is only true if the world is viewed as Western Europe. This is a “Euro-centric” view of history based on those countries that entered the road of capitalist development earlier than other nations and regions. Today, however, it is clear that Western Europe preceded other countries in one development level of capitalism. One cannot ignore the hundreds of millions of people who make up the greater half of the world population. The Trotskyists would likely say that this is not simply a question of quantitative weight, but this quantity also turns into quality. Today, large countries such as the Soviet Union, China, and India, continue to follow the path of capitalist development by forming national capital, even though the form differs from that of advanced capitalist countries. This fact is the best response to the dogma of Trotskyists.
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Nevertheless, Stalinists, and to a large extent Trotskyists, identify socialism with “nationalization” and “planning”. They either forget or ignore the fact that if a state that carries out nationalization and planning does not have the class character of a true proletarian state, then this nationalization and planning will not have socialist content. Instead, they make “nationalization” and “planning” the criterion for judging whether or not a country is a proletarian state or socialist society. Even if commodity production generally operates and production for “profit” is developed, they still insist that countries like the USSR and China are socialist (or at least workers’ states) because they have a “planned economy”. Nevertheless, as long as “planning” in the Soviet Union and other countries takes place upon the foundation of a commodity society, this does not signify socialism and certainly will not in the future.