Trotskyist rebuttal to state capitalism?

[Jacob Cliff]

How does the State acting as sole employer of labor-power, of appointing managers and officials, of making all business activities, etc., make any qualitative difference from capitalism? What is the Trotskyist rebuttal to the analysis of the USSR as "state capitalism"? Please don't make some biased anti-Trot one-liner; I just want insight.

Also: didn't Lenin specifically refer to the soviet economy as "state capitalism," or was that a reference to the NEP?

[Sewer Socialist]

The Trotskyist approach

The more sophisticated Trotskyist theorists have criticised the method of state capitalist theories of the USSR. They argue it is wrong to seek to identify an abstract and ahistorical essence of capitalism and seek to identify its existence to a concrete historical social formation such as the USSR. For them the apparent contradiction between the non-capitalist and capitalist aspects of the USSR was a real contradiction that can only be understood by grasping the Soviet Union as a transitional social formation.

As we saw in Part I, for Trotskyists, the Russian Revolution marked a decisive break with capitalism. As a consequence, following 1917, Russia had entered a transitional period between capitalism and socialism. As such the USSR was neither capitalist nor socialist but had aspects of the two which arose from the struggle between the law of value and of planning.

As a result Trotskyists never denied the existence of capitalist aspects of the USSR. Indeed they accepted the persistence of capitalist forms such as money, profits, interest and wages. But these were decaying forms - 'empty husks' - that disguised the emerging socialist relations in a period of transition. This becomes clear, they argue if we examine these 'capitalist forms' more closely.

Firstly, it may appear that in the USSR that production took the form of production for exchange and hence products took the form of commodities. After all, different state enterprises traded with each other and sold products to the working class. But for the most part such exchange of products was determined by the central plan not by competitive exchange on the market. As a consequence, while the state enterprises formally sold their outputs and purchased their inputs such 'exchanges' were in content merely transfers that were made in accordance with the central plan. Hence production was not for exchange but for the plan and thus products did not really assume the form of commodities.

Secondly, since there was no real commodity exchange, but simply a planed transfer of products, there could be no real money in USSR. While money certainly existed and was used in transactions it did not by any means have the full functions that money has under capitalism. Money principally functioned as a unit of account. Unlike money under capitalism, which as the universal equivalent, was both necessary and sufficient to buy anything, in the USSR money may have been necessary to buy certain things but was often very far from being sufficient. As the long queues and shortages testified what was needed in USSR to obtain things was not just money but also time or influence.

Thirdly, there were the forms of profits and interest. Under capitalism profit serves as the driving force that propels the expansion of the economic system, while interest ensures the efficient allocation of capital to the most profitable sectors and industries. In the USSR the forms of profit and interest existed but they were for the most part accounting devises. Production was no more production for profit than it was production for exchange. Indeed the expansion of the economic system was driven by the central plan that set specific targets for the production of use-values not values.5 (http://libcom.org/library/what-was-the-ussr-aufheben-part-4#footnote5_p4lbejp)

Finally and perhaps most importantly we come to the form of wages. To the extent that Trotskyist theorists reject the Stalinist notion that the Russian working class were co-owners of the state enterprises, they are obliged to accept that the direct producers were separated from both their means of subsistence and the means of production. However, in the absence of general commodity production it is argued that the Russian worker was unable to sell her labour-power as a commodity. Firstly, because the worker was not 'free' to sell her labour power to who ever she chose and secondly because the money wage could not be freely transformed into commodities. As a consequence, although the workers in the USSR were nominally paid wages, in reality such wages were little more than pensions or rations that bore scant relation to the labour performed. The position of the worker was more like that of a serf or slave tied to a specific means of production that a 'free' wage worker.

We shall return to consider this question of 'empty capitalist forms' later. What is important at present is to see how the Trotskyist approach is able to ground the contradictory appearance of the USSR as both capitalist and non-capitalist in terms of the transition from capitalism to socialism. To this extent the Trotskyist approach has the advantage over most state capitalist theories that are unable to adequately account for the non-capitalist aspects of the USSR. This failure to grasp the non-capitalist aspects of the USSR has been exposed in the light of the decay and final collapse of the USSR.
- Aufheben's What was the USSR?, Part IV (http://libcom.org/library/what-was-the-ussr-aufheben-part-4)

[Fourth Internationalist]

How does the State acting as sole employer of labor-power, of appointing managers and officials, of making all business activities, etc., make any qualitative difference from capitalism? What is the Trotskyist rebuttal to the analysis of the USSR as "state capitalism"?

I am not a good debater on this topic, so I am not going to give my own personal rebuttal. Trotskyist groups have written much about the issue. Pamphlets like the International Communist League's Why the U.S.S.R. is Not Capitalist (http://www.bolshevik.org/history/Other/Why_USSR_is_Not_Capitalist.pdf) might be a good starting point if you are interested in the entirety of the Trotskyist viewpoint. Though, there are many different theories of state-capitalism, so I do not know if this would sufficiently answer all questions you have (I believe the specific pamphlet I linked is mostly about Maoist theories of state-capitalism and the Cliff theory of state-capitalism). I would recommend searching various groups' websites (use google and type in -- site:websiteurl.com "specific words or phrases to find" -- this is usually better than the search function on any organization's website in my experience) to find as much information as possible. Emailing organizations about their positions could also work if you have specific questions.


Also: didn't Lenin specifically refer to the soviet economy as "state capitalism," or was that a reference to the NEP?

It was a reference to the NEP, not to the entire Soviet economy, which Lenin explicitly stated was a transitional economy.