NEP [Archive] - RevLeft

Lamanov

28th October 2006, 17:14

[This is not a 'Leninist' description. Aufheben is "ultra-left"]

Originally posted by Aufheben+--> (Aufheben)By 1921 the Bolshevik Government faced a severe political and economic crisis. The policy of forced requisitioning had led to a mass refusal by the peasantry to sow sufficient grain to feed the cities. Faced with famine, thousands of workers simply returned to their relatives in the countryside. At the same time industry had been run into the ground after years of war and revolution. In this dire economic situation, the ending of the civil war had given rise to mounting political unrest amongst the working class, both within and outside the Party, which threatened the very basis of the Bolshevik Government. Faced with political and economic collapse the Bolshevik leadership came to the conclusion that there was no other option but make a major retreat to the market. The Bolshevik Government therefore abandoned War Communism and adopted the New Economic Policy (NEP) which had been previously mooted by Trotsky.
Under the NEP, state industry was broken up in to large trusts which were to be run independently on strict commercial lines. At the same time, a new deal was to be struck with the peasantry. Forced requisitioning was to be replaced with a fixed agricultural tax, with restrictions lifted on the hiring of labour and leasing of land to encourage the rich and middle-income peasants to produce for the market.[14] With the retreat from planning, the economic role of the state was to be mainly restricted to re-establishing a stable currency through orthodox financial polices and a balanced state budget.[/b]

Aufheben
‘War Communism’

The conditions of civil war and imperialist invasion that Russia fell into in the second half on 1918, altered the conditions of debate and broke the Left Communists as a cohesive opposition. On the one hand, where the alternative to the Bolsheviks was White armies committed to the restoration of the old order, criticism by workers and peasants of the measures the party was taking, was tempered. But apart from this pragmatic issue, the civil war also exposed the inadequate foundation much the left communist criticism had been based on. Considering that, for many left communists, their critique of the New Course, and the consequent accusation of state capitalism, was based mainly on the notion of compromise with private capitalists, and perceived concessions to the peasantry, in the face of what was to be called ‘war communism’ they had very little left to criticise. Not only did a whole wave of nationalisations take place, virtually wiping out the previous role of the private capitalist, but if there was one thing war communism was not, it was system based on concessions to the peasants. It consequently became difficult for them to describe Russia as state capitalist.
In fact, the technocratic wing of the Left Communist even went as far as welcoming ‘war communism’ as a real advance to communism. And when war communism resulted in mass inflation virtually wiping out money, they equally saw it as a general move to an economy in kind with all sorts of transactions, even wages, ceasing to use money. The self-emancipatory wing, (which was to provide both the original arguments as well as personnel of the later left oppositions of the Democratic Centralists and the Workers Opposition) took a more cautious stand. They had tended to focus their criticism on the excessive centralisation of power and the bureaucratic capitalist methods of the state economy, to which they counter-posed a restoration of power and local initiative to the soviets and other workers’ bodies. But without the other components of their earlier critique, and considering that Lenin himself had described state capitalism - with all its management methods - as playing a progressive part, the left oppositions ceased to describe it as such.
The mistake of confusing the war-time measures as a step in the direction of socialism became clear as the war came to an end and the Bolsheviks tried to step up the war economy measures.[15] The fallacy of associating state-control with socialism, despite the intensification of capitalistic production relations, became clear as workers and peasants reacted to their material situation with a wave of strikes and uprisings. The Kronstadt revolt in particular showed the giant gulf between the state and the working class. Despite this general discontent, both outside and within the party, Lenin responded with, on the one hand, the New Economic Policy(NEP), and on the other, the banning of factions with the famous statement that was to characterise the regime thereafter: ‘Here and there with a rifle, but not with opposition; we’ve had enough opposition’

New Economic Policy: New Opposition

It is important then to grasp that the NEP, which was essentially a return to the moderate state capitalism championed by Lenin in the New Course debate, did not mark an abandonment of communism, but merely a change in the form of state capitalism. Central to the New Economic Policy (NEP) was a changed relation to the peasantry with a progressive tax in kind replacing state procurement and leaving the peasants free to trade for a profit anything left above this. Free trade which had not disappeared was now legal. On the industrial front small scale production was totally denationalised and many, though not the largest factories, leased back to their former owners to run on a capitalist basis. For the working class there was reintroduced payment of wages in cash and charges for previously free services. The command economy of the ‘war communism’ years was abandoned in favour of the running of the economy on a commercial basis. Nevertheless the commanding heights of the economy remained under state control and the basis for systematic state planning in terms of forecasting etc. continued to be developed. In fact, the very continuity between the New Course and the NEP also showed up in the fact that Lenin, in trying to justify the NEP in the pamphlet Tax in Kind, reprinted large parts of his earlier critique of the Left Communists, including the ‘5 socio-economic structures’ model of the Russian economy.
In 1921 Lenin gave the same reply to Workers Opposition accusations of state capitalism as he had to the Left Communists in 1918, namely that state capitalism would be a tremendous step forward from what Russia actually was, which was a ‘petty producer capitalism with a working-class party controlling the state.’[16] The key thing about the regime developing at the time of NEP was that, accompanying economic concessions to private capitalism, was intensified political repression, the banning of factions in the party, and non-toleration of any independent political tendencies in the working class. As Ciliga later observed, before the NEP the intensity of repression of left opposition had varied, after this date all opposition was repressed on principle and the treatment of prisoners grew worse.[17]
It was in this context of political repression and economic re-imposition of capitalist forms that a number of small opposition groups emerged, which again took up the notion of state capitalism. What was common to these new groups was that, unlike the previous left communist tendency and the later left opposition of Trotsky, these groups did make a decisive break from the Bolshevik party. One such group that emerged was the Workers Truth centred around an old left adversary of Lenin, Bogdanov. In issuing an Appeal, starting with Marx’s famous ‘the liberation of the workers can only be the deed of the workers themselves’, they argued that the Bolshevik party was no longer a proletarian party, but rather the party of a new ruling class, and thus they called for a new party. [18]
With at first a little less theoretical clarity, it was however, the Workers Group, centred around Miasnikov, that made the biggest impact on the class. The main opposition strand had been the Workers Opposition, which while appearing to support the working class, had essentially been demanding a transfer of power from one party faction to another, namely that organised in the trade unions. Miasnikov and his supporters had at this point rejected both the state economic bodies and the trade unions as bureaucratised forms, and in arguing for a return of power to the soviets, had implicitly questioned the party. Miasnikov stood out even more by not supporting the repression of Kronstadt, which he described as an abyss the party had crossed. This willingness to break with the party was crucial because oppositions until then, though reflecting discontent outside the party, had remained wedded to it seeking refuge in organisational fixes that failed conspicuously to deliver.
In 1923 they produced a Manifesto appealing to both the Russian and international proletariat. Rather than theoretical considerations their description of the NEP as standing for the ‘New Exploitation of the Proletariat’ simply tries to express the conditions that the workers were facing. They denounced the attacks on the working class the Bolshevik regime was carrying out making a point that echoed Luxemburg:[19] “the bourgeoisie has, and will have, no better advocate” than the “socialists of all countries” because they have the ability to disorientate the proletariat with their phrases. Or again: ‘a very great danger threatens the achievements of the Russian proletarian revolution, not so much from outside as from inside itself.’ Expressing this emphasis on the world proletarian movement the workers group took a resolutely internationalist line. They were sure that the Russian proletariat’s only hope lay in aid from revolution elsewhere. They argued that the Bolshevik policies of a ‘socialist united fronts’ and workers governments were acting against that hope of world revolution. [20]
However, the real significance of the group was the fact that they took their criticism of the state capitalist direction of the Bolsheviks to its logical conclusion of supporting proletarian opposition to the regime. In late ‘23 a wave of strikes broke out and the Workers Group became involved gaining an influence for their Manifesto among the proletariat and prompting their suppression by the secret police. Soon their existence was relegated to the prison camps or in exile. It was here that they moved away from their focus on the NEP, and started to question war communism. There their state capitalist analysis became more and more influential in the camps where, as Ciliga observed, a political life repressed elsewhere continued. They extended their critique to the sort of ‘socialism’ that the Bolsheviks had tried to create even before NEP, arguing that because it was based on coercion over the working class and not the free creation of the class, was in reality a bureaucratic state capitalism.
We have looked then at those arguments of the Russian Left most illuminating for an understanding of the Revolution. The importance of the 1918 Left Communists was not just the fact that they right from an early stage argued that there was a danger that not socialism, but capitalism would emerge from the revolution, but also because in his battles with them, Lenin most explicitly revealed his own support for ‘state capitalism’. The importance of Miasnikov’s Workers Group lay in them being the most significant of the post 1921 groups who took their criticism of the state capitalist direction of the Bolsheviks to its logical conclusion of supporting proletarian opposition to the regime. Their confrontation with the Russian state was far more consistent and coherent than that of Trotsky’s Left opposition. However we cannot say that they provided the theoretical arguments to solidly ground a theory of state capitalism. We will turn now to the tendencies in Europe, with whom they made contact, to see if they had more success.