Die Neue Zeit
2nd March 2008, 07:48
While I disagree with the notion of "bureaucratic socialism"/"bureaucratic collectivism" for various reasons (not least of which because it's identical to the orthodox Trotskyist "degenerate workers' state" position):
http://www.revleft.com/vb/stamocap-t59014/index3.html
Clearly, the socialist mode of production implied here is a combination of "directly democratic planning" and the still-evolving "moneyless economy" (with the private capitalists, cooperatives, "parecon economy," and Gosplan all gone by then).
...
As for choosing between said dichotomy, like in my "class relations" thread, things are more complex in the "multi-economic" era of proletocracy: the reduced private economy (with an expansion of cooperative businesses and the parecon economy within), the state-capitalist economy (centralized planning by a state BUREAUCRACY), the socialist/directly democratic economy, and the communist/moneyless economic.
Although this was hinted at decades ago in a mere era of "revolutionary democracy" (Lenin's Left-Wing Childishness), the key parts are applicable for the post-revolutionary social structure.
I belatedly commend the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), which the Russian Marxist dissident Boris Kagarlitsky associates with in terms of British communist organizations, for coughing up the excellent material below:
http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/176/genesis_1.html
http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/177/genesis_2.html
http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/178/genesis_3.html
The party’s social base was shrinking. Making matters far worse, it was also becoming declassed. The working class declined even more in quality than quantity. Those most committed to the new order were those most prepared to join the Red Army and die for it. But for the vanguard deproletarianisation took other forms besides six foot under the Russian sod. The best workers were syphoned off into full-time positions in the administrative machine and the Communist Party. Another of Hegel’s historical ironies. To strengthen the proletarian regime the party of the proletariat saw its proletarian roots wither.
...
Not surprisingly the distinction between party and state became increasingly blurred. With the workers a formless declassed mass, the soviets lost all dynamism. They switched from organs of self-activity into something resembling the parish council of Archer middle England. Inexorably the focus of power shifted: from the congress of soviets to its executive committee, from there to Sovnarkom, then to the party’s central committee, and finally to its politburo. Having members of the Communist Party occupy leading positions in the soviets was one thing. Effectively replacing them at all levels with the party itself was another. It was administratively convenient. But fused with the state, the Communist Party had to itself assume some of the features of a state organ.
There can be no question that this transformation conformed with Lenin’s wishes. He actively encouraged the merging of party and state functions and bodies. Imperialist intervention, civil war, working class retreat and economic reconstruction demanded it. But there were decidedly negative side effects - most notably overbearing and corrupting bureaucracy. And that deformation was not to Lenin’s liking.
Several years ago, I had the pleasure and displeasure of reading Ted Grant's Trotskyist account, titled Russia: From Revolution To Counter-Revolution. The Trotskyist account of the "rise of Stalinism" did NOT consider the fusion of the party and the state already occurring during Lenin's time, instead talking of "czarist bureaucrats" here and "czarist bureaucrats" there.
Then here's this little party organ, which I addressed here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/limitations-directly-materialist-t68278/index.html), that the Trotskyist account failed to consider, as well:
Since 1920 Uchraspred, the Registration and Distribution Department of the central committee, had been responsible for the mass mobilisations of party workers. With the end of the Civil War its scope was broadened to include the appointment of party members to specific posts. Indeed at the party’s 12th Congress in April 1923 Stalin demanded that Uchraspred “be expanded to the utmost”. He got what he wanted. Soon it was responsible for a whole range of appointments, not only within the party, but the state and big industrial enterprises too. Uchraspred thus became a powerful instrument in the hands of Stalin - general secretary of the party since April 1922 - to build his “personal authority in the state as well as the party machine”.
And here's the shocker (and a shot at Trotsky's "permanent revolution"):
Some, most notably the [Trotskyists], fondly recall the days when Lenin was leader as a democratic golden age. Their worthy motive is, of course, to draw a sharp, revolutionary-counterrevolutionary line of demarcation from the instant Stalin took effective command. Yet, as will have been gathered, the truth was altogether more complex. Being must develop from the internal contradictions in its not-being. Stalinism and Leninism were at once identical and opposite. Lenin did after all characterise his Soviet Republic as “a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions”.
...
Ellenstein correctly states that the conditions under which the revolution triumphed - ie, Russian backwardness - were entirely responsible for the retreat and bureaucratisation of formal socialism and the problematic and tenuous nature of working class rule. To blame either Lenin, Stalin, or any other individual, or set of individuals, for this state of affairs shows a failure to understand the ABC of historical materialism.
...
Of course the original Bolshevik perspective was to carry through a 1789-type bourgeois democratic revolution uninterruptedly to socialism under a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Life, in the shape of the 1917 February revolution and dual power, demanded that this elastic formula be concretised. Lenin’s renowned April thesis did just that. However though the new semi-state of soviets, he envisaged, would be a first step “towards socialism”, Lenin was insistent that it was not yet possible to set the aim of “introducing socialism”. And it should be emphasised that any further steps Russia took in the direction of socialism were seen as ultimately dependent on proletarian revolution in the west.
And here I explain why:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-stalin-and-t66656/index.html
I can say that there was continuity between the Bolsheviks and their bureaucratic successors, in the form of state capitalism (not that I "blame" Lenin as a "Leninist" myself, because Russia simply wasn't as ready for a proper socialist revolution as Trotsky thought). Alas, that also poses great challenges to the "degenerate workers' state" position. At best, Lenin acknowledged that Russia was "not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state." (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm) At worst, we all know the "left" criticisms regarding the prevalent one-man management systems put in place.
However, in terms of [mantle] continuity, there was discontinuity between the Bolsheviks and their bureaucratic successors. While the former wanted the state capitalism to develop under a "revolutionary-democratic" framework, all the latter wanted a more bureaucratic approach instead
And a shot or two at Trotsky the person:
Though the Left Opposition platform called for democracy in the party, it steered clear of foreign policy. Nevertheless Trotsky’s own interventions into this minefield, in particular the pivotal German question, show that disputes at this time were still presented as those of shade. In fact Trotsky’s stance appeared to place him on the right of what was then the Comintern spectrum.
...
Yet despite drawing a crude parallel between their record in 1917 and the German events of October 1923, the fact of the matter was that Maslow, Fischer and Thaelmann - ie, those pressing for an immediate uprising in Germany (wrongly in my view) - were aligned with Zinoviev, not Trotsky. Within the top echelons of the Communist Party of Germany it was the scapegoated Heinrich Brandler whom Trotsky backed. Again on the international terrain, though Trotsky’s present-day followers make great play of his fight against ‘socialism in one country’, the fact was that for two years he kept quiet on the notorious second edition of Foundations of Leninism, where Stalin signalled his conversion to the theory. Trotsky considered Zinoviev his main rival.
...
Indeed it was Trotsky’s writings on the economy that were perhaps the most revealing of the narrowing field of vision Russian conditions were imposing even on such a panoramic and towering intellect. In The new course, published in January 1924, Trotsky stated that the development of “state industry” was the “keystone of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the basis of socialism”. And in similar vein he bluntly maintained in his August 1925 [i]Towards capitalism or socialism? that the “premise for a socialist economy is the nationalisation of the means of production”.
The equation of nationalisation with socialism is a widely held idea. But, as we have more than once noted, it has nothing to do with the Marxist outlook. I am not trying to prove Trotsky a philistine or an opponent of Marxism. That would be stupid. Nevertheless till the end of his life he considered that the Soviet Union possessed a socialist character, essentially because of the nationalisation of industry, land, transport, etc. Like the left-Ricardians of the 19th century, his critique of the relations of distribution were full of insight and savage condemnation. But his analysis was not able to penetrate to the depths of the system, to the relations of production themselves. His equivocal position on the Mensheviks was reproduced as an equivocal position on the Soviet social formation. In power, in opposition, in exile he remained a man of the Soviet state. It is not surprisingly then that Trotsky’s initial forays against the rising bureaucracy were based around the demand for higher rates of growth in the state sector and central planning. He appears to have believed that the ruling group was incapable of delivering such a package. For Trotsky salvation lay with Gosplan, not workers’ self-activity.
This technocratism was pointedly referred to by Lenin in his Testament. “Comrade Trotsky,” Lenin argued, “is personally perhaps the most capable in the present central committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.” Ditto with the other Left Opposition leader-to-be, Pytakov: “He is unquestionably a man of outstanding ability,” said Lenin, “but shows too much zeal for administration and the purely administrative side of work.”
Trotsky’s technocratic approach led him, when he was in a position of power, when he was the ‘prophet armed’, to advocate the most authoritarian measures, including the “militarisation of labour”, not only because of Russia’s parlous economic state, but because as a “general rule, man strives to avoid labour”. Hardly something that endeared him to the workers.
And yet:
Trotsky was in many ways the personification of the revolution (not the party). And it was the February Revolution which brought both Trotsky’s return to Russia and the party. Unity negotiations between his small group, the Mezhraiontsy, and the Bolsheviks were completed by August 1917. Despite often being fraught, they secured Trotsky’s entry into party membership and onto its leadership. Past bitterness between Lenin and Trotsky immediately evaporated. Making the revolution permanent in practice took Trotsky to Lenin’s side. And once there he was an invaluable asset. Trotsky brilliantly fulfilled the most exacting tasks. It was Trotsky who masterminded the October insurrection. It was Trotsky who built and directed the Red Army. It was Trotsky who was the pen of the Communist International. Friend and foe alike joined the names, Lenin and Trotsky, when referring to the Soviet regime.
...
The communist-Kuomintang alliance in China ended in the mass slaughter of the Shanghai workers. Zinoviev, Trotsky and Radek had been clamouring for an immediate change of line, but the politburo had pig-headedly insisted on the continued subordination of the Communist Party of China to the nationalists (the Chinese revolution thus lost its proletarian content - it continued under the military leadership of Mao Zedong as a peasant movement).
On "socialist" primitive accumulation, which wasn't addressed by the Woods account:
Marx showed in Capital that the “starting-point” of capitalist development was the “expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil”. Herein was the ‘secret’ of primitive capitalist accumulation. Preobrazhensky and the supposed ‘super-industrialisers’ of the left proposed, as we have seen, a painless primitive socialist accumulation, not by expropriating the peasant, but through uneven exchange and taxation.
...
The industrialisation drive, by its very unplanned nature, precipitated a goods shortage and, as its velocity was recklessly increased month by month, it reached the point of famine. Runaway inflation punctured the value of the rouble. The real worth of the fixed price paid for agricultural products sunk below the cost of production. If there had been something to buy the peasants still might have gone to market. But there was not. Hence the state’s options effectively closed. Higher real agricultural prices would divert, maybe halt, industrialisation and reassert the peasants’ bargaining power with a vengeance. Special measures and forced grain requisitions inevitably resulted in a sowing strike and diminishing returns. Stalin, following the line of least resistance, had to go for “total” collectivisation.
...
Aside from this debate, Ellman rightly emphasises the role of coercion in the whole process and the “fall in urban real wages”. Force was the prime economic mechanism. Wages in the first five-year plan were cut by some 50%. Overall urban living standards did not decline to the same extent due to the ending of unemployment, etc. In spite of that it was only after the second five-year plan that urban consumption overtook what it had been at the beginning of the first five-year plan.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/stamocap-t59014/index3.html
Clearly, the socialist mode of production implied here is a combination of "directly democratic planning" and the still-evolving "moneyless economy" (with the private capitalists, cooperatives, "parecon economy," and Gosplan all gone by then).
...
As for choosing between said dichotomy, like in my "class relations" thread, things are more complex in the "multi-economic" era of proletocracy: the reduced private economy (with an expansion of cooperative businesses and the parecon economy within), the state-capitalist economy (centralized planning by a state BUREAUCRACY), the socialist/directly democratic economy, and the communist/moneyless economic.
Although this was hinted at decades ago in a mere era of "revolutionary democracy" (Lenin's Left-Wing Childishness), the key parts are applicable for the post-revolutionary social structure.
I belatedly commend the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), which the Russian Marxist dissident Boris Kagarlitsky associates with in terms of British communist organizations, for coughing up the excellent material below:
http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/176/genesis_1.html
http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/177/genesis_2.html
http://cpgb.org.uk/worker/178/genesis_3.html
The party’s social base was shrinking. Making matters far worse, it was also becoming declassed. The working class declined even more in quality than quantity. Those most committed to the new order were those most prepared to join the Red Army and die for it. But for the vanguard deproletarianisation took other forms besides six foot under the Russian sod. The best workers were syphoned off into full-time positions in the administrative machine and the Communist Party. Another of Hegel’s historical ironies. To strengthen the proletarian regime the party of the proletariat saw its proletarian roots wither.
...
Not surprisingly the distinction between party and state became increasingly blurred. With the workers a formless declassed mass, the soviets lost all dynamism. They switched from organs of self-activity into something resembling the parish council of Archer middle England. Inexorably the focus of power shifted: from the congress of soviets to its executive committee, from there to Sovnarkom, then to the party’s central committee, and finally to its politburo. Having members of the Communist Party occupy leading positions in the soviets was one thing. Effectively replacing them at all levels with the party itself was another. It was administratively convenient. But fused with the state, the Communist Party had to itself assume some of the features of a state organ.
There can be no question that this transformation conformed with Lenin’s wishes. He actively encouraged the merging of party and state functions and bodies. Imperialist intervention, civil war, working class retreat and economic reconstruction demanded it. But there were decidedly negative side effects - most notably overbearing and corrupting bureaucracy. And that deformation was not to Lenin’s liking.
Several years ago, I had the pleasure and displeasure of reading Ted Grant's Trotskyist account, titled Russia: From Revolution To Counter-Revolution. The Trotskyist account of the "rise of Stalinism" did NOT consider the fusion of the party and the state already occurring during Lenin's time, instead talking of "czarist bureaucrats" here and "czarist bureaucrats" there.
Then here's this little party organ, which I addressed here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/limitations-directly-materialist-t68278/index.html), that the Trotskyist account failed to consider, as well:
Since 1920 Uchraspred, the Registration and Distribution Department of the central committee, had been responsible for the mass mobilisations of party workers. With the end of the Civil War its scope was broadened to include the appointment of party members to specific posts. Indeed at the party’s 12th Congress in April 1923 Stalin demanded that Uchraspred “be expanded to the utmost”. He got what he wanted. Soon it was responsible for a whole range of appointments, not only within the party, but the state and big industrial enterprises too. Uchraspred thus became a powerful instrument in the hands of Stalin - general secretary of the party since April 1922 - to build his “personal authority in the state as well as the party machine”.
And here's the shocker (and a shot at Trotsky's "permanent revolution"):
Some, most notably the [Trotskyists], fondly recall the days when Lenin was leader as a democratic golden age. Their worthy motive is, of course, to draw a sharp, revolutionary-counterrevolutionary line of demarcation from the instant Stalin took effective command. Yet, as will have been gathered, the truth was altogether more complex. Being must develop from the internal contradictions in its not-being. Stalinism and Leninism were at once identical and opposite. Lenin did after all characterise his Soviet Republic as “a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions”.
...
Ellenstein correctly states that the conditions under which the revolution triumphed - ie, Russian backwardness - were entirely responsible for the retreat and bureaucratisation of formal socialism and the problematic and tenuous nature of working class rule. To blame either Lenin, Stalin, or any other individual, or set of individuals, for this state of affairs shows a failure to understand the ABC of historical materialism.
...
Of course the original Bolshevik perspective was to carry through a 1789-type bourgeois democratic revolution uninterruptedly to socialism under a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Life, in the shape of the 1917 February revolution and dual power, demanded that this elastic formula be concretised. Lenin’s renowned April thesis did just that. However though the new semi-state of soviets, he envisaged, would be a first step “towards socialism”, Lenin was insistent that it was not yet possible to set the aim of “introducing socialism”. And it should be emphasised that any further steps Russia took in the direction of socialism were seen as ultimately dependent on proletarian revolution in the west.
And here I explain why:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-stalin-and-t66656/index.html
I can say that there was continuity between the Bolsheviks and their bureaucratic successors, in the form of state capitalism (not that I "blame" Lenin as a "Leninist" myself, because Russia simply wasn't as ready for a proper socialist revolution as Trotsky thought). Alas, that also poses great challenges to the "degenerate workers' state" position. At best, Lenin acknowledged that Russia was "not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state." (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm) At worst, we all know the "left" criticisms regarding the prevalent one-man management systems put in place.
However, in terms of [mantle] continuity, there was discontinuity between the Bolsheviks and their bureaucratic successors. While the former wanted the state capitalism to develop under a "revolutionary-democratic" framework, all the latter wanted a more bureaucratic approach instead
And a shot or two at Trotsky the person:
Though the Left Opposition platform called for democracy in the party, it steered clear of foreign policy. Nevertheless Trotsky’s own interventions into this minefield, in particular the pivotal German question, show that disputes at this time were still presented as those of shade. In fact Trotsky’s stance appeared to place him on the right of what was then the Comintern spectrum.
...
Yet despite drawing a crude parallel between their record in 1917 and the German events of October 1923, the fact of the matter was that Maslow, Fischer and Thaelmann - ie, those pressing for an immediate uprising in Germany (wrongly in my view) - were aligned with Zinoviev, not Trotsky. Within the top echelons of the Communist Party of Germany it was the scapegoated Heinrich Brandler whom Trotsky backed. Again on the international terrain, though Trotsky’s present-day followers make great play of his fight against ‘socialism in one country’, the fact was that for two years he kept quiet on the notorious second edition of Foundations of Leninism, where Stalin signalled his conversion to the theory. Trotsky considered Zinoviev his main rival.
...
Indeed it was Trotsky’s writings on the economy that were perhaps the most revealing of the narrowing field of vision Russian conditions were imposing even on such a panoramic and towering intellect. In The new course, published in January 1924, Trotsky stated that the development of “state industry” was the “keystone of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the basis of socialism”. And in similar vein he bluntly maintained in his August 1925 [i]Towards capitalism or socialism? that the “premise for a socialist economy is the nationalisation of the means of production”.
The equation of nationalisation with socialism is a widely held idea. But, as we have more than once noted, it has nothing to do with the Marxist outlook. I am not trying to prove Trotsky a philistine or an opponent of Marxism. That would be stupid. Nevertheless till the end of his life he considered that the Soviet Union possessed a socialist character, essentially because of the nationalisation of industry, land, transport, etc. Like the left-Ricardians of the 19th century, his critique of the relations of distribution were full of insight and savage condemnation. But his analysis was not able to penetrate to the depths of the system, to the relations of production themselves. His equivocal position on the Mensheviks was reproduced as an equivocal position on the Soviet social formation. In power, in opposition, in exile he remained a man of the Soviet state. It is not surprisingly then that Trotsky’s initial forays against the rising bureaucracy were based around the demand for higher rates of growth in the state sector and central planning. He appears to have believed that the ruling group was incapable of delivering such a package. For Trotsky salvation lay with Gosplan, not workers’ self-activity.
This technocratism was pointedly referred to by Lenin in his Testament. “Comrade Trotsky,” Lenin argued, “is personally perhaps the most capable in the present central committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.” Ditto with the other Left Opposition leader-to-be, Pytakov: “He is unquestionably a man of outstanding ability,” said Lenin, “but shows too much zeal for administration and the purely administrative side of work.”
Trotsky’s technocratic approach led him, when he was in a position of power, when he was the ‘prophet armed’, to advocate the most authoritarian measures, including the “militarisation of labour”, not only because of Russia’s parlous economic state, but because as a “general rule, man strives to avoid labour”. Hardly something that endeared him to the workers.
And yet:
Trotsky was in many ways the personification of the revolution (not the party). And it was the February Revolution which brought both Trotsky’s return to Russia and the party. Unity negotiations between his small group, the Mezhraiontsy, and the Bolsheviks were completed by August 1917. Despite often being fraught, they secured Trotsky’s entry into party membership and onto its leadership. Past bitterness between Lenin and Trotsky immediately evaporated. Making the revolution permanent in practice took Trotsky to Lenin’s side. And once there he was an invaluable asset. Trotsky brilliantly fulfilled the most exacting tasks. It was Trotsky who masterminded the October insurrection. It was Trotsky who built and directed the Red Army. It was Trotsky who was the pen of the Communist International. Friend and foe alike joined the names, Lenin and Trotsky, when referring to the Soviet regime.
...
The communist-Kuomintang alliance in China ended in the mass slaughter of the Shanghai workers. Zinoviev, Trotsky and Radek had been clamouring for an immediate change of line, but the politburo had pig-headedly insisted on the continued subordination of the Communist Party of China to the nationalists (the Chinese revolution thus lost its proletarian content - it continued under the military leadership of Mao Zedong as a peasant movement).
On "socialist" primitive accumulation, which wasn't addressed by the Woods account:
Marx showed in Capital that the “starting-point” of capitalist development was the “expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil”. Herein was the ‘secret’ of primitive capitalist accumulation. Preobrazhensky and the supposed ‘super-industrialisers’ of the left proposed, as we have seen, a painless primitive socialist accumulation, not by expropriating the peasant, but through uneven exchange and taxation.
...
The industrialisation drive, by its very unplanned nature, precipitated a goods shortage and, as its velocity was recklessly increased month by month, it reached the point of famine. Runaway inflation punctured the value of the rouble. The real worth of the fixed price paid for agricultural products sunk below the cost of production. If there had been something to buy the peasants still might have gone to market. But there was not. Hence the state’s options effectively closed. Higher real agricultural prices would divert, maybe halt, industrialisation and reassert the peasants’ bargaining power with a vengeance. Special measures and forced grain requisitions inevitably resulted in a sowing strike and diminishing returns. Stalin, following the line of least resistance, had to go for “total” collectivisation.
...
Aside from this debate, Ellman rightly emphasises the role of coercion in the whole process and the “fall in urban real wages”. Force was the prime economic mechanism. Wages in the first five-year plan were cut by some 50%. Overall urban living standards did not decline to the same extent due to the ending of unemployment, etc. In spite of that it was only after the second five-year plan that urban consumption overtook what it had been at the beginning of the first five-year plan.