"Building socialism" vs. "achieving socialism" in a single country

http://www.revleft.com/vb/building-s...833/index.html (an unusually lengthy and fruitful discussion, I might add)



There's a significant difference between "building" and "achieving." Until the rather "revisionist" Congress of Victors, both sides agreed that achieving their common view of "socialism" within a single country was impossible. When one side gave way, some elements of that side went so far later on as to declare the achievement of "communism" within the USSR as something to be met by 1980... before other elements settled for the increasingly market-based mechanisms of "developed socialism," as pointed out by an ironically "revisionist" Enver Hoxha (since Mao was either too busy early on or dead later on).

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell...ipconcepts.pdf

The achievements of the Stalin tyranny were undoubtedly impressive. A 21st century world, that looks on in amazement at China’s rapid ascent to economic super-power under a system of ’market socialism’, forgets the even faster industrialisation that planned socialism achieved in Russia during the 1930s and 1950s. And unlike the Chinese industrialisation, which has been socialist in name but capitalist in essence, the Russian industrialisation under the communists followed much more closely the prescription laid down in the Communist Manifesto and quoted earlier: ”The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” The centralised, state owned economy established in the USSR during the late 1920s and early 1930s, is now stigmatised as ’Stalinist’, but was a perfectly orthodox implementation of the original Communist Manifesto.

[Note: By "socialism," Cockshott here refers to the traditional monetary conception of it.]

Technically speaking, when one country has undergone proletocratic revolution and others haven't, and when said country enacts transitional measures, that country *is* "building socialism in one country."

While that phrase later on became a cover for "achieving" (culminating in the 1934 Congress of Victors and later on Khrushchev's bogus 1980 remark), Trotsky meanwhile was very confused about the difference between "transitional" slogans and transitional measures (hence his economistic Transitional Program). This confusion was exploited by Stalin and co. by means of wrongfully charging Trotsky with "defeatism."

Rather than declaring the impossibility of "socialism in one country", I think it would be more correct to say that the possibility of building socialism increases with the size of the territory involved. The greater the territory, the easier it is to build socialism there. If you've got the entire planet, it is easiest of all.

[By "territory," he meant territories with reasonable amounts of resources and not something as vast but barren as the Sahara Desert.]

A further vindication of the original "building socialism" premise can be found in Karl Kautsky's Prospects of the Russian Revolution:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/prospects-...942/index.html

There can be no doubt that, as of yet, Russian capitalism offers very little in terms of starting points for socialist development. However, considerable steps could be taken in this spirit through the nationalisation of: large firms; railways - to the extent that they are not already (excluding Finland, the Russian empire’s railways total more than 74,000 kilometres, and of that 54,000 kilometres are state-owned); the mines, above all the mining of coal, gold and oil; as well as large individual firms in heavy industry. Further, through state confiscation of the goods of the dethroned dynasty and the monasteries, through state acquisition of large land holdings and finally through giving over property to the towns - both to build cheaper and healthier housing and to produce food for their inhabitants.

Although I appreciated Cockshott's efforts to defend a working vision of socialism, his Stalinism really does him a disservice.

Look at the quote from the Communist Manifesto again and you'll note next to the word "state" the disclaimer "i.e the proletariat organised as the ruling class". This links in with Marx's general perspective on the state developed in the course of the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right as the instrument through which the particular interest of one class is represented as an illusory general interest. I think it's pretty clear that M & E had in mind a state controlled by the workers and not a parisitic beuracracy. But we could always let them speak for themselves:

During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government. They must achieve these guarantees by force if necessary, and generally make sure that the new rulers commit themselves to all possible concessions and promises – the surest means of compromising them. They must check in every way and as far as is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers.

Here he is committing precisely the same mistake that Trotsky committed with his "degenerated workers state" formula of equating a state with all MoP nationalised and production planned with a "workers state" even when the so-called "workers state" acts directly against the interests of the working-class.

As for the achievments of the planned economy, they were undoubtedly impressive. But as Raya Dunayevskyaya notes, feudal Japan made comparable achievments in the same time period:

Presumably, it was because Japan was not among the highly industrialized nations that Russian statisticians, who so impartially compared the Russian growth to that of the advanced nations of the capitalist world, did not include “feudal” Japan in their comparison. We must, however, pause here and note that not only “socialist” Russia but also “feudal” Japan showed a tremendous rate of growth during that period. If we take a comparable period of development, say 1932-37, we find that the total value of the output of Soviet heavy industry was 23.2 billion rubles in 1932 and 55.2 billion in 1937, the value at the end of the Second Five Year Plan thus being 238 per cent of that in 1932.

Japan, also passing to a more rationalized economy, had an index of 97.9 for heavy industry in 1932 and 170.8 in 1937, or 176 per cent of the 1932 figure. Moreover, Japan, poor in materials of industry, was compelled to travel long distances to import 85 per cent of its iron ore and 90 per cent of its crude .oil and was far short of being self-sustaining in copper, lead, zinc, tin and other essential industrial metals. Further-more, were we to take Japan’s high point of industrialization, August, 1940, as the criterion, we would see that Japan had achieved a 253.5 per cent growth in the means of production, as compared to the index of 1931-33.

I don't think anyone here would see Japan at the same time as being on the road to socialism though.

Although I appreciated Cockshott's efforts to defend a working vision of socialism, his Stalinism really does him a disservice.

Look at the quote from the Communist Manifesto again and you'll [note] next to the word "state" the disclaimer "i.e the proletariat organised as the ruling class"

His background is from Maoism, but he also read quite a bit of Bordiga. As you know, Bordiga went further than Stalin by calling for a labour credits economy organized by technocrats against "the democratic principle." As for the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels at that time had a primitive conception of how classes become the ruling political class.

"Mechanically," this meant a violent proletarian revolution (1917) for the establishment of suffrage favouring the working class (the 1918 constitution) or universal suffrage (the 1936 "Stalin Constitution" and the constitutions of the "people's democracies"), since John Stuart Mill wrote of the "danger of class legislation on the part of the numerical majority, these being all composed of the same class." Formally, this was seen especially in the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe, with the leading Communist parties flanked by satellite parties in a Popular Front (peasant parties, Christian-Democratic parties, "Liberal-Democratic" parties, etc.).

There was also the odd case of pro-CPSU voters handwriting petitions on their ballots for local or regional socioeconomic projects, something which today's bourgeois states don't allow! What do they favour instead? Pork barrelling by "representatives": let us get your pork for you!

Plus, Marx and Engels never repudiated the electoral principle.

From this simplistic perspective, the then-transitional measures could be implemented, including the obligation of all to work carried through to the 1936 "Stalin Constitution" (see my Learning thread response on its relevance today).