Sideways step. Good riddance to old Rubbish.
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Today, fellow comrades, marks the downfall of our fight in Russia.
The downfall of communism in 1991, when this event happened, led to dischord in many "independant" countries, many of which started wars and internal conflicts which still divide this part of the world today...
It also gave a profoundly bad image to our struggle, mainly because of the lack of judgement of few men thirsty with power.
But most important of all, it severed the helping hand given to the cuban people and to the revolution for it to continue its existance........
I was too young when this event happened, but are there anyone here who remember this dark day in history ? I'd love to hear your thoughts of this....
May it serve as a lesson for our future struggles, future fights, and future victories...
Hasta la victoria Siempre !
:hammer: :cuba: :hammer:
-Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!-
Zack de la Rocha
A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself... -Jim Morrison-
The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.
Vienes quemando la brisa
con soles de primavera
para plantar la bandera
con la luz de tu sonrisa
Our Word is Our Weapon!
Sideways step. Good riddance to old Rubbish.
Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly "world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives.
Karl Marx
YKTMX do you really consider the destruction of what remained of the October Revolution as a "sideways step"? Well how do you explain that Russian production fell by 64% from 1991-1995? For reference:
USSR 1941-45: About 50% fall in production
USA 1929-34: About 33% fall in production
Clearly the destruction of the planned economy was not just a "sideways step" but a human catastrophe for the peoples of Eastern Europe.
"A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains,
and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—
Let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
-Leon Trotsky
Certainly the declining standard of life is an unmiitigated disaster for the Russian people.
The reason I believe it was a sideways step is because it is still the same people who control Russia now as did then. They have merely conceived a better way of exploitation. It wasn't a "counter-revolution" because no change took place a the top of society.
Oh, and what was left over from the spirit of October was drowned in a sea of blood some time in the 20's.
Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly "world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives.
Karl Marx
You are against privatisation in Britain right? - doesn't that mean that you are against privatisation in the former USSR also? In other words you must be in favour of keeping as much as possible of the economy under state ownership.
So tell me, do you consider a nationalised planned economy as a necessary requisite for the movement towards socialism? Yes or no?
If yes, then how can you say that there is no fundamental change in the USSR?
And if no, then why are you against privatisation at all, anywhere? Surely it makes no difference whether the economy is "state capitalist" or "normal" capitalist? It's all capitalism! It's all the "same people" who run it!
I'll say it unambiguously: The break-up of the USSR was the greatest working class defeat in all history including Hitler's victory. Failure to recognise this means theoretical bankruptcy for any revolutionary!
Drowned in the 20's? Lots of things were drowned in the 20's and 30's but one thing remained: The planned economy. Do you disagree? Do you think that the planned economy was just a "different way of exploitation"? Then please explain to me, how it came to be that during the 1930's, when the whole capitalist world was going through the worst depression, the USSR had a yearly growth rate of 15 to 20 per cent. Can you explain that? Surely there must be some difference between normal capitalism and "state capitalism"!
The USSR was a deformed workers' state. This doesn't mean, as your theoreticians say, that it was "some form of socialism". Trotsky never said that. The point is that you can't go straight from capitalism to socialism, because there still exists scarcity. Not even in America could you skip the transitional stage. In the USSR the struggle for necessities were extremely aggravated because of the backwardness. In the pages of The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky produced a definition which has stood the test of time much better than Cliff's state capitalist theory.
"To define the Soviet regime as transitional, or intermediate, means to abandon such finished social categories as capitalism (and therewith "state capitalism") and also socialism. But besides being completely inadequate in itself, such a definition is capable of producing the mistaken idea that from the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible."
Isn't this exactly the pit in which Cliff's theory has fallen? Trotsky's genius predicted the shortcomings of the theory of state capitalism before it was even invented! The SWP said that there was capitalism in Russia since 1928. Now, when they are faced with a real capitalist counter-revolution, because of their own faulty theory they do not recognise it.
The point is that you can't marshal the Soviet Union into one or the other: "Socialism" or "capitalism" - because it was a transitional regime between the two. Here is Trotsky's definition:
"A more complete definition will of necessity be complicated and ponderous.
The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; © norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena."
In the 1990s, prognosis (h) was carried out. Only Trotskyism can explain what is going on in Russia today. Cliff, on the other hand, could not explain it at all.
Comradely
"A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains,
and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—
Let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
-Leon Trotsky
Yes, of course.
Yes, I see it as a requisite but not the only one or the main one.
OK. What to do mean by the term "revolution", which "fundamental change" implies. We mean a total restructuring of society from the bottom up. That never happened in Russia. All that happened was the Communists changed their cards for stocks and shares, became "democrats" and continued to exploit the Russian people as they had done before. Look at the names! It's the same people for god sake!
I support state ownership. I am quite clear on this point. Not because I see it as a neccesarily socialist characteristic, but because I see collective provision as progressive and the best of way of protecting workers' rights.
Thatcher privatised lot's of things? Was British society before her socialist? Was the society she created a new form of society? Answer is no. It was merely an attack on the working class and a symptom of the shift in the balance of class forces. The same happened in Russia. The bureaucracy decided that the "communist" system was no longer sustainable, politically or economical, so decided to change it for their own benefit. As usually happens when the top re-orders things, the bottom of society suffers. Tragic? Absolutely. A crucial defeat for socialism? No.
I'm afraid it is here we part company. Russia, in all it's forms and rhetorical postures from 1928 onwards, was the biggest disaster for the socialist movement in history. It set us back decades, placing obstacles in our way that may well be unsurmountable.
I'm afraid you're re-treading worn Stalinist propaganda lines now. That are many explanations why the SU boomed under Stalin, none of them suggest that this was a socialist society. China is undergoing an economic boom, is China socialist? Maybe it is.
Set me put it succintly. The USSR was not socialist. It had no socialist characteristics.
And I'm afraid you seem to have misread Marx. Socialism is the transitional stage on the road to communism. The S.U. was not socialist, therefore, to look at it from a Marxist point of view we need to examine it's place in history and I'm afraid "deformed workers state" just doesn't do. State capitalism explains it perfectly, and Cliff has been totally vindicated.
Let me just be clear about the role of dear Comrade Trotsky here. The orthydoxists, like yourself, see sticking rigidly to his analyses as the only way to preserve the spirit of "Trotskyism". Cliff saw the theory of State Capitalism as not a rejection of Trotsky, but of a return to the classical Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky.
Let me ask you a question not about Russia but about the Warsaw pact states. Were they too "deformed workers states"? They had many the same structures and roles as the USSR? They had been won by Stalin as a spoil for his assistance in WW2. So where does this leave the first principle of Marx i.e. self emancipation. By your approach, the workers don't need to create their own "Ocotber's", all they need is the Red Army to roll in and declare their country socialist. That, I'm afraid is completely indefensible from a Marxist viewpoint.
So, if you accept that these regimes were not "deformed workers states" then what were they? They were almost identical to Russia in character but are somehow diffirent from it. We then reach the opinion that if Russia has created these regimes that are on the whole - economically "progressive" - but socially repressive and tyrannical, what does that mean for Russia?
"No country which oppresses another can itself be free".
Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly "world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives.
Karl Marx
You are contradicting yourself comrade!
Good to have that cleared up.
The fact is that there was a planned economy, which in your opinion is a necessary step on the road to socialism, but there is not any more. This cannot be denied! So why do you continue to say that there's no fundamental change? It's absurd, like saying: "Yes, trade unions and democratic rights are important conquests of the working class. However, there's nothing wrong with having them destroyed by Nazis!" Once you acknowledge that a planned economy is a step on the road to socialism, then you must defend the planned economy against capitalist restoration with all your might. Otherwise you'll fall into frightful contradictions!
Let me quote from the introduction to the Russia book (www.marxist.com/russiabook):
"In a period of 50 years, the USSR increased its gross domestic product nine times over. Despite the terrible destruction of the second world war, it increased its GDP five times over from 1945 to 1979. In 1950, the GDP of the USSR was only 33 per cent that of the USA. By 1979, it was already 58 per cent. By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union was a formidable industrial power, which in absolute terms had already overtaken the rest of the world in a whole series of key sectors. The USSR was the world's second biggest industrial producer after the USA and was the biggest producer of oil, steel, cement, asbestos, tractors, and many machine tools. The Soviet space programme was the envy of the world.
Nor is the full extent of the achievement expressed in these figures. All this was achieved virtually without unemployment or inflation. Unemployment like that in the West was unknown in the Soviet Union. In fact, it was legally a crime. (Ironically, this law still remains on the statute books today, although it means nothing.) There might be examples of cases arising from bungling or individuals who came into conflict with the authorities being deprived of their jobs. But such phenomena did not flow from the nature of a nationalised planned economy, and need not have existed. They had nothing in common with either the cyclical unemployment of capitalism or the organic cancer which now affects the whole of the Western world and which currently condemns 35 million people in the OECD countries to a life of enforced idleness.
Moreover, for most of the postwar period, there was little or no inflation. The bureaucracy learned the truth of Trotsky's warning that "inflation is the syphilis of a planned economy". After the second world war for most of the time they took care to ensure that inflation was kept under control. This was particularly the case with the prices of basic items of consumption. Before perestroika (reconstruction), the last time meat and dairy prices had been increased was in 1962. Bread, sugar and most food prices had last been increased in 1955. Rents were extremely low, particularly when compared to the West, where most workers have to pay a third or more of their wages on housing costs. Only in the last period, with the chaos of perestroika, did this begin to break down. Now, with the rush towards a market economy, both unemployment and inflation have soared to unprecedented levels.
The USSR had a balanced budget and even a small surplus every year. It is interesting to note that not a single Western government has succeeded in achieving this result (as the Maastricht conditions prove), just as they have not succeeded in achieving full employment and zero inflation, things which also existed in the Soviet Union. The Western critics of the Soviet Union kept very quiet about this, because it demonstrated the possibilities of even a transitional economy, never mind socialism. Now that the Russian people are sampling the joys of capitalism, they are finding out what it means to have a huge and uncontrolled budget deficit, meaning that wages are not paid for months on end.
...Not since the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire has Europe seen such an economic catastrophe in peacetime. In particular, the collapse of production in Russia resembles the effects of a massive defeat in war, or, more correctly, in two wars. It has no parallel in modern history. In the last six years production has plummeted by around 60 per cent. It can only be described as a historic wipe-out of productive technique and industry. The steep fall in American production of 30 per cent in the Great Depression of 1929-33 was relatively minor by comparison. Each year of life in Russia is equivalent to the deepest depression ever experienced in the West. In 1996, the GDP fell by a further 6 per cent. Industrial output was down by 5 per cent and agricultural output by 7 per cent. Output in light manufacturing plunged by 28 per cent, and in the construction materials industry by 25 per cent. Chemical and petro-chemical production declined by 11 per cent and new housing construction by 10 per cent. Russia's 1996 grain harvest was the third smallest in 30 years. Nor is Russia's decline the worse case. In the five years to 1994, the economies of the ex-republics of the Soviet Union have plummeted by up to, in the case of Georgia, an astonishing 83 per cent. Since then, there have been further falls."
Certainly the Russians have a different opinion from the SWP.
The fact is that when you have 100% nationalisation, a qualitative change takes place. Britain has never had a planned economy. Under capitalism, the nationalised industry only serves the private sector. But when the whole economy is nationalised, there's no bourgeoisie that can benefit from the nationalised economy. The economy can't operate on capitalist lines because there are no capitalists. Isn't this obvious? Britain never achieved growth levels like the USSR, because the economy was not planned. If there was 100% nationalisation of industry, and a democratic plan, then Britain could achieve prodigious growth levels.
How explain the resurrection of Orthodoxy, monarchism, fascism, antisemitism, the throwing back of women's rights, inflation, unemployment, wages not paid for months and years, if there was "no fundamental change"? The fact is that what took place in the 1990s was a capitalist counter-revolution the likes of which the world has never seen.
Hmmmm. Now let us review what you wrote just a few minutes ago.
Daymare17: Do you consider a nationalised planned economy as a necessary requisite for the movement towards socialism?
YouKnowTheyMurderedX: Yes, I see it as a requisite but not the only one or the main one.
You yourself just stated that the planned economy is a socialist characteristic!
Trotsky demolished your arguments sixty-eight years ago! It's very sad that the SWP miseducates its members so much. Have you even read The Revolution Betrayed, the pillar work of the Trotskyist movement? Doesn't seem that way. Trotsky said:
"Capitalism prepared the conditions and forces for a social revolution: technique, science and the proletariat. The communist structure cannot, however, immediately replace the bourgeois society. The material and cultural inheritance from the past is wholly inadequate for that. In its first steps the workers’ state cannot yet permit everyone to work "according to his abilities”—that is, as much as he can and wishes to—nor can it reward everyone "according to his needs", regardless of the work he does. In order to increase the productive forces, it is necessary to resort to the customary norms of wage payment—that is, to the distribution of life’s goods in proportion to the quantity and quality of individual labor.
Marx named this first stage of the new society "the lowest stage of communism", in distinction from the highest, where together with the last phantoms of want material inequality will disappear. In this sense socialism and communism are frequently contrasted as the lower and higher stages of the new society. "We have not yet, of course, complete communism," reads the present official Soviet doctrine, "but we have already achieved socialism—that is, the lowest stage of communism." In proof of this, they adduce the dominance of the state trusts in industry, the collective farms in agriculture, the state and co-operative enterprises in commerce. At first glance this gives a complete correspondence with the a priori—and therefore hypothetical—scheme of Marx. But it is exactly for the Marxist that this question is not exhausted by a consideration of forms of property regardless of the achieved productivity of labor. By the lowest stage of communism Marx meant, at any rate, a society which from the very beginning stands higher in its economic development than the most advanced capitalism. Theoretically such a conception is flawless, for taken on a world scale communism, even in its first incipient stage, means a higher level of development that that of bourgeois society. Moreover, Marx expected that the Frenchman would begin the social revolution, the German continue it, the Englishman finish it; and as to the Russian, Marx left him far in the rear. But this conceptual order was upset by the facts. Whoever tries now mechanically to apply the universal historic conception of Marx to the particular case of the Soviet Union at the given stage of its development, will be entangled at once in hopeless contradictions."
Ted Grant wrote a critique of the theory of state capitalism which, to my knowledge, has never been answered by any SWP leaders. In fact it seems like they try to deny his very existence! In the 1940's Cliff was a leader of the RCP together with Ted, but in Cliff's recent pamphlet "Trotskyism after Trotsky" he doesn't mention Ted even once!
If you're interested in "broadening your horizon", give it a shot! I'm confident that it will shake up your conceptions.
www.marxist.com/russiabook/appendix2.html (this is the modern version, the original 1949 version can be found at http://www.tedgrant.org/works/4/9/re...ny_cliff.html)
The critique is misplaced. In a sense, it was a social revolution in that it eliminated capitalism and landlordism, but to become socialism (or at least a democratic workers' state) the workers had to make a political revolution clearing away the bureaucracy. In this way it differs in no way from our position on the USSR. What is so wrong and "indefensible" about this? I never said that it was not a "deformed workers' state". Where did you get that from? Why should I say that? As we saw clearly in the 90's counterrevolution, the workers needed to create their own "Octobers". The Stalinist bureaucracy had no interest in building socialism. But that doesn't mean we don't support the progressive and, in fact, revolutionary measures taken by the Stalinist bureaucracy (against its own will!such as the elimination of capitalism and the creation of a planned economy! Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here.
As a matter of fact Trotsky dealt with this phenomenon before his death. Cliff, I am sad to say, only knew Trotsky very superficially and never understood him. Here are a couple of articles by Trotsky dealing with the Red Army's entry into Finland, Poland and the Baltic States.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/wo...39/1939-war.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/wo...940-finnish.htm
In your opinion, were these wars "imperialist"? Then how do you explain the social overturn, and the fact that the Polish workers enthusiastically supported the nationalisation? I've never seen an imperialist army nationalise the economy of the country it invades.
And here is Ted Grant's article "Stalinism in the Postwar World" which explains what happened in Eastern Europe. http://www.tedgrant.org/works/5/1/stalinis...twar_world.html
Feel free to browse www.tedgrant.org. If you can't answer some of the points in the articles, then chances are that he is right. Theoretical education is very important. Anyway, you'll see that our "orthodoxyist" position (not strictly true, we opposed all the postwar leaders of the Fourth) is not as infantile as your leaders would have it.
Comradely
"A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains,
and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—
Let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
-Leon Trotsky
No, the word I used was "requsite" which means that all socialist societies have a planned economy. That doesn't mean that all societies that have planned economies are socialist. The distinction is quite clear.
OK, so let's call it like it is then. The workers aren't needed to destroy capitalism. That's your view.
I am compleltely confounded by your conception of the bureaucracy. You seem to see it as some sort of benign, abstract force which is a hinderence to societies that would naturally be socialist without it.
In fact, the bureaucracy in all the "deformed workers states" where a group in society who stood in a diffirent relation to the means of a production i.e they were a class! Now, Marx identified two groups in society as you know. The workers and the bosses. They obviously weren't workers because they were "benefiting materially" (in houses, clothes, food, services etc) from the expropriation of the workers. Therefore, they must have been bosses?
You're obcession with the form of property (an obcession Marx often attacked) blinds you to pure, historical fact. A counter-revolution took place in Russia after Lenin's death. Stalin set out to isolate the Russian people and then to destroy them. He took control of the degenerated Bolshevik party and used to it stage to organise society in very "familiar" ways. Those at the top who benefit, those at the bottom who toil.
No, in fact it does! You say they had "no interest in building socialism". Now, the question that springs to mind is what were they interested in building. A planned economy, yes, but for what purpose, to what end? That is the question we must ask. You've ducked politics in favour of economics, something Stalin often indulged in.
Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly "world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives.
Karl Marx
I'm kind of tired so I'll just post a long fucking quote (its in my nature :P)
http://www.marxist.com/russiabook/part4.html
[The theory of state capitalism's] most recent contemporary exponent is Tony Cliff in his book Russia: A Marxist Analysis (1964) republished as State Capitalism in Russia (1974). This work is based upon an earlier version entitled The Nature of Stalinist Russia published in June 1948. Given its theoretical weaknesses, and the criticism of this work made by ourselves at the time, its arguments were later modified. Initially, Cliff argued that Russia had undergone a transformation in 1928, the first year of the Five-Year Plans, from a deformed workers' state to state capitalism because it can be conclusively "be said that with the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, the bureaucracy's income consisted to a large extent of surplus value". (T. Cliff, The Nature of Stalinist Russia, p. 45.)
However, this key argument was dropped after it was made clear to Cliff that from 1920 onwards, the bureaucracy had consumed a great part of the surplus value produced by the working class, legitimately and illegitimately. As Marx had correctly explained, in a workers' state in the transitional period, the production of surplus value would be used for the speedy building up of industry and so prepare the way for the quickest possible transition to equality and then complete communism. No Marxist could maintain that the class nature of the Soviet state had changed because of this. Tony Cliff unceremoniously abandoned this argument without any explanation and subsequently developed new ones in an attempt to strengthen his theory of state capitalism. This summed up his whole eclectic approach to this question for the past 40 odd years.
Trotsky on 'state capitalism'
The theories of bureaucratic collectivism and state capitalism were demolished by Trotsky in the 1930s. The prime question for Trotsky in understanding Stalinism was the Marxist method. Far from being rigid and formalistic, as Tony Cliff claimed, Trotsky was scrupulously dialectical in his analysis of Stalinism, meticulously examining the contradictory features of the process unfolding at each stage. For him, the process was not simply black or white, but far more complicated and complex. He was not looking for nice neat categories to satisfy the laws of formal logic, but sought out the contradictory reality of what was actually taking place within the Soviet Union.
Cliff's method was totally different. In a most shallow way, he examined the surface characteristics of Stalinism in Russia and then drew a superficial analogy with certain aspects of capitalism, without understanding the real nature of the Soviet Union and the contradictory processes taking place within it. Without doubt there were similarities with capitalism, but there were also fundamental differences. "In Russia the horrors of forced industrialisation, of brutal collectivisation of the peasantry, the deprivation of workers' rights to organise in trade unions or to strike, the police terror, all were byproducts of an unprecedented rate of capital accumulation," states Cliff. (Binns, Cliff and Harman, Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism, p. 11.) These features of Stalinism existed, but they were not due to the primitive accumulation of some alleged state capitalist society.
Trotsky explained these developments, not as the result of the workings of capitalist economic laws, but arising from the actions of the Stalinist bureaucracy attempting to consolidate its privileged position by catching up with the West. Other bureaucracies have acted in a similar ruthless fashion - for example, the Nazi bureaucracy, which sought world domination. However, this fact did not change the class nature of the regime. Given Cliff's fundamentally different approach, he rightly concludes: "Our analysis of the class nature of Russia under Stalin, and today, differs from that made by Leon Trotsky." (Ibid., p 12.) The point is that Trotsky was correct in his method and analysis, and Cliff is wrong.
Tony Cliff asserts that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new ruling class, but nowhere in his writings is a real analysis made or evidence adduced as to why and how such a class constitutes a capitalist class. This is not accidental, it flows from his method. Starting off with the preconceived idea of state capitalism, everything is artificially fitted in to that conception. Instead of applying the theoretical method of Marxism to Russian society in its process of motion and development, he has scoured the works of the great Marxists to gather quotations and attempted to compress them into a new theory.
The main criterion for Marxists in analysing social systems is this: Does the new formation lead to the development of the productive forces? Cliff skirts around this question by false comparisons of individual capitalist growth rates and the fact that world industrial production has actually grown since 1891. But what needs to be compared is the growth rate of the Soviet Union and the rest of the capitalist world. The theory of Marxism is based on the material development of the forces of production as the moving force of historical progress. The transition from one system to another is not decided subjectively, but is rooted in the needs of production itself. It is on this basis and this basis alone that the superstructure is erected: of state, ideology, art, science and government. It is true that the superstructure has an important secondary effect on production and even within certain limits, as Engels explained, acquires its own independent movement. But in the last analysis, the development of production is decisive.
Marx explained the historical justification for capitalism, despite the horrors of the industrial revolution, despite the slavery of the blacks in Africa, despite child labour in the factories, the wars of conquest throughout the globe - by the fact that it was a necessary stage in the development of the forces of production. Marx showed that without slavery, not only ancient slavery, but slavery in the epoch of the early development of capitalism, the modern development of production would have been impossible. Without that the material basis for socialism could never have been prepared. In a letter to P.V. Annenkov, 28th December 1846, Marx wrote:
"Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry, it is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
"Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy - the complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation." (MESW, Letter - Marx to P.V. Annenkov in Paris, Vol. 1, pp. 523-4.)
Of course, the attitude of Marx towards the horrors of slavery and the industrial revolution is well known. It would be a gross distortion of Marx's position to argue that because he wrote the above, therefore he was in favour of slavery and child labour. Similarly, no more can it be argued against the Marxists that because they supported state ownership in the USSR that they therefore justified the slave camps and other crimes of the former Stalinist regime. Marx's support of the German ruler Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian war was dictated by similar considerations. In spite of Bismarck's "blood and iron" policy and the reactionary nature of his regime, because the development of the productive forces would be facilitated by the national unification of Germany, Marx gave critical support for the war of Prussia against France. The basic criterion was the development of the productive forces. In the long run, all else flows from this.
Any analysis of Russian society must start from that basis. Once Cliff admits that while capitalism was declining and decaying on a world scale, yet preserving a progressive role in Russia in relation to the development of the productive forces, then logically he would have to say that state capitalism is the next stage forward for society, or at least for the backward countries. Contradictorily, he shows that the Russian bourgeoisie was not capable of carrying through the role which was fulfilled by the bourgeoisie in the West and consequently the proletarian revolution took place.
If we say that there was state capitalism in Russia (ushered in by a proletarian revolution), then it is clear that the crisis of capitalism is not insoluble but only the birth pangs of a new and higher stage of capitalism (state capitalism). The quotation that Cliff himself gives from Marx - that no society passes from the scene till all the possibilities in it have been exhausted - would indicate that if his argument is correct, a new epoch, the epoch of state capitalism, would have opened up before us. The idea of Lenin that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism would be false. The whole of Marxism would have to be revised from beginning to end.
'A trade union in power'
In dealing with "state capitalism", we see the kind of fetishism of which Marx spoke and which can even affect the revolutionary movement - change the name of a thing and you change its essence! Trotsky described it as "terminological radicalism". But sticking these labels on to the phenomenon of Stalinism does not change the character of the regime. Such a method has nothing in common with Marxism. As a matter of fact, if the idea of state capitalism or bureaucratic collectivism is correct, then the whole theory of Marx becomes a Utopia. Let us proceed from fundamental propositions. According to the theory of Marx, no society passes from the scene of history till it has exhausted all the potentialities within it. For a whole historical period, the Soviet regime made unexampled strides forward, much greater than anything seen in the West. We have the absurdity of a new revolution, according to the advocates of state capitalism, a proletarian revolution in 1917, changing the economy into - state capitalism. As Trotsky explained: "An attempt has been made to conceal the enigma of the Soviet regime by calling it 'state capitalism'. This term has the advantage that nobody knows exactly what it means." (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 245.)
Where Trotsky found proof of a workers' state in the transformation of the forms of property, the supporters of the theory of state capitalism find proof of the reverse. They may argue that unless the working class has direct control of the state, it cannot be a workers' state. In that case, they will have to reject the idea that there was ever a workers' state in Russia, except possibly in the first few months after October. Even here it is necessary to reiterate that the dictatorship of the proletariat is realised through the instrument of the vanguard of the class, i.e. the Party, and in the Party through the Party leadership. Under the best conditions this will be effected with the utmost democracy within the state and within the Party. But the very existence of the dictatorship, its necessity to achieve the change in the social system, is already proof of profound social contradictions which can, under unfavourable historical circumstances, find a reflection within the state and within the Party. The Party, no more than the state, can automatically and directly reflect the interests of the class. Not for nothing did Lenin think of the trade unions as a necessary factor for the defence of the workers against their state, as well as a bulwark for the defence of their state.
Here again, we see the results of substituting formalistic thinking for dialectical analysis. The advocates of this theory base themselves on pure abstractions - a workers' state in general, as opposed to the real workers' state formed under conditions of frightful backwardness, poverty, illiteracy. A materialist approaches the subject in an entirely different way. While it is the most homogeneous class in society, the proletariat is not entirely homogeneous. There are important differences between different layers of the class - skilled and unskilled, backward and advanced, organised and unorganised, and so on. The same processes can take place in the working class as in other classes, according to the concrete conditions.
The history of the workers' organisations under capitalism, which can experience a process of bureaucratisation under certain conditions, especially where the workers are not participating actively, is a useful analogy. Trotsky in the last analysis compared a workers' state to a trade union which has conquered power. After a long strike, with no victory in sight, the workers tend to lapse into inactivity and apathy, beginning with the most backward elements. Likewise in Russia, after years of war, revolution and civil war, the workers were exhausted. Gradually, they fell into inactivity. The soviets, the unions and other organs of workers' power became bureaucratised over a period as a result. A similar process can be seen in the French Revolution, although with a different class content. If it was possible for the party of the working class (the Social Democracy), especially through its leadership, to degenerate under the alien pressures of capitalism, why is it impossible for the state set up by the workers to follow a similar pattern? Why cannot the state gain independence from the class, and at the same time (in its own interests) defend the new economic forms created by the revolution? In reality, the transition from one society to another was found to have been far more complex than could have been foreseen by the founders of scientific socialism.
No more than any other class or social formation has the proletariat been given the privilege of inevitably having a smooth passage in the transition to its domination, and thence to its painless and tranquil disappearance in society, i.e., to socialism. That was a possible variant. But the degeneration of both Social Democracy and the Soviet state under the given conditions was not at all accidental. It represented in a sense the complex relations between a class, its representatives, and the state, which, more than once in history the ruling class, bourgeois, feudal and slave-owning, had cause to rue. It mirrors in other words, the multiplicity of historical factors which are the background to the decisive factor: the economic.
Contrast the broad view of Lenin with the mechanistic view of the exponents of state capitalism. Lenin emphasised over and over the need to study the transition periods of past epochs especially from feudalism to capitalism, in order to understand the laws of transition in Russia. He would have rejected the conception that the state which issued from October would have to follow a preconceived norm, or thereby ceased to be a workers' state. Lenin knew very well that the proletariat and its party and leadership had no god-given power which would lead, without contradictions, smoothly to socialism once capitalism had been overthrown. That is necessarily the only conclusion which must follow from the Kantian norms categorically laid down by proponents of state capitalism. That is why in advance Lenin emphasised that the dictatorship of the proletariat would vary tremendously in different countries and under different conditions.
However, Lenin hammered home the point that in the transition from feudalism to capitalism the dictatorship of the rising bourgeoisie was reflected in the dictatorship of one man. A class could rule through the personal rule of one man. Ex post facto Tony Cliff is quite willing to accept this conception as it applies to the bourgeoisie. But one could only conclude from his schematic arguments that such a development would be impossible in the case of the proletariat. For the rule of one man implies absolutism, arbitrary dictatorship vested in a single individual without political rights for the ruling class whose interests, in the last analysis, he represents. But Lenin only commented thus to show that under certain conditions the dictatorship of the proletariat could also be realised through the dictatorship of one man. Lenin did not develop this conception. But today, in the light of the experience of Russia and Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and the other deformed workers' states, we can deepen and understand not only the present but the past developments of society as well.
Under certain circumstances, the dictatorship of the proletariat can take the form of the dictatorship of one man. We are not talking about a healthy workers' state, but a distortion that can arise from the separation of the state from the class it represents. This means that the apparatus will almost inevitably tend to become independent of its base and thus acquire a vested interest of its own, hostile and alien to the class it represents. That was the case in Stalinist Russia. When we study the development of bourgeois society, we see that the autocracy of one individual, with the given social contradictions, served the needs of the development of that society. This is clearly shown by the rule of Cromwell and Napoleon. But although both stood on a bourgeois base, at a certain stage bourgeois autocracy becomes, from a favourable factor for the development of capitalist society, a hindrance to the full and free development of bourgeois production.
However, the dictatorial regime of absolutism does not then painlessly wither away. In France and England it required supplementary political revolutions before bourgeois autocracy could be changed into bourgeois democracy. But without bourgeois democracy a free and full development of the productive forces to the limits under capitalism would have been impossible. If this applies to the historical evolution of the bourgeoisie, how much more so to the proletariat in a backward and isolated country where the dictatorship of the proletariat degenerated into the dictatorship of Stalin - of one man?
In order that the Russian proletariat should take the path of socialism, a new revolution, a supplementary political revolution was necessary to turn the Bonapartist proletarian state into a workers' democracy. This entirely fits in with the experience of the past. Just as capitalism passed through many stormy contradictory phases (we are far from finished with them yet, as our epoch bears witness), so in the given historic conditions did the rule of the proletariat in Russia. So also through a mutual reaction, Eastern Europe and China passed through this proletarian Bonapartist phase.
The peculiar notion that a workers' state is always born as immaculate as the Virgin Mary, and must under all conditions appear in the classical form of a perfect workers' democracy, or else must be damned as a "new class state", is a mystical idea which has nothing whatever to do with the materialist method of Marxism. It is the product of thinking in abstract, formal categories. In point of fact, it is in the interrelation between the class and its state under the given historical conditions that we find the explanation of Stalinist degeneration, not in supra-historical abstractions.
As a matter of fact, even now the class nature of the Russian state has not been decisively determined. But the protagonists of the empty and superficial theory of state capitalism are least of all capable of shedding light on the processes that are unfolding in the former Soviet Union. If the present move in the direction of capitalist restoration proves unsuccessful, in the long run, the economic factor (property relations), after many upheavals and catastrophes, will prove decisive. It is a question of which property forms will ultimately prevail - nationalisation or private property. This struggle is still unfolding, but the result is not yet decided. Of course, if we accept that Russia has been capitalist (even if "state capitalist") for the past 60 or 70 years, then this is just a little detail, about which we should not concern ourselves too much.
The Russian working class, through painful experience, has come to understand that there is indeed a fundamental difference between a nationalised planned economy and capitalism. At the moment of writing, the Russian miners are striking against the bourgeois government in Moscow. An increasing number of workers are learning the need to defend what is left of nationalised industry against the depredations of the nascent capitalist class. Does this mean some kind of capitulation to the bureaucracy? Not at all. The Russian workers will fight against the nascent bourgeoisie with their own methods, strikes, demonstrations, general strikes. In so doing they will soon rediscover the great revolutionary traditions of the past. But the prior condition for this is the realisation of the need to wage an all-out struggle against the immediate threat of capitalist counter-revolution.
Having blocked the road to capitalist counter-revolution in struggle, they will acquire a sense of their own strength and the necessary consciousness that will enable them to overthrow the bureaucracy and organise a healthy workers' democracy on a higher level. Such a development will not be a return to the position of the weak and impoverished Soviet state of 1917. On the basis of the technological and scientific advances made possible by the achievements of the nationalised planned economy in the past, they will be able to decree immediately a general reduction of the working week. Within one or, at most two, five-year plans, with the democratic control and participation of the masses, the whole situation will be transformed. Given the present level of development, it should be possible quite soon to introduce the 32 hour week, followed by a further reduction of hours and a general raising of living standards and culture. Then the workers' state will, more or less, correspond to the ideal norm worked out by Marx and Lenin.
The theory of 'state capitalism' today
The debate over the class nature of the USSR is not an academic exercise, but has very serious practical consequences. Trotsky had previously warned that the tendency that adopts the false theory of state capitalism runs the risk of becoming "the passive instrument of imperialism". But at the very time of a move to restore capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe, the theories of state capitalism play the most pernicious role imaginable. The thinness and lack of theoretical insight of Cliff and his supporters is shown by their complete inability to explain the processes that are unfolding before our eyes in Russia. The whole thing is dismissed with the threadbare, flippant phrase that the bureaucracy just took a "step sideways" (!
In arguing his case Cliff dismissed Trotsky's analysis of the class character of the Soviet Union as "contradictory" to Marxism. According to him, Trotsky's analysis "suffered from one serious limitation - a conservative attachment to formalism, which by its nature is contradictory to Marxism that subordinates form to content". (Cliff, Russia: A Marxist Analysis, p. 145.) This view is also upheld by another prominent colleague of Cliff, Duncan Hallas, who states: "Trotsky's analysis of the class struggle in the USSR after 1927 has clearly been shown to be erroneous." (T. Cliff and others, The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialists, p. 8.) Again, "there can be no doubt that by 1928 a new class had taken power in RussiaÉ" says another supporter of Cliff's theory, Chris Harman. "The Left Opposition was far from clear about what it was fighting. Trotsky, to his dying day, believed that the apparatus that was to hunt him down and murder him was a degenerated workers' state." (Binns, Cliff and Harman, op. cit., p. 35.) Trotsky and his supporters resisted Stalinism, but, claims Harman, their "own theories about Russia made this task more difficultÉ" (Ibid., p 36.)
As early as 1936, Trotsky, in a brilliant deduction, predicted that the bureaucracy would inevitably turn to individual ownership of the means of production, if the workers did not take power. How about the advocates of state capitalism? The move to restore individual ownership caught these ladies and gentlemen completely by surprise. What alternative could they offer to the denationalisation of industry and the abolition of the plan? This is not a merely theoretical question, but a vital one for the interests of the Russian working class. It is necessary to give a concrete answer. How does this square with state capitalism?
Despite the fact that all the bourgeois commentators in the West and the bourgeois press are expressly behind the moves for capitalist restoration, Chris Harman claims that, "the move from the command economy to the market is neither a step forward nor a step backwards, but a step sideways, from one way of organising capitalist exploitation to another"! (C. Harman and E. Mandel, The Fallacies of State Capitalism, p. 79.) For Tony Cliff, "privatisation was an irrelevant question".
This position is, of course, quite logical if you accept that the capitalist counter-revolution has happened already decades ago. Belatedly they now say they are opposed to privatisation in the ex-Stalinist states, in the same way they are opposed to privatisation in the West, although why they should do so remains a mystery. Is "state capitalism" progressive after all? In this way, the advocates of this position proceed from bad to worse! The resulting contradictions are not lost on at least some of them. A leading speaker at their summer school in 1990 put forward the view that Trotsky "had a fetish about the nationalised economy". To call into question the very notion of a nationalised planned economy as the prior condition of a movement in the direction of socialism is, indeed, implicit in their whole position. But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from this?
If nationalisation is "irrelevant" and what has taken place in Russia is only a "step sideways", then why oppose it? Surely it should be a matter of indifference whether the nascent bourgeoisie takes over from state capitalism? Of course, for the workers threatened with privatisation, things do not look so simple! But from the standpoint of the theory of state capitalism, there is absolutely nothing to choose between the two, and thus the only consistent position would be complete neutrality. (This would also apply to the question of privatisation in the West.) However, the last thing the proponents of this theory can be accused of is consistency!
Whether East or West, it is the elementary duty of every class conscious worker to defend the gains of the past. The only remaining historic gain of the Russian Revolution is the nationalised planned economy. The pro-bourgeois government of Yeltsin, backed and promoted by Western imperialism, is attempting to destroy the nationalised economy, break it up, and sell if off through privatisation. If they succeed in this, it will represent the complete elimination of the gains of the October Revolution. It will mean the destruction of the deformed workers' state and the establishment of a new capitalist state. That is after all the aim of the nascent bourgeois in Russia and the Western imperialists. The situation could not be clearer. And yet the theory of state capitalism seeks to turn things on their head and sow the maximum confusion.
Since the success of the October Revolution, Marxists have consistently defended the nationalised property rights that issued from the revolution. We did not support the Stalinist reaction or the policies of the Stalinist regime. These policies, far from defending the revolution, were assisting to weaken and undermine it. Eventually, as envisaged by Trotsky, the bureaucracy would move to consolidate its position by capitalist restoration. That is what has been taking place for the last six years or so in Russia and Eastern Europe. For Cliff and his supporters, state capitalism not only existed in the USSR, Eastern Europe, and other Stalinist states where private property has been abolished, but apparently was also widespread in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. In the words of Harman, "state intervention went further in many so-called developing countries, where the individual capitalist groups were too weak to stop the state dominating the industrial sector of the economy". He gives the examples of Egypt, Syria, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Ireland and South Korea as varied forms of state capitalism.
"It [the state] behaved very much as the East European states didÉ" states Harman. "It was an expression of a tendency throughout the world, from the 1930s through to the mid-1970s to resort to administrative, state capitalist interventions in economies prone to crisis. That phase of capitalist history is, however, drawing to a close. The state still intervenes, but with decreasing effectiveness. In the West that has meant a return to the classic slump; and in the East it means that the bureaucracies find it increasingly difficult to avoid going down the same path." (C. Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83, p. 327.)
Harman tortuously twists the facts to fit the theory of state capitalism. Countries like Argentina under Perón and Egypt under Nasser, were not new state capitalist societies, but were capitalist economies that used state intervention, which is characteristic of all capitalist countries in the epoch of imperialism, to protect the interests of the national bourgeois against competition from the big imperialist powers. Given the extent of state intervention, using Harman's logic, the system of state capitalism would be practically universal! It appears that the cold war and the hostile relations between the USSR and the West was simply a big misunderstanding as state capitalist countries were on either side of the Iron Curtain, instead of a fundamental antagonism between two social systems. If they were basically the same, why all the fuss, the diplomatic and military tensions and the arms race?
"How are we to view the end of the cold war, the collapse of the USSR and Russia's initial orientation on the US?" asks Dave Crouch, Cliff's co-thinker in Moscow. According to him, the collapse of Stalinism was no victory for US imperialism - despite what all the bourgeois commentators internationally said. "There was no 'capitulation' to the Americans. When the Russian ruling class stopped reeling from the defeats inflicted on it by the population after 1989 it set about strengthening its position both at home and abroad. The big show of post-cold war friendship between Russia and the US was necessary to both sides. The Kremlin needed to persuade its people that the bad old days were over and that reform would take them to an affluent market future." (International Socialism, No. 66, Spring 1995, pp. 12-4.)
How muddled can you get? According to Dave Crouch, the collapse of Stalinism has resulted in strengthening of state capitalism "both at home and abroad"! Crouch, despite being based in Moscow, evidently lives on another planet. He does not see the collapse of the productive forces, the chaos, the misery of the masses, the political convulsions, the military catastrophe that has overtaken the Russian people. No. Not only has there been no real change, but by some mysterious means which only Dave Crouch understands, the former regime has actually strengthened itself! Here we take leave of Marxism altogether and enter the realm of science fiction.
Apparently, the "state capitalists" of Russia and Eastern Europe, in an attempt to overcome their problems, were forced to move towards a more conventional form of market capitalism. In other words, the upheavals in Russia and Eastern Europe are purely "tactical" problems for different sections of the capitalist class to sort out. Privatisation, the key note of the bourgeois counter-revolution, is considered a trick of some kind because ownership was not really being transferred at all; selling shares was merely a "device" by which the "state capitalists" could raise revenue! According to these gentlemen, socialists could not defend one form of capitalism against another. In the early 1950s, this position resulted in Tony Cliff remaining neutral during the Korean war when the deformed workers' state of North Korea was under imperialist attack. But in the Vietnam war, due to the pressure of the students and petty bourgeois in their ranks, it was fashionable to support "state capitalist" North Vietnam against American imperialism. Today it is unfashionable to defend the planned economies of the former USSR and Eastern Europe against counter-revolution, but was fashionable to support the Romanian student's demands for capitalist restoration.
Life always takes its revenge on a false theory. The whole artificial construction of state capitalism lies in ruins. Yet instead of honestly admitting their mistake, they attempt to cling to the wreckage by their fingernails. They now try to maintain that no real change has taken place. This immediately leads them into a small error - that of being unable to distinguish between revolution and counter-revolution! According to the theory of Tony Cliff and others, capitalist counter-revolution in Russia today is impossible. Since the bureaucracy "owned the state" and played the same role as the capitalist class, where is the difference? From this point of view, it is a matter of indifference whether state property is privatised or not, since it is all "capitalism"! Thus, the so-called theory of state capitalism, if it were accepted by the Russian workers today, would completely disarm them in the face of the nascent bourgeoisie. This fact alone is sufficient to underline the vital importance of theory, which, sooner or later must be manifested in practice.
Trotsky made the Marxist position clear in the Manifesto of the Fourth International. "To be sure, the nationalisation of the means of production in one country, and a backward one at that, still does not insure the building of socialism. But it is capable of furthering the primary prerequisite of socialism, namely, the planned development of the productive forces. To turn one's back on the nationalisation of the means of production on the ground that in and of itself it does not create the well-being of the masses is tantamount to sentencing a granite foundation to destruction on the ground that it is impossible to live without walls and roof. The class conscious worker knows that a successful struggle for complete emancipation is unthinkable without the defence of conquests already gained, however modest these may be. All the more obligatory therefore is the defence of so colossal a conquest as planned economy against the restoration of capitalist relations. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones." (Trotsky, Writings 1939-40, p. 199.)
"A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains,
and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—
Let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
-Leon Trotsky
Now 75% of East Germans think that Stalinism was better than capitalism!
http://www.che-lives.com/forum/index...howtopic=28491
How rubbished is your position?
"A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains,
and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—
Let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"
-Leon Trotsky
