First Published: Marxist-Leninist Forward, Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The thesis that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union is one of the key points on which all trends in our movement are agreed. Nevertheless, there is ideological struggle over the hows and the whys of this restoration; and this is a reflection and continuation of the general ideological struggle between Marxism-Leninism and opportunism within our movement.
Red Papers 7 (“How Capitalism Has Been Restored in the Soviet Union and What This Means for the World Struggle”), published by the RU in October 1974, is one of the very few texts produced by the U.S. movement that attempts to go at all deeply into this question.[1] As I wrote in a review of this text (“Metaphysics Cannot Defeat Revisionism”) in Class Struggle No. 2) published in the summer of 1975, it contains considerable useful material for the exposure of the new tsars in the USSR, and makes a contribution from that point of view; but the theoretical framework which attempts to tie the material together, and to give a concept of the Soviet system today as a whole, is shot through with metaphysics. Important differences between socialist and capitalist forms of production are blurred over, social relationships (such as capital) are arbitrarily confused with material things (e.g. machinery) on the one hand, and equally arbitrarily divorced from “politics” on the other hand; with the result that the exposition creates enormous confusion, and reveals considerable room for doubt whether capitalism has, in fact, actually been restored.
There the open polemics rested for a year and a half. Now the RU, which has meanwhile become the RCP, has reopened them, in the form of an article by an author signing himself or herself “C.R.,” in No. 1 of the RCP’s theoretical journal The Communist, dated October 1976. The chief task which C.R. undertakes is to defend RP7 against my critical review.
This defense is of more than ordinary interest inasmuch as C.R. conducts it under the “Party” banner. As C.R. declares at the outset, RP7 in Oct. 1975 became an official publication of the RCP; and hence, according to C.R., the defense of this identical text (apart from one typographical error) is now a high and bounden “Party” duty.
A small illustration, trivial in itself, nicely illustrates the spirit in which this defense is conducted. The authors of RP7 had the frankness to admit, at one point, that “at times this account has been necessarily quite complicated ... and some readers may have found parts a bit confusing.” (p. 53) C.R. asserts, by contrast, that “Nicolaus is the only reader of RP7 to have been confused.” (p. 40) In short, the same exposition which admittedly had its shortcomings when it was pre-party literature, a circle text, has now allegedly become a model of clarity, by virtue of having had the “Party” flag draped over it. The transformation of circle work into party work signifies for C.R. not that the shortcomings in the work must be recognized and rectified with all the greater urgency, but just the contrary, that they must be covered up. Circle “vices” become party “virtues” – this is C.R.’s unspoken motto; and of course C.R. is not alone in operating by this rule.
What C.R. accomplishes, with his defense of the weak strains in RP7, is touring these points even more obviously and glaringly to the surface, and to tie them together into a consistent theme. This theme is the arbitrary separation of “economics” – questions of the forms of economic organization, of the economic foundation of society – from “politics,” i.e. questions of the superstructure, the state. The practical results of this arbitrary separation can be seen in the RCP’s policy of publishing organs with little or no Marxist political content for the working class (the “Worker” papers), and a separate “political” organ for the intelligentsia, for example. C.R.’s article reveals the variations to which this Economist separation gives; rise on the theoretical level, as applied to problems of history and political economy on a large canvas.
C.R.’s principal argument is that the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat “is most fundamentally a political struggle. The question of whether a society is moving forward through socialism towards communism or whether capitalism has been restored is, in essence, a question of which class rules.... It is not, fundamentally, a question of which forms characterize the organization of the economy, the ’free’ market, or some type of planning.” Thus C.R. poses as the champion of “class struggle,” of “politics” and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and wishes to hang the label of “revisionism” on anyone who asserts that the forms of economic organization prevailing under the dictatorship of the proletariat (and those under the bourgeois dictatorship) are also fundamental questions, fundamental precisely to the political power of the class that rules.
What C.R.’s thesis does – and C.R., as will be seen, applies it fairly consistently – is to exclude the sphere of “forms of economic organization” from the sphere of “politics.” In one breath he reminds us to “grasp class struggle as the key link,” and in the next breath he negates this truth by asserting that the question of the economic foundation of society is not also a question of class struggle and of class dictatorship. “Politics,” for C.R., is something that takes place everywhere else but in the base of society.
Thus C.R. takes the truth that “politics is the lifeblood of economic work” (Chairman Mao), and twists its meaning, making it appear as if politics existed outside economic work, as if economic work were void of political content. He drains the political lifeblood out of economic questions.
It requires only a brief survey of some high points of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat in China to expose the fallacy that the “forms of economic organization” are not “fundamental questions” for the progress or degeneration of the proletarian dictatorship.
Shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a “philosopher” by the name of Yang Hsien-chen put forward the theory of the “synthesized economic base.” He asserted that “In the period of transition the economic base of the state power of the socialist type” was of a “synthesized nature,” “embracing both the socialist sector and the capitalist sector, and the sector of individual peasant economy as well.” He argued, in other words, that the proletarian superstructure could also take the capitalist economy as its enduring foundation. He obliterated the diametrical antagonism and struggle between socialist economic forms and capitalist economic forms; and this denial was a way of opposing the establishment of a socialist economic base and of undermining the proletarian dictatorship. C.R.’s line has precisely the same political content.
Immediately following Yang came Yang’s patron and mentor, Liu Shao-chi, with the slogan of the “four freedoms.” These were “freedom” of land sale, of hiring labor, of usury, and of trading. He advocated, in other words, that the form of economic organization in which the means of production, labor power, money and products have the social form of commodities should be expanded and generalized throughout China.
According to C.R., the question of “whether a society is moving forward through socialism towards communism.... is not, fundamentally, a question of which forms characterize the organization of the economy, the ’free’ market, or ... planning.” In C.R.’s view, therefore, the Chinese proletariat should not have become fundamentally ’disturbed’ by Liu Shao-chi’s demands; they should have realized that this was ’merely’ a question of forms of economic organization, and that what “really” counts is “politics,” i.e., according to C.R., something separate from and different from “forms of economic organization.”
Undoubtedly C.R. believes that those in China who rebelled against this program concerning the forms of economic organization were (as C.R. asserts on p. 32) “looking at capitalism not from the vantage point of the working class, but from the viewpoint of the ’alienated’ petty bourgeois intellectual who is shocked and repelled by the ’vulgarity’ of a society organized according to mercantile principles .” Had they “understood,” as C.R. does, that a ”society organized according to mercantile principles” is something other than capitalist society, no doubt they would have “understood” that Liu Shao-chi was not trying to restore capitalism, he was “merely” proposing a change in the dominant “form of economic organization.” This is what C.R.’s logic amounts to.
Or take the case of the “cat fallacy” – “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” This was meant to say, it doesn’t matter whether capitalist or socialist forms of economic organization are promoted, so long as production goes up. C.R. pretends to oppose this. But C.R.’s line is based on the same premise: it doesn’t matter which forms of economic organization dominate. In place of the conclusion, so long as production goes up, C.R. puts the “political” conclusion, “so long as the proletariat stays in power.” But the basic premise is the same, and it is this premise which is revisionist.
“Grasp Revolution, Promote Production.” This is the correct guideline for strengthening the proletariat’s power both in the superstructure and in the economic base. Class struggle is the key link on both fronts, not only on one of them.
All of C.R.’s talk about “restricting bourgeois right,” (incidentally, there is not a word about bourgeois right in RP7), “narrowing the three great differences,” and so forth, omits to add one rather central and vital point: “build the socialist economy, the base of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” For C.R., the socialist economy has no positive content of its own; it exists merely as the partial absence of capitalism. Socialist economic organization, according to C.R., is merely capitalist organization restricted by the dictatorship of the proletariat; or, since that dictatorship is itself a restriction on capitalism, “socialism” in C.R.’s view may be defined simply this way: socialism is capitalism under proletarian rule. Or, even more concisely: socialism is any form of economic organization that exists under the proletarian dictatorship.
In 1921, Lenin said, “Either we lay an economic foundation for the political gains of the Soviet state, or we shall lose them all.”[2]
With this declaration, Lenin was pointing to the fact that a socialist economic foundation had only just begun to be laid. In fact, so devastated was Russia’s economic life by imperialist intervention and civil war that a “direct assault” to build socialism was impossible. As Lenin repeated and reiterated on many occasions, because of these particular historical circumstances, “we must first set to work in this small-peasant country to build solid gangways to socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to communism.”[3]
This “gangway” was the New Economic Policy (NEP), which began in 1921.
Lenin took pains to point out that this was not the ordinary state capitalism found in the economic textbooks. It was state capitalism under the proletarian dictatorship. At the same time he warned sharply against confusing the system with socialism, or concealing its capitalist character: “things would go very hard with us if we attempted to conceal it.”
Summing up the political and economic situation, therefore, in 1918 and again in identical words in 1921, Lenin said: “Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognized as a socialist order.” And, in one of the last speeches of his life, Lenin emphasized the point again: “NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.”
All these and other statements of Lenin’s on the pre-socialist character of the predominant economic forms in Russia during the NEP period are cited with their specific page references in Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR, Chs. 2 and 3.
For C.R., all these are wasted words. To my earlier critique to the effect that RP7’s view of socialist and capitalist forms of economy is so blurry that NEP Russia would have to be defined as mainly a socialist system, C.R. replies:
“Absolutely correct, sir! This was ’socialism’ because the working class ruled.” (p. 27)
And I have no doubt that C.R., staunch defender of his line that he is, would have stood up to Lenin himself, following Lenin’s warnings that the “new economic system” was not to be recognized as a socialist order, and shouted back:
“Absolutely wrong, sir! It is socialism because the working class rules.”
C.R. follows up this tasteless “polemical” sally by flinging down a sort of challenge to me: “Would Nicolaus like to make the key dividing line between socialist Russia and capitalist Russia the start of the first Five Year Plan and not the revolution of October, 1917 (as several bourgeois historians have tried to do before him)? Would he like to argue that state-capitalism (and not just its ’forms and techniques’ as Lenin saw it) was the dominant system in the Soviet Union until it was overthrown, not by the masses in proletarian revolution, but by the plan?” (p. 27)
This question reveals once again that, in C.R.’s view, revolution by the masses is something counterposed to building the economic foundations of the proletarian dictatorship. However, I will accept the challenge.
After assessing the relative rates of growth or decline of the major economic forms existing in Russia in 1925, mainly the capitalist and the socialist, Stalin notes with satisfaction the very large and growing share of the latter. However, he adds:
“For all that, our system as a whole cannot yet be called either capitalist or socialist. Our system as a whole is transitional from capitalism to socialism.”[4]
This characterization is exactly consistent with Lenin’s definition of NEP as the transition from capitalism to socialism.
At the 16th Congress in 1930 Stalin announced, in view of the “increasing preponderance of the socialised sector over the non-socialised sector,” that Soviet economy has entered “the last stage of NEP,” the stage of the “victory of socialism over capitalism.”[5]
Finally, in a report delivered in January 1933 on “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan,” Stalin declares:
“The results of the five-year plan have shown that it is quite possible to build a socialist society in one country; for the economic foundations of such a society have already been laid in the U.S.S.R.” A year later, in his report to the 17th Congress, Stalin passes in review the five different forms of social and economic structure that existed at the time NEP was introduced, traces their relative rise and fall, and declares:
“...the fifth form – the socialist form of social and economic structure – now holds undivided sway and is the sole commanding force in the whole national economy. (Stormy and prolonged applause.)”[6]
Of course, if we speak of the social order which the proletarian dictatorship aimed to achieve, then Russia was a socialist country from October 1917 on. There can be no quarrel on that score. But if we speak not of aims, but of the social order which actually existed as the dominant one, then NEP Russia indeed became socialist Russia at the time of the first Five-Year Plan. If C.R. considers this to be the line of “certain bourgeois historians” (which ones, by the way?), then C.R. will have to add to the catalogue of Stalin’s other faults the charge that he was a bourgeois historian.[7]
Since, in C.R.’s view, any form of economic organization that exists under the proletarian dictatorship is socialism, it follows that the struggle under the proletarian dictatorship to overcome the bourgeois organization of economic life and to build up a collective, planned economy in its stead must appear to C.R. as a rather pointless exercise, lacking in “class,” “political” significance. Let us therefore examine more closely C.R.’s view of economic planning.
For C.R., as we have seen, the progress or degeneration of the proletarian dictatorship “is not, fundamentally, a question of which forms characterize the organization of the economy, the ’free’ market, or some type of planning.” (p. 26) The question of “whether there is a plan or a market” is for C.R. “simply one of form.” (p. 47). Consistent with this line of thinking, C.R. begins a sentence with the phrase: “Even where the socialist economy is mainly a planned economy...” (p. 26) – clearly implying that there can be socialist economies in which planning does not predominate.
Such an assumption is an absurdity, an absurdity which flows directly from C.R.’s logic, however. The idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat which conducts political struggles in every other sphere, which exerts its leading role in every other sphere, but not in the sphere of economic organization – this is peculiar indeed. Economic planning is nothing more than a form by which the proletariat exercises leadership in the field of economic organization; it is the proletarian dictatorship’s instrument for conquering and as far as possible destroying the capitalist forms of economic organization, and of imposing its will instead of the will of the bourgeoisie on the country’s economic life.
When Stalin put the first five-year plan on the agenda in the USSR, he also had to meet the objection, coming from a certain quarter, that the Party should not concern itself with the sphere of economic organization. He said:
“There was a time, comrades, two or three years ago, when a section of our comrades, headed by Trotsky, I think (...) rebuked our Gubernia Committees, our Regional Committees and our Central Committee, asserting that the Party organisations were not competent to interfere in the country’s economic affairs and had no business to do so. Yes, there was such a time. Today, however, it is doubtful whether anybody would dare to cast such accusations at the Party organisations. That the Gubernia and Regional Committees have mastered the art of economic leadership, that the Party organisations are leading the work of economic construction and not trailing in its rear, is such a glaring fact that only the blind or imbecile would dare to deny it. The very fact that we have decided to put on the agenda of this congress the question of a five-year plan of development of the national economy, this very fact alone shows that the Party has made immense progress in the planned leadership of our work of economic construction....”[8]
C.R.’s recipe of divorcing “politics” from “economic forms” under the dictatorship of the proletariat amounts to a “division of labor” between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat should command “political life,” but the bourgeoisie should command the economy. Such a “division of labor” was precisely what Trotsky proposed at that time. It is nothing but a recipe whereby the bourgeoisie “destabilizes” the proletariat and overthrows it.
The nub of C.R.’s thinking on this particular question is laid out on the table on p. 28, where C.R. writes that “planning by itself is a classless concept.”
I am grateful to C.R. for putting this thesis down on paper. It proves that all of C.R.’s phrases about “grasp class struggle as the key link” are for C.R. just phrases, and that he promptly “forgets” them every time it comes to a concrete question of economic organization.
C.R. takes refuge in the fact that capitalists also talk of and to a degree practice something they call “planning.” “The capitalists plan every day. They plan to achieve the highest rate of profit for themselves. On the level of the single enterprise the capitalists plan production and sales to maximize the rate of profit. |And on the state level the capitalists can also engage in planning, as in many countries in Western Europe. However, as RP7 points out, ’these plans are drawn up only to insure the profitability of major monopolized industries.’” (p. 28)
Yes. But many of these same Western European countries also talk of something they call “socialism.” Moreover, there are the Eastern European countries, which talk not only of “planning” and “socialism” but also of “Marxism-Leninism.” Are we therefore to conclude that this really is planning, really is socialism and Marxism-Leninism, and that these too, like “planning,” are “classless concepts”?
This is rubbish which has nothing in common with the Marxist presentation of the question of planning. As for C.R.’s point that capitalist “plans” (or plans) are “drawn up only to insure the profitability of major monopolized industries,” this is true so far as it goes, but the workers can hear this sort of “revelation” equally well from Ralph Nader and other petty-bourgeois reformists. The Marxist analysis of planning only begins with this ABC, it does not rest there.
In the first place, the fact that the capitalist monopolies and their states are increasingly resorting to a more “planned” exploitation of the workers “should serve the genuine representatives of the proletariat as an argument proving the proximity, facility, feasibility and urgency of the |socialist revolution,” as Lenin pointed out already in State and Revolution. C.R.’s thesis that “planning is classless” wipes out any spark of such an argument in one stroke.
Secondly, and even more importantly in the present dispute, the Marxist presentation of the question also emphasizes the impossibility of a planned economy under capitalism. No matter how concentrated and centralized, capitalist economy always remains dominated by the anarchy of production, and no efforts at planning can fundamentally alter this.
As Lenin points out also in State and Revolution, “the trusts, of course, never produced, do not now produce, and cannot produce complete planning.”
Most particularly, the monopolistic organization of industry and banking, which is always the foundation of capitalist “planning,” cannot abolish economic crises.
It is tiresome to have to cite one quotation after another, but when C.R. asserts such nonsense as “classless planning” in the guise of “Marxism,” there is no choice.
“The statement that cartels can abolish crises is a fable spread by bourgeois economists who at all costs desire to place capitalism in a favorable light,” points out Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He continues: “On the contrary, the monopoly created in certain branches of industry increases and intensifies the anarchy inherent in capitalist production as a whole.”
In other words, the more that capitalist develops to the degree of concentration where planning appears technically feasible, the more feverish does the force of economic anarchy become, which continually tears the capitalists’ best-laid plans to shreds.
As A. Leontiev correctly summed up in his Political Economy, A Beginner’s Textbook, “Imperialism does not eliminate, but on the contrary, strengthens and sharpens all the fundamental contradictions in the capitalist system. Anarchy of production not only does not disappear, but, on the contrary, assumes gigantic proportions and gives rise to particularly devastating consequences.” (pp. 223)
It is for these reasons that Stalin rightly treated with scorn any assertions that a planned economy could be achieved as well by the bourgeoisie as by the proletariat. He observed:
“Reference is sometimes made to American and German economic bodies which, it is alleged, also direct their national economy in a planned way. No, comrades, those countries have not yet achieved this, and never will achieve it, as long as the capitalist system exists there. To be able to lead in a planned way it is necessary to have a different system of industry, a socialist and not a capitalist system.
“True, they also have something in the nature of plans; but these are forecast plans, guess-work plans, not binding on anybody, and they cannot serve as a basis for directing the country’s economy. Things are different in our country. Our plans are not forecast plans, not guess-work plans, but directive plans, which are binding upon our leading bodies, and which determine the trend of our future economic development on a country-wide scale.”
“You see, we have a fundamental difference here.”[9]
C.R.’s notion of “classless planning” completely glosses over this fundamental difference. If “planning is classless,” then there is no reason why a capitalist economy cannot be a planned economy just as much as a socialist one.
The idea of a “planned capitalism” was in fact (and remains) a favorite theme of the treacherous Social-Democratic “theoreticians,” who, in Leontiev’s words:
“...try to maintain that with the growth of monopoly there is an end to the blind forces of the market. Capitalism supposedly organizes itself, competition disappears, anarchy of production is eliminated, crises become things of the past, planned, conscious organization predominates The theory of organized capitalism is a further development of Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism.” (p. 223)
Precisely such a Social-Democratic fable is what C.R. dishes out not only when he dignifies “many countries of Western Europe” as planned economies, but even more so, when he describes the USSR today.
To be sure, C.R. throws in a couple of figleaf phrases about “anarchy of production” to cover himself. His main thesis, however, is that “there still is a single state ’plan’” in the USSR today (p. 36); the Soviet economy “is a state-monopoly capitalist economy in which there is a unified and directed state plan” (p. 40, my emphasis); it is “run according to a plan” (p. 46) and (yes, Virginia) “there really is a plan in the Soviet Union.” (p. 48, my emphases). Remark that C.R. uses “planning” with or without quotation marks.
In short, when I pointed out in my earlier critique that the image of the USSR painted by RP7 resembled Kautsky’s myth of “ultra-imperialism,” I was precisely correct. It is the resurrection and further development of that myth; it is the Social-Democratic fantasy of “organized capitalism.”
What C.R. glosses over is the contradictions and antagonisms within the structure of Soviet capitalism. The well-known fact that Soviet state-monopoly capitalism is more highly concentrated and centralized than any other in the world today also means that a more feverish anarchy, a more intense disorder is packed into a more compact, dense and hence more volatile, unstable, explosive mass than elsewhere.
We must ask C.R.: if Soviet capitalism is able to achieve such a degree of “organization” that it can be “run according to a unified and directed state plan,” why cannot U.S. capitalism be run in the same way? If the Social-Democratic myth of “planned capitalism” has come true for the USSR, what prevents it from coming true for the U.S.A.?
In reality, Soviet economic “planning” today – with the possible but by no means definite exception of the directly military sector – plays just as much the role of rearguard to the march of anarchy as it does in the Western European countries. I have presented my research findings on this score in the body of Chs. 18-20 of Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR, with supplementary evidence in the other chapters. These data, taken from Soviet sources themselves, especially from the Soviet “planners,” demonstrate that the USSR today is not an economy dominated by planning but by the anarchy of production. It could not be otherwise in a capitalist economy.
C.R., who displays an aristocratic aloofness on the question whether economic life under the proletarian dictatorship is or is not organized in a planned way, nevertheless considers it a cardinal question touching the honor of RP7 and of the RCP to “prove” that the capitalist economy under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the USSR today is a “planned economy.” I suggest, firstly, that C.R. is using the Soviet Union as a screen onto which to project in slightly disguised form his revisionist, Kautskyite illusions about an “organized capitalism”; and secondly, that C.R. and the RCP will be wasting their (and our) time in trying to “prove” this thesis. There is already enough Soviet social-imperialist, CPUSA revisionist, Trotskyite and other bourgeois propaganda about Soviet “planning” today, and we do not need the RCP to regurgitate it for us.
Just as C.R. would like to date the establishment of the socialist social order in the USSR from October 1917, so his logic leads him in the direction of dating the re-establishment of the capitalist social order (as the dominant system) from the moment of Stalin’s last heartbeat, in 1953, if not earlier. The Klonsky circle’s thinking has drifted in the same direction. This question of when the full restoration of the capitalist system occurred is so filled with implications which both C.R. and the Klonsky circle blissfully ignore, that it deserves to be treated separately at another time. In my own view, which is laid out in Restoration, the Soviet system during the Khrushchov years (1956-64) had a transitional character, much as did NEP Russia, but “upside down” and “backward.” The bourgeoisie (arising on the soil of bourgeois right under socialism) had seized state power, and was using its control of the superstructure to restore capitalism. It fully succeeded at this task – that is, capitalism was fully restored – with the “new economic system” measures of 1965.
But doesn’t this mean that the USSR would have had to be a state of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, one of the fascist type, before the full restoration of capitalism? Yes; that is so. The superstructure played the “leading” role in the restoration, moving in advance of the consolidation of the economic base along capitalist lines. To point out that the superstructure can play the principal and leading role, and the economic base can follow behind – during the particular and peculiar conditions of the transition period – is not contrary to materialism.[10]
It is quite another thing, however, to assert that this situation did not evolve and become transformed into its opposite, but that the superstructure of Soviet capitalism continues today to determine its economic foundation, and that this state of affairs has become a permanent feature of the Soviet social structure.
While not denying in any conditions the reaction of the superstructure on the base, Marxist analysis holds that, in general, it is the base that determines the superstructure. Thus, for example, Marxist analysis shows that the bourgeois political parties and bourgeois states act in the way they do (i.e. they repress the working class and the nationalities, they conduct wars, etc.) not because they “prefer” it but because it is dictated to them by the interests of their class, and these interests are in turn determined by the place of their class in the system of production. Thus Marxism explains, for example, imperialist war not as the product of the “character” or “mentality” of the politicians in power, but as a result of the basic structure of monopoly capitalism, its built-in expansive drives, etc. Marxism analyzes the imperialist state, therefore, not as something that “stands above” the imperialist monopolies and “commands” them, but just the opposite, as the servant and instrument of these monopolies, which is commanded by them.
According to RP7, however, the system that was established in the USSR with the restoration of capitalism is quite different from this. Unlike all other capitalist countries, in which the bourgeois parties and the state bureaucracy are subordinated to the monopoly corporations, in the USSR allegedly the reverse is true: the monopoly corporations are “subordinated” to the political interests of the state bureaucracy which is “run” by a political party. (RP7, p. 51). This allegation dovetails with C.R.’s idea of the Soviet economy being “controlled” by a “single, unified, directed state plan.” Thus, instead of the political apparatus serving the capitalist monopolies, as in every other capitalist country, in the USSR the capitalist monopolies allegedly serve the political apparatus. So thinks C.R.
What does this idea mean? It means that the Soviet political apparatus, the state, stands not only above the people in general (the working class and peasantry), it also stands above the capitalist monopolies. It is a political apparatus which, unlike any other in the world, allegedly stands above all classes, and subordinates all classes to itself.
What is this notion? It is nothing but revisionism on the question of the state; it is nothing but a disguised echo of the Brezhnev propaganda machine which claims that it, too, “governs” the Soviet trusts and combines rather than being the servant and instrument of these capitalist monsters. Having swallowed the myth of “classless planning” and echoed the fable of “planned capitalism,” C.R. is compelled likewise to parrot the essentials of revisionist propaganda about a “classless state.”
The fact that in the USSR the capitalist monopolies appear in the form of state monopolies, so that economic and political power both display the “state” label, must not be used as a cover for smuggling in revisionism on the state. As Stalin noted in Economic Problems of Socialism, the so-called “coalescence of the monopolies with the state machine” which makes up state-monopoly capitalism is in reality “the subjugation of the state machine to the monopolies.”[11]
Just such a subjugation of the political apparatus to the capitalist monopolies is what took place in the restoration process in the USSR; the reader will find it described in Chs. 18-22 of Restoration.
What is asserted in RP7 and by C.R., in contrast, is a Kautskyite myth which, if C.R. dared to follow it through consistently, leads to the conclusion that imperialism is a policy preferred by Brezhnev and a few cohorts, which they compel the Soviet capitalist monopolies to pursue whether they like it or not. Remove this handful of politicians, and the driving force behind imperialism disappears. Nonsense! Brezhnev and his cohorts are imperialist politicians because they are the servants of the monopoly-capitalist economic organization, which they themselves brought into life and promoted.
Again, a question to C.R.: if it is possible in the USSR for a bourgeois political party to subordinate the capitalist monopolies to itself, and to keep them there, why is it not possible in any other capitalist country?
The worst of it is that C.R., like RP7, imagines that Nazi Germany was the model of such a supra-class party and state. “Under the Nazis all sections of German imperialism were subordinated to the state bureaucracy run by the Nazi party. In return for abandoning a certain amount of ’independence,’ the big corporations were rewarded in a number of ways.... The economy, of course, remained thoroughly capitalist but the state played the leading role.” (p. 51, RP7) And this is what C.R. imagines is the situation in the USSR.
This picture of German fascism, however, is a fake, as I pointed out already in my earlier critique. It is drawn from the writings of the bourgeois, liberal British writer Tim Mason; and Mason, in turn, consciously or not, drew it from the self-defense speeches made by the Krupps and Thyssens and the heads of the I.G. Farben trust at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. All these financial oligarchs claimed that they and their banks and corporations had had nothing to do with fascism and the war, but that the Nazi party had “forced” them to participate, that “all sections of German imperialism” had been “subordinate” to this bunch of fascist politicians.
What is C.R.’s reply? Not a word about the substance of my argument, only a blanket defense of RP7 and of “poor Tim Mason,” whose work C.R. calls “illuminating” (p 39) – and, on top of it, a broadside attack on Dimitrov’s definition of fascism. Now, we may well disagree about the strategy of a United Front Against Fascism, and we may argue about one or another secondary aspect of Dimitrov’s definition (e.g. is fascism backed only by one sector of monopoly capital or by all sectors unanimously) – but when we deny that fascism is a form of dictatorship by monopoly capital, and instead assert that fascism is a kind of dictatorship over monopoly capital, then we are leaving the ground of anything that can even loosely be called “Marxism;” we are on the ground of blatant bourgeois apologetics. The Nazis themselves, in their everyday propaganda, presented their party and the state in precisely this light, in order to conceal from the masses that they were the lackeys of finance capital.
Shame on C.R. for conducting this kind of a “defense” of RP7!
As for the other points that C.R.’s polemic raises, it is not worth the space and time to answer them here. Most of them are covered in Restoration. Instead, a few words in summary and conclusion.
(1) C.R.’s ideas on one question after another are variations on the basic theme of Economism, a form of revisionism that sets up a wall between the everyday working world of the working class, the material foundation of society, on the one hand, and the world of “politics,” particularly Marxist politics, on the other hand.
(2) This metaphysical separation leads inevitably to a revisionist line on both “economics” and “politics,” both the economic foundation and the state. In both ways it liquidates the proletarian dictatorship.
(3) The “Party” label is not a magic wand which can erase or rectify the weaknesses in a piece of political literature. By conducting his defense of the revisionist streak in RP7 under the “Party” banner, C.R. has only engaged his whole party in an even more open and broadside attack against the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism.
[1] The Klonsky circle’s recent decision to stop distribution of Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR (Liberator Press, 1975) – after more than 10,000 copies had been sold – now leaves the RCP’s Red Papers 7 a virtual monopoly in the field of home-grown literature on this topic. Comrade Avakian is very grateful to you for this, comrade Klonsky. (And so is Mr. Silber of the Guardian!)
[2] “Second Congress of Political Education Departments” (Oct. 1921), Collected Works Vol. 33, p. 73.
[3] “Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” (Oct. 1921), CW Vol. 33, p. 58.
[4] “Fourteenth Congress of the CPSU(B),” Works, Vol. 7, p. 317; emphasis added.
[5] Works, Vol. 12, p. 315.
[6] Works, Vol. 13, pp. 219, 316.
[7] C.R.’s line on this point, not coincidentally, is the same as the Klonsky line expressed in the Klonsky “credo” and in The Call Nov. 30, and my reply to C.R. on this point can serve likewise as a reply to M.K. (See M-L FORWARD No. 1, “Marxism or Klonskyism?”) Many of the Klonskyite points – more than there is space to deal with here – are either apparently directly cribbed from C.R.’s article, or represent an ESP-like “meeting of the minds.”
[8] Works, Vol. 10, p. 334
[9] Works, Vol. 10, pp. 334-35.
[10] See Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” Selected Works Vol. I, pp. 335-336.
[11] Problems of Socialism, FLP, p. 43.