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Date Sent: December 13 2005 11:35:15 - (read)
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Theses on the fall of the USSR and the nature of the Soviet and Soviet-type regimes
This is my "take" on this issue in a highly condensed form.
Mike Macnair
I. The place of the USSR in the long historical view
1. Classes continue to exist after the fall of capitalism and until the petty proprietors are absorbed into the proletariat. The "petty proprietors" includes not only peasants and artisans, but also the owners of intellectual property, particularly the intelligentsia/ professional middle classes. The absorption of this segment of the petty proprietors into the proletariat occurs through the skills, which they monopolize as a class, becoming devalorized through all proletarians acquiring them (universal education/ higher education; workers' control leading to workers' management; rotation of managerial and state posts; abolition of all forms of state and commercial secrecy and confidentiality; etc.).
2. Hence the proletariat continues to need a state, i.e. a special bureaucratic apparatus, or special apparatus of coercion, until this process is completed, and the formulation of withering away, not immediate abolition, of the state is correct. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the class rule of the proletariat as a class over the state bureaucratic apparatus and over the petty proprietors, which constantly attacks all manifestations of attempts by the petty proprietors and state bureaucrats to maintain forms of monopoly right in skills, information, and positions of power.
3. All rising classes hitherto have had to experiment until they found a form of state which would answer to their class control, at first creating forms of state which collapse towards prior class forms. This is visible in early feudalism (sixth to seventh century Western barbarian kingdoms, and perhaps the immediate post-Byzantine Islamic regimes) as well as in early capitalism (Italian city-state republics and C16-C17 "kingdom of God" attempts). There are strong reasons to suppose that the same is true of the proletariat. If marxism is scientific socialism, we are bound to learn through trial and error modifying theoretical predictions. In the long historical perspective, therefore, the fall of the USSR is merely the failure of a state form which, though proletarian in its inception, proved insufficiently strongly tied to the proletariat to resist recapture by the bourgeoisie. We do not abandon the project of the dictatorship of the proletariat (working class rule) but learn the lessons and go on.
II. Bureaucratic capture of workers’ organisations and states
4. The Russian October was (as the left socialists predicted) simultaneously the forerunner/ trigger, and an outlier in a backward country, of a powerful revolutionary movement of the working class in Europe as a whole in 1917-20. The failure of the USSR is ultimately merely the long-delayed result of the failure of this European revolutionary movement. This failure stems from the proletariat's loss of control over its organizations in most of Europe, which were captured by the petty proprietors of intellectual property in the shape of the party and union bureaucracy and thereby reconciled to the bourgeois order - either as labour lieutenants of capital, as in Germany and France, or as trade unions combined with petty sects competing for "niche markets" in the bourgeois political marketplace, as in England and the USA.
5. Russia was exceptional in this process in that the process of loss of proletarian control did not take effect until after the seizure of power. There are two sides to this exception.
The first is that Lenin and his co-thinkers actually organized the socialist left into an organized faction capable of taking independent political action - while the socialist left elsewhere in Europe developed only a merely ideological polemic with the right within the framework of the existing workers' organizations. As a result the Bolsheviki were capable of acting as a political leadership in 1917, while the Spartakists, etc., lacked this capability in 1918-19. It is probably wrong to see this as a matter of Lenin's political-organizational genius. Rather it resulted primarily from the semi-accident that the Bolsheviki captured an episodic majority of the RSDLP in 1903 and thereafter, though they remained within a common party identification with the Mensheviki until 1912 and in many respects until 1917, and did episodically compromise for common action with the Mensheviki, refused to carry compromise to an extent that would bar them from independent action.
The second is the activity of the Tsarist state in conducting an inefficient repression of the socialists and of trade unions. If the Tsarist state had conducted an efficient repression of the socialists, they probably would have been wiped out, as the Bolshevik oppositions were in the 1930s USSR or the Indonesian CP in the 1960s. If it had abandoned repression altogether, the trade unions and the socialists would have developed a bureaucratic apparatus or apparatuses, which would have become reconciled with the bourgeoisie either as labour lieutenants of capital or as competing sects.
The result of inefficient repression was that the party could develop through various cracks in the repression, while, at the same time, the leadership (a) was subjected to rotation of office in the form of arrest by the Tsarist police, and (b) actually disposed of no power over the local branches and sectoral fractions other than its political authority, so that this authority and the unity of the party was constructed purely through ideological debate.
6. The expansion in the former Tsarist Empire/ USSR of the party and union apparatus at the expense of its dependence on the proletarian ranks began almost immediately on the seizure of power, as could be predicted from understanding it as the same phenomenon which had already destroyed the proletariat's control of its organizations elsewhere in Europe. The Bolsheviks' (including Trotsky's) failure to understand the process can be seen in four ways:
(1) They persistently attributed the whole process in Russia to one element of it, which was the "cultural capture" of the workers' officials by the culture of the Tsarist late-feudal bureaucracy (blat, chains of personal patron-client relations, etc.).
(2) Reflecting this mis-assessment, their responses to it (Control Commission, purges and levies, Rabkrin, etc) in fact merely created more bureaucrats and more power of the bureaucracy over dissent.
(3) They attributed the failure of the Second International not to capture by the party and union apparatuses but to capture by "accidental elements" in the socialist intelligentsia or "opportunists", not in the sense of rightists as such but of career bourgeois politicians who saw an opportunity to obtain office by attaching themselves to the workers' movement (a real but secondary phenomenon).
(4) Reflecting this mis-assessment, their ideas for the organization of the parties of the Third International involved both rigid organizational centralism, and discipline requirements designed to keep out "accidental elements". These positions, characterized by Lenin as "too Russian", facilitated rapid bureaucratic capture of the European parties of the Comintern in the 1920s, so that serious oppositions developed only in the colonies and semi-colonies, where bourgeois or other imperfect repression prevented full implementation of "Bolshevization".
In the light of this much of what Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders wrote about the dictatorship of the proletariat during and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian civil war has to be discarded as being addressed to Russian specificities and even there inadequate.
7. The result of the error on the failure of the SI was - and here Trotsky was right - that the parties of the Comintern in the imperialist centres were turned into instruments of the foreign policy of the USSR - when the proletarian dictatorship should have had the opposite result, that the foreign policy of the USSR served the needs of the international proletariat. In 1931-33 in Germany, 1936 (possibly) in France, and 1936-39 in Spain, the effect was to lead to major defeats for the working class, block revolutionary developments, and thereby reinforce the isolation of the Russian revolution. This was almost certainly also true of the policy of the PCI and PCF in the immediate aftermath of WWII and may be of that of the CPGB both in the run up to and during the 1945 Labour Government. In the colonial world, however, the problem was a different one: that the ideological system developed to justify Moscow's diplomatic manoeuvres with "democratic imperialism", etc., was capable of paralysing the action of some, though not all, CPs.
8. The problem of bureaucratic capture of workers' organizations is logically identical to the problem of the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat - subordination of the state to the proletariat - as a state form. A state is, after all, merely a very successful armed organisation. It is a problem which remains unsolved even in theory.
The solution of the Left Communists, Spontaneists and Autonomi - rejection of permanent organization, or of intervention in bourgeois politics - has proved over eighty years to create organizations which are ineffective and are often in reality as strongly dominated by the intellectual petty proprietors as their opponents. The left Maoists' attempt in the Cultural Revolution to pursue a similar policy of the immediate destruction of the middle classes was ineffective and massively destructive. The idea that anti-bureaucratic ideological commitment is enough is disproved by the fate of the Trotskyists, including state-capitalist and bureaucratic-collectivist variants, over sixty years.
On theoretical grounds - that we are concerned with the capture of workers' organizations by a segment of the petty proprietors who then convert the organization and the leadership posts into a form of property and throw up a (Louis) Bonaparte to "send rain and sun from on high", the keys should involve:
complete transparency (openness of the organization's conduct of its debates - no secrets from the class - and of the leadership's - no secrets from the membership);
complete freedom of the members to organize tendencies, factions, caucuses, etc, running across the official organizations of the organization and outside it;
systematic education of all members as potential leaders; and
some form of rotation of officers or term limits as a means to resist the conversion of leadership positions into a form of property.
The difficulty is that the positive experimental evidence is so weak (there's plenty of negative experimental evidence!). It does, however, seem to be clear that only those socialist organizations which have been subjected to "inefficient repression", with the result that the leadership is financially weak relative to the local and sectoral organizations, subjected to ‘term limits’ by the repression, and hence dependent on immediate political persuasion for authority and resources, have been capable of playing a revolutionary role (not, notice, all such organizations; scientific political ideas or an approximation to them is also necessary).
III. The illusion of the worker-peasant alliance and Bolshevik Bonapartism
9. Hitherto we have been concerned with a general problem of proletarian revolution, applicable as much in the imperialist centres as in the colonies and semicolonies and centrally relevant to the surviving bureaucratic regimes. But there is also a specific problem which affected Russia, Poland, southeastern Europe, China, Korea and Indochina (though not Czechoslovakia, the GDR or Cuba). This is the local dominance of small peasant agricultural production at the time of the overthrow of capitalism. The problem is that the small peasantry is a segment of the class of petty proprietors. If we analyze the petty proprietors as a class in marxist terms it is clear that:
(1) They seek (as insurance as much as for accumulation) to retain the whole of their surplus product for themselves, so that in the absence of market pressures on them, or slave or capitalist large-scale agriculture, no civilisation can exist without coercive extraction of the agricultural surplus from the peasantry.
(2) The male petty proprietors have a class interest in the exploitation - in the strict sense, since it forms the basis of small-scale accumulation - of their labour of their dependent wives and children, and therefore in patriarchal legal status rules which are opposed to the interest of the proletariat in class unity through the emancipation of women and youth.
(3) The peasant petty proprietors are, due to their atomization, incapable of ruling for themselves, and therefore as far as they take political action tend to throw up the absolutist bureaucratic state. (This is also true of the urban petty proprietors, but by an indirect route. Their horizon tends to be limited to the locality, and they throw up localised guild-corporatist forms which then through their localism throw up the absolutist bureaucratic state.)
In consequence, there can be no strategic alliance of the workers and peasants, smychka, or "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" except in the very short-term transitional sense of the Russian soviets between February and October. What is possible in the long term is either (a) the dictatorship of the landlord class supported by the bourgeoisie over the peasantry (Tsarism, pre-1945 Italy, Franquist Spain); or (b) the dictatorship of the proletariat over the peasantry (which may be more generous than the landlord or bourgeois class dictatorship, but cannot allow the peasantry to retain the whole agricultural surplus or its proceeds, and must therefore coerce the peasantry); or (c) the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the peasantry leading to the liquidation of the peasantry as a class (England, the US, north Germany, etc.) or (d) a bourgeois state which partially acts as a Bonaparte to preserve the peasantry (France, South Germany, post-1945 Italy, EU) , or (e) an absolutist state as the Louis-Bonapartist political representative/ master of the petty proprietors.
10. The political problem this poses in countries dominated by peasant agriculture is this. If tomorrow capitalism was overthrown in Britain or the USA, the dictatorship of the proletariat over the petty proprietors would be a dictatorship of the substantial majority over a minority, albeit a significant minority. The same was true (obviously) in the GDR, since the north-east was the centre of capitalist agribusiness in Germany, and (less obviously) in Cuba in 1961, since landless urban and rural workers were the clear majority of the Cuban population in 1958. But in Russia in 1917 the dictatorship of the proletariat over the petty producers meant the dictatorship of a class perhaps 10% of the population over the remaining 90%. The problem was less acute but still present in south-eastern Europe and Poland (though not in Czechoslovakia and the GDR), and equally present, albeit under different rural and urban forms, in China, Korea and Indochina.
This placed the Bolsheviks in a dilemma, not when they attempted to take power as the advance guard of the European revolution, but when they decided to hold on and wait for the European revolution - to try to retain power, after the European revolution had ebbed by 1921. If they stood openly for the dictatorship of the proletariat over the peasantry, they would lose the peasant base which they had obtained by adopting the SRs' land reform programme and be destroyed by an uprising of the large majority of the country: this was the hidden meaning of the Makhnovites, ‘Greens’ / Antonovschina and of Kronstadt. If, in contrast, they attempted to politically represent the peasantry, they could do so only by crushing the struggles of the proletariat and its most advanced sections - by becoming a collective Louis Bonaparte. But in this case - unlike Louis Bonaparte, who in the last analysis rested on the bourgeoisie, or the similar Byzantine or pre-revolutionary Chinese regimes, which in the last analysis rested on slaveholder and landlord classes - the Bolsheviks could not count on the peasantry's class fear, but could only rely on ideology and direct coercion.
11. The NEP was the Bolsheviks' attempt to square this circle, at least temporarily, by making a deliberate, explicit and partial retreat to capitalism (in the form of a kind of state capitalism). It performed well for a short period and then ran up against the resistance of the peasantry in the form of the scissors crisis. The Left Opposition offered technical solutions to this problem (Preobrazhensky) which failed to recognize that the scissors crisis was the expression of an underlying struggle of the peasantry to retain the whole product of the agricultural surplus, that is, a form of tax strike, a class struggle against what was still de facto a dictatorship of the cities over the country; or, in the alternative (Trotsky, Radek) urged a more strongly left course in international affairs and the Comintern in the hope of triggering the European revolution and thereby saving the USSR. The right (Bukharin) claimed the problem would correct itself.
From 1928 Stalin finally embarked, with the support of the majority of the former left, on the road of coercion of the peasantry (and in international affairs on the adventurism of the "Third Period"). The results are well known: enormous destruction of forces of production in agriculture, mass starvation, and coercion turned first against agricultural kulaks and 'saboteurs', then against urban 'saboteurs', and against the party itself, and the creation of industrial penal slavery under the aegis of the GPU.
Along with this went internal passports and the development of factory-by-factory and town-by-town corporatism, a curious caricature of the regimes of the later Roman empire and Byzantium, pre-revolutionary China, and eighteenth century Germany. The effect was a deproletarianisation of the urban working class even as this class grew. Without a labour market - which implies freedom of movement of workers and of capital - a working class is not a proletariat in the sense of Marx’s analysis, but an urban serf class. There was also a major growth of state slavery, in the form of the gulag.
Analytically, this turn was - paradoxical as it may seem - the completion of the shift of the CPSU to becoming the political representative of the peasantry. The peasantry cannot rule: and in consequence it can only, when it acts independently, find a master who will coerce it to produce for the society. That master is the absolutist state. The forced collectivizations and their consequences were not the result of Stalin the monster, or even merely of economic mismanagement. They were the consequences of letting the peasantry loose in the first place through the land reform and the ideology of the smychka. That this is the case can be demonstrated easily enough from the parallels in other Soviet-model states. The very same phenomenon - scissors crisis, leading to a wildly ultra-left swing to coercing the peasantry under the name of "mobilizing" them, leading to mass starvation, etc. - can be seen most clearly in China's "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution". Milder forms of the same phenomenon have occurred in every soviet-style regime to have had a significant peasantry in the first place or to have created one through "land reform". A more extreme version can be seen in Cambodia under Pol Pot.
12. Trotsky anticipated in 1938 that the Stalin regime would collapse in the face of the coming world war. This assessment proved to be wrong. The frontal assault of Nazism in 1941 called forth an enormous mobilization of the Russian people (note the deliberate non-class expression of this point - workers, peasants and urban intelligentsia alike) under the banner of the defence of Holy Russia and the global people's front with US and British imperialism. The Soviet bureaucracy was significantly reshaped politically, but the regime held together at the head of this mass mobilization. The victories of the USSR opened the way for the creation of new Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe, China, Korea and Vietnam.
But the underlying contradictions remained in place and were exported to the new “peoples’ democracies”. Underlying them all was the continued stubborn resistance of the peasantry, even under forced collectivization, leading to agricultural underproduction; and of the working class, "peasantized", or more exactly reduced to guild-corporatist subordination, by the absolutist political regime. In both cases this resistance took the form of go-slow: again a form of resistance familiar from slave and feudal regimes. On its own this would not have broken the state; but the USSR and its satellite regimes became, from the middle 1970s, subject to a new form of attack from world imperialism.
IV. Capitalist resistance and counter-attacks
13. The bourgeoisie as a class tolerated, for a while, being governed by feudal-absolutist regimes it did not control. But as the feudal regimes decayed, the bourgeoisie was increasingly driven to tax strikes against the use of state revenue for feudal-dynastic purposes; from tax strikes to political organization; and from political organization to the overthrow of the feudal state regimes and the creation of bourgeois states. These latter are characteristically based round central banks and bourgeois-contractual forms of corrupt dependency of the state officials on the major capitals, and structured and legitimated by “the rule of law”. Both the feudal-dynastic and the feudal-clerical elites fought back, but by the 1780s (when the French feudal state’s intervention in the American Revolution succeeded only in assisting the creation of a new bourgeois state and bankrupting the French state) their capacity for global, as opposed to local, resistance was gone.
As a result, since the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie’s willingness as a class to tolerate state regimes it does not control has been limited to cases (a) where an old state is tolerated, on condition that it does not seriously interfere with capital, because the alternative appears to be the rise of the proletariat (1848 and after); and (b) as in the case of the USSR and its satellites, where the bourgeoisie has attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow the state (1918-21, 1941-45) and calculates that the political-military costs of the attempt are too high for an immediate assault. In other cases, any escape of the state power from bourgeois class control is met with immediate attacks first on the state’s financial structure from the banks, then on the productive economy from individual capitals attempting to disinvest. This pattern of capitalist behaviour has been repeatedly evidenced, not only in cases where the bourgeoisie has actually lost state power (the USSR, eastern Europe, China, north Korea, Cuba, Vietnam) but also in cases where the bourgeoisie merely fears that it may lose state power: disinvestment and economic dislocation in the former Tsarist empire began well before October 1917, and the same phenomena appeared in Italy and Germany in the early 1920s, Spain in the 1930s, in several neocolonial countries faced with revolution up to the present date (most recently Nicaragua), and even, on a milder scale, in response to the popular front governments in the aftermath of WWII, and the 1945 and 1974 Labour Governments in Britain.
The bourgeoisie does not need to conspire for this purpose (though conspiracies undoubtedly do occur): it is the natural and rational response of every individual capitalist to the loss of political security, so long as capitalist class control remains in any significant country. Thus the idea of a “national bourgeoisie” which is more committed to the nation-state than to its class position is illusory; and so is any strategy based on retaining the “mixed economy” by avoiding as far as possible statization of the economy.
14. In addition, the evidence is now clear that the capitalist class is from its earliest days international in its operations, and that the bourgeois order – even a nascent bourgeois order – always contains a ‘world-hegemonic’ state which is the ultimate guarantor of international money and the international market. Venice played this role in the later middle ages, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Britain from the eighteenth to the early twentieth, and the USA from the 1940s to today.
Because the world-hegemonic state is the ultimate guarantor of the international market, its calculations are governed as much by geopolitical considerations affecting this market, as by the immediate interests of the particular capitals on which it depends. Thus Britain in the 1790s intervened, not primarily against French capital, but against the threat of plebeian democratic revolution.
For the same reasons, the British in 1918-21 orchestrated intervention against the Russian Revolution, and the USA since 1945 has engaged in a series of political interventions of one sort or another which were against the immediate interests of significant sectors of US capital, and probably against the immediate interests of capital as a whole, but consciously aimed by state strategy to secure the interests of capital as a global class (most clearly the Vietnam war).
It is thus necessary to in order to understand the actions of the world-hegemonic state to analyze them not only through class interests but also through the conscious conceptions of state/ class strategy held by central state actors. As a result, political dynamics and very localised political ideologies can here, at least temporarily, override objective class interests. This means that the evolution of policy can only be discussed historically and not derived directly by either formal or dialectical deduction from underlying dynamics.
15. The first response of British imperialism and its Entente and US partners to the Soviet regime was to attempt reconquest through the White generals or to carve out as many dependent states as possible from the body of the former Tsarist empire. By 1921 this policy had been clearly defeated, and the most far-sighted element of the British imperialist centre, the wing of the Liberals led by Lloyd George, sought to exploit NEP to restore capitalism. However, forces linked to the Whites were strong enough in the domestic political relation of forces and in the state apparatuses in both Britain and France to block a change of policy in this direction, and the former Entente powers continued to maintain a regime of, in effect, trade sanctions against the USSR through the 1920s and 1930s.
Lenin and Chicherin, while fighting for trade opening with the Entente powers, more realistically sought to develop Russian relations with the defeated German imperialism, and achieved a substantial agreement at Rapallo (1922). However, here, too, the internal relation of forces was an obstacle to the development of trade relations producing the sort of broad-ranging trade and investment the USSR needed. The German advocates of the Rapallo policy came from the military-heavy industrial complex and their political representatives on the nationalist-revanchist right. German light industry, and the German Social-Democracy, was committed to a rapprochement with the Entente powers and opposed this policy. Thus, though Rapallo did allow some Russo-German trade and German investment in Russian reconstruction, it was skewed towards heavy industry and did not alleviate the problem of relations between the proletariat and peasantry.
Stalin’s turn to quasi-re-enserf the peasantry through forced collectivisation and the five year plans took place within this framework of semi-blockade. Through the idea of ‘socialism in one country’ it actually celebrated the semi-blockade - thereby representing the nationalism of the petty proprietors even as the regime made itself their master.
16. In the aftermath of the 1929 crash the international relation of forces was profoundly altered. Britain was forced to major cuts in arms expenditure which entailed losing its absolute global military-technical predominance, while the US under Roosevelt and Germany after Hitler’s coup embarked on deficit-led public works programmes, including arms expansion. A sector of US capital assisted in funding German rearmament, clearly with a view partly to finally breaking British power, partly to German eastwards expansion and conquest of the USSR. A sector of the British state elite clearly accepted this latter project and it informed their attitudes to the Austrian Anschluss and to the 1938 Sudetenland crisis. In this sense the political dynamic had shifted again to a policy of reconquest, leading up to 1941.
However, the specific configuration of diplomatic dynamics, and of British and French domestic political dynamics, in 1939-40 had the effect that the Nazi regime set out to conquer western Europe before attacking the USSR, and found itself through this course of action and through its alliances with Italy and Japan in direct conflict first with Britain and, from 1941, with the US.
Under these conditions the Stalin regime was able in response to the 1941 invasions to mobilise its population under the banner of national self-defence and an international People’s Front, i.e. alliance with the western ‘democratic capitalists’, and received significant material aid from the western imperialist Allies.
This configuration of forces inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Nazi regime, allowed the Kremlin to create a glacis in eastern Europe and northern Korea and CPs in Yugoslavia, Albania, China and northern Vietnam to seize power, and thereby gave a powerful ideological impulsion to the ideologies of people’s front, national roads to socialism and party monolithism. It also allowed a very substantial technology transfer to the Moscow regime both from the US and from the defeated Germans, and thereby gave a powerful material impulsion to the Soviet economy which was not to be exhausted till the later 1960s.
17. In response to these developments US policy-makers in the late 1940s developed the systematic policy of ‘containment’ of communism. This was in substance a return to the policy of blockade on a more systematic level: trade controls were accompanied by a large-scale military presence of the US and its allies at the borders, and by major concessions to the European (Marshall Aid, GATT 1, Bretton Woods), and, later, the east Asian bourgeoisies and to their working classes, to make capitalism more attractive to the populations of the borderlands on both sides of the line. The Soviet and soviet-modelled regimes responded by accentuating their commitments to nationalism and ‘socialism in one country’ and by positive steps of self-blockade, most strikingly symbolised by the Berlin Wall.
The partial blockade and self-blockade was never complete: trade between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ continued, under controls. But it did block movement of persons, movement of capital, and the integration of the peasantry into the world market, which are critical elements in the formation of the proletariat as a class and the decline of the petty proprietors, and substantially reduce technology transfers. As a result it reinforced the underlying condition of Bonapartist dictatorship in countries dominated by extant or re-created peasant agriculture, in spite of the absolute growth of the urban working class. The apparent stability of the regimes, which was actually an effect of the policy of ‘containment’, made them appear to be a real alternative to capitalism.
18. The apparent strength of the bureaucratic regimes and of the ideological project of the people’s front - national roads - socialism in one country - party monolithism was not a simple fake which international capital supported as a weapon of control over the working class (Ticktin). Rather, the political-military configuration of forces in 1939-45 supported it between 1941 and 1948. This configuration of forces grew out of the internal contradictions of the capitalist order: the fact that 1939-45 was not only an attempt to reconquer the USSR, but also a war for world imperialist hegemony.
US imperialism’s policy of ‘containment’ was not originally started because Stalinism was a good way of controlling the working class: it wasn’t, as the late 1960s and early 1970s proved. It was started because of the weakness of international capital in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the - probably justified - belief that starting a new general war in 1948 over the east European glacis states (or China) would result in revolution in western Europe and Britain and might even bring down the US state.
Nonetheless, the survival and even extension of the bureaucratic regimes between 1948 and the 1980s was an artefact of the US’s policy of containment. The internal contradictions of these regimes meant that they needed to be under blockade: a real opening to the world market would destroy the internal social relationship of forces which supported the regime.
Conversely, the nationalism which ideologically supported the policy of economic autarky inevitably meant conflicts between national bureaucracies which emerged in the period of containment: first Tito, then Gomulka, then Nagy, who went too far and was crushed, then the Sino-Soviet split. The Sino-Soviet split legitimised and gave potential material backing to more independent behaviour both of regimes (Cuba, Albania, Romania) and of communist parties in the capitalist countries. This in turn weakened the ability of the regimes to respond to the centralised manoeuvres of US-led world imperialism, and reinforced (by producing national plans inconsistent with a rational international division of labour in Comecon) the planning irrationalities which flowed from bureaucratic control of information, from the go-slow resistance of the workers and peasants, and from the development of local corporatisms.
19. The policy of containment reached its limits with US defeat in Vietnam and the offensive of the working class in the US and Europe around 1970. The underlying problem was that (a) the absolute dominance of US productive capital in the wake of 1945 had been eroded, with the result that US military commitments in Vietnam and the resulting budget deficit blew up the Bretton Woods monetary system, and (b) the material and ideological concessions made to the US and European proletariat from the 1950s for the sake of containment began to threaten capitalist control.
In the result the US state gradually and experimentally evolved a new policy. The first element of this policy was Nixon’s China turn: an increased attention to exploiting national divisions between the bureaucracies. The second, also dating from the Nixon administration, and connected, was applied both to the Soviet-style regimes and to the neocolonies. It was a major turn to international lending to states, which would supposedly finance development projects. This was expected to draw states away from bilateral relations with the USSR and towards integration in the western financial system. Thirdly, and consistent with these policies, the Nixon and Ford administrations began the policy of the US responding to colonial nationalism with ‘counter-subversion’ using covert aid to minority nationality and religious groups to support guerrilla resistance.
Fourth was an ideological offensive, initiated under Jimmy Carter, around the banners of ‘human rights’ and a revival of pre-Keynesian economic theory. At this period US covert funding was shifted in Europe from right social-democrats to neo-liberals and in the colonies from rightist military nationalists to forms of religious traditionalism.
The final element was put in place by the Reagan administration. A major expansion of US arms expenditure was financed on a deficit basis (which was made available by US seigniorage in the floating currencies regime which followed the collapse of Bretton Woods). On the one hand, this delivered a substantial stimulus to the US economy at the expense of rival capitalist centres. It thereby enabled the creation of a new political coalition in the US which could escape the concessions to the proletariat which had affected the ‘New Deal’ coalition of the 1940s-1960s. On the other hand, it confronted the Moscow regime with a choice between attempting to match US spending, or becoming subject to nuclear blackmail to enforce US demands that Moscow abandon support for colonial national movements and for its own satellite states.
US and British strategic thinkers writing around 1980 anticipated that the ‘Soviet empire’ would break up under the weight of its national contradictions (which the US was sedulously promoting): Afghanistan was to be the shape of the Soviet future.
In fact, what happened was both unexpected and unexpectedly rapid. Moscow briefly attempted to match US military spending, and as a result destroyed the state budget and the (already pretty limited) functionality of the central plan. Then, under Gorbachev, the regime collapsed politically and financially, and abandoned its former clients, leading to rapid collapses in eastern Europe. Only at the final stage did national contradictions of the regimes break through to break up the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.
20. Capitalist theorists expected the Soviet regime to break up around the national question. In fact, it collapsed politically, from the centre outwards. Trotskyist theorists held that there could be a workers’ revolution against the bureaucratic regime, a view shared by ‘state capitalism’ theorists and by some ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ theorists. In fact, the collapse of the regimes produced demoralisation of the proletariat, further atomisation and a tendency for collective political life in general to be reduced to gravel. These phenomena were radically unlike the crises and collapses of feudal and capitalist political regimes with which we are all familiar from history. The political collapse of the regime has echoed through the workers’ organisations internationally: even the social-democracy has proved to be less autonomous of the Soviet regime than, for the last eighty years, it proudly believed.
These unexpected results occurred because though the Soviet bureaucracy had escaped from the control of the proletariat and come to be the Bonapartist representative-master of the petty proprietors, it had not escaped from ideological and social dependence on the quasi-enserfed Russian urban working class, or from ideological dependence on and integration in the international workers’ movement.
V. The state, its ‘1921 ideology’ and the form of the collapse
21. The Soviet bureaucracy was not a class and the Chinese, Cuban, etc., bureaucracies do not form a class. Class is an inheritable relation to the means of production, grounded on the social institution of private property in the means of production. (Though this proposition does not appear explicitly in Marx, the reason it does not is fairly clearly that as a lawyer trained in the civilian tradition he assumed that the relation of “ownership” was inherently an inheritable and private one.)
Class formations are tolerated by societies over prolonged periods of time for two reasons. The first is that the competitive relations between private slaveowners, feudal barons, capitalists, etc., tend to create incentives to develop the forces of production (albeit more slowly in pre-capitalist than in capitalist societies). The second is that the institution of small productive property (the peasant’s farm, the artisan’s shop, and so on) legitimates the individual property claims of large owners.
The bureaucracy had neither form of legitimacy. But for the form of 1939-45 it would have collapsed in that period; because of the form of that attack and the character of US policy after 1948, it survived for one more generation of the political regime and collapsed with the dying-off or retirement of the generation that fought in 1941-45.
Instead, the bureaucracy is a segment of the intelligentsia, distinguished by political, managerial, etc., office within the hierarchy of the regime. A sacked bureaucrat, or a bureaucrat’s child, is no longer a bureaucrat but just another manager or professional. The intelligentsia in turn is a segment of the class of petty proprietors, defined by its collective monopoly of certain skills and information and individual ownership of other skills and information. The bureaucracy as distinct from the petty proprietors in general is thus a political entity distinguished by its participation in the state as a special organisation of armed force.
22. A state is a body of armed forces backed by a bureaucratic logistics apparatus and having a sufficient military preponderance in a territory to be capable of levying taxes to support itself. Put another way, a state is an exceptionally successful protection racket. Historically, several states have started out as simple looting operations, and in the recent past a number of states have collapsed into competing small-scale looting operations. Without more, however, what we have is not the state but warlordism.
To go beyond small-scale warlordism the state needs to be able to hold soldiers and bureaucrats back from simple looting, for two reasons. The first is that an army is different from any other bunch of people with weapons because it is organisationally coherent. The second is that at the end of the day the state is a minority group and if it loots to excess, or fails to provide the services normally expected of states (military defence, dispute management and the management of natural emergencies) the society as a whole will cease to tolerate it.
For a single generation, or at most two, coherence can be provided by the role of a charismatic individual leader (Genghis Khan, etc.). To go beyond this a state needs a political ideology, expressed partly directly as ideas and culture and partly in organisational forms, to give it organisational coherence and enable state self-control of the tendency of individual soldiers and bureaucrats to loot. US state actors, for example, have to believe that they are defending and applying the US Constitution.
In classical antiquity both ideology and structural form are given to the state by the religio-political ideologies of the slaveowner power; in feudalism by the ideas of organised religion, the nation, and the feudal patron-client chain. In most modern states this ideology and organisational form is given by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The state is held together by the ideas of the state as a ‘national’ firm in the world market and of constitutionalism and the ‘rule of law’, i.e. the assimilation of all disputes to private property disputes. The organisational forms of credit financing of the state through a central bank and financial markets, and the rule-structure of the bureaucracy through tax law, military law and constitutional and administrative law provide the institutional basis of coherence.
23. The Soviet state was created in 1918-21, after the collapse of the ‘Commune state’ policy, by creating a military striking force, whose core was drawn from the urban proletariat, which could represent the peasants’ struggle against the landlords by mastering the peasants’ resistance to food levies. This state was cohered by the ideology that the Communist Party politically represented the working class as its most advanced element, as against the ‘backward’ elements of the mass of the class opposed to the Party, and that the party leadership similarly represented the party as its most advanced element, against the ‘backward’ elements of the party ranks opposed to it. Its critical institutional forms were thus the ‘leading role of the party’ and the internal hierarchical form of the party. The ideology of representation of the proletariat was given organisational form through the policy of levies and purges, which would supposedly maintain the proletarian purity of the party and its connection to the class.
Other institutional pillars of the state were given by steps taken to defeat the economic resistance first of the bourgeoisie and then of the peasants, priests and ‘NEPmen’: the state monopoly of foreign trade, the general statization of large-scale industry, the campaigns against religion, and finally general planification and the forced collectivisations. These institutional forms destroyed both the right of property, and religion, as potential ideological bases of the state.
All that was left was (a) nationalism - ‘socialism in one country’ - reflecting the character of the regime as the representative of the petty proprietors, and (b) the ideology that the party represented the proletariat, reflecting its historical origin in the proletarian movement and need of a worker-origin core to be able to master the peasantry. In order to remain coherent as a state, the bureaucracy thus had to believe that it politically represented the proletariat - and it had to continue the policy initiated as ‘levies and purges’, which tied it sociologically to a section of the proletariat.
24. The ideology that the Party represented the proletariat had the consequence in domestic politics that the bureaucracy could not enter into endemic open collective conflict with the quasi-enserfed urban working class and the working class could not enter into endemic open collective conflict with the bureaucracy. This is a radical divergence from capitalism, where the endemic open conflict of proletarian and capitalist over pay, hours and conditions of work both grounds the formation of independent proletarian organisations and has major effects in shaping capitalist politics.
The bureaucracy, if it entered into endemic open conflict with the working class, would suffer increasing ideological crisis and the state would lose its internal coherence. Hence in the first phase of the bureaucratic regime under Stalin, the bureaucracy’s struggle for power took the form of removing oppositionists and suspected oppositionists from the society: the purges, the labour camps and mass executions. In the post-Stalin period, the result was a dynamic in which collective worker resistance led initially to sharp repression, followed by concessions: some worker leaders were removed from the society, while others were integrated into the bureaucracy. This regime tended towards stagnation, because the individual resistance of the working class in the form of go-slow and low quality labour could not be crushed or a reserve army of labour created without the state losing ideological coherence. The bureaucracy thus tended, not to maximise the extraction of the social surplus from the primary producers, but to fail to extract a social surplus except in the absolutely marginal form of personal consumption privileges.
The working class, conversely, could not develop organisations and experienced local activists independent of the bureaucracy (a “workers’ vanguard”), because workers’ leaders who refused integration into the bureaucracy would be removed from the society. The bureaucracy’s ideological claim to represent the working class, and its reflection in the integration of a section of worker leaders into the bureaucracy, had the effect of disabling class politics as an ideology of resistance. It was thus guaranteed that when the bureaucracy finally collapsed, and even in episodic crises like those in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, and Poland 1976 and 1980, the working class would be unable to develop class political independence.
25. The ideology that the Party represented the proletariat had the consequence in international politics that the bureaucracy was bound by its nature to attempt to master the international workers’ movement, and by virtue of its possession of state power was likely to succeed in doing so.
The bureaucracy was bound to attempt to master the international workers’ movement for two reasons. The first and fundamental was that it its core ideology that the party represented the class meant that it was no more capable of entering into endemic and unmitigated conflict with the workers’ organisations internationally than it was of entering into endemic conflict with the domestic working urban class. The RSDLP-Majorityite was born out of the Second International’s policy of unifying the socialist groups into parties; the Russian Communist Party was born in the struggle for the Communist International. If the Soviet state was not only isolated on the world stage but also isolated within the international workers’ movement, ideological collapse would result. This dynamic produced the attempts of several distinct national bureaucracies after the Sino-Soviet split to produce their own ‘international communist movements’ (Beijing, Havana, Tirana).
Secondly and secondarily, the international workers’ movement played an important ancillary role in the struggles in 1918-21 to defeat the intervention and in the NEP period to break out of the partial trade blockade. It thus became an important, albeit secondary, component of the political culture of the regime to call on the aid of the international workers’ movement for its diplomatic manoeuvres. This ideology informed the advice of the Comintern leadership to the CPs in Britain in 1926, China in 1927, France in 1936 and - most spectacularly - GPU operations against the left in Spain in 1936-38. The phenomenon of official Communist parties and their fellow-travellers being drawn into tactics aimed to support Moscow’s (or Maoists Beijing’s) diplomatic operations continued down to the collapse, though after 1941-45 it had much less practical significance.
The bureaucracy was likely to succeed in mastering the international workers’ movement because its possession of state power meant that it had both the authority of apparent success, and much greater material resources than those possessed by any workers’ organisation under capitalism. Only the pro-capitalists and social-democrats, who threw the weight of the capitalist states into the balance against the official communists, could overwhelm them. In addition, the ideology of monolithism, national roads and peoples’ fronts actually expressed the distinct interests of the trade union and social-democratic bureaucracies more perfectly than classical social-democracy: there was therefore a tendency for even the overt pro-capitalist wings of the social-democracy to become ‘stalinised’ while rejecting the official communists’ and their fellow-travellers’ support for the USSR etc.
The principle of top-down military-style discipline and the authority of higher committees over lower also had the effect that within broader workers’ organisations the striking power of those parties whose organisational forms built on the 1921 Theses was far greater than their unorganised or less centralised opponents. The price paid for this was, however, an underlying tendency - proceeding more slowly in the capitalist countries than in the USSR and the other bureaucratic regimes - to annihilate the local mediations between the party (or trade union, etc.!) centre and the mass of the class. Communist parties and Communist-led organisations (and semi-Stalinised social-democratic ones) increasingly became hollowed-out shells at the base.
The hegemony of the bureaucracy in the international workers’ movement meant that it was absolutely impossible for a forward movement in the class elsewhere in the world to produce a rival revolutionary pole which could overthrow the bureaucracy, or animate a movement in the Soviet-model regimes for its overthrow, in the interests of the working class. Any such forward movement would, even if it started outside official communism, be forced to elect between the hegemony of the bureaucracy and that of the capitalist state system.
26. On this basis it should be possible to see why the collapse took the form and had the consequences it did. The efforts of the imperialists to detach the USSR’s clients and draw them into the US orbit promoted not only this direct effect, but also nationalism at the centre: a sense that Russia was losing out, both by subsidising the client states, and by not getting the apparent benefits of the world financial market (in the first phase of the US’s turn, when private capitals lent freely to semicolonial countries and to Soviet clients who were prepared to take ideological distance from Moscow). The pressure of US high-tech on Soviet military budgets displayed with awful clarity the inferiority of the bureaucratic regime as a producer of military technology and, indeed, more generally of ‘growth’. The generation of the top bureaucracy below those adult and active in 1939-45 thus simply ceased to believe in the superiority of the Soviet system and the ideology that the party represented the working class. When, under Gorbachev, they began to carry this loss of belief into practice, the client regimes were abandoned and the central political regime collapsed like a house of cards.
In collapsing in this way, the bureaucracy demonstrated the utter falsity of the theory of “Soviet imperialism”: the existence of the client regimes flowed from the bureaucracy’s ideological commitments and in particular from the ideologies that the party represented the proletariat and of the ‘anti-imperialist front’, not from any internal dynamic driving a desire to expand the surplus controlled by the bureaucracy.
The inability of the working class to attain class-political independence in this crisis, resulting from the prior character of the regime, meant that all that was left was a choice between pure petty-proprietor nationalism and the importation of ideas from the US. Given the fact that the US’s turn was a response to the decline of its world-hegemony, there was never any question of a ‘New Marshall Plan’ to restore capitalism as it had been restored in postwar western Europe. The result of the ascendancy of the free-market ideologues was therefore immediate exposure to the world market and a catastrophic economic collapse. This collapse further weakened the working class as a class (as collapses always do), and was interpreted as further evidence of the uselessness of the Soviet economic regime.
27. Internationally, the hegemony of the Soviet model meant that the regime could not go down without dealing a body-blow in ideology and morale to the international workers’ movement. If the policy of the trotskyists and semi-trotskyists, of a workers’ revolution against the bureaucracy, had had any purchase on the course of events, the left would have been reorganised round trotskyism. But precisely because the bureaucracy was in reality socially and ideologically dependent on its claim to represent the working class, the idea of a workers’ revolution against the bureaucracy was illusory: the working class could not attain class-political independence without the prior overthrow of the bureaucracy by some other force, which inevitably meant its overthrow by capital.
In addition, the trotskyists and semi-trotskyists, by their commitment to the cult of the personality of Trotsky, had committed themselves to not examining the proletariat’s loss of control of the state in 1918-21 or the centrality of 1921 to the ideology of the bureaucracy. They were thus none of them real advocates of the overthrow of the bureaucracy, whose forms they replicated in little in their own ranks, producing unprincipled splits, a wilderness of sects, and a tendency to collapse politically into left variants of official communism. Those leftists who were prepared to recognise that the proletariat lost control of the state in 1918-21, on the other hand, clung to utopian commitments to the council state, rejected party organisation and the ‘Kautskyite’ preparatory tasks of building mass organisations of the working class and fighting for a minimum programme, and marginalised themselves - or else simply joined the camp of the social-democracy.
Once the bureaucracy had collapsed, there began to be space for class trade union and political organisation. In eastern Europe this space was rapidly occupied by an element of the former bureaucracy, which transformed itself into bureaucracies of unions and workers’ parties under capitalism. This was predictable, since, as we have already seen, the bureaucratic regimes precisely drew into the regime workers’ leaders who under a capitalist regime would have formed a component of the broad workers’ vanguard. In the former ‘capitalist world’ the uselessness of trotskyist ideology meant that the official CPs by and large survived, albeit on a much smaller scale than before, or dissolved into left-nationalist utopian socialist and populist formations. The collapse of the USSR therefore meant a continued hegemony of the ideas of official communism within a workers’ movement tending to decline both in size and coherence.
VI. The remaining bureaucratic regimes
28. China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba are variants on the Soviet blocked social configuration of forces and state formation ideologically connected to the working class, created by different means and less immediately dependent on the Soviet state than the regimes of eastern Europe were. For this reason they did not fall when the USSR fell. It is incorrect to regard capitalist, or semi-colonial, political regimes as having yet been restored in any of these countries.
In China and Vietnam the 1918-21 Russian process of an army and bureaucracy originally based on a small proletariat becoming the collective representative-master of the peasantry took place before the formal seizure of power, and at some distance from the proletarian movements (Shanghai 1920s, Tonkin 1930s) which formed the basis of the parties in question becoming mass parties. The civil war-revolution process also took place in response to actual direct national subordination to imperialism rather than, as in Russia in 1918-21, to secondary imperialist intervention in a civil war. The result is that the relative weight of petty-proprietor nationalism in the regime’s ideology, relative to the 1921 ideology, is higher than it was in the USSR’s state formation. The 1921 ideology is, however, by no means absent, and it is not yet clear whether it is critical for the ability of the state to retain coherence or can be dispensed with without collapsing the state.
North Korea is an east asian equivalent of the GDR without the pre-history of the development of workers’ parties under capitalism. Originally created by Soviet occupation in 1945, it was saved from US reconquest by Chinese intervention in 1950-53. After the Sino-Soviet split it became a Soviet client in order to maintain national autonomy from China, a choice also followed by Vietnam after the 1970s turn of China to support for US global policy. The US in the period of ‘containment’ forced through land reform and built up a substantial autonomous capitalism in South Korea. The result is that Korean capitalist reunification is neither in Chinese interests (because it would risk creating a US client with a substantial land border with China) nor in US interests, unless it involves a war sufficiently destructive to knock South Korean capital out of the global picture (because it would risk creating a fully autonomous capitalist state and reducing US strategic control in the far east). North Korea thus remains under rigorous blockade, and - understandably, given the original marginality of the proletariat in the creation of the state - has created in ‘Juche’ an ultra-nationalist ideology.
Cuba was at the time of the revolution a dependent capitalist country with a proletarian majority, and the revolution was made by the proletariat through a general strike in November 1958 leading to the political collapse of the Batistiano state, and the creation of quasi-soviet forms in the aftermath of this collapse. In 1959-61 a US policy of blockade, together with efforts of the Khrushchev leadership in the USSR to posture to the left at the period of the Sino-soviet split, led to the attachment of Cuba to the USSR as a client state and the creation of bureaucratic state forms (leading role of the party, etc.) and ‘land reform’ which strengthened the previously marginal Cuban peasantry. Guevara endeavoured to create a myth of the Cuban revolution as the product of rural guerrilla warfare, and this myth has had some impact on the internal ideology of the Cuban state (as well as extensive and disastrous impact on these elements of the left in Latin America which bought the Guevarist myth). However, the (dependent) capitalist character of the pre-revolutionary regime and the leading role of the proletariat in the revolution has had the effects (1) that the internal contradictions of the regime are less violent than elsewhere and (2) that an ideological form of internationalism, going deeper than Soviet internationalist ideology, has been a persistent theme of Cuban state ideology. As a further result, the regime has considerable political support both in Latin America and in the US left. Cuba remains under US blockade both for this reason and for US domestic political reasons: like the White Russians in 1920s Britain and France, the Cuban emigres have a significant organised lobby in the US.
29. In China, uniquely, there is some possibility of the emergence of a fully independent capitalist state, which would naturally become a contender for imperialist hegemony, out of the bureaucratic regime. There are several reasons for this distinctive dynamic.
Pre-revolutionary China was, in levels of technique and culture, a relatively highly developed area of the world, though the emergence of an autonomous Chinese capitalist state was blocked by the late survival of very ancient state forms which, in turn, artificially preserved peasant landownership. US geopolitics towards the Chinese revolution in the 1950s led to the substantial pre-existent expatriate Chinese bourgeoisie being able to develop an enclave mercantile-financial capitalism, alongside significant industrial development in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Within this background, US geopolitics in relation to the USSR and Vietnam led in the 1970s to the US making significant trade, financial and technical openings towards China. The result, after the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’, was a major shift, through a NEP-style policy, in the direction of the development of capitalism in China within the political integument of the bureaucratic regime. This development has involved not only inwards investment by capitals from the existing imperialist centres, but also a substantial growth of Chinese capitals.
Under these conditions the Chinese state leadership has around the turn of the century been endeavouring to reinvent the state with a view to managing a cold transition to capitalism without collapsing into semi-colonial status. For ideological forms for this purpose it has drawn both on the long history of the pre-revolutionary confucian bureaucracy, and on ‘social market’, ‘sustainable development’ and social-democratic ideas current in western Europe. It faces, however, two major contradictions in this project.
The first is that it is not in the interests of the US that China should emerge as an independent capitalist or imperialist power, either strategically - because the ring of US clients and semi-clients round China is not at all identical to the effective subordination of the European powers to the US, so that an independent capitalist China would present a strategic threat to US world hegemony - or immediately - because the immediate solvency of the US financial sy
