The Stalinist theory is, despite zigzags, logical and consistent. Like every theory of all exploiters it is the theory of the rulers, the result of their struggle with the direct producers whom they exploit, and of competition with other rulers. The theory justifies Stalinist exploitation of the Russian workers. It can be used as a weapon against the traditional bourgeoisie in the struggle for the domination of the world working class movement without impairing the position of the rulers inside Russia. It fortifies this position in the minds of the public which is interested in these questions and the members and fellow-travellers of the Stalinist parties.
The theory itself is an adaptation of the pre-Marxian petty-bourgeois ideology from Kant to Sismondi and Proudhon to the specific conditions of state-capitalism. That we shall go into later. But then as now its purpose can be summed up in a phrase - the radical reorganization of society with the proletariat as object and not as subject, i.e., with no essential change in the mode of labor. The crisis of world-capitalism, a hundred years of Marxism, thirty years of Leninism, impose upon this theory, as a primary task, the need to destroy and to obscure the theory of class struggle in the process of production itself, the very basis of Marxism and of the proletarian revolution.
The Stalinists did not arbitrarily "choose" this theory. Politics on the basis of the analysis of property is of necessity the struggle over correct policy and the correction of "evil". Social division, if not rooted in classes, automatically becomes a selection of personnel. The criterion not being a criterion of class becomes automatically a criterion according to competence, ability, loyalty, devotion, etc. This personnel, comprising many millions, the Stalinists have enshrined in the 1936 constitution under the name of "our socialist intelligentsia". The most competent, the most able, most loyal, most devoted, the elite become the party. The instrument of the party is the state. The corollary to disguising the rulers of production as "our socialist intelligentsia" is the Stalinist denunciation of bureaucracy as inefficiency, red tape, rudeness to workers, laziness, etc. - purely subjective characterizations.
The first task of the revolutionary International is clarification of this term, bureaucracy. The Stalinists take advantage of the fact that Marx often used the term, bureaucracy, in relation to the mass of state functionaries. But with the analysis of state-capitalism by Engels, the word bureaucracy began to take on a wider connotation. Where Engels says "Taking over of the great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies, later on by trusts, then by the State," he adds: "The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried employees" (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, p. 138).1 These are bureaucrats.
The moment Lenin saw the Soviet, the new form of social organization created by the masses, he began to extend the concept, bureaucracy, to include not only officials of government but the officials of industry, all who were opposed to the proletariat as masters. This appears all through State and Revolution and, in its most finished form, in the following:
"We cannot do with out officials under capitalism, under the rule of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is oppressed, the masses of the toilers are enslaved by capitalism. Under capitalism democracy is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage-slavery, the poverty and misery of the masses. This is why and the only reason why the officials of our political and industrial organizations are corrupted - or more precisely, tend to be corrupted - by the conditions of capitalism, why they betray a tendency to become transformed into bureaucrats, i.e., into privileged persons divorced from the masses and superior to the masses.
"This is the essence of bureaucracy, and until the capitalists have been expropriated and the bourgeoisie overthrown, even proletarian officials will inevitably be 'bureaucratized' to some extent".2
Lenin's whole strategic program between July and October is based upon the substitution of the power of the armed masses for the power of the bureaucrat, the master, the official in industry and in politics. Hence his reiterated statement that if you nationalize and even confiscate, it means nothing without workers' power. Just as he had extended the analysis of capitalism, to state-capitalism and plan, Lenin was developing the theory of class struggle in relation to the development of capitalism itself. This strengthened the basic concepts of Marxism.
Marx says: "The authority assumed by the capitalist by his personification of capital in the direct process of production, the social function performed by him in his capacity as a manager and ruler of production, is essentially different from the authority exercised upon the basis of production by means of slaves, serfs, etc.
"upon the basis of capitalist production, the social character of their production impresses itself upon the mass of direct producers as a strictly regulating authority and as a social mechanism of the labor process graduated into a complete hierarchy. This authority is vested in its bearers only as a personification of the requirements of labor standing above the laborer". (Capital, Vol. III, p. 1,027).3
This is capitalist production, this hierarchy. The special functions are performed "within the conditions of production themselves by special agents in opposition to the direct producers". (p. 1,025).4 These functionaries, acting against the proletariat in production, are the enemy. If this is not understood, workers' control of production is an empty phrase.
With the development of capitalism into state-capitalism, as far back as 1917, Lenin, in strict theory, denounced mere confiscation in order to concentrate his whole fire upon the hierarchy in the process of production itself, and to counterpose to this, workers' power. It thus becomes ever more clear why the Stalinists in their theory will have nothing whatever to do with state-capitalism and rebuke and stamp out any suggestions of it so sharply. The distinction that Lenin always kept clear has now developed with the development of capitalism over the last 30 years. It has now grown until it becomes the dividing line between the workers and the whole bureaucratic organization of accumulated labor, science and knowledge, acting against the working class in the immediate process of production and everywhere else. This is the sense in which the term bureaucracy must be used in Russia.
It is upon this Leninist analysis that the theory of state-capitalism rests, and inseparable from this theory, the concept of the transition from social labor as compulsion, as barracks discipline of capital, to social labor as the voluntary association, the voluntary labor discipline of the laborers themselves. Lenin in "The Great Beginning" theoretically and practically wrote an analysis of labor in Russia which the development of society on a world scale during the last 30 years, now raises to the highest position among all his work on Russia. This must be the foundation of a Marxist approach to the problems of economics and politics under socialism. In that article Lenin did two things:
a. Established with all the emphasis at his command that the essential character of the dictatorship of the proletariat was "not violence and not mainly violence against the exploiters". It was the unity and discipline of the proletariat trained by capitalism, its ability to produce "a higher social organization of labor".5
b. Analyzed the Communist days of labor given to the Soviet state and sought to distinguish the specific social and psychological characteristics of a new form of labor, and the relation of that to the productivity of labor.
With all its mighty creations of a Soviet state and Red Army, and the revolution in the superstructure, it is here that the Russian socialist revolution could not be completed. The "historical creative initiative" in production, the "subtle and intricate" relations of a new labor process - these never developed for historical reasons. But there has been a vast development of capitalism and of the understanding of capitalism all over the world since the early days of the Russian Revolution. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Stalinist bureaucracy, the whole capitalist class in the U.S. (and in the U.S. more than anywhere else) - all declare that the problem of production today is the productivity of labor and the need to harness the human interest, i.e., the energy and ability of the worker. Many of them are aware that it is the labor process itself which is in question.
What they see partially, contemporary Marxism must see fully and thereby restore the very foundations of Marxism as a social science.
It is in the concrete analysis of labor inside Russia and outside Russia that the Fourth International can find the basis of the profoundest difference between the Third International and the Fourth International. The whole tendency of the Stalinist theory is to build up theoretical barriers between the Russian economy and the economy of the rest of the world. The task of the revolutionary movement, beginning in theory and as we shall see, reaching to all aspects of political strategy, is to break down this separation. The development of Russia is to be explained by the development of world capitalism and specifically, capitalist production in its most advanced stage, in the United States. Necessary for the strategic task of clarifying its own theory and for building an irreconcilable opposition to Stalinism, it is not accidental that this method also is the open road for the revolutionary party to the socialism inherent in the minds and hearts, not only of the politically advanced but the most backward industrial workers in the United States.
It is for this reason that the analysis of the labor process in the United States must concern us first and only afterwards the labor process in Stalinist Russia.
Roughly, we may attribute the decisive change in the American economy to the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, taking 1914 as a convenient dividing line. After World War I the Taylor system, experimental before the war, becomes a social system, the factory laid out for continuous flow of production, and advanced planning for production, operating and control. At the same time there is the organization of professional societies, management courses in college curricula and responsible management consultants. Between 1924 and 1928 there is rationalization of production and retooling (Ford).* Along with it are the tendencies to the scientific organization of production, to closer coordination between employers, fusion with each other against the working class, the Intervention of the state as mediator and then as arbiter.
For the proletariat there is the constantly growing subdivision of labor, decrease in the need of skills, and determination of the sequence of operations and speed by the machine. The crisis of 1929 accelerated all these processes. The characteristic, most advanced form of American production becomes Ford. Here production consists of a mass of hounded, sweated labor (in which, in Marx's phrase, the very life of society was threatened); and opposed to it as a class, a management staff which can carry out this production only by means of a hired army (Bennett) of gangsters, thugs, supervisors who run production by terror, in the plant, in the lives of the workers outside production, and in the political control of Detroit. Ford's regime before unionization is the prototype of production relations in fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia.
But - and with out this, all Marxism is lost - inextricably intertwined with the totalitarian tendency is the response of the working class. A whole new layer of workers, the result of the economic development, burst into revolt in the CIO. The CIO in its inception aimed at a revolution in production. The workers would examine what they were told to do and then decide whether it was satisfactory to them or not. This rejection of the basis of capitalist economy is the preliminary basis of a socialist economy. The next positive step is the total management of industry by the proletariat. Where the Transitional Program says that the "CIO is the most indisputable expression of the instinctive striving of the American workers to raise themselves to the level of the tasks imposed upon them by history," it is absolutely correct. The task imposed upon them by history is socialism and the outburst, in aim and method, was the first instinctive preparation of the social revolution.
Because it was not and could not be carried through to a conclusion, the inevitable counterpart was the creation of a labor bureaucracy. The history of production since is the corruption of the bureaucracy and its transformation into an instrument of capitalist production, the restoration to the bourgeoisie of what it had lost in 1936, the right to control production standards. Without this mediating role of the bureaucracy, production in the United States would be violently and continuously disrupted until one class was undisputed master.
The whole system is in mortal crisis from the reaction of the workers. Ford, whose father fought the union so uncompromisingly as late as 1941, now openly recognizes that as far as capitalism is concerned, improvements in technology, i.e., the further mechanization of labor, offers no road out for the increase of productivity which rests entirely with the working class. At the same time, the workers in relation to capitalism resist any increase in productivity. The resistance to speed up does not necessarily mean as most think that workers are required to work beyond normal physical capacity. It is resistance by the workers to any increased productivity, i.e., any increase of productivity by capitalist methods. Thus, both sides, capital and labor, are animated by the fact that for each, in its own way, the system has reached its limit.
The real aim of the great strikes in 1946 and since is the attempt to begin on a higher stage what was initiated in 1936. But the attempt is crippled and deflected by the bureaucracy, with the result that rationalization of production, speed up, intensification of exploitation are the order of the day in industry.
The bureaucracy inevitably must substitute the struggle over consumption, higher wages, pensions, education, etc., for a struggle in production. This is the basis of the welfare state, the attempt to appease the workers with the fruits of labor when they seek satisfaction in the work itself. The bureaucracy must raise a new social program in the realm of consumption because it cannot attack capitalism at the point of production without destroying capitalism itself.
The series of pension plans which have now culminated in the five-year contract with General Motors is a very sharp climax of the whole struggle. This particular type of increase in consumption subordinates the workers to production in a special manner after they have reached a certain age. It confines them to being an industrial reserve army, not merely at the disposal of capital in general but within the confining limits of the specific capitalist factory which employs them. The effect, therefore, is to reinforce control both of employers and bureaucracy over production.
But along with this intensification of capitalist production and this binding of the worker for five years must go inevitably the increase of revolt, wildcat strikes, a desperate attempt of the working class to gain for itself conditions of labor that are denied to it both by the employers and the labor bureaucracy. While the bureaucracy provides the leadership for struggles over consumption, it is from the workers on the line that emerges the initiative for struggles over speed up. That is precisely why the bureaucracy, after vainly trying to stop wildcat strikes by prohibiting them in the contract, has now taken upon itself the task of repressing by force this interruption of production. It expels from the unions workers who indulge in these illegal stoppages, i.e., who protest against the present stage of capitalist production itself. The flying squads, originated by the union for struggle against the bourgeoisie, are now converted by the bureaucracy into a weapon of struggle against the proletariat, and all this in the name of a higher standard of living, greater consumption by the workers, but in reality to ensure capitalist production.
The increase of coercion and terror by the bureaucracy increases the tendency of the workers to violent explosion. This tendency, taken to its logical conclusion, as the workers will have to take it, means the reorganization of the whole system of production itself - socialism. Either this or the complete destruction of the union movement as the instrument of proletarian emancipation and its complete transformation into the only possible instrument of capital against the proletariat at this stage of production.
This is the fundamental function of the bureaucracy in Russia. Already the tentative philosophy of the bureaucracy in the United States, its political economy of regulation of wages and prices, nationalization and even planning, its ruthless political methods, show the organic similarity of the American labor bureaucracy and the Stalinists. The struggle in the United States reveals concretely what is involved in the Stalinist falsification of the Marxist theory of accumulation, etc., and the totalitarian violence against the proletariat which this falsification protects.
In the recent coal strikes, despite the wage and welfare gains of the miners, the heads of the operators declared that control of production had been restored to them by the two-year contract. C. E. Wilson, president of General Motors, hailed the five-year settlement as allowing the company "to run our own plants," and as "the union's complete acceptance of technological progress". Reuther hailed the G.M. settlement as a "tremendous step foward" in "stabilizing labor relations at G.M"..6 An editor of Fortune magazine hailed the contract as the harbinger of "new and more meaningful associative principles" with the corporation as 'The center of a new kind of community".
The Stalinist bureaucracy is the American bureaucracy carried to its ultimate and logical conclusion, both of them products of capitalist production in the epoch of state-capitalism. To reply to this that the bureaucracy can never arrive at maturity without a proletarian revolution is the complete degradation of Marxist theory. Not a single Marxist of all the great Marxists who analyzed state-capitalism, not one ever believed capitalism would reach the specific stage of complete centralization. It was because of the necessity to examine all its tendencies in order to be able to mobilize theoretical and practical opposition in the proletariat that they followed the dialectical method and took these tendencies to their conclusions as an indispensable theoretical step. In the present stage of our theory it is the scrupulous analysis of production in the United States as the most advanced stage of world capitalism that forms the indispensable prelude to the analysis of the labor process of Russia.
The Russian Revolution of October, 1917, abolished feudalism with a thoroughness never before achieved. The stage was therefore set for a tremendous economic expansion. Lenin sought to mobilize the proletariat to protect itself from being overwhelmed by this economic expansion. The isolated proletariat of backward Russia was unable to do this. The subsequent history of the labor process of Russia is the telescopic re-enactment of the stages of the process of production of the United States; and, added to this, the special degradation imposed upon it by the totalitarian control of the bureaucracy and the plan.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 substituted for the authority of the capitalist in the factory the workers' control of production. Immediately there appeared both the concrete development of self-initiative in the factory and the simplification of the state apparatus outside. There was workers' control, with some capitalists as owners, but mere owners. Production conferences, not of bureaucrats but of workers, decided what and how to produce. What capitalists there remained seemed to vanish into thin air once their economic power was broken, and workers' control was supplemented the following year by nationalization of the means of production. The red thread that runs through these first years of workers' rule, workers' control, seems to suffer a setback under war communism in general and with order 1042* in particular.** It takes less than a year for the workers to force a change, and the all-important trade union debate of 1920 follows.7 Lenin fights successfully both Trotsky, the administrator, and Shlapnikov, the syndico-anarchist, and strives to steer a course in consonance with the Declaration of the Rights of the Toilers, that only the masses "from below" can manage the economy, and that the trade unions are the transmission belts to the state wherein "every cook can be an administrator".8
In the transition period between 1924 and 1928 when the First Five-Year Plan is initiated, the production conferences undergo a bureaucratization, and with it the form of labor. There begins the alienation of mass activity to conform to specified quantities of abstract labor demanded by the plan "to catch up with capitalism". The results are:
a. In 1929 ("The year of decision and transformation") there crystallizes in direct opposition to management by the masses "from below" the conference of the planners, the engineers, economists, administrators; in a word, the specialists.
(b) Stalin's famous talk of 1931 "put an end to depersonalization". His "six conditions" of labor contrasted the masses to the "personalized" individual who would outdo the norms of the average. Competition is not on the basis of creativity and Subbotniks,^* but on the basis of the outstanding individual (read: bureaucrat) who will devise norms and have others surpass them.
c. 1935 sees Stakhanovism and the definitive formation of an aristocracy of labor.9 Stakhanovism is the pure model of the manner in which foremen, overseers and leadermen are chosen in the factories the world over. These individuals, exceptional to their class, voluntarily devote an intensity of their labor to capital for a brief period, thus setting the norm, which they personify, to dominate the labor of the mass for an indefinite period.
With the Stakhanovites, the bureaucratic administrators acquire a social base, and alongside, there grows the instability and crisis in the economy. It is the counter-revolution of state-capital.
d. Beginning with 1939 the mode of labor changes again. In his report on the Third Five-Year Plan, Molotov stressed the fact that it was insufficient to be concerned merely with the mass of goods produced. The crucial point for "outstripping capitalism" was not the mass but the rate at which that mass was produced. It was necessary that per capita production be increased, that is to say, that each worker's productivity be so increased that fewer workers would be needed to obtain an ever greater mass of goods. Intensity of labor becomes the norm.
During the war that norm turned out to be the most vicious of all forms of exploitation. The Stalinists sanctified it by the name of "socialist emulation". "Socialist emulation" meant, firstly, that the pay incentive that was the due of a Stakhanovite was no longer the reward of the workers as individuals, once they as a mass produced according to the new raised norm. In other words, the take-home pay was the same despite the speed up on a plant-wide basis. Secondly, and above all, competition was no longer limited to individual workers competing on a piecework basis, nor even to groups of workers on a plant-wide basis, but was extended to cover factory against factory.
Labor Reserves are established to assure the perpetuation of skills and a sufficient labor supply. Youth are trained from the start to labor as ordered. The climax comes in 1943 with the "discovery" of the conveyor belt system. This is the year also of the Stalinist admission that the law of value functions in Russia.
We thus have:
1918: The Declaration of the Rights of Toilers - every cook an administrator.
1928: Abstract mass labor - "lots" of it "to catch up with capitalism".
1931: Differentiation within labor - "personalized" individual; the pieceworker the hero.
1935: Stakhanovism, individual competition to surpass the norm.
1936-37: Stalinist Constitution: Stakhanovites and the intelligentsia singled out as those "whom we respect".
1939-41: Systematization of piecework; factory competing against factory.
1943: "The year of the conversion to the conveyor belt system".
Whereas in 1936 we had the singling out of a ruling class, a "simple" division between mental and physical work, we now have the stratification of mental and physical labor. Leontiev's Political economy in the Soviet Union lays stress not merely on the intelligentsia against the mass, but on specific skills and differentials, lower, higher, middle, in-between and highest.
If we take production since the Plan, not in the detail we have just given, but only the major changes, we can say that 1937 closes one period. It is the period of "catching up with and outdistancing capitalism" which means mass production and relatively simple planning. But competition on a world scale and the approaching Second World War is the severest type of capitalist competition for world mastery. This opens up the new period of per capita production as against mere "catching up". Planning must now include productivity of labor. Such planning knows and can know only machines and intensity of exploitation. Furthermore, it includes what the Russians call rentabl'nost, that is to say profitability. The era of the state helping the factory whose production is especially needed is over. The factory itself must prove its worthiness by showing a profit and a profit big enough to pay for "ever-expanded" production. And that can be done only by ever-expanded production of abstract labor in mass and in rate.
Nowhere in the world is labor so degraded as in Russia today. We are here many stages beyond the degradation which Marx described in the General Law of Accumulation.10 For not merely is the Russian laborer reduced to an appendage to a machine and a mere cog in the accumulation of capital. Marx said that the reserve army kept the working laborer riveted to his martyrdom. In Russia, because of the power to plan, the industrial reserve army is planned. Some 15 million laborers are planned in direct forced labor camps. They are organized by the MVD (GPU) for production.11 The disciplinary laws which began with reduction in wages' for coming 15 minutes late have as their final stage, for lack of discipline, "corrective labor," i.e., the concentration camp.
What the American workers are revolting against since 1936 and holding at bay, this, and nothing else but this, has overwhelmed the Russian proletariat. The rulers of Russia perform the same functions as are performed by Ford, General Motors, the coal operators and their huge bureaucratic staffs. Capital is not Henry Ford; he can die and leave his whole empire to an institution; the plant, the scientific apparatus, the method, the personnel of organization and supervision, the social system which sets these up in opposition to the direct producer will remain. Not inefficiency of bureaucrats, not "prestige, powers and revenue of the bureaucracy," not consumption but capital accumulation in its specifically capitalist manner, this is the analysis of the Russian economy.
To think that the struggle in Russia is over consumption not only strikes at the whole theory of the relationship of the superstructure to the productive mechanism. In practice, today, the crisis in Russia is manifestly the crisis in production. Whoever is convinced that this whole problem is a problem of consumption is driven away from Marxism, not toward it.
It was Marx's contention that the existence of a laboring force compelled to sell its labor-power in order to live meant automatically the system of capitalist accumulation. The capitalist was merely the agent of capital. The bureaucrats are the same. Neither can use nor knows any other mode of production. A new mode of production requires primarily that they be totally removed or totally subordinated.
At this point it is convenient to summarize briefly the abstract economic analysis of state-capitalism. We have never said that the economy of the United States is the same as the economy of Russia. What we have said is that, however great the differences, the fundamental laws of capitalism operate. It is just this that Marx indicated with his addition to Capital dealing with complete centralization of capital "in a given country".
"A given country" meant one specific country, i.e., the laws of the world-market still exist. If the whole world became centralized, then there would be a new society (for those who want it) since the world-market would have been destroyed. Although completely centralized capital "in a given country" can plan, it cannot plan away the contradictions of capitalist production. If the organic composition of capital on a world scale is 5 to 1, moving to 6 to 1, to 7 to 1, etc., centralized capital in a given country has to keep pace with that. The only way to escape it would be by a productivity of labor so great that it could keep ahead of the rest and still organize its production for use. Such a productivity of labor is impossible in capitalism which knows only the law of value and its consequence, accumulated labor and sweating proletarians. That is precisely why Engels wrote that though formally, i.e., abstractly, complete state-property could overcome the contradictions, actually it could not, the "workers remain proletarians". The whole long dispute between underconsumption and rate of profit theorists has now been definitively settled precisely by the experience of Russia.
Lenin in 1917 repeated that state-capitalism without the Soviets meant "military penal labor" for the workers. The Soviet power was the road to socialism. The struggle in Russia and outside is the struggle against "military penal labor" and for the Soviet power. The revolt which gave birth to the CIO prevented American capital from transforming the whole of American production and society into the system which Ford and Bennett had established. This monstrous burden would have driven capital still further along the road of accumulation of capital, domination over the direct producer or accumulation of misery, lowered productivity, barbarism, paralysis and gangrene in all aspects of society. That was Germany. That would be the plan, the plan of capital, and with state-property it is more free than before to plan its own ruin.
The totalitarian state in Russia prevents the workers from making their social and political experiences in open class struggle. But by so doing, it ensures the unchecked reign of capital, the ruin of production and society, and the inevitability of total revolution.
The decisive question is not whether centralization is complete or partial, heading toward completeness. The vital necessity of our time is to lay bare the violent antagonism of labor and capital at this definitive stage of centralization of capital. Whether democratic or totalitarian, both types of society are in permanent decline and insoluble crisis. Both are at a stage when only a total reorganization of social relations can lift society a stage higher. It is noteworthy that in the United States the capitalist class is aware of this, and the most significant work that is being done in political economy is the desperate attempt to find some way of reconciling the working class to the agonies of mechanized production and transferring its implacable resistance into creative co-operation. That is of educational value and many of its findings will be used by the socialist proletariat. In Russia this resistance is labelled "remnants of capitalist ideology" and the whole power of the totalitarian state is organized to crush it in theory as well as in fact.
We shall see that upon this theoretical analysis the whole strategy of revolutionary politics is qualitatively differentiated from Stalinism, inside and outside Russia. The Stalinists seek to establish themselves in the place of the rival bureaucracy. The rival bureaucracy seeks to substitute itself in the place of Stalinism. The Fourth International must not seek to substitute itself for either of these, not after, not during nor before the conquest of power. Theory and practice are governed by the recognition of the necessity that the bureaucracy as such must be overthrown.
We can now come to a theoretical conclusion about the question of plan and with it, nationalization. For the capitalist mode of labor in its advanced stages, the bureaucratic administrative plan can become the greatest instrument of torture for the proletariat that capitalism has yet produced. State-property and total planning are nothing else but the complete subordination of the proletariat to capital. That is why in The invading Socialist Society we summed up our total theory in two points, the first of which is:
"1. IT IS THE TASK OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL TO DRIVE AS CLEAR A LINE BETWEEN BOURGEOIS NATIONALIZATION AND PROLETARIAN NATIONALIZATION AS THE REVOLUTIONARY THIRD INTERNATIONAL DROVE BETWEEN BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY AND PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY".12
All theory for our epoch must begin here.But aren't state-property and the plan progressive?
State-property as such and plan as such are metaphysical abstractions. They have a class content. Aren't trusts progressive, Lenin was asked in 1916. He replied:
"It is the work of the bourgeoisie to develop trusts, to drive children and women into factories, to torture them there, corrupt them and condemn them to the utmost misery. We do not 'demand' such a development; we do not 'support' it; we struggle against it. But how do we struggle? We know that trusts and factory work of women are progressive. We do not wish to go backwards to crafts, to premonopolist capitalism, to domestic work of women. forward through the trusts, etc., and beyond them toward socialism!" (The Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 495).13
We reply similarly. This is Marxism - the antagonism of classes. Under capitalism, private or state, all science, knowledge, organization, are developed only at the expense and degradation of the proletariat. But at the same time capitalism organizes the proletariat for struggle. We do not "demand" or "support" plan. We propose to substitute proletarian power and subordinate plan to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.
Where does orthodox Trotskyism stand on this? Every member knows the answer. Nowhere. Its conception of plan is summarized in the slogan in the Transitional Program: "The plan must be revised from top to bottom in the interests of the producers and consumers".14
The capitalist plan cannot be revised except in the interests of capital. It is not the plan that is to be revised. It is the whole mode of production which is to be overthrown.
The whole analysis is in terms of (to use the underlined phrases of the Transitional Program) "social inequality" and "political inequality".15 In The Revolution Betrayed the chapter entitled "The Struggle for productivity of Labor" deals with money and plan, inflation, rehabilitation of the ruble.16 It says that analysis of Stakhanovism proves that it is a vicious form of piece work. But it soon returns to the question of the ruble. And it finally ends on the note that the Soviet administrative personnel is "far less adequate to the productive tasks than the workers". Therefore, what is needed is more competence, more efficiency, less red tape, less laziness, etc. If the Russian bureaucracy were more efficient, more scientific, etc., the results for the Russian proletariat would be worse.
The chapter "Social Relations in the Soviet Union" in The Revolution Betrayed deals with the privileges, wages, etc. of the bureaucracy in relation to the workers.17 Neither in the Transitional Program nor The Revolution Betrayed does analysis of the worker in the production process find any place, except where in the Program the slogan is raised, "Factory committees should be returned the right to control production".18 In the analyses of orthodox Trotskyism there are a few references here and there to creative initiative being needed at this stage. That is all.
All the slogans in the Transitional Program do nothing more than demand the restoration of democracy to where it was in 1917, thereby showing that the whole great experience of thirty years has passed orthodox Trotskyism by. World capitalism has moved to the crisis and counter-revolution in production. The program for the reintroduction of political democracy does no more than reintroduce the arena for the reintroduction of a new bureaucracy when the old one is driven out.
But, after all, production relations must include somewhere workers, labor, the labor process - the place where the population is differentiated by function. The World Congress Resolution (Fourth International, June, 1948) quotes from The Revolution Betrayed an elaborate summary by Trotsky of his own position in 1936. The worker in the labor process is not mentioned. The resolution asks: What alterations have to be made in the analysis following the development of the past eleven years? It begins:
"... the social differentiation is the result of bourgeois norms of distribution; it has not yet entered the domain of ownership of the means of production".19
The struggle out of which the CIO was born, the domination of the machine, the drive for greater productivity, what about that? The Orthodox Trotskyist in 1950 would have to reply: the question is not a question of production. It is a question of collective ownership; it is a question of the thieving bureaucracy taking for itself consumption goods which belong to the workers; it is a question of whether the bureaucracy passes laws of inheritance; it is a question in 1950 as it was in 1934 of whether the tendency to primitive accumulation will restore private property, etc., etc. Is this an injustice to orthodox Trotskyism? If it is, then what would it reply, and where is any other reply to be found?
* A similar process in Germany led straight to Hitler.
** This was the order issued in the attempt to get the completely disorganized railroad system to function. The railroads were placed under almost military rule, subordinating the ordinary trade union democracy to "Chief Political Departments" which were established in the railway and water transport workers' unions. As soon as the critical situation had been solved, the transport workers demanded the abolition of the "Chief Political Departments" and the immediate restoration of full trade union democracy.
^* Subbotniks were the workers who on their own initiative volunteered to work five hours' overtime on Saturdays without pay in order to help the economy of the workers' state. From the word Subbota, meaning Saturday.
1 Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, (1880). The quotes are from near the end of Chapter 3.
2 The quotes are from Chapter 6: 'The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists', of V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, (1917).
3 The quote is from Chapter 51 of Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 3, (1894).
4 Ibid.
5 V. I. Lenin, A Great Beginning, (1919).
6 Walther Reuther (1907-1970) was a union organiser. He became President of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in 1946 (a post he held until his death in 1970) and he was President of the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) from 1952 to 1955. An article critical of the opportunism of Reuther was published in the Fourth International (theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers' Party), in Vol.11 No.6, November-December 1950. Martin Glaberman, a veteran of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, wrote a review of a book about Reuther in the 1990s.
7 The "trade union debate" is a reference to a series of debates within the Communist Party of Russia, in 1920-1921, over the role of trade unions and workers democracy in the USSR. The perspective of the Bolsheviks on the role of trade unions after the October Revolution was set out in the Resolution on the Trade Unions, passed by the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in April 1920.
"Under the dictatorship of the proletariat the trade unions cease being organs which struggle against the capitalist ruling class as sellers of labour and are converted into the apparatus of working-class rulers. The tasks of the trade unions are principally organizational: economic and educational. The trade unions must carry out these tasks not as a self-contained and organizationally isolated force but as one of the fundamental apparatuses of the Soviet state, guided by the Communist Party".
All sides in the debate agreed that the role of trade unions was different in the context where industry was no longer in the hands of the capitalist class. Where they differed was on the relationship between the Party, the trade unions and the working-class.
The debate took place in the context of the move from the policy of War Communism to the New Economic Policy. War Communism had been developed in the context of civil war, a trade blockade and famine. Large parts of the economy, particularly the railways and food distribution, had been taken under direct party control. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced at the end of the Civil War in an attempt to rebuild economic output. A key part of the NEP involved the introduction of some, limited, free trade.
In the debate Trotsky and Bukharin argued for Party control over the trade unions to be extended further.
Alexander Shliapnikov was a metalworker and trade union organiser. He was a member of the Bolsheviks. He led the bureau of the Bolshevik central committee in Petrograd in early 1917. And during the February Revolution, he helped organize the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies. In late 1919 he began to express disagreement with the Communist Party policy on trade unions. He argued for trade union control of industry and the workerisation of the Party. This argument gained a following that led to the formation of the Workers' Opposition.
Lenin argued against Trotsky and Bukharin. He summarised his criticism of Trotsky by saying: "The sum and substance of his policy is bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions" (the quote is from the final paragraph of V. I. Lenin, The Trade Unions The Present Situation (1920), (which is subtitled 'And Trotsky's Mistakes').
Lenin also argued against Shliapnikov and the Workers Opposition (see e.g. Report On The Role And Tasks Of The Trade Unions and Summing-Up Speech On The Report Of The C.C. Of The R.C.P.). He shared Shliapnikov's concern regarding the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union, but accused Shliapnikov of having no practical suggestions for overcoming this. Lenin argued that workers' control of the economy, without any Party intervention, was utopian because the cultural level of the working-class was too low. The Party had an important role in ensuring that the trade unions played a role in educating workers, so that they could run the economy in the interests of workers as a whole, not individual workplaces or sectors.
For Lenin's summary of some of the key moments in the debate see: V. I. Lenin, 'The Party Crisis' (1920).
8 The Declaration of the Rights of the Toilers was proposed at the first Constituent Assembly, held in January 1918. The Assembly voted against the Declaration, shortly afterwards it was dissolved by the Bolsheviks. An English language copy of the Declaration is reproduced by Louise Bryant in Chapter 9 of her book, Six Red Months in Russia, (1918).
The quote "every cook can be an administrator" is a reference to: V. I. Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, (1917).
9 For more on Stakhanovism see: Chapter 4 of Raya Dunayevskaya's An Analysis of the Russian Economy, (1942) and N. Markin, 'The Stakhanovist Movement', New International, Vol. 3 No. 1, February 1936, pp. 9-13.
10 The reference is to Chapter Twenty-Five of Marx's Capital: Volume 1, (1867).
11 The GPU (Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie - State Political Directorate) was the name of the Russian state intelligence and secret police body from 1922-23.
12 The quotes if from Chapter 5 of: CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, The Invading Socialist Society. Original published by the Johnson-Forest Tendency in 1947. Capitalised in the original.
13 The quote is from: V. I. Lenin, Part 2 of 'The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution', (1916).
14 In the version of the Transitional Program on the MIA, this is translated as "A revision of planned economy from top to bottom in the interests of producers and consumers!". See the end of the section 'The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch'.
15 Ibid.
16 Leon Trotsky, Chapter 4, 'The Struggle for Productivity of Labor': The Revolution Betrayed, (1936).
17 Leon Trotsky, Chapter 9, 'Social Relations in the Soviet Union': The Revolution Betrayed, (1936).
18 See the end of the section 'The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch'.
19 The quote is from Clause Eight of the Resolution on The USSR and Stalinism, adopted by the Second Congress of the Fourth International, in Paris, in April 1948.
Previous Chapter ¦ Next Chapter