The Paradoxes of working class of Russia and USSR

Submitted by meerov21 on January 16, 2019

The main paradox of the working class of Russia is that it brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 and it was the first who rose against the Bolsheviks in 1918. The historian Dmitry Churakov compares the scale of the workers' protests against Lenin in 1918 with the Russian revolution of 1905 and 1917!

The workers saw this party was not fulfilling its promises. By the summer of 1918, half the workers in Petrograd and hundreds of thousands more workers across the country lost their jobs. The Bolsheviks did not know how to manage industry and it was paralyzed.

The workers of the largest factories and plants began to kick the Bolsheviks out of the Soviets. This was probably the main reason for the ban on re-election the Soviets and the transition to one-party dictatorship in 1918. Then workers formed alternative Councils - the "Assemblies of commissioner factories and plants", which united half of the working class of Petrograd and quickly spread to all industrial centers. But this movement was crushed in 1918.

In 1919-1921 workers many times went on strike against the Bolsheviks putting forward political slogans. In the spring of 1919 the Left SRs (they already had an anarcho-syndicalist program (*1)) initiated strikes at the big factories of Petrograd. Moreover, along with economic requirements, there was also a demand for free elections to Councils. It was a real, not fake, libertarian social-revolutionary movement, during which there were armed clashes between workers of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. Then the left Social Revolutionaries of Petrograd and Northwest Russia wrote that "Bolshevik and tsarist counter-revolutions are identical". But this movement was defeated. Hundreds of activists of the left SRs were arrested or shot. After this the working class becomes very weak.

Separate protests took place in 1922 - 1930 and in 1962 (a workers revolt in Novocherkassk, which was shot). But in the late USSR, workers were integrated into the system of social partnership. It was a strange system of state paternalism at the factories. Workers and superiors were connected by a mass of informal links. It gave to the workers certain advantages (for example, the opportunity to get a cheap tourist trip or closed eyes on poor quality work), but paralyzed their resistance. Some of my familiar russian supporters of the council communism called this system "quasi-feudal."

Also the state provided a good social protection for the russian workers and building social housing for them in 1956 -1986. The state of Stalin's time was bloody terrorist form of fordism associated with hunger (*2), but Khrushchev and Brezhnev improved the situation of workers, began to pay pensions to the elderly, built social housing etc. The state bureaucratic apparatus owned property, began to exploit workers more gently.

In addition, workers of the USSR were crushed by terror and fear. The KGB and the party committees (two hands of the regime) carefully monitored the behavior of the workers. Dissatisfied workers leaders could be arrested or placed in a mental hospital. Therefore, the population of the USSR was extremely atomized and far less able to protest than the working class of Western and Eastern Europe, where the control was weaker. This monstrous pressure spawned disintegration of the collectivist traditions of the working class of Russia.

It is one of the main paradoxes of the Leninist countries: their population is more individualistic than the population of the West. For example so famous researcher of two Koreas, Andrei Lankov, notes that North Koreans are far more individualist than the southerners. This is another amazing paradox of Bolshevism: state collectivism, which declared the whole society a "single family" (there was even such a famous propaganda film about the working class of the USSR in 1954: "Big Family"), led to the most extreme, destructive forms of individualism and to the total cynicism and to disbelief in the triumph of any utopian idea.

Finally, drunkenness became an important aspect of life in the Bolshevik Russia. Perhaps it was a reaction to a hopeless existence, a product of "learned helplessness" (a special phenomenon that psychology studies). It is also possible that this was a reaction to the collapse of utopia. Drunkenness reached monstrous proportions in the proletarian districts. For example, my childhood was spent in a working-class area, where almost the entire male population at the weekend was drunk.

However, in the late USSR, economic strikes happened occasionally. For example, sometimes there were miners' strikes. In addition, in 1980, under the influence of the impression of Polish "Solidarity", workers of the Latvian port of Ventspils went on strike. The reaction of the authorities was ambivalent. Usually, they tried to fulfill some of the requirements of the workers. At the same time, if the workers persisted, the state resorted to repression.

In addition, spontaneous riots sometimes occurred: mobs attacked police stations. But these riots were usually caused by the violence of police officers. This was, for example, a riot in the city of Murom in 1961 (the authorities responded with repressions: a few dozen people were arrested and three were sentenced to death).

But In general, the working class of Russia was not ready for a big fight. In 1989-1991 hundreds of thousands of miners went on strike. In the 1990s a wave of privatizations began and then 50% of the industry was destroyed. But the working class which had lost the traditions of the struggle could not offer decent resistance to this.

It was another paradox of the totalitarian system of Bolshevism, which appropriated the name "socialism". Many factories were privatized and looted by representatives of the party bureaucracy and the KGB, who merged with mafia groups. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the working class (including highly skilled or unskilled workers, as well as engineers and other specialists) did not resist them. Bolshevik totalitarianism became a real sado-masochistic school of violence and passivity, which prepared the workers for submission to the new-old bosses.

***

1) How a society based on self-government labor groups would look like? Perhaps the answer to this question is the Kronstadt republic. Libertarian socialists and anarchists are well informed about the uprising in Kronstadt in 1921. But only few know about non-authoritarian (libertarian) experience of Kronstadt in 1918. In 1918, the vast majority of the council of Kronstadt belonged to anti-authoritarian (libertarian) socialist currents, Left SRs and SR Maximalists. Radicals (with the strong support of the majority of workers and sailors of the city) started reforms. Delegate from Kronstdat Lefts SRs A. Brushvit on the 2nd Congress of his Party spoke about how these reforms were going. https://libcom.org/forums/history/practice-anti-authoritarian-socialism-kronstadt-republic-1918-02102014

2) According to modern studies of economists, prepared by a group of one of the leading Russian and European economists Sergei Guriev, the economic system of the USSR in 1928-1940 did not exceed the tsarist system. The Tsar's trend can gave about the same results as Stalin's one. On the other hand, the Bolshevik system had much more victims. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/golosov/files/cggt_revision.pdf

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 16, 2019

Ugg i think it can be intresting for you
Link i wood like to know your opinion

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 17, 2019

Here is the discussion about Asiatic mode of production, " retro-gradualism" or bureaucratic collectivism or state-capitalism

There was a group of German Marxist immigrants during WWII who created the theory of "retro- gradualism". According to it "stalinism and fascism" is a sort of throwback to the absolutist-feudal society.

Some other Marxists, such as Karl Wittfogel, believed that Stalin's USSR is a form of the Asiatic mode of production. Similar ideas were expressed by non-Marxist libertarian (he became authoritarian later) German philosopher Rudolf Baro. That also means sort of a regress in comparison with capitalism...

Moshe Machover, a Marxist Israel dissident, said: "In this context there was a very serious sub-theme regarding the major under-developed countries -countries like China, Japan, Russia, Turkey and Persia, which had been great powers and were never colonies, but in which capitalism had not developed properly, and which therefore found themselves left behind. In all these countries the “objective” historical task was to get modernisation and industrialisation going. And in all of them the ruling classes (traditional or newly arrived to power) imposed some form of forced modernisation and industrialisation...The new ruling class led by Stalin attempted another road to modernisation and industrialisation: command planning, while market forces were largely suspended. A valid historical assessment of bureaucratic collectivism cannot be performed by comparing it, even negatively, to socialism. This would not only be unfair to the very idea of socialism, but also irrelevant to the place of bureaucratic collectivism itself in history"... :

https://libcom.org/forums/theory/asiatic-mode-production-retro-gradualism-09042016

AnythingForProximity

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AnythingForProximity on January 20, 2019

Meerov, I agree with others that you should contact the Libcom admins and request a blog – it would be a better format for your well-researched essays than a forum post.

meerov21

The Bolsheviks did not know how to manage industry and it was paralyzed.

Then again, the situation where it was up to the Bolsheviks to manage industry should never have arisen in the first place!

meerov21

In 1919-1921 workers many times went on strike against the Bolsheviks putting forward political slogans. In the spring of 1919 the Left SRs (they already had an anarcho-syndicalist program (*1)) initiated strikes at the big factories of Petrograd.

If the strikers had an explicitly anarchosyndicalist program as early as 1919, that's an important counterpoint to the view expressed by the likes of Victor Serge, who argued in Year One of the Russian Revolution that the Petrograd factory workers striking against the Bolsheviks were the most backward elements of the proletariat, simply because the most conscious and dedicated workers had left the factories for the frontlines of the civil war. While this claim is little more than a convenient excuse for how the Bolshevik dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship over the proletariat, there is probably some element of truth to it as well. Peter Sedgwick, in his introduction to Serge's book, mentions British agents having encountered slogans such as "Долой Ленина с кониной, дайте царя со свининой!" at workers' demonstrations. It is important to know that despite such isolated occurrences, many workers still struggled against the Bolshevik government on their own class terrain.

I find it surprising that an anarchosyndicalist program should be formed by the Left SRs. Would you happen to have a link to that program (assuming that it was actually written down and printed in some pamphlet or newspaper), or at least to a brief summary of it? On a related note, what was the relationship / programmatic agreement between the left SRs and Russian anarchists before and after October 1917?

meerov21

Finally, drunkenness became an important aspect of life in the Bolshevik Russia. Perhaps it was a reaction to a hopeless existence, a product of "learned helplessness" (a special phenomenon that psychology studies). It is also possible that this was a reaction to the collapse of utopia. Drunkenness reached monstrous proportions in the proletarian districts. For example, my childhood was spent in a working-class area, where almost the entire male population at the weekend was drunk.

How reminiscent of Bakunin: Of escape there are but three methods — two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.

meerov21

Some other Marxists, such as Karl Wittfogel, believed that Stalin's USSR is a form of the Asiatic mode of production.

Obviously, this opens up the whole discussion about the nature of the USSR, and by extension, the even more fundamental discussion about the Marxist conception of history (unilinear vs. multilinear). Both topics have been discussed on Libcom before. Here, Marcel van der Linden's Western Marxism and the Soviet Union is an essential resource, offering what is pretty much an exhaustive overview of Marxist theories on the subject, including those of Wittfogel, Bahro, and Machover. (A condensed summary can be found on pages 309 and 318–319 of the pdf linked to above.) The startling conclusion of van der Linden's book is that none of the many hypotheses advanced so far is both compatible with the Marxist theoretical framework and consistent with the facts…

meerov21

Similar ideas were expressed by non-Marxist libertarian (he became authoritarian later) German philosopher Rudolf Baro. That also means sort of a regress in comparison with capitalism...

Not necessarily. This is illustrated by the analysis developed by Alexandr Zimin (also given in van der Linden's book), who came up with a sophisticated theory that allowed him to incorporate the Asiatic mode of production into a unilinear conception of history by allowing for limited deviations1 from the main sequence of slavery → feudalism → capitalism → communism. Zimin explained the similarities between the USSR and the Asiatic MoP by postulating that both were failed transitions between two "main-sequence" modes of production: the Asiatic MoP between primitive communism and slavery, the USSR between capitalism and communism. More generally, both were failed instances of the same transition undertaken in opposite directions: the Asiatic MoP from a classless society to class society, the USSR from class society to a classless society.

  • 1Obviously, there's the question of whether it's fair or even useful to call a "deviation" something that was the dominant mode of production in most of the world for several thousand years.

link

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by link on January 21, 2019

Sorry but ive missed out on these discussions of Russia and on Meerovs invitation to comment so im only just catching up and not really responding to the detail of any specific contribution

Ugg started one of the other threads by identifying Russia as state capitalism which appears to have generated a discussion about what else Russia could have been. In spite of Meerov’s personal knowledge I would agree with Ugg .

I think it is significant that we talk of a world or global market nowadays. This is something that capitalism created when it took over from a feudal system which was very slow to develop the economy and based on classes which were fixed in law. Under feudalism, the ruler owned everything in his or her realm and was able to dispose of roles in managing regions to Dukes etc down to Lords of the Manor. A serf’s status was fixed in law and they supplied tithes to the lord of the manor out of the work they performed but kept the rest to themselves.

It was some time ago that I read about the Asiatic modes of production but the basic points I remember are that it seemed more like a variation of European feudalism based mainly on regional powers. I don’t feel expert on this so perhaps Meerov you will wish to expand on this very brief summary.

As capitalism developed a world market it established its control over the whole world and I think this has been true throughout the 20th century. It is important to start at this world level because it is clear to see there are many variations of capitalism in different countries and there are many localising examples of pre-capitalism societies and modified pre-cap societies. I don’t think you can understand the world by looking at the local first.

Whats more one major feature of capitalism in this last century has been the development of what is called state capitalism as the dominant structure within capitalism. The state itself was a relative minor institution during the 18th century and even by the early 1900s was still relatively small – the army tending to the be the largest element of the state even at that stage. Since then the state has gradually taken over most elements of the running of society in all countries and private capital has had to back down and accept this – obviously there are significant differences in how this is expressed from country to country however.

To resond to Meerov’s arguments then, I cannot see justification for seeing Russia as something separate to the capitalist world. I would also argue that the revolution of 1917 was a working class revolution where workers took power with the help of the Bolsheviks. Isolated in one country however it could never stay in power and the Bolsheviks weaknesses in understanding, on role of the Party and Nationalism for example, meant that from the early 20s onwards the workers grip on power was weakening dramatically and capitalism restored its control. The revolution had got rid of the Absolutist monarchy and the bourgeoisie, so all that was left to run capitalism was the state apparatus.

As a state, it employed workers and paid wages and owned the means of production and owned the surplus value generated by work done ie capitalist exploitation where capital is owned by the state. The state managed by a planning system, true, which did not function in the same way as a free capital market internally It planned and accounted for its internal production and operated capital markets by barter and exchange rather than financial markets. It operated within the framework of a world market and was dominated by this. It traded with this world market with surpluses and obtained items it could not produce itself.

Key for me is the exploitation of a waged working class. I do not see how this can be labelled as anything other than state capitalism

Spikymike

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on January 21, 2019

Will just get in here another recommendation for this book that deals with many (though not all) of the related theories of the Soviet Union as capitalist in some form.
https://libcom.org/library/capitalism-class-struggle-ussr-neil-c-fernandez

AnythingForProximity

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AnythingForProximity on January 22, 2019

link

the Bolsheviks weaknesses in understanding, on role of the Party and Nationalism for example, meant that from the early 20s onwards the workers grip on power was weakening dramatically and capitalism restored its control.

Arguably, the examples given by Meerov (or even by Victor Serge in his book that I linked to above; see also the excellent timeline from The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control) show that the workers had lost their grip on power long before that, with antagonisms between the Bolshevik government and the Russian working class already in full force as early as 1918.

link

The revolution had got rid of the Absolutist monarchy and the bourgeoisie, so all that was left to run capitalism was the state apparatus.

That's one of the problems with the state capitalist theory – if there was capitalism in the USSR, where was the capitalist class, given that the revolution had gotten rid of it?

Did the state apparatus become a new bourgeoisie? That seems unlikely; individual bureaucrats did not own any individual enterprises that they could freely dispose of (e.g., by bequeathing them to their heirs), did not compete with one another for market share, and did not individually benefit from the production of surplus value.

Or maybe the USSR was one huge capital, one huge firm, and the state apparatus simply managed it on behalf of someone else? If so, who was that someone? The NEP-men were the closest Soviet Russia ever came to having real capitalists, but they did not outlive the NEP period. Was it the peasants, who were for the most part violently expropriated as a result of the Bolshevik collectivization policies? Or was it the international bourgeoisie? That too seems unlikely. The very reason why the USSR became a role model for a number of third-world anti-imperialist movements was that by rapidly industrializing and sealing itself off from the world market (though never completely so), it managed to assert itself against the international bourgeoisie, who would have probably much preferred for Russia to be a backwater that could be freely exploited for its markets and resources, as in Czarist times.

Or was the USSR a capitalism without capitalists, where the workers exploited themselves in a system of cooperatives which the state apparatus simply did its best to coordinate (Naville), or where society acted as an "abstract capitalist" (Bordiga, making a somewhat creative use of the Manuscripts of 1844)? As pointed out by van der Linden, that would contradict Marx, who explicitly wrote in the Grundrisse that "[t]he concept of capital contains the capitalist".

link

Key for me is the exploitation of a waged working class.

That is the key issue, but many have argued that wages, and by extension wage labor, did not play the same role in the USSR as in capitalist societies, and thus were actually nothing of the sort. The wages of Soviet workers were not established by the competition of individual capitals in a free labor market, but rather set by the State. They were not tied to performance, and they were simultaneously unnecessary and insufficient for appropriating consumer goods. Many basic goods and services were provided by the State for free (public healthcare, transport, education) while others were subject to chronic shortages and could not be acquired regardless of how high your wages were. Still others were only available in limited amounts, and their allocation was primarily dictated by non-monetary factors (time spent waiting in line, having the right connections). Again, many of these points have been raised on Libcom before – see this thread in particular.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 21, 2019

1.
AnythingForProximity Meerov, I agree with others that you should contact the Libcom admins and request a blog – it would be a better format for your well-researched essays than a forum post.

Thanks so much. I've tried that before. I wrote to the administrator but have not received any response.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

2.

Me:
"In 1919-1921 workers many times went on strike against the Bolsheviks putting forward political slogans. In the spring of 1919 the Left SRs (they already had an anarcho-syndicalist program (*1)) initiated strikes at the big factories of Petrograd."

AnythingForProximity If the strikers had an explicitly anarchosyndicalist program as early as 1919, that's an important counterpoint to the view expressed by the likes of Victor Serge, who argued in Year One of the Russian Revolution that the Petrograd factory workers striking against the Bolsheviks were the most backward elements of the proletariat, simply because the most conscious and dedicated workers had left the factories for the frontlines of the civil war.

I don't know why Victor Serge became popular in the West. I find this man was largely (though not entirely) a Pro-Bolshevik.

In any case, a lot of new documents and studies have been published today, so such views are simply outdated.

Victor Serge is lying. Already in 1918, workers of the largest factories of Petrograd protested against the Bolsheviks. These workers had a variety of political ideas, from the Menshevist version of social-democracy and parlamentarism to anarcho-syndicalism and the left SR. But All the striking workers demanded free elections to the Soviets!

Also they sometimes demended the elimination of the Cheka, free development of workers ' cooperatives, direct product exchange between the city and the village etc. Some workers were on strike also in 1921 under the slogans of free elections to the Soviets and in defense of Kronstadt.

Moreover: Workers of Petrograd (Leningrad) went on strike and issued the same slogans in February 1927!

If you can read in my (Russian) language, you can read the documents, where it is said about it, in the book. There are alot of documents: Pavlov,D.B. “The workers' opposition movement in Bolshevik Russia. 1918 " http://communism21.org/books/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%B5%20%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5%20%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5%20%D0%B2%20%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9%20%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8%201918%20%D0%B3.pdf

The fact is that a couple of months after October, the mood of the workers began to turn against the Bolsheviks. And it was happening fast because the economic catastrophe was becoming more and more pronounced.

There was no big civil war at that time. Continuing economic problems of 1917 + mismanagement by the Bolshevik government destroyed the industry.

Also One of the reasons for the paralysis of the economy was the struggle of the government of Lenin with the Association of workers and specialists of Railways (VIKZHEL). This Association demanded the transfer of Railways in the self-management of workers and under the protection of the workers ' militia. The Bolsheviks responded with a split of VIKZHEL and repressions. But this has led to a sharp deterioration of the Railways and to new economic problems.

In the spring-summer of 1918 the workers of the biggest factories began to withdraw deputies-the-Bolsheviks across all the country. In response, the Bolsheviks:

a) prohibited the re-election of some Soviets
b) falsified the elections to the Soviets (like in Petrograd in the spring or summer)
c) dispersed non-Bolshevik Soviets, if the workers still elect them (Samara, Tambov, Izhevsk)
d) dispersed election meetings, strikes and demonstrations of workers (Yaroslavl),
e) has closed the opposition press,
f) made an armed attacks against the opposition groups (anarchists, social revolutionaries-maximalists in Moscow and Samara and Izhevsk)
g) ...or have completely banned the activities of opposition parties (June 14, 1918 Mensheviks and SR were banned).

In General, you probably have a bad idea how much new has become known today due to the publication of new documents... For ex:

The use of chemical weapons in Russia in 1918. Lenin was the Assad of its era.
https://libcom.org/forums/general/use-chemical-weapons-russia-lenin-was-assad-its-era-22012019

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

3

AnythingForProximity find it surprising that an anarchosyndicalist program should be formed by the Left SRs. Would you happen to have a link to that program (assuming that it was actually written down and printed in some pamphlet or newspaper), or at least to a brief summary of it? On a related note, what was the relationship / programmatic agreement between the left SRs and Russian anarchists before and after October 1917?

The ideas of the left SR until July 6 were a strange mixture of authoritarian and anti-authoritarian socialism. They criticized the Bolsheviks, but at the same time cooperated with them in some areas. For example, they helped Bolshevik operations against anarchists in April 1918 in Moscow.

But then left SR adopted at its fourth Congress (September-October 1918) a radically new program which I would describe as a combination of ideas close to the German-Dutch left Communists and anarcho-syndicalism.

After the defeat in the fight against the Bolsheviks on 6 July left S. R. ceased to be a centralized party, has become (de facto) Federation of Autonomous regional groups and ideological and political factions. The power of the Central Committee of Left SR sharply decreased. In addition, Pro-Bolshevik elements left the party. So to some extent it stops to be a party ))

Finally, the left SR Trutovsky recalled that the workers who remained in the party were opposed to nationalization. In the autumn of 1918 many workers began to see that Bolshevik nationalization led the country to disaster. Workers inside the left CP was supported by the program of "Syndical-Cooperative Federation"

...In Spain Friends of Durruti (revolutionary faction of CNT) advocated the economy is controlled by revolutionary syndicates, local life ruled by Councils of deputies of the Commune and militia were under the control of the Soviets of deputies elected from the fighters ("Huntas").

In Russia there was a revolutionary and to some extent libertarian movement - Party of left socialists - revolutionaries (PLSR), which supported similar ideas in 1918-1923.

a) In the field of politics, the left SR became strong supporters of free Councils. They sharply condemned the opinion of the Bolsheviks about the Soviets. In her letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee, in November 1918, Maria Spiridonova, the leader of the left SR, wrote that the Soviets should be a "living laboratory of the masses", and not an instrument in the hands of the parties. She pointed out that the power should be in the hands of the Soviets and workers ' assambliers of any plant or village have the right to withdraw delegates at any time, she also said that "there is something wrong in the power of any party". So "the party should generate new ideas, and the workers themselves should rule with the help of Councils".

b) As for the economy, the lef SR believed that it should be transferred to the hands of the "Syndical-Cooperative Federation".
They believed the associations of factory committees should create syndicates and take control of the factory. Also consumers should unite in "consumer cooperatives" (At that time about a third of Russian peasants and a part of city inhabitants took part in work of self-governing consumer, trade-and-purchasing, credit and production cooperatives). Then, syndicates and cooperative-unions-of-consumers had to choose special Economic Councils, in order to plan production according to the needs of the working population.

c) One of the leading theorists of the left SR Isaac Steinberg called it a "System of separation of Soviet authorities".
He believed it's not enough to smash the Bolsheviks dictators. Steinberg said: "It is necessary to crush the common fist of the Power of Soviets".
One can argue that Councils is a system of direct democracy, which relies on the Assembly of workers. But there is a problem: the most active people usually come to the Councils as delegates and make operational decisions on their own, while the people's assemblies can not control them all the time.
Steinberg developed the "theory of crystallization". According to this theory, within even the most free society there are pockets of authoritarianism (parent-child relationship, teacher-student, doctor-patient). So there may be authoritarian centres of crystallization and then pyramids of autocracy will start to line up. Therefore, it is necessary to separate the different decision centers make them to control each other ("constant mixing of the liquid to prevent authoritarian crystallization").

P.S. You can read something here https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%85_%D1%81%D0%BE%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2-%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8E%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

4

link
I would also argue that the revolution of 1917 was a working class revolution where workers took power with the help of the Bolsheviks.

They did not. The working class cannot take power through the party. The party is a centralized bureaucratic system that serves its top management, not the working class. Moreover, the idea of party representation has its roots in exploitative society, with its parliamentary systems, centralized army, police and postal service. The working class, universally organized in the Association of Soviets, can take power. The party, like the centralized Union, is the mortal enemy of the Soviet system. The Bolshevik party, relying on an Alliance with the old tsarist bureaucracy, destroyed the Soviets in 1918 -1921.

link
Isolated in one country however it could never stay in power and the Bolsheviks weaknesses in understanding...

The problem with this scheme, which comes from the left Communists, is that it is completely wrong.

There is an interesting paradox for me. I agree in many ways with the supporters of German-Dutch communism of the Soviets in terms of the social revolutionary role of the Soviets in history,

I agree with their criticism of trade unions.

I agree with the criticism of anti-fascism.
https://libcom.org/forums/organise/fascism-anti-fascism-18102018

I certainly agree that the Bolsheviks did not build a socialist society.

But at the same time, the evaluation of Bolshevism on the part of the German-Dutch left communism and bordigism is incorrect. That's not the problem that the Bolsheviks were weak. On the contrary, to my great regret, these bastards were very strong!

In 1918-1921, the Bolsheviks, relying on the old tsarist bureaucracy, and red army, which was ran by the Alliance of new red burocrats ("commissari") and old tsarist officers built a powerful terrorist system of exploitation, which destroyed the workers ' movement.

At the same time, the anti-Bolshevik labor movement in 1918 was huge, furious and comparable in scale with the movement of 1905 and 1917.

Please read above what I wrote in my answer to AnythingForProximity in "N2" about the Bolsheviks ' destruction of Soviet power.

link

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by link on January 22, 2019

I find a major contradiction in AfP and Meerovs views. Ok you are both arguing that the Bolsheviks were the bad guys because they took power away from the working class (and on this latter point I would agree with you) but I am assuming that means you accept that there was a working class revolution to start with.

So, after the revolution, the Bolsheviks took power away from the class. What did they do with it is the question then? There is for me a major differentiation to be made between the Bolsheviks prior to 1917 and the Stalinist regime. Meerov seems to be arguing that they introduced an Asiatic Mode of Production ie Stalin’s regime was a new ruling class that managed to return history to a previous state of being. This was not the dark ages when everything fell apart but a new construct created by Stalinism. How is such a thing possible? I find it problematic that in condemning the Bolsheviks, a so-called marxist Wittfogel is used to justify this theory. Wittfogel didn’t join the CP till the early 20s when you say they were already anti working class and then didn’t stop supporting Stalinism until they allied with Germany for a period prior WW2? He’s no revolutionary marxist and nor was Stalin or his regime. But neither were they representative of a feudal type regime

AfP raises the issue without a private enterprise based ruling class there can be no capitalism but fails to identify what type of system existed. The Bolsheviks are condemned in the 30s and 40s for the way they exercised power, yet apparently they was not the ruling class and were even to be supported because Russia ‘managed to assert itself against the international bourgeoisie’ (AfP Post 7)

Does this not seem like a bunch of major theoretical contradictions to say that the Bolsheviks created a brand new society but they was either no ruling class at that time running things, not even Stalin, or they were a feudal ruling class.

Things get even more complicated later on as capitalism takes over again when ‘the KGB and party bureaucrats privatised and looted the old system and because new old bosses’ (from Meerovs first post on this thread). Somehow then an Asiatic mode of production has been converted into capitalism by members of the Asiatic bureaucracy.

I would put it this way. If the state owns and manages the means of production and exploits the working class then the bureaucracy is either the whole or part of the ruling class. What is the problem with this? The theory of state capitalism makes a far more coherent argument that the ones ive criticised above.

Certainly there is no point in condemning workers at the lower levels of the state as part of the ruling class, but are you really going to keep arguing me that Stalin and the Bolsheviks, Hitler and the Nazis, Churchill, Thatcher, Trump Xi Jinping etc etc are not part of the ruling class. Perhaps this approach is why some anarchist nowadays seem so willing to support Labour Party and CP campaigns cos they don’t see these political parties are part of the ruling class under capitalism. ( Meerov, I know I can exclude you from this criticism thankfully but I hope you can see the logic of the point im making)

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

Ok, there are a lot of questions and important comments, thank you. I will try to answer some things today (but not all of them, because there are big questions).

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

1.

Wittfogel ... He’s no revolutionary marxist

So what?
I do not quite understand what it matters.

In 1939, Vitfogel was influenced by the news of the Stalinist repressions and the Soviet-German pact so he breaks with the Communists. Later he came to his theories of the Asian mode of production and the hydraulic state. Theories of Witfogel became to some extent the product of his life and disappointment in Bolshevism.

But even if Witfogel for a 100% a bad person, a supporter of all the worst on earth, what's the difference? I'm not saying that he was a good guy or that his political calls were good. I say just that his scientific theories were interesting. He is one of the most famous researchers of Asia, and his scientific doctrine is interesting.

(By the way, Marx relied on the ideas of the millionaire and stock-market player Ricardo, and on the ideas of the Prussian reactionary and nationalist Hegel ;) )

link

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by link on January 22, 2019

I responded to your use of Wittfogel because you called him a marxist. But he was a stalinist and whether he become critical of USSR or not, he is a bourgeois politician and therefore I do not trust him to make a clear class analysis of the situation. I think it is important to use genuine revolutionaries to help our analyses and not rely on leftist bourgeois ideas from stalinism or social democracy or trotskyist ideologues. This is why I took up this point although yes I would use them for more empirical facts. I look forward to your responses to my other arguments.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

2. "Commissarocracy"

Link :
I find a major contradiction in AfP and Meerovs views. Ok you are both arguing that the Bolsheviks were the bad guys because they took power away from the working class (and on this latter point I would agree with you) but I am assuming that means you accept that there was a working class revolution to start with.
So, after the revolution, the Bolsheviks took power away from the class. What did they do with it is the question then? There is for me a major differentiation to be made between the Bolsheviks prior to 1917 and the Stalinist regime.
Meerov seems to be arguing that they introduced an Asiatic Mode of Production ie Stalin’s regime was a new ruling class that managed to return history to a previous state of being. This was not the dark ages when everything fell apart but a new construct created by Stalinism. How is such a thing possible?

The Russian revolution began in February-March 1917. The first Soviets were created by workers of large factories in the same time as the Provisional Government.

At the same time, various forms of self-organization of workers and communitarian peasantry developed throughout the country (village councils, factory committees, house committees, soldier committees, cooperatives, workers' unions, engineers, teachers).

In October 1917, the Bolshevik party was able to win over most of the workers and soldiers who were dissatisfied with the economic difficulties and the continuation of the imperialist war. Relying on this part of the working class and the soldiers, the Bolsheviks were able to initiate a series of uprisings, shift the Provisional government and create their own government.

Although officially this movement in October-November 1917 took place under the slogan "All power to the Soviets", in practice, already in December, the influence of the Bolshevik central government began to grow (Council of People's Commissars - "Sovnarkom"). It dismisses the revolutionary armed detachments and creates centralized ministries and power structures, which are subordinate directly to the new government and to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks: the Cheka, then the Red Army and GLAVKi (ministries). In all these structures, former tsarist officials and officers are absolutely dominant (with the exception of the Cheka).The Bolsheviks ruled the new-old departments only with the help of small cells (party groups), which they were able to introduce into the tsarist ministries, and these party cells were subordinate to the Central Committee. An alliance appears between the old tsarist bureaucracy and the new red bureaucracy. In 1918-1921, this alliance destroyed the Soviets (leaving only a shell from them) creates a totalitarian bureaucraсy, destroys elections, bans any criticism and opposition to the party, nationalizes all industry and introduces a serf system (workers of Petrograd in 1921 organize strikes demanding "detach them with their wives and children from the factories " - to give tham wrights change the work of their own will - Read the collection of documents "St. Petersburg Workers and Dictatorship of the Proletariat" of St. Petersburg 2000. ).

The councils of workers' deputies were, as the leader of the left SR Maria Spiridonova wrote, a gigantic "laboratory", where the workers ’ assamblears could choose certain people, individuals, parties and groups, and change them at any time.

The alliance of the tsarist bureaucracy and the Bolshevik bureaucracy destroy this laboratory in 1918, after workers outraged by the economic crisis began to recall the Bolshevik deputies.

It was Lenin who created the total system of state exploitation and a serf system that oppressed the workers.

Of course it was the Asian system, because the workers in 1919 - 1921 became slaves or serfs attached to factories, having ceased to be hired workers. True, after riots and strikes, slavery was weakened in 1922. Stalin again introduced these measures against the workers in 1940.

This system exacerbated certain features of the royal autocracy (samoderjavie). The revolutionary workers called it at that time the "Commissarocracy" (komissaroderjavie).

I do not know why you are paying so much attention to Stalin here. The name of the main counter-revolutionary in Russia, who created a new\old system of exploitation - Vladimir Lenin.

Tomorrow I will try to answer questions about the Asian mode of production.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

I responded to your use of Wittfogel because you called him a marxist. But he was a stalinist and whether he become critical of USSR or not, he is a bourgeois politician and therefore I do not trust him to make a clear class analysis of the situation. I think it is important to use genuine revolutionaries to help our analyses and not rely on leftist bourgeois ideas from stalinism or social democracy or trotskyist ideologues. This is why I took up this point although yes I would use them for more empirical facts. I look forward to your responses to my other arguments.

I do not think that Vitfogel remained Stalinist, officially he was against the USSR and Stalin. And I separate scientific knowledge and analysis from moral and political ideas. The scientist's assessments and analysis can be deep, while his political views are terrifying.

Many people are too dependent on passions and personal experience and some psychological transference when it comes to some personalities, and in this they can be less interesting and objective as in the science. I'm afraid Sigmund Freud and his like-minded people also influenced me here;)

Ugg

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Ugg on January 22, 2019

Hey I really like your article and also agree with everyone it would be cool to see some of your articles on the frontpage.

meerov21

The historian Dmitry Churakov compares the scale of the workers' protests against Lenin in 1918 with the Russian revolution of 1905 and 1917!

I tried to look Dmitry Churakov up but I can't find anything in English. Do you feel he has any other useful insights? It's both inspiring and disheartening to learn that the scale of the opposition to the Bolsheviks compared to that of the Revolution itself because it means that the masses were doing everything right but still were unable to stop what was happening.

meerov21

Also the state provided a good social protection for the russian workers and building social housing for them in 1956 -1986.

Raya Dunayevskaya thought that Kruschev was going to be similarly brutal as Stalin was, but that uprisings in places like Hungary as well as resistance by soviet workers led to the state backing down on some of these things. Do you feel like this is a fair assessment?

meerov21

It is one of the main paradoxes of the Leninist countries: their population is more individualistic than the population of the West.

How do you feel like this has changed since the fall of the USSR? Do you think the increase in "individualism" was positive in some ways or was it mostly just that people felt alienated and isolated from one another?

meerov21

But In general, the working class of Russia was not ready for a big fight. In 1989-1991 hundreds of thousands of miners went on strike. In the 1990s a wave of privatizations began and then 50% of the industry was destroyed. But the working class which had lost the traditions of the struggle could not offer decent resistance to this.

Do you feel like the fall of the USSR was something that was taken away from the masses, the same way the Russian Revolution was?

meerov21

1) How a society based on self-government labor groups would look like? Perhaps the answer to this question is the Kronstadt republic. Libertarian socialists and anarchists are well informed about the uprising in Kronstadt in 1921. But only few know about non-authoritarian (libertarian) experience of Kronstadt in 1918. In 1918, the vast majority of the council of Kronstadt belonged to anti-authoritarian (libertarian) socialist currents, Left SRs and SR Maximalists. Radicals (with the strong support of the majority of workers and sailors of the city) started reforms. Delegate from Kronstdat Lefts SRs A. Brushvit on the 2nd Congress of his Party spoke about how these reforms were going. https://libcom.org/forums/history/practice-anti-authoritarian-socialism-kronstadt-republic-1918-02102014

Do you think it could have been possible that had it not been crushed sooner Russia would have looked a lot more like Anarchist Catalonia? I feel like some of the demands of Kronstadt Uprising mirror a lot of the ways Anarchist Catalonia was run (ie. Abolition of wage-slavery, equalization of rations, allowing farmers to either join collectives or farm individually so long as they didn't exploit labour, etc.)

There's another article I read on here (https://libcom.org/library/soviets-factory-committees-russian-revolution-peter-rachleff ) which talks about how during this period there was some roadbumps in trying to coordinate supplies and stuff, and that factories were still in competition with one another. Do you feel like given enough time they would have begun engaging in mutual aid and some form of organized communist production?

meerov21

>2) According to modern studies of economists, prepared by a group of one of the leading Russian and European economists Sergei Guriev, the economic system of the USSR in 1928-1940 did not exceed the tsarist system. The Tsar's trend can gave about the same results as Stalin's one. On the other hand, the Bolshevik system had much more victims.

What do you think could have been done to fix the high level of violence and low productivity?

I've tried reading a bit about the USSR's economy and a lot of the decisions they made don't make sense to me. For example Alec Nove talks about how at one point the price of means of production was set way above the actual demand for them while the price of lumber was artificially lowered to below the actual cost it took to produce it.

I wish I knew what the planners were thinking because there seems to be a lot of cases like this where there was some level of disregard for trying to have supply meet demand. It almost seems like they had this pointless bureaucracy that mediated things that would have happened automatically within a market, where where prices tend to go up and down relative to supply and demand. I don't know if it was because the system was just too centralized or something.

link

Ugg started one of the other threads by identifying Russia as state capitalism which appears to have generated a discussion about what else Russia could have been. In spite of Meerov’s personal knowledge I would agree with Ugg .

I wish there was a term I could use that could encompass both the state capitalist interpretation as well as others. Even though I tend to agree with the state-capitalist theory what's most important to me is that it was a hierarchal, exploitative system where workers were compelled to minimize costs and maximize production.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 22, 2019

Thank you, Ugg, English is not my native language and it is difficult for me to write on it. I will try to briefly answer only a few questions. Later I will try to answer the others.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 23, 2019

Ugg,
Do you feel he has any other useful insights? It's both inspiring and disheartening to learn that the scale of the opposition to the Bolsheviks compared to that of the Revolution itself because it means that the masses were doing everything right but still were unable to stop what was happening.

Not certainly in that way. When in 1918 a gigantic wave of indignation of workers rose up against the Bolsheviks, when the workers began to form an alternative system of Soviets ("Assemblies of commissioner factories and plants"), many Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and others decided that this wave would soon wash away the Bolsheviks. However, they did not take into account several factors.

1) Unemployment and non-payment of wages drove workers out of the revolutionary industrial centers, Moscow and Petrograd. People moved to the village or wandered around the country in search of work. By the summer of 1918, the number of the working class in Petrograd had fallen by from 400 to 200 thousand. This led to the erosion of labor collectives where anti-Bolshevik ideological-political crystallization began.

2) The working masses were weakened by hunger in 1918. Many did not have enough food. People just lost physical strength and fell ill with various diseases.

3) Burnout syndrome. The workers were shocked by the failure of two love stories. In March 1917, they fell in love with the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, in September-October 1917, the workers fell in love with the Bolsheviks and brought them to power during the uprising. The disappointment was terrible. This led many workers to apathy.

4) Conflict within the working class. The movement against the Bolsheviks in 1918 was grouped around the working intelligentsia of the factory, which realized (to some extent) their group corporate interests. "Assemblies of commissioner factories and plants" depended on the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, but overwhelmingly said that the workers should no longer follow the parties, that the workers should not be the tools of the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks, but should defend their class interests. I think that the German-Dutch Communists of the Soviets would greatly appreciate this. But some workers did not like the working intelligentsia, which created the core of the protest movement.

5) In addition, it is possible that the confrontation with the white armies in 1919-1920 inspired some workers during this period that the Bolsheviks are the lesser evil. But this factor does not explain the defeat of the working class in 1918 and in 1921.

But the main reason for the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik labor movement of 1918-1921 was that the working class was weakened and scattered around the country due to a combination of unemployment and hunger.

Link and AnythingForProximity i I also comment here on your discussion on the confrontation of the working class and Bolshevism.

AnythingForProximity

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AnythingForProximity on January 23, 2019

link

Meerov seems to be arguing that they introduced an Asiatic Mode of Production ie Stalin’s regime was a new ruling class that managed to return history to a previous state of being.

No, that's incorrect in more than one way. First, even those who identified the USSR as a form of the Asiatic mode of production did not claim that this social formation was introduced into Russia by the Bolsheviks. Wittfogel, for example, believed that Russia became "Asiatic" as a result of the Mongolian invasions, and after a brief window of opportunity for transitioning to capitalism that was opened by the February revolution, relapsed into it, though on a higher, industrialized level. Other theoreticians, like Zimin, simply pointed out what they perceived to be analogies between the USSR and the Asiatic MoP, without going so far as to say that the former was a type of the latter.

Second, no one is suggesting that Stalin somehow turned back the clock of history and replaced capitalism with the Asiatic MoP. (Here I'm going to disagree with Meerov and say that even if that was what happened, it still wouldn't be appropriate to talk of "regress", since the Asiatic MoP is supposed to belong to an entirely different road of history than capitalism – that's what makes the whole notion so controversial for Marxists.) The same authors who noticed similarities between the USSR and the Asiatic MoP would also deny that pre-1917 Russia had been capitalist. Bahro, who was mentioned by Meerov, came closest to what you're implying – he considered Czarist Russia to be a primarily Asiatic society with relatively unimportant feudal and capitalist outgrowths, both of which were destroyed when the Bolsheviks expropriated the capitalists and the big landowners. However, Bahro still viewed the Bolshevik dictatorship as essentially progressive in light of the rapid industrialization it had achieved, even if he didn't think that this industrialization had changed the underlying social structure.

link

I find it problematic that in condemning the Bolsheviks, a so-called marxist Wittfogel is used to justify this theory.

I'm with Meerov on this, and don't find it problematic. People with shitty politics are occasionally capable of astute insights, just as it is possible for people with sound politics to commit serious analytical blunders.

link

AfP raises the issue without a private enterprise based ruling class there can be no capitalism but fails to identify what type of system existed.

True, and it would be surprising if I didn't. I mean, Marxists and revolutionaries everywhere have been debating this for over a hundred years, and you expect me to provide a definitive answer in a forum post?

link

yet apparently they was not the ruling class

That's your claim (I only argued that they were not bourgeois), but yeah, there are problems with saying that they were. First, if we are aiming for a Marxist analysis, a class must be defined by its relationship to the means of production, and it's not immediately obvious that the Soviet bureaucracy satisfied that criterion. Overseers, managers and bureaucrats have been a constant feature of all class societies – slavery, feudalism, capitalism – but in none of them did they constitute a distinct class of their own, so it's unclear why the USSR should have been different in this respect. Again, saying that the Bolsheviks were not a class as such, just the representatives of one, gets around this issue but introduces others. Second, as pointed out by van der Linden, if the Soviet bureaucracy was a class, then it was a class that only constituted itself after it came to power – which flies in the face of not just Marxism but basic logic.

link

I would put it this way. If the state owns and manages the means of production and exploits the working class then the bureaucracy is either the whole or part of the ruling class. What is the problem with this?

There's a whole bunch of them. Your reasoning is circular, since by using categories like "exploitation" and "working class", you're presupposing what you're trying to prove. Moreover, even if you showed that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted a ruling class, that would not be enough to prove that the USSR was capitalist; ruling classes that appropriated the social surplus product for themselves also existed in pre-capitalist modes of production. If you are going to simultaneously maintain that (1) the USSR was capitalist and that (2) the bureaucracy was the ruling class there, you have to prove that the bureaucracy turned into a new bourgeoisie. You haven't even come close to doing that.

link

But neither were they representative of a feudal type regime

link

or they were a feudal ruling class.

Again, the whole controversy about the Asiatic MoP consists in the fact that it is supposed to be fundamentally different from feudalism. Noticing similarities between the political economy of the USSR and the Asiatic MoP has even less to do with feudalism.

link

were even to be supported because Russia ‘managed to assert itself against the international bourgeoisie’ (AfP Post 7)

No, that's your inference and it's totally wrong; don't ascribe it to me. The phrase was simply meant to indicate that while the Bolsheviks' ascent to power was not the preferred outcome from the viewpoint of the international bourgeoisie (otherwise 13 different countries would not have invaded Russia to aid the Whites), it came to pass anyway; the invading armies were ultimately defeated. I could just as well say that the US asserted itself against the international bourgeoisie by electing Trump and then starting a global trade war under his leadership; that was not the international bourgeoisie's preferred turn of events, either, and yet it happened anyway. Doesn't mean you'll see me wearing a MAGA hat.

Noah Fence

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Noah Fence on January 23, 2019

Meerov, what admin did you message? I know they’ve been a bit slow on the uptake lately as a friend had to put in a message to a few different ones before eventually getting a response.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 23, 2019

I do not remember ... And to whom should I send, to what address?

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 23, 2019

That's your claim (I only argued that they were not bourgeois), but yeah, there are problems with saying that they were. First, if we are aiming for a Marxist analysis, a class must be defined by its relationship to the means of production, and it's not immediately obvious that the Soviet bureaucracy satisfied that criterion. Overseers, managers and bureaucrats have been a constant feature of all class societies – slavery, feudalism, capitalism – but in none of them did they constitute a distinct class of their own, so it's unclear why the USSR should have been different in this respect. Again, saying that the Bolsheviks were not a class as such, just the representatives of one, gets around this issue but introduces others. Second, as pointed out by van der Linden, if the Soviet bureaucracy was a class, then it was a class that only constituted itself after it came to power – which flies in the face of not just Marxism but basic logic.

1. I do not think that there is a big difference between ownership and control. An American researcher, economist John Gilbraith showed that managers, at least the top management of large corporations, are part of the social stratum that owns property.
I add that the Top management makes decisions about investments, manages the labor process, decides on the issue of dismissals and hiring, and the salaries of top management are comparable to the income of large businesses and can be tens of millions of dollars. I do not think that it is correct to absolutize nominal (formal) ownership of property. For ex. formally, according to the USSR constitution, the property was owned by the people of the USSR, and in fact, it was owned by the Pirdamid of officials, above all, its elite, who possessed gigantic power over production and people.

2. The bureaucracy of the USSR was originally a product of the merger of the Bolshevik leaders and their party factions with a huge layer of tsarist officials. Although officially this movement in October-November 1917 took place under the slogan "All power to the Soviets", in practice, already in December, the influence of the Bolshevik central government began to grow (Council of People's Commissars - "Sovnarkom"). It dismisses the revolutionary armed detachments and creates centralized ministries and power structures, which are subordinate directly to the new government and to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks: the Cheka, then the Red Army and GLAVKi (ministries). In all these structures, former tsarist officials and officers are absolutely dominant (with the exception of the Cheka).The Bolsheviks ruled the new-old departments only with the help of small cells (party groups), which they were able to introduce into the tsarist ministries, and these party cells were subordinate to the Central Committee. An alliance appears between the old tsarist bureaucracy and the new red bureaucracy. In 1918-1921, this alliance destroyed the Soviets (leaving only a shell from them) creates a totalitarian bureaucraсy, destroys elections, bans any criticism and opposition to the party, nationalizes all industry and introduces a serf system (workers of Petrograd in 1921 organize strikes demanding "detach them with their wives and children from the factories " - to give tham wrights change the work of their own will - Read the collection of documents "St. Petersburg Workers and Dictatorship of the Proletariat" of St. Petersburg 2000. ).

3. During Stalin's time, the royal bureaucracy and the part of the old lenin's bureaucracy was largely destroyed and replaced by new bureaucrats loyal to Stalin.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 23, 2019

Link:
Things get even more complicated later on as capitalism takes over again when ‘the KGB and party bureaucrats privatised and looted the old system and because new old bosses’ (from Meerovs first post on this thread). Somehow then an Asiatic mode of production has been converted into capitalism by members of the Asiatic bureaucracy.
I would put it this way. If the state owns and manages the means of production and exploits the working class then the bureaucracy is either the whole or part of the ruling class. What is the problem with this?

The process of the collapse of the USSR was connected with the fact that the numerous middle layers of bureaucracy, primarily the leadership of individual economic departments and the leadership of the Republics that were part of the USSR, refused to obey the top management (the Central Committee of the Party and the Political Bureau). You must understand that the Central Committee was the true master of the country, to the extent that within the Central Committee there were departments that duplicated the work of all the ministries and economic departments! Local party and state-economic leaders left the subordination of top management (Central Committee and Political Bureau), were able to divide USSR into separate states and privatize part of the economies of these new countries. Then they became independent politicians and businessmen and enrich themselves uncontrollably.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 23, 2019

Noah Fence
Meerov, what admin did you message? I know they’ve been a bit slow on the uptake lately as a friend had to put in a message to a few different ones before eventually getting a response.

This one https://libcom.org/user/1
Todey i have done it second time!

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 23, 2019

AnythingForProximity
There's a whole bunch of them. Your reasoning is circular, since by using categories like "exploitation" and "working class", you're presupposing what you're trying to prove. Moreover, even if you showed that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted a ruling class, that would not be enough to prove that the USSR was capitalist; ruling classes that appropriated the social surplus product for themselves also existed in pre-capitalist modes of production. If you are going to simultaneously maintain that (1) the USSR was capitalist and that (2) the bureaucracy was the ruling class there, you have to prove that the bureaucracy turned into a new bourgeoisie.

Very accurate! The bureaucracy in the USSR was the ruling class. I agree with that. But exploitation exists not only under capitalism. The bureaucracy appropriated the products of labor and acted as the force that controlled the process of labor and the distribution of products. However, we can find these characteristics in pre-capitalist exploitative systems, primarily in countries with the Asian mode of production. It was there, in contrast to the ancient or feudal society, that the state led the labor process, speaking in the role of manager and engineer. At the same time, the state appropriated the results of labor and actively controlled the distribution.

First, even if we assume that capitalism in 1917 was a world system, this does not mean that all regions of the world lived under capitalism. 90% of the population of Russia, communal peasants lived in an archaic community that had an ancient pre-capitalist origin, and their economy was partly (but not completely) natural. On the other hand, the Russian state was the leading force and engine of the economy, which owned huge statу enterprises.

Incidentally, Karl Marx, in his preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, allowed the possibility of a direct transition from the Russian community to communism, without going through capitalism. Anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries thought about the same, although they understood communism or socialism differently than Marx.

Why, then, cannot it be assumed that Russia could develop alternatively, creating a different non-capitalist system based on the exploitation of slave workers? ?

The second. The society in which I was born and lived in the USSR had nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is based on three principles - private property (initiative), market relations and hired labor. None of this was in my country.

A private initiative was pursued by the police. State-owned enterprises were not private, they never went bankrupt, because they received subsidies from the treasury and their superiors lived in freebies, blocking the introduction of new technologies. On the other hand, state-owned enterprises could produce an inconceivable amount of defective products, because they did not sell their goods, but transferred them to other state-owned companies or retail chains there and then the state ordered it at prices which established by the state also.

Market relations were poorly developed, and the state led the production, making plans for the whole country, and centrally distributed the produced things.

I am not sure that the workers in a Bolshevik country can be considered "hired". Workers were attached to factory in 1919-1921 and 1940-1956 and did not have the right to change jobs (this is more than a quarter of the total time of the Bolshevik Russia). There was a registration, people were attached to their cities and housing and could not just get housing and work in another city throughout almost the entire history of the USSR. The state forcibly sent students to different jobs after graduation from universities. The state provided a different level of food supply for workers depending on their place of residence. For example, Moscow was supplied better than most regions of Russia. Etc.

link

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by link on January 23, 2019

I wrote this contribution to supplement my previous comments thinking it to be relevant to the discussion. I still think it is but it does not include direct responses to the last posts from AfP and Meerov. I will come back to specific points shortly and looks like I should try to find time to read up on asiatic MoP too!.

I would like to say that I have always believed that one of the most important ideas that Marx presented is his view of history and how it develops. His Materialist Conception of History is an absolutely basic tool to a clear understanding how society has developed over the ages and is very relevant to this discussion about the USSR.

It categorises society by the economic relations of production and recognises that social classes perform differing roles within those relationships. The ruling class in each society generates and represents the ruling ideology that supports those relationships. Both he and Engels wrote about how societies in history had developed progressively after one another and only came into being because each new society provided more efficient means of production

The basic framework they set up was the progression from simple communism to feudalism to capitalism (with some discussion about Asiatic mode I know but never developed so I still see this as a form of feudalism) and each being represented by a new class that developed within the old society that became the ruling class in the new.. However they saw capitalism as the culmination of this process, ie a very dynamic mode of production that generates no new ruling class and therefore they suggested it cannot be superseded by a new exploitative society. Only the working class exists in opposition to capitalism and it can only get rid of capitalism when it understanding what it is fighting and what it is fighting for.

They saw capitalism in the process of completing a world market in the latter part of the 19th century and hence establishing a world wide domination of society.

Im was trying to keep this brief but feel im gtting long winded now!! Anyway the point I want to make is that capitalism dominated then and still does today. Certainly different histories in different nations lead to different stuctures of types of regimes (and isolated tribal communities and so forth still exist) but capitalism still dominates the world market and each nation within that. The nation state is the basic building block for capitalism and it dominates the world today. Each nation state may vary in exactly how it is constructed and the type of regime that exists but they are all capitalist. So the Russian revolution never created socialism and never got rid of the domination by world capitalism (it just created the possibility of doing so but failed) and it was inevitable as the Bolshevik party took power away from the soviets and the bureaucracy came to dominate that it fitted back into world capitalism even if it followed a somewhat autarkic policy vis a vis that world market.

So on the question of the role of a bureaucrary and the complicating factors regarding Russia (and other individual countries), here is Engels simplifying the issue in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head.

link

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by link on January 23, 2019

Meerov, 1 would like to respond to some points raised in your post 28

I agree that there was a significant portion of the Russian population involved in feudal or semi feudal economies in the early part of the 19th C but there was as you say also a large and well developed industrial economy run the Russian state. Because it was peculiar and not standard practice for capitalist economies, it gets called an absolutist regime, but that does not deflect from the idea that it was a significant capitalist economy., one of the largest in the world at that time. So despite the population difference, the power that ran Russia came with the industrial economy. Equally we can look at China, India, Africa, Middle East and say that there were and have been significant feudal and semi feudal communities with them at that time and to some extent in recent years – I think peasant economies have become more and more dependant on markets for purchases and sales of surpluses rather than being genuinely feudal though. The situation does not mean that capitalism was not dominant across the world because it held the economic power and it had established political control by having created nation states throughout the world.

The second half of your contribution starts with your point that ‘Capitalism is based on three principles - private property (initiative), market relations and hired labor. None of this was in my country. “

I obviously cannot match your detailed knowledge of Russia so perhaps I can point out some of the realities of western countries because they do not either match your idealised characteristics of capitalism.

IN the 1930s, economic crisis dominated the world and nations generally followed autarkic policies which restricted the world market and international trade, industries were limited in production and unemployment grew massively. Countries used forms of forced employment for these unemployed getting them to working in social projects . Hitler famously used unemployed to build motorways and generate industrial growth during this period. War economies (forced labour and state planning) became the norm for most countries.

Just as you say happened in Russia, during the period form the late 30s to early 50s, forced labour became the norm in the western war economies, restriction were placed on moving jobs and wages and rationing existed for many years after the war.

Following the war, the USA came to dominate the western economies and enforced the opening of markets to trade (to buy American goods of course) and countries followed a deliberate policies of nationalisation and a demand managements to control and redevelop industries. Significant portions of the western economies were run by the state in this period (eg 40-50% of a national economy in the UK was dependant on the state) . In the course of this and the controls established by the welfare state apparatus, the state bureaucracies in west countries grew enormously.
Its only from the 80x onwards that government started to recognise how inefficient nationalist industries were (with all the same problems you mention in Russia) and began a process of denationalisation and deregulation that enabled firms and industries to function better on world market. This is pretty much the same influences that led to the collapse of the old USSR nations at the end of the 80s.

For all these reasons all countries are now state capitalist regimes with massive bureaucracies that establish a highly developed set of rules and regulations on society as a whole.! No country now has a system that is run by private enterprise with little or no state apparatus such as existed in the 19th Century

Lastly wages. In Britain, wages were highly bureaucratised and controlled by the TUs and government in the 50 and 60s. This has become freer in recent years being more individually negotiation in the skilled professions but this has just led to spiralling wages for senior management who can now earn enormous amounts relative to the lowest paid workers in a firm. Wage restraints for the masses are still set in place by the government and have remained in place throughout this whole period and ensured that poverty is increasing and wages level for the workers stay low.

One particular feature of the western system that I know did not exist in the Eastern bloc to anything like the same level is household debt (savings levels in the USSR were far higher than in the west). I recognise that as a dictatorial regimes, eastern bloc countries had control on workers that did not exist here, but household debt has been increasing enormously during the period since WW2 and I believe it to be one of the major factors that have prevented workers from fighting back against the conditions they face here. I understand that household debt is now the equivalent of one year's GDP which is a massive constraint on workers.

I hope this comparison is useful because it seems to me there is less difference between the way the west functions and the way the USSR functioned than you suggest and your 3 characteristics of capitalism may well have been accurate for the 19th Century and earlier when capitalism was in its early phases and supplanting feudal economies but things are just anyway near a simple as that in the age of state capitalism.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 24, 2019

First of all, I would like to thank all the participants in the discussion. I am very happy to see such a discussion in this forum. I believe that such discussions are necessary on all important issues of the past, present and future, from the Russian or Spanish revolution to modern Yellow vests in France. This is a real debate, not the argument that one of the participants was politically incorrect. ;)

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 24, 2019

1

Link, I see no reason why I should follow Marx's logic entirely. I don't think that's the Bible. However, I don't think Marx is as straightforward as you draw it.

Marx saw the majority of the Russian population (about 60-70%) lives in non-capitalist communes with public ownership of land and semi-subsistence farming. And he allowed with many reservations the possibility of a direct transition from the world of these communes to socialism, without capitalism.

Many Russian socialists, such as anarchists and socialists-revolutionaryies, thought the same. Their economists argued in the early 20th century that 100 million Russian peasants had not yet become capitalists or wage labourers, but lived in communities of producers linked by collective ownership of land and semi-subsistence farming (semi-natural economy). Russian economist Chayanov wrote that the Russian community has not yet become capitalist. Moreover, the state imposed huge taxes on this community, sucking out of it the means for industrialization (which was carried out through the development of not only private but also public industry).

Moreover. Today we know that during the civil war of 1918-1921 there was a sharp transition of the community to subsistence farming, as the market was destroyed. Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the CheKa and, at the same time, the VSNH (the main Directorate, which led the economy of the USSR), wrote that by 1921 the Russian community had become a group of equal people, and class differences were "leveled" there.

Yes, there was a large industry in Tsarist Russia. But you have to remember that part of this industry was statist and that the working class was no more than 3-4% of the population (peasants were about 80-90%).

And that's what I'm saying. Even if Marx believed that Russia could develop non-linearly from the community directly to communism, why can't we assume the possibility of Russia's transition in the 20th century to a non-capitalist system of exploitation, many features of which it possessed before the revolution? Moreover, the new ruling class of the USSR was originally a mixture of tsarist officials and Bolshevik party members.

AnythingForProximity

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AnythingForProximity on January 25, 2019

meerov21

This one https://libcom.org/user/1
Todey i have done it second time!

I'd also try messaging individual admins: Steven, Juan Conatz, or, dare I say it, the ever-present Mike Harman.

meerov21

I do not think that there is a big difference between ownership and control. An American researcher, economist John Gilbraith showed that managers, at least the top management of large corporations, are part of the social stratum that owns property.

Right, and that makes sense. Whether the managers are capitalists, workers, or even some mixture of both, they don't constitute a class of their own; they are recruited from one or more of the existing classes of capitalist society. They may enjoy particular benefits not available to others and they certainly perform a distinct social function, but they do not form a separate class, since they ultimately relate to the means of production either as capitalists (like you say) or as workers.

On the other hand, if we are going to say that in the USSR, the bureaucracy collectively owned the means of production, and therefore formed a class, we must be very careful about what that implies. One explanation is that the bureaucracy somehow autonomized itself (as suggested by Kautsky, who would claim in his late years that in the USSR, the State stood above both labor and capital) and constituted itself into a new class – that is the basis of all the "bureaucratic collectivism" / "managerial revolution" theories. However, then we face the problem of (1) postulating an entirely new mode of production totally unknown to classical Marxism1 and (2) suggesting that a class only constituted itself after coming to power.

The other option is that the Soviet bureaucracy corresponded to one of the historically known ruling classes. We both agree that the bureaucrats were not bourgeois, and I don't think that anyone would seriously argue that they were ancient Greece-style slave-owners or feudal lords, either. So what are we left with? The ruling class of the Asiatic mode of production, apparently. But that might not get rid of the problem either. I feel like my knowledge of Marx is insufficient here, but the impression I got is that he was unwilling to explicitly talk about classes in connection with the Asiatic MoP. In many places, he refers to the ruling minority in control of the Asiatic State as a "clique" or "higher community" rather than a class, and he stresses the communal ownership of land. Perhaps Zimin was on to something when he described the Asiatic MoP as a failed transition between classless and class societies that had some features of both.

I still think there is something to be said for the idea that despite the (admittedly convincing) appearances, the Soviet bureaucracy was not, in the strict Marxist definition of the term, a class.

meerov21

I do not think that it is correct to absolutize nominal (formal) ownership of property. For ex. formally, according to the USSR constitution, the property was owned by the people of the USSR

I totally agree, and I'd further add that getting hung up on the purely nominal / formal existence of certain features of Soviet society has done great harm to Marxist analyses of the USSR. The Trotskyist conception of a degenerated workers' state is obviously the most egregious example, but Bordiga was guilty of this, too: it was enough for him that there were distinct enterprises in the USSR that paid their workers' "wages", put "prices" on their products, and generated "profits" while "trading" among themselves, and he never raised the question of whether the content of those forms was the same as in capitalism. (Then again, people like Chattopadhyay did raise that question and came to the conclusion that it was.)

meerov21

The bureaucracy of the USSR was originally a product of the merger of the Bolshevik leaders and their party factions with a huge layer of tsarist officials. Although officially this movement in October-November 1917 took place under the slogan "All power to the Soviets", in practice, already in December, the influence of the Bolshevik central government began to grow (Council of People's Commissars - "Sovnarkom"). It dismisses the revolutionary armed detachments and creates centralized ministries and power structures, which are subordinate directly to the new government and to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks: the Cheka, then the Red Army and GLAVKi (ministries). In all these structures, former tsarist officials and officers are absolutely dominant (with the exception of the Cheka).The Bolsheviks ruled the new-old departments only with the help of small cells (party groups), which they were able to introduce into the tsarist ministries, and these party cells were subordinate to the Central Committee. An alliance appears between the old tsarist bureaucracy and the new red bureaucracy.

That's a really important observation. If the Bolshevik-created state apparatus ended up absorbing the old Czarist bureaucracy, that would support Wittfogel's model of a "relapse" into the Asiatic mode of production after a brief revolutionary period that presented an opportunity for change.

  • 1Indeed, this possibility was mostly advocated by people like Burnham who either had already abandoned the Marxist framework or would do so shortly thereafter.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 24, 2019

2 To Link

I think you're exaggerating the scale of nationalization in Western society after the second imperialist war. For example, I have seen figures according to which the public sector in Italy did not exceed 40%, and in England 25% of industry. Nevertheless, I agree with you there has been a high level of nationalization and state control in the West for several decades.

Some researchers describes the Soviet economy as a "mobilization" economy. As Mike Harman wrote to me "as when in war-time countries certain aspects of capitalist process are modified but not done away with. Who would say the USA ceased being capitalist during WW2?"

This is the most interesting question for me. The fact is that in the era of world wars, many authors wrote that capitalism is over! Theories of bureaucratic collectivism, military socialism, etc., appeared. Many wrote about it. Walter Rathenau, Ernst Jünger, Max Shechtman...

Some researchers, such as Shechtman, believed that a world war or the monopolism and the gigantism of modern capitalist production led to over-centralization of management and a concentration of resources in the hands of the state. So a state distribution of industrial products and food would lead to the transformation of capitalism into a system of totalitarian bureaucratic society based on central planning - "bureaucratic collectivism".

In Russia anarchist Andrei Andreev and some other people developed similar ideas but they did not associate these ideas with war. They believed that the class of owners can be replaced by a new class of exploiters - educated management, intellectuals. By the way, they voiced this idea half a century before John Kenneth Galbraith and his theory of industrial society, in which management plays a Central role, including state management.

Andreev believed that the left parties, with their ideas of a centralized state and a planned economy, really reject capitalism. But they do so not becouse they want create a classless society, but to put management in the place of exploiters. So for the left-wing parties, capitalists are "class enemies" as competitors in the struggle for control of property and for the right to exploit workers.

Andreev believed that within capitalism there were conditions for the maturation and development of a new exploitative but non-capitalist system, and the left parties are connected with the interests of new exploiters, who replaced the old ones, just as the capitalists replaced the feudal lords.

John Kenneth Galbraith the famous USA economist believed in the role of government in economic planning. He thought that the motivation of large corporations depends on the influence of "technostructure" or departmental management, and such corporations are governed by the desire for security and expansion, rather than the pursuit of maximum profit. In the book "Economic theory and social goals" J. K. Galbraith noted that corporations managed by the technostructure make up the planning subsystem of the economy, and small firms - the market subsystem.

Let me tell you what I think. I am not a fanatical proponent of the theory of the Asian moud of production in the spirit of Wittfogel or Baro. But I believe that this approach should be taken into account, as well as the theory of bureaucratic collectivism etc.

Currently, the spectacular counter-offensive of neoliberalism has thrown this opportunity away. But in the world of the future, we can see a new round of protectionism and world wars, hot and cold. And who knows what will become, for example, China? We can see the new rise of the masses in China, and why don't you let us see the new Mao or Qin Shi Huang?

Just... The concept of state capitalism raises too many questions to be considered basic. Realy! ;)

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 24, 2019

AnythingForProximity Thank you very much for your help and participation in the discussion. I'll answer you in a couple of days)

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 24, 2019

AnythingForProximity also I answered you above in detail about the views of the Left SRs and their transformation towards anarchism.

AnythingForProximity

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AnythingForProximity on January 24, 2019

Yeah, thanks for that, and also for the link to Pavlov's book!

Dave B

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on January 26, 2019

For discussion??

There are many problems associated with doing a detailed analysis of the “revolutionary” conditions in Russia circa 1900.

One is that Russia was not uniform ‘socio-economically’ so making generalizations is a flawed process and susceptible to selective presentations of facts; often to support a preconceived position.

Second would be that the peasantry, although they formed a majority of the population with active political engagement, are not discussed much in history books written in English.

And are often dismissed in derogatory quick fashion by [the majority] Bolshevik and ‘Marxist’ literature on the subject.

And as well Marx himself, as regards the ‘communist’ Mir peasntry etc, had an ‘incomplete’ understanding the economic conditions in Russia itself in the late 1800’s.

It wasn’t easy getting that kind of information out of Russia as the Tsarist autocracy wasn’t keen on meddling western liberals wandering around doing anthropology with the peasantry.

And when detailed information on the Mir first came out in 1847 Russian leftist tended to sugar coat it a bit, as a Slavophile counter narrative, to concepts that West was leading the way to communism and that the Slav’s were historically behind and reactionary etc etc.

The seminal work was done by the Bod below; and I think the wiki entry is reasonable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_von_Haxthausen

What was ‘overlooked’ was that peasantry organized their work ‘communistically’ and ‘co-operatively’ under conditions that they would provide an income stream, surplus value and surplus labour to the ruling class.

In the form of taxes, rent , labour rent and or corvee labour etc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e

So making a bit of an analogy to the standard theoretical analysis of industrial capitalism?

It was a clever system as it didn’t require the ruling class and recipients of surplus value to directly engage in managing production and employing overseers to make sure the workers weren’t slacking.

And it optimized the ‘production’ process as the ‘workers’ themselves allocated work and the distribution of the collective ‘wage bill’ [gross production of the village commune ‘diminished’ by surplus value], on a ‘to each according to need and from each according to ability’ basis.

It would appear now from some fairly recent historical material that this kind of system was operating in some places in Europe in the ‘middle ages’.

Although contemporary material on the subject is rare; in a way the Russian Mir system offered ‘modern’ 19th historians and anthropologists a potential opportunity a glimpse as how past systems, buried in opaque history, might have worked.

Although it was still operating after that kind of ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ fashion in St Kilda as late as the 1920’s.

They did actually pay rent, perhaps in kind or as a portion of potential ‘cash crops’ to the McLeod landlord.

http://www.whatissocialism.net/general/examples-of-socialism/13-st-kilda-and-socialism

There is a wiki entry on the Mir system below without a leftist socio-economic analysis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina

This entered into the leftist theoretical lexicon with Kropotkin and Karl’s letter[s] to Vera ‘trigger’ Zasulich.

Circa 1917 the peasantry themselves, including the first and second generation peasantry working in factories split into several positions.

Some wanted to, or took an ‘anarcho-syndicalist’, Kibbutz like position, of wanting to continue the 'traditional' Mir type commune system; without others creaming off surplus value.

They had notions of trading, exchanging or selling ‘surplus product’ as commodities to others thus it would be run as a kind of co-operative ‘business’.

That would be, making a sweeping generalization; the left SR position.

Other peasants took a more ‘petty bourgeois’ position of wanting to own their own family farm and run it as a ‘private’ self employed enterprise of simple commodity production.

Likewise the right SR position.

Many of these from elsewhere in Europe fulfilled that ambition by emigrating to the US in a free land grab and became as American as apple pie, eg the Ingalls?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie_(TV_series)

You could make the case I think that other emigrants to the US pursued a left SR position eg the Shakers?

https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1844/10/15.htm

A lot of the ‘Russian’ factory workers when they weren’t just ‘actual’ peasantry themselves doing seasonal work in the factories and mines etc and sending back remittances to family farms etc.

Were often only second generation factory workers still infused with 'peasant ideology'; of both types.

The family farm Right SR’s didn’t want their farms collectivized.

And the left SR’s didn’t, or wouldn’t want, their ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ communes collectivised under a ‘national’ system [or state either].

To some extent you could argue that the peasant left SR ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ ideology affected the industrial workers in the sense that they had ambitions to run appropriated industrial enterprises in a similar ‘Mir’ like way.

In fact you could argue that this [both] was an original or peculiarly Russian version of Proudhonism.

I am no state capitalist Leninist;

but Lenin did use Marxist theory to describe both the Ingalls position and the ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ position as ‘petty bourgeois’.

Under that analysis there is no difference between the two ‘SR peasantry’ apart from scale and the smaller and narrower nature of a family farm.

They would have no social relationships with the outside world other than the commercial exchange of commodities.

People in the cities or anywhere could be starving to death and they wouldn’t part with their surplus grain unless they would give them a good price for it.

I think Marx’s position is that with the full development of capitalism you get kind of ‘facts on the ground’.

The workers get used to the idea of not owning their own private means of production; be it the ‘private’ family farm or artisan linen weaving or tailoring business or something else.

And with the workers in a capitalist global market etc production becomes fully integrated.

Workers don’t sell steel to JCB excavators factories and the workers at JCB excavators factories don’t sell excavators to road builders.

So making an abstraction, and not having so much of commodity fetishism, one can perhaps more clearly see the potential for world co-operative production without the mediation of money or commodity exchange between individual productive units.

Or just one world ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ productive unit.

link

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by link on January 27, 2019

I would like for make some further comments on the issue of state capitalism as I think an understanding of the current situation is an important thing for militants. Only if there is a good analysis of contemporary society can an understanding contribute to the development of a revolutionary change ie if you don’t know what you is going on then you cant suggest the right way forward.

For me, understanding state capitalism and its role is very important. Meerov exaggerates the differences found in the USSR as opposed to state capitalism in the west – wages were paid for the work done by workers, workers bought their mean of subsistence shops (some state run admittedly) which were supplied by food production industries who sold their goods on a market. Both AfP and Meerov introduce complications into the discussion of the role of the state and the bureaucracy and basically ending up with the position that they don’t know what was going on in Russia.

It must be recognised that capitalism has changed markedly in the way it functions over the past couple of hundred years. No longer do we have private industry employing police forces and armies to control their workers and undertake colonial sorties. No longer even do we have nation states undertaking wars in search on the economic resources their economies can gain from colonies. This doesn’t mean capitalism no longer exists as both Meerov and AfP in effect imply. OK in its heyday when it was spreading rapidly and taking over the world’s economy, capitalism was more genuinely a system of “private property (initiative), market relations and hired labour. (Meerov post 27.)

Times have clearly changed since then and as capitalism achieved domination over the world in the early 20th Century, the internal structure of the nation state and the relationships between nation states started to change. The role of the state has grown enormously in this last 100 years and state capitalism is now the order of the day everywhere..

Imperialism is now the dominant relationship between nations in the world economy and is basically the economic (and ultimately physical) conflict between nation states that is managed by the nation state. The state has grown not only to manage the social problems that capitalism nowadays generates but the economic problems of the nation economy.

So today all nations are state capitalist even if the exact form varies. Most, nations are a mixture of private capital and state owned enterprises but the rules for the market place and the employment of workers are set by the state.
The implication that capitalism can only exist if there is private property market relations and hired labour on a free labour market without state involvement/control is patently unreal today. It suggests that when an individual nation moves towards a dictatorship (and presumably examples of that could be USSR, Nazi regimes in Germany, Spain or Italy, Chile or China or Philippines or Sudan or Saudi Arabia and son on) then they become something other than capitalist. No, that’s just nonsense.

Although we have clearly seen both in Russia and the west a trend to re-privatise the national economies, the state retains the major power in how the nation functions as a capitalism. The state has become ever more important. This is why for example we see Brexit as a conflict between primarly economic interests from private and public economy arguing with the primarily political interests of the brexiteers. So far the political arguments for letting the economy be run by London are winning. The same is happening in many countries where the populist nationalists are increasing influential in the state

I don’t quite understand what Meerov was saying about the period around WW2 but if can stress my point of view, all nation states took over the entire management of the nation economic and political systems so the state of play in the USSR and the west was the same during WW2. Imperialist war is not something separate to economic competition but the end result of it. The war economy is really the ultimate capitalism economy in this day and age.

The whole point about the dynamism of capitalist methods of production is that is automatically integrates non-capitalist and less dynamic economies into itself simply because the wealth that they have or can generate becomes more profitably used by investment in production and retail systems that are based on factory labour ie capitalist. And, if there was a new system more dynamic than capitalism it would take over the whole world very rapidly.

The issue of the state bureaucracy is not straightforward in the sense that there is no longer an easily identifyable set of private owners of industry, I admit. However neither is it too complex to understand that this state bureaucracy administers the economic and political life of each nation in a way that is entirely in accord with the development of industrial capitalism in this modern world economy. The only explanation that makes any sense is that that bureaucracy is part of the capitalist ruling class ( not as Meerov and AfP seem to suggest as some new undefined and mystery form of exploitative society).

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 27, 2019

For me, understanding state capitalism and its role is very important. Meerov exaggerates the differences found in the USSR as opposed to state capitalism in the west – wages were paid for the work done by workers, workers bought their mean of subsistence shops (some state run admittedly) which were supplied by food production industries who sold their goods on a market. Both AfP and Meerov introduce complications into the discussion of the role of the state and the bureaucracy and basically ending up with the position that they don’t know what was going on in Russia.

You are talking about buying and selling as if there was a market in the USSR. But it is not. Some products could be bought on the market. But most people bought food, clothing and household appliances in government stores. The prices there were set not by the market, but by the state. Moreover, the state organized the supply of different cities in different ways, for example, in Moscow there were more food products than in other cities. The wages of the workers were also set not by the labor market, but by the state. In addition, the state from time to time lemited consumption, introducing cards. The state centrally redistributed products and labor between the districts. You speak of this as a capitalist economy, then you will find capitalism in China from the time of Qin Shi Huangdi or in the Yin-Shang Empire.

So today all nations are state capitalist even if the exact form varies. Most, nations are a mixture of private capital and state owned enterprises but the rules for the market place and the employment of workers are set by the state.
The implication that capitalism can only exist if there is private property market relations and hired labour on a free labour market without state involvement/control is patently unreal today.

There is a huge difference. In the case of the modern United States or France, the private sector absolutely dominates the economy, and market relations are decisive for pricing. Yes, of course, state policy can distort market impulses, but still these impulses work. Even in modern China, where the state plays a very important role in the economy, the private sector produces 60% of GDP and employs 70% of the population. In the USSR, the state itself redistributed products, set prices, etc., and at the same time, 95% worked in the public sector. These are different systems.

meerov21

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on January 28, 2019

As for the community (Mir), Lenin lied, calling the peasants "petty bourgeoisie". Most Russian peasants collectively owned the land. At the same time, they sold only a part of the products, while the other part was produced for self-consumption. But even that they sold they used to buy goods in the city. Is this bourgeois relations? Russian economist Chayanov dealt with this issue. These peasants were not private owners, did not accumulate capital and the majority did not hire workers. If These peasants are bourgeois, then Europe in the 12th or 14th century was bourgeois, because the majority of the population of Medieval Europe were the same or similar peasants. ))

The Russian community (the Mir) had an institution of self-government and yes, a significant part of the Russian workers had ideas of self-government, thanks to links with the village. However, at the same time, some skilled workers believed that they could better manage the plants then bosses.

The ideas of the left SR as many of the Russian anarchists were to convert the country into an association of self-government groups. Yes, at first, these communities would trade products, and then, through unions of production and consumer unions, would begin to plan production according to the needs of populatipn. This is not Proudhonism. The syndico-co-operative federation of the left SR must cover the whole country, and then Europe.

So what, do you think that you can build a classless society in another way? Direct communization in 1 minute is impossible. Either it will be as the left SR and the russian anarchists wanted, or the state apparatus will seize property and power and will exploit the workers, as Lenin did, relying on the old Tsarist bureaucracy.

ajjohnstone

5 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ajjohnstone on January 28, 2019

Some products could be bought on the market. But most people bought food, clothing and household appliances in government stores. The prices there were set not by the market, but by the state

Meerov, just how extensive was the black market or informal economy or shadow economy or underground economy or simply bribery and corruption in daily life? I have not done a particular study but it did struck me that it was central that reality and legality may well not be aligned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_economy_of_the_Soviet_Union

Also came across this on the hidden unemployment
https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/pre1998/1992-806-36-2-Moskoff.pdf

Dave B

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on January 31, 2019

I think I might want to put a kind of counter or other argument to my comrade “ajjohnstone” although we agree on most things.

The general view of course as Karl said somewhere about the definition of capitalism after he eventually got around to it late in volume III.

That it was about workers being ‘free’ to sell their labour power and buy whatever commodities they so choose on a market or whatever.

We like thus twist and turn and select our factoids that that happened in state capitalist
‘Stalinists’ Russia.

The idea that it wasn’t quite that straightforward and squaring the circle, so to speak, in Stalinist Russia can appear to be a problem I think.

State capitalism can clearly I think operate within a framework or platform of non state capitalism were workers are selling their labour power to the highest bidder and some or most capitalist enterprises are gearing themselves up and adapting to capture the revenue of disposable wages etc.

However does it have the propensity to ‘degenerate’? into something else or worse, as state capitalism gradually displaces ‘bourgeois’ capitalism?

Or does it completely say after 1926?

When perhaps a ‘truck system’ goes national and inescapable?

…..Secondly, truck systems are normally regarded as undesirable or illegal because they limit employees' ability to choose how to spend their earnings. For example, credit or company scrip might be usable only for the purchase of goods at a monopolistic company-owned store, at which prices are set artificially high and there is no competition to lower prices. Hence, a truck system relies on a closed economic system in which employees are: required to become indebted, subject to a retail monopoly in essential goods and/or considered unfree labour….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_wages

In addition?

Then you could start to look at it as industrial serfdom or industrial non-wage slavery
?

As that might sound like a whacky idea.

By comparison we could start by looking at something historically and geographically ‘totally different’?

Other than Russia; the historical socio-economic traditional precepts in Russia in the middle to late 1800’s are relevant and I will get to that eventually.

The cotton/argricultural slave owners the southern states of the US were quite used to loaning out or renting out their slaves to other slave owners when their own had little to do and others needed them as was the way things often panned out.

No point in keeping them idle when there was potential work to be done elsewhere.

They sort of got used to this idea and it panned out to renting out slaves, on ‘mass’ to local industrial capitalists.

It was covered I seem to remember in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.

The remuneration system for the mass rented out slaves could be varied.

Sometimes it could be given in ‘wages’ by the industrial capitalist to buy their necessities on their very local market.

Sometimes not; and it was the responsibility of the slave owner to keep them ‘non market’ supplied as he would of done on his own estate.

It is dialectical; non black and white?

[They also had a ‘Hiring Out’ system where responsible skilled ‘Christian’ slaves with family as hostage would be ‘Free’ to go out and sell their labour power to anyone who would have it.

It is generally known but there was a wealth of detailed archived economic information on it from a US university that was using these people as cooks, cleaners and what not.

As well as stuff from New York ship repairers employing southern slave carpenters etc.

Moaning about how they could pay them less if their workers didn’t have to send back remittances to Mississippi plantation owners.

There is a kind of modern parallel with industrial capitalists having to pay workers extra money to pay off student debt to the ‘financial class’ and debt peonage?]

Oh yes I remember now, Russia and traditional state capitalism and serf industrial capitalism.

Mass industrial production in Russia probably started circs 1850.

From a state strategic militaristic perspective the Tsarist autocracy wanted to ‘tool’ up and have a railway network and an independent military industrial complex etc.

So they actually setup a fairly advanced locomotive works using as it happened imported US know how, and imported engineers.

And there was an associated metallurgical industry from local iron ore etc.

But the people working in these places were rented out serfs/slaves from the highly seasonal, northern hemisphere, agricultural workers.

So rather than chilling out and idle like in the winter and telling stories and playing Rousseau like ‘crude musical instruments’, they would be sent or rented out to gold mines etc.

Or state run ‘military industrial complex stuff’.

The ‘scumbag’ Karensky’ cut his teeth on this kind of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_massacre

The first indigenous capitalists proper in Russia, circa 1860, were as is common,
textile, entrepreneurs.

They as rouble millionaires would be institutionally or legalistically owned by the aristocracy.

Below is some stuff from Bukharin from circa 1920.

I think Bukharin was a total Bolshevik shit; but he was a clever bod for all that,

I think it is worth reading around the quotes I provide?

I think I can go along to some extent with that thing the Trot intellectual Titskin said.

“….. it wasn’t state capitalism, it was worse than that….”

…..State capitalism uniting and organizing the bourgeoisie, increasing the power of capitalism, has, of course, greatly weakened the working class. Under State capitalism the workers became the white slaves of the capitalist State. They were deprived of the right to strike; they were mobilized and militarized; everyone who raised his voice against the war was hauled before the courts and sentenced as a traitor. In many countries the workers were deprived of all freedom of movement, being forbidden to transfer from one enterprise to another. ' Free' wage workers were reduced to serfdom; they were doomed to perish on the battlefields, not on behalf of their own cause but on behalf of that of their enemies. They were doomed to work themselves to death, not for their own sake or for that of their comrades or their children, but for the sake of their oppressors……

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/04.htm

Here I must raise another question. If the working class does not regard industry as its own, but as State capitalism, if it regards the factory management as a hostile force, and the building up of industry as a matter outside its concerns, and feels itself to be exploited, what is to happen? Shall we then be in a position, let us say, to carry on a campaign for higher production? “What the devil!” the workers would say, “are we to drudge for the capitalists? Only fools would do that.” How could we draw workers into the process of building up industry “What!” they would say, “shall we help the capitalist and build up the system? Only opportunists would do that.” If we say our industry is State capitalism, we shall completely disarm the working class. We dare not then speak of raising productive capacity, because that is the affair of the exploiters and not of the workers. To what end then shall we get larger and larger numbers to take part in our production conferences, if the workers are exploited, and when all that has nothing to do with them? Let the exploiter look after that! If we put the matter in this light, not only shall we be threatened with the danger of estrangement from the masses, but we shall not be in a position to build up our industries. That is as clear as daylight.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1926/01/x01.htm

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 8, 2019

Me
Some products could be bought on the market. But most people bought food, clothing and household appliances in government stores. The prices there were set not by the market, but by the state

ajjohnstone
Meerov, just how extensive was the black market or informal economy or shadow economy or underground economy or simply bribery and corruption in daily life? I have not done a particular study but it did struck me that it was central that reality and legality may well not be aligned.

Yes, that's a very good question. Residents of the late USSR bought part of the products on the market. These were most often the official markets that functioned in the late USSR. But the prices there were too high. I can say that my family and the families of everyone I knew usually bought food and most things in state shops.

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 8, 2019

Dave B
Or does it completely say after 1926?

Why are You so fix attention on the Stalinist era, forgetting about the experiments of Lenin?

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 8, 2019

Dave B
I think I might want to put a kind of counter or other argument to my comrade “ajjohnstone” although we agree on most things.
The general view of course as Karl said somewhere about the definition of capitalism after he eventually got around to it late in volume III.
That it was about workers being ‘free’ to sell their labour power and buy whatever commodities they so choose on a market or whatever.
We like thus twist and turn and select our factoids that that happened in state capitalist
‘Stalinists’ Russia.
The idea that it wasn’t quite that straightforward and squaring the circle, so to speak, in Stalinist Russia can appear to be a problem I think.
State capitalism can clearly I think operate within a framework or platform of non state capitalism were workers are selling their labour power to the highest bidder and some or most capitalist enterprises are gearing themselves up and adapting to capture the revenue of disposable wages etc.
However does it have the propensity to ‘degenerate’? into something else or worse, as state capitalism gradually displaces ‘bourgeois’ capitalism?
Or does it completely say after 1926?
[/i]

I don't really understand why you're starting to discuss this issue with "Stalinism". Lenin built the system of total centralized state control of production and distribution of goods from 1918 to 1921. All businesses including hundreds of thousands of small private businesses or cooperatives were nationalized. The distribution of goods was concentrated in the hands of the state. By 1921, Lenin had turned workers into serfs, depriving them not only of the right to strike, but also of the right to change jobs without permission of the state! Even the wives and children of the workers were forcibly attached to the factory canteen! There was no capitalism, there was some ancient system of slavery and state control in the spirit of ancient China or the distributive monarchies of Minoan Greece.

I will add that only a handful of top officials of this regime were Bolsheviks-Leninists. 90% of officials and managers worked in the tsarist bureaucracy in the past. This fact was not a secret from Lenin.

After the uprisings in Kronstadt and Western Siberia and after workers ' protests, workers gradually gained the right to change jobs at will and move around the country. Since the early 1930s, these rights began to be limited. From 1940 to 1956, workers and specialists of the USSR again turned into serfs slaves without the right to change jobs at will. I'm not even talking about the huge sector of slaves who worked in concentration camps (including prominent scientists like Korolev, who worked on rocket and space research).

Dave B

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on February 8, 2019

I am no fan or apologist of pre-stalinist and thus Leninist state capitalism.

However I think there was a ‘nuanced’ or perhaps just rhetorical difference between the command state capitalism of Stalin and the the commercial, ‘for profit state capitalism based on a market of the 1921?

3. The State Enterprises that Are Being Put on a Profit Basis and the Trade Unions.

The conversion of state enterprises to what is called the profit basis is inevitably and inseparably connected with the New Economic Policy; in the near future this is bound to become the predominant, if not the sole, form of state enterprise. Actually, this means that with the free market now permitted and developing, the state enterprises, will to a large extent be put on a commercial, capitalist basis. This circumstance, in view of the urgent need to increase the productivity of labour and make every state enterprise pay its way and show a profit, and in view of the inevitable rise of narrow departmental interests and excessive departmental zeal, is bound to create a certain conflict of interests between the masses of workers and the directors and managers of the state enterprises, or the government departments in charge of them. Therefore, it is undoubtedly the duty of the trade unions, in regard to the state enterprises as well, to protect the class interests of the proletariat and the working masses against their employers.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/dec/30b.htm

donald parkinson

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by donald parkinson on February 8, 2019

I don't understand why people are so terrified of the idea of "state-capitalism" as a transitionary phase. For Lenin, state-capitalism was considered an improvement of where they were at with War Communism, which was massively inefficient and corrupt but was able to unite the workers and peasants enough to win the Civil War, but not without massive political fallouts. The NEP was the period of the USSR with probably the most general pluralism, workers control, democracy and had achieved food stability. It was a far more effective general basis for transition than War Communism, and to expect Russia and beyond to go from a majority agrarian to communist country without a transition involving elements of state capitalism is a fantasy.

Uncreative

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Uncreative on February 8, 2019

donald parkinson

It was a far more effective general basis for transition than War Communism, and to expect Russia and beyond to go from a majority agrarian to communist country without a transition involving elements of state capitalism is a fantasy.

Hows that transition to communism in Russia going, out of interest? Fantastically, would you say?

donald parkinson

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by donald parkinson on February 8, 2019

The NEP system was destroyed by Stalin in what historians call his "Revolution from above".

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 9, 2019

donald parkinson
The NEP was the period of the USSR with probably the most general pluralism, workers control, democracy and had achieved food stability. It was a far more effective general basis for transition than War Communism, and to expect Russia and beyond to go from a majority agrarian to communist country without a transition involving elements of state capitalism is a fantasy.

Unfortunately, you have no information about it. There was no democracy during the NEP. All opposition groups were banned and thousands of people (socialists and anarchists) were imprisoned. In 1923 repressions against opposition groups within the Bolshevik party began. Working control ceased to exist in 1918. I can only advise you to read the documents and Analytics, published in the collection of "Russia in the NEP" https://royallib.com/book/pavlyuchenkov_s/rossiya_nepovskaya.html , and in the collection of the "Labour opposition movement in Bolshevik Russia in 1918" http://communism21.org/books/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%B5%20%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5%20%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5%20%D0%B2%20%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9%20%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8%201918%20%D0%B3.pdf .

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 9, 2019

I am no fan or apologist of pre-stalinist and thus Leninist state capitalism.
However I think there was a ‘nuanced’ or perhaps just rhetorical difference between the command state capitalism of Stalin and the the commercial, ‘for profit state capitalism based on a market of the 1921?

The Leninist system, which is called "war communism", was based not on the market, but on the attempt to destroy market relationship. Later in his work "НЭП и задачи Политпросветов". Lenin admitted that he and his party in 1918-1921 tried to build "Communist relations" in society. The party-state apparatus controlled all industrial production, conducting a total nationalization in the cities, as well as the state controlled the distribution of goods and labor.
But the Bolshevik leadership was forced to abandon this policy at the 10th party Congress in March 1921 after a wave of peasant and workers ' uprisings and protests.

The State Enterprises that Are Being Put on a Profit Basis and the Trade Unions.
The conversion of state enterprises to what is called the profit basis is inevitably and inseparably connected with the New Economic Policy; in the near future this is bound to become the predominant, if not the sole, form of state enterprise. Actually, this means that with the free market now permitted and developing, the state enterprises, will to a large extent be put on a commercial, capitalist basis. This circumstance, in view of the urgent need to increase the productivity of labour and make every state enterprise pay its way and show a profit, and in view of the inevitable rise of narrow departmental interests and excessive departmental zeal, is bound to create a certain conflict of interests between the masses of workers and the directors and managers of the state enterprises, or the government departments in charge of them. Therefore, it is undoubtedly the duty of the trade unions, in regard to the state enterprises as well, to protect the class interests of the proletariat and the working masses against their employers.

1. All this is a sort of propoganda or empty promises , except the fact that during the NEP state factories and associations (trusts) began to sell their products. So yes - that was " commercial, ‘for profit state capitalism" if you like.

2. But it initially did not lead to increased antagonism between the workers and the administration, but on the contrary softened this antagonism, because now the workers have an opportunity to eat))). In times of military communism, the workers were starving and many died of hunger, for example, Petersburg was transformed in 1921 to almost a dead city. Therefore, initially the workers took a positive transition to the market - naw they have the opportunity to eat normal food. Moreover: according to a study published by historian Sergei Yarov, workers were positive about the privatization of some factories, because there were higher wages.

3. In addition, in 1921, Lenin abolished serfdom for workers and allowed them to change jobs at will; it was achieved by strikers in St. Petersburg in February 1921. And it also softened the antagonism and reduced the workers ' protests.

4. Nevertheless, conflicts between workers and administration emerged periodically. But independent trade unions in Russia were banned by the Bolsheviks, and destroyed by them together with the Soviets and Workers ' control in 1918-1921. Formally, these institutions continued to exist, but in practice they are subordinate to party committees, and these committees fulfil the instructions of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party. At the same time lovely party Central Committee continued to be the owner of the plants, i.e. the Supreme exploiter. Do you really think that in such circumstances, when trade unions and factories have the same owner, trade unions will protect the rights of workers? I hope you're joking...
Although, in practice, the official trade unions in some cases could support the workers.

5. Stalin made a turn from NEP to a system reminiscent of Lenin's military communism.

Dave B

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Dave B on February 9, 2019

I think we were talking earlier on to what extent in Russia post 1928? Gosplan;

workers were free to sell their labour power or ‘freedom to be exploited’ and be free wage slaves rather than ‘un-free’ ? wage slaves.

Or industrial serfdom, or just slaves owned by the state working in industry and with ‘modern’ technology?

Or ‘militarised serfdom’?

I think it reasonable to argue that the so called Stalinist 1928? Gosplan system or theory was a return to the so called ‘war communism’ or ‘Militarising the Economy’.

Trotsky was a leading advocate of it so you could say Trotsky was a Stalinist or Stalin was a Trotskyist.

The following document in this respect is or was quite important.

It is sort of from pre April 1920 and thus maybe late 1919.

. …….Socialist construction rejects in principle the liberal capitalist principle of ‘freedom of labour’, which in bourgeois society means, for some, freedom to exploit and, for others, freedom to be exploited. In so far as the fundamental task of social organisation is to overcome the external physical conditions inimical to man, socialism demands compulsory participation by all members of society in the production of material…..

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/military/ch06.htm#fw01

It is not that long so is worth it even for our lazy Bolsheviks to give it a full read.

It was discussed a lot apparently by the magic circle of trot intellectuals in the 1930’s.

------------

Was;

…. Lenin admitted that he and his party in 1918-1921 tried to build "Communist relations" in society….

Connected to the so called subbotnik stuff?

V. I. Lenin, SPEECH DELIVERED AT, THE FIRST CONGRESS OF AGRICULTURAL COMMUNES AND AGRICULTURAL ARTELS DECEMBER 4, 1919

To bear this out, I would refer to what in our cities has been called subbotniks. This is the name given to the several hours' unpaid voluntary work done by city workers over and above the usual working day and devoted to some public need………….. that they may set an example of real communist labour, i.e., labour performed gratis.

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/FCAC19.html

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 9, 2019

I think we were talking earlier on to what extent in Russia post 1928? Gosplan;

Gosplan of the USSR was created in 1923
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%BD_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0

I think it reasonable to argue that the so called Stalinist 1928? Gosplan system or theory was a return to the so called ‘war communism’ or ‘Militarising the Economy’.
Trotsky was a leading advocate of it so you could say Trotsky was a Stalinist or Stalin was a Trotskyist.

Yes, I think you're absolutely right. If you read the memoirs of Nikolai Valentinov, a Marxist, a senior economist of the Gosplan USSR , he assessed Trotsky's economic program in this way. The ideas of Trotsky and Stalin (from 1926-1927) differed only in terms of the structure of the Bolshevik party. But they had a lot in common in the economy. Also in his biography of Trotsky, his Secretary Isaac Doicher admitted that since the late 1920s Stalin's policy "fed on fragments of the ideas of the broken left opposition."

meerov21

5 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by meerov21 on February 9, 2019

It was discussed a lot apparently by the magic circle of trot intellectuals in the 1930’s.

In General, I must say that Trotskyism was originally a very colorful phenomenon. In the 1920s, it was an Alliance between some high-ranking Bolshevik oligarchs, like Trotsky himself and his supporters in various bureaucratic departments, part of the mid-level "apparatchiks" and some young Bolsheviks, dissatisfied with bureaucracy and corruption.

In addition, the national question was important among the Trotskyists there was a huge number of Jews concerned about Stalin's anti-Semitism. Recently, Russian historians found a document walled up in the prison wall with discussions of the arrested Trotskyists. This is a very interesting text, but I remembered it also because about 50% of these people were Jews.

These people criticized the censorship imposed by Stalin in internal party discussions and demanded freedom of factions. But I must also say that in the field of economy, they were in one form or another for a return to military communism. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, one of the companions of Trotsky, put forward even "the theory of socialist accumulation of capital", by analogy with the capitalist accumulation, requiring extra-economic exploitation of peasants with the purpose of growing state industry.

After Stalin began his new policy of industrialization, 2\3 Trotskyists and almost all of their leaders sided with Stalin. Moreover. Hundreds of Trotskyists received important positions in the "People's Commissariat of heavy industry" and actually led Stalin's economic policy of the industry. As I said, they agreed with some economic ideas of Stalin and Trotsky.

But it did not prevent Stalin to kill them all in 1937-1938.

A minority of Trotskyists in the 1930s broke up with the Bolshevik party and many went away from the ideas of Trotsky. They were no longer part of the ruling class. Some supported revolts of workers and peasants and get views close to the left social democracy or the left communism. All of them were also killed by Stalin; many after a heroic hunger strike in a concentration camp in 1937 or 1938.