By Jan Appel for KAPD's journal Der Proletarier, this text criticizes the reconstruction of Russia under the NEP and various other Bolshevik theories. Originally published in "Proletarier, 1926, No. 8 and 9".
Jan Appel during interview
I.
At the center of all debates in the KPR are the questions of economic reconstruction. If you want to gain clarity on these issues, you have to look at the Bolsheviks' position on the economic problems, because this party is identical with the government in Russia. The basis of Russian reconstruction policy is characterized by the fact that the majority of industry and transport are under state control. All government measures have a direct impact here. On the other hand, there is private ownership by farmers, craftsmen and the rest of industry. Moreover, as a result of its economic backwardness, Russia is highly dependent on the capitalist environment. If the Russian economic policy results from these actual conditions of production, then the embedding of state production in the peasant or other private economy must be examined in order to put the economic program of the Bolsheviks, the forced NEP policy, in the right light.
From War Communism to the Free Market.
With the liquidation of the Kerensky regime, the millions of peasants seized the land as the basis of their food supply. On the other hand, the workshops and factories came into the hands of the industrial proletariat, which united in soviets and factory committees. The market, the mediating bond within industry as well as between town and country, and ultimately also between production and consumption, was torn apart with the fall of the capitalists. In order to deprive the overthrown propertied classes of any possibility of gathering new strength, even the uncontrolled exchange of goods, as it takes place on the free market, had to be prevented by force.
The market was replaced by the centralized control of industry by the state, and where competition had previously brought about the exchange of products, bureaucratic administration was now to take over this task. The guiding aspect of this administrative work was the necessity of waging civil war against the counter-revolution for years, and if the necessary means of war could only be produced by that industry, then the industrial workers had no choice but to submit to the compelling imperative of such “socialization”, especially when, in the absence of capital and the free market, the exchange of products and thus also the replacement of the used means of production became impossible for the individual enterprise. Without going into the internal shortcomings and limited effectiveness of such a bureaucratic administrative machinery, which were so drastically demonstrated in Russia itself, the question of food procurement for the working masses at the workbench and in the tunic will be examined first. In the early days, everything that could be collected from the peasants was requisitioned and food was rationed in the city. This wartime measure could not solve the problem itself and became impossible to the same extent that the peasants switched to passive resistance, growing no more than they could eat and hide themselves. It was necessary to grant the peasants ownership of the land and its products and to allow them to utilize their surplus, i.e. to re-establish the free market. The same had to be done with small businesses and that part of industry that could no longer be controlled by state administration.
Rationalization as “Socialist Construction”.
This reopened the profit economy in all its consequences and even the state-run part of the economy was unable to escape the capitalist competition in the long term. Consumed labor power once again became the measure of value, but it appeared in the mystified form of money with a stable value, the chervonets. Labor power itself becomes a commodity again and is subject to the law that measures its value according to the labor time required to produce the food it consumes. Increased productivity and longer working hours now mean greater profit again. The Russian entrepreneur sought to implement both immediately and the state had to support the capitalists' endeavors. The state economy is dependent on the market for the purchase of the means of production and the sale of its products; it must compete and therefore cannot exclude itself from the measures of the entrepreneurs in order to grant any privileges to the worker who happens to work in the state enterprise over the mass of the proletariat. Lenin himself expressed this state of affairs, albeit in a veiled manner: “Free trade and capitalism are now permitted and are developing, subject to state regulation, and on the other hand the socialist state enterprises are being transferred to economic calculation, which, in view of the general cultural backwardness and exhaustion of the country, will inevitably lead more or less to the fact that in the consciousness of the masses the administration of the enterprises concerned will come into opposition to the workers employed by them.” When Lenin calls the state enterprises socialist, this lacks any justification, unless he wants to call the state itself socialism. But “economic calculation” in state-owned enterprises simply means preparing for competition with private industry, and how could the workers not realize that they are being exploited?
The propaganda for the new economic program, which the Bolsheviks have been pushing at full speed since the 14th Party Congress, is intended to distract the workers' attention from this fact, to promote and increase the masses' willingness to work for this state capitalism. It is therefore not surprising that every party member was obliged to address the state-owned enterprises as a “consistently socialist type”, thus breaking with all opposition. Workers must be made to believe that, despite all the exploitation they experience first-hand, they are ultimately working for socialism, or even communism. In reality, the programme contains nothing other than state measures to rationalize the economy, apart from concealing the actual state of exploitation. This is the sign of Russian reconstruction.
The Prosperous Village — “Socialist Accumulation”.
The programme is the first to pronounce the “course towards industrialization”. In all the speeches of the leading Bolsheviks, the phrase that the country's need for industrial goods cannot be met in Russia itself is repeated as a justification for this. Rykov speaks about this: “The main cause of the hunger for goods is the forced growth of solvent demand. The peasant's budget underwent a major change compared to the pre-war period. The nationalization of land, the liberation of the peasant economy from the burdens of land purchase and rent payments to the landowner alone increased the peasant's purchasing power hand in hand with the upswing in agriculture. Thanks to the significant reduction in the standard agricultural tax and the growth in grain prices, and thanks to the generous granting of credit to our grain collection agencies, the village's purchasing power has grown considerably this year.“1 If we now disregard the fact — which Rykov also mentions — that the expansion and construction of new industry consumes finished goods, but does not yet bring any goods onto the market, thus exacerbating the hunger for goods, private property remains as the buyer of a larger quantity of goods. The essential point for us communists, however, is that the right to purchase a larger quantity of goods is acquired through the exploitation of labor power. This exploitation does not extend to the workers in private enterprises. The state workers are also being fleeced by the increased grain prices. Rykov also mentions that workers' wages have risen, but he does not mention whether real wages have also risen or even fallen.
Because the purchasing power of private property has increased, industry is to be expanded in order to meet demand. This brings the second point of the program, prudently called “socialist accumulation”, to the fore. The Russian state can only obtain the means for this — if one disregards the taxation of the country — through the exploitation of the workers in the state enterprises. Last but not least, the program therefore provided for a campaign to increase the productivity of labour. Stalin puts it in the following words: “Finally, we must conduct a campaign against time wasting in the factories and enterprises, for increasing the productivity of labor, for strengthening labor discipline in our enterprises. We must explain to the workers that by allowing absenteeism and not improving work performance, they are harming the general cause.” — In other words, the belief that working for socialism should encourage workers to work harder. Let us now examine what happens to the surplus product generated by the workers on the basis of the statements made by the leading figures.
Royalty Communism.
Stalin thus declares: “It is necessary to reduce, cheapen and sanitize our state and cooperative apparatus, our people's commissariats and economic settlement institutions. It is not for nothing that Lenin declared dozens and hundreds of times that the workers and peasants cannot stand the overburdening and costliness of our state apparatus, that it must be reduced and cheapened at all costs.” He cites as an example the fact that instead of the calculated 5 kopecks per pood, 13 kopecks were used in the state grain collection and explains this by the fact that every more or less independent employee, before going to work, was provided with an army of stenographers and typists and absolutely had to have an automobile.” “There you can see” — he adds — ”where the resources we have accumulated are going and will go if we do not take the strictest measures against the gluttony of our state apparatus. I have only cited a single example here, but who is unaware that there are hundreds and thousands of such examples in our country?”
He speaks quite drastically about the arbitrary behavior of the communists as state officials, who, for example, make payments to a number of employees, which are called royalties. Literally: “Some communists don't have much trouble entering the garden of the state like pigs and rummaging around there or showing their generosity at the expense of the state.“2 The theft of state property is also widespread, and Stalin himself emphasizes that the thief's surroundings are more inclined to encourage him than to deter him.
If the Bolsheviks declare that they want to get to grips with this “pig economy” by all means, they will only succeed to a limited extent because they cannot attack its breeding ground. The state and its economy, as long as they are based on exploitation, are a foreign body to the oppressed members of society. Each individual then seeks to realize his own personal advantage and one will have to accept that a large part of the surplus product produced by the workers will remain caught in the meshes of the necessarily colossal bureaucratic apparatus.
In spite of all this, a part of the surplus will remain, which can be used for accumulation, for the expansion of industry. But what this new construction of factories and workshops, in which wage labor is once again exploited, can have in common with socialism remains the secret of the Bolsheviks, which we will discuss further in the next issue.
II.
The reference to the actual conditions in Russia is dismissed by the partisans of the Moscow International — when their rallying rhetoric is over — by saying that the return of capitalism in Soviet Russia is simply due to the power of conditions. Social relations are not supernatural powers, but human relations. And if in the Russian October Revolution the peasant and proletarian classes fought simultaneously for their liberation, the KAPD can claim that it had already grasped the difficulties of the Russian situation and called for active, international solidarity when Zinoviev's boarders were still showing the working masses everywhere the sky of the proletarian revolution — for whatever reason — full of bass violins. Marxism sees the locomotive of history in the class struggle. One must therefore not simply relieve the Bolsheviks of all responsibility for their policies by referring to “circumstances”.
Leninism is State Capitalism.
From the point of view of the class struggle, it would be nonsensical to call on the Bolsheviks to relinquish the power of government, because we must march towards capitalism after all. It was just a pathetic gesture when Trotsky declared years ago that if the Bolsheviks had to leave the historical stage, they would throw the door shut behind them so that the globe would tremble. One must be struck with blindness not to recognize that in the economic doctrines of Bolshevism, in its conception of the organization of the national economy and the economic policy arising from it, there is a straight line which ultimately leads to that new system of exploitation which we call state capitalism.
Lenin outlined the basic lines of this new economic organization as early as 1917 in his work “State and Revolution”, and the policy of the Bolsheviks to this day is a unique continuation of the path once taken, which naturally takes on its own specific practical face in the course of life. Lenin demands as the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat the organization of the entire economy “according to the pattern of a state capitalist trust”. All the measures taken by the Russian government are clearly aimed at implementing this principle. It has already been implemented in state-administered industry. Central trading companies in the field of circulation and productive cooperatives in town and country are to bring the rest of the economy under state control. “Consolidation into a trust” is the guiding principle of state economic policy in Russia. And the dispute as to whether the state's undertakings can be called socialist is only about whether one wants to call such a state trust “socialism”.
In practice, however, it is clear that the state can only summarize and manage the economy as it is, i.e. an economy that is for the most part directly private, that requires a free market — because it is not possible to balance goods through state bureaucracy — and that is based on the exploitation of “free” wage labour in the absence of any other economic regulation.
“State Socialism” is Wage Bondage.
As far as the private economy exists and will continue to exist in this system, the surplus product of the exploited labor power ends up in the hands of the private users of other people's labor power. The surplus product of the workers in the state enterprises is at the disposal of the state itself, which here too is not a chimerical idea, but the real face of the bureaucracy that owns and exercises power. Stalin has given us telling examples of how it operates.
The economic concerns of the state can now be no other than those of the private capitalists. Above all, they are pressing for greater productivity of labour, trying to improve the organization of the economy and to make the administrative apparatus cheaper. This is nothing other than what corporations and trusts do in capitalist countries: Rationalization of the economy. If one assumes that the Russian state succeeds in the rationalization cloaked in socialist phrases by the Bolsheviks, the only possible result is a strengthening of the state economy. The larger size of the state economy brings a greater mass of surplus product or surplus value, which is at the disposal of the state and serves to further socialist accumulation? Where is the end here, or in other words? How is the interest of the producer, the wage laborer, preserved in this development? The Muscovites are never at a loss for an answer and refer, for example, to the reports of the workers' delegations to Russia, who were able to tell of recreation homes and other social benefits from the state. What is deliberately overlooked, however, is that it is above all the state bureaucracy that provides for itself and its subjects in this way and that a social gradation necessarily prevails in this area too. A unique “socialism”, by the way, which first exploits the workers in order to later provide them with state social benefits.
The Russian workers are also promised by the state an increase in wages as a result of higher productivity. Although in practice we see nothing of this — when wages are nominally increased, prices also rise, as in any other country — even if the workers' standard of living is actually raised, this is not something peculiar to socialism. American industry has raised labor productivity to the highest level and pays workers far higher wages than capitalism in Europe. On the other hand, in Russia it is the state, i.e. the bureaucracy that embodies it, that determines whether and to what extent wages should be increased and how social benefits should be granted. The state of the workers and peasants — the short formula for the economic doctrine of Leninism — is the guarantee of socialism. Accordingly, the entire economic policy of the Bolsheviks is directed towards the nationalization of the economy and is in full harmony with the actual course of development in Russia.
Faith in the State and the Power of the Leader.
According to Leninism, all life is concentrated in the state, all the energies of society flow to it as the central culminating point, and from it the united energy radiates back to all the members of society. Thus this doctrine must become a complicated mechanical system of social life, into which the multiform flow of things is tried to be pressed. The question of the implementation of communism, that is, the right of the producers expropriated by capital to dispose of the reclaimed means of production, is thus necessarily shifted to the area where the workers must fight for a greater or lesser degree of influence over the mechanical, bureaucratic administrative apparatus. Soviet elections, activity in the trade unions and in the ruling party offer opportunities for this. Through these channels, the will of the workers and peasants is to be directed to the central government, which then radiates out from here via the Supreme People's Economic Council, the trust administrations and other central administrative bodies, finally confronting the workers again in the person of the “red director”. You don't even need to be an ABC supporter of Marxism to know what transformation the “will of the people” undergoes in this way.
The fact of domination and exploitation is not changed by a system, however finely thought out, which wants to let the worker and peasant determine state policy; it exists and is exercised by the bureaucratic state apparatus. The only way to achieve progress within this system is to “democratize” the state.
The nascent state economic colossus in Russia, which even in its youth presents itself with all its repulsiveness, is not only the result of special Russian conditions, but at the same time also the product of the active intervention of the Bolsheviks, who in this context embody a very specific school of thought of the old workers' movement. The belief in the omnipotence of the state runs like a red thread through social democracy from Lassalle to Lenin. The views vary in detail but converge at the focal point where the state, i.e. the centralized political power of command, solves the social problem with the aid of production — as with Lassalle — or by means of dictatorship — as with Lenin. Behind the cult of the state is in reality the disbelief in the forces of the proletariat and, in practice, the harmony between labor and capital.
The trade unions as economic organizations breathe the same spirit; they embody the principle of binding the masses to the leader in order to be led by him out of hardship and misery into liberating socialism. The conception of socialism that corresponds to this spirit therefore also sees in the person of the leader the guarantee for the liberation of the working class. If the working class acts in this spirit, it can lead in practice to nothing other than the working class handing over all power to the leaders, making them its masters and expecting them to fulfill its hopes and wishes. The capable, loyal, non-treacherous leader thus becomes the core problem and ideal of the workers' movement. — What a contrast there is between this ideology and revolutionary Marxism!
Nowhere is it clearer than here that the Russian Bolsheviks are flesh of the flesh of the old social democracy. As old-style leaders, they believe they can maneuver the proletariat and society into communism from their commanding heights, and yet they are only prisoners of their own system. Even if they think they are little Napoleons, they will not cheat history, because the productive forces of society, once bound to a certain system, will follow the laws determined by it. The state of the leaders — as this dictatorship must be called — can only ever strive to increase its power and thus breeds its own adversary, the exploited proletariat, until it finally comes to a revolutionary discharge and a new order is born.
From the Bottom Up.
If Marx summarizes the task of the proletarian revolution as placing the means of production back into the hands of the producers who have been expropriated by capital, then state socialism is precisely the opposite. The disposal of the means of production is taken from the workers and placed absolutely in the hands of the state. The state, however, which pompously proclaims itself to be the state of the workers and peasants, takes on the character of a centralized, state-run economic apparatus that rules over society and whose power dwarfs even the great capitalist trusts.
If the proletarian revolution is to lead to communism, it must give the workers actual control over the means of production, for only then will the proletariat be in a position to determine its own destiny. In the KAPD and the General Workers' Union, for the first time in the history of the workers' movement, the path of achieving the highest unity in the essence of the cause with the greatest independence and self-administration of the groups was taken in practice. What here lives in the first rudiments of the class-conscious proletariat must become the basic feature of communist economy. Building on the self-administration of the factory organizations, the unifying bond will then wrap itself around social production through their unification. The nature and content of administration, however, is then — in contrast to state communism, where this is the task of the state and its leaders — a public matter. The highest unity of the economy is achieved through self-administration in the form of laws and guidelines according to which the administration of workplace organizations must take place, rules for the course of production and reproduction. It will be our task to explain the main features of this economic order in detail elsewhere. But without anticipating this, we can state with all certainty that the administration of the economy by the state trust never leads to a classless society, but only means the reconstruction of the exploitative economy — albeit in a modified form.
It is precisely on this question that the KAPD must bring clarity to the minds of the workers, for here lies the root of the grandiose betrayal of the proletariat that we now encounter everywhere at every turn.
Comments