The Paradoxes of working class of Russia and USSR

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.

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

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

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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.

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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".

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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.

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)

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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But neither were they representative of a feudal type regime

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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