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Theories of Russia
An obvious starting point for a discussion of Marxist theories of Russia is the work of Leon Trotsky. If Trotsky’s answers are not in my view entirely satisfactory, his work does have the merit that it asks the right kind of questions. Trotsky tries to explain the development of Stalin’s Russia and its internal dynamics in terms of the interaction of classes and groups in post-revolutionary Russia, and in terms of the country’s place in the world capitalist economy. Trotsky’s ideas are repeated and followed, today, by several writers, most notably Ernest Mandel.
Trotsky defined Russia as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. This is a formulation which echoes Lenin’s account, in 1921, of the social character of the state at the end of the Civil War [10]:
‘Comrade Trotsky speaks of a “workers’ state’. May I say that this is an abstraction ... it is ... a patent error to say “Since this is a workers’ state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?” The whole point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. What we actually have is a workers’ state, with the peculiarity, firstly, that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and, secondly, that it is a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.’
Only, Trotsky insisted, the ‘bureaucratic distortions’ of which Lenin spoke had multiplied a hundred-fold.
The Russian bureaucracy, the ruling stratum, said Trotsky, is not a ruling class. It does not enforce its own independent will on Russian society, its own goals on production:
‘Class has an exceptionally important and moreover a scientifically restricted meaning in Marxism. A class is defined not by participation in the distribution of the national income alone, but by its independent role in the general structure of economy and by its independent roots the economic foundation of society. Each class works out its own special forms of property. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule. The existence of a bureaucracy in all its variety of forms and differences in specific weight, characterises every class regime. Its power is of a reflected character. The bureaucracy is bound up indissolubly with a ruling economic class, feeding itself upon the social roots of the latter, maintaining itself and falling together with it.’ [11]
Rather than being a class in the Marxist sense of that term, the bureaucracy is a ‘parasitic caste’, a ‘tumour’ on the body of Russian society. ‘A tumour can grow to a tremendous size and strangle the organism, but a tumour can never become a living organism.’ [12] Neither its property relations, nor its privileges, make it a class exploiting society, it remains merely parasitic on a mode of production independent of its determination:
‘The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented, and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy independently of any special property relation of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income; it pretends that as a social group it does not even exist. Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism.’ [13]
‘... the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the basis of Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a class, but from those property relations which have been created by the October evolution and which are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat. To put it plainly, in so far as the bureaucracy robs the people ... we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, albeit on a very large scale.’ [14]
The bureaucratic caste should be understood as having raised itself up as a balancing force, mediating the central conflicts within Russian society – conflicts between workers and peasants, between town and country, between different layers of the working class, between the whole of Russian society and the capitalist world market, etc. Mandel similarly insists: ‘... the ruling bureaucracy is recognised as a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum of the proletariat and not as a new socially ruling class’. [15]
The power of the bureaucracy is a phenomenon produced by the backward character of Russian economy and society, arid its continued backwardness in turn is a product of the failure of the revolution to spread:
‘The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there are few goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the Soviet bureaucracy.’ [16]
Thus the bureaucracy regulates conflicts occurring, above all, in the sphere of consumption and distribution. As such, it is itself a privileged stratum, battening on society, living off as well as moderating and regulating the conflicts produced by the economic situation of backwardness and relative poverty.
The ‘bureaucracy’ has arisen gradually out of the need of the revolution due to its poverty and isolation, for ‘bureaucratism’. It has now developed a distinctness, and a set of interests of its own. Those interests, which it now enforces on the rest of society, are above all the expansion and preservation of its own privileged situation, above all its privileges in the sphere of consumption. By comparison with the workers and peasants, the bureaucrats live in luxury, and the defence and expansion of their luxury is the purpose of their rule. Mandel amplifies the argument; the bureaucracy is not the owner of the means of production, in either the juridical or the economic sense. It cannot use the control over the means of production which it monopolises either (a) for the acquisition of private property or b) ‘for any other specific economic purpose outside the consumption sphere.’ [17]
‘Why doesn’t the “central administrative elite” admits workers’ control and social control over the planning mechanism, if not because it is afraid of losing its material privileges?’ [18]
This interest in their privileged consumption of consumer goods is what binds the bureaucracy together with a common social interest.
However ‘degenerated’ the political forms of Russian society, however undemocratic its government, the bureaucracy still maintains an important element inherited from the 1917 revolution, in the shape of planning and especially of nationalised state property. This element it is still compelled to defend and maintain, for fear of the working class. It is this, the maintenance of state property, which makes the regime still a degenerated workers’ state. The Russian ‘degenerated workers’ state’ is a form of society different from and superior to capitalist society. In Mandel’ s term, it is a form of society ‘transitional’ from capitalism to socialism. It is still, as it were, balanced between capitalism and socialism, neither advancing towards socialism because of the bureaucracy, yet not returning either to a capitalist regime of private property. Such a society, in transition between capitalism and socialism, does not represent any form of socialism, says Mandel, but has its own specific relations of production. [19] The economic order of ‘transitional society’, says Mandel, is ‘governed by the conflict of two antagonistic economic logics: the logic of the plan and the logic of the market’. [20] What has been superseded in Russia, via the ‘abolition of private ownership and transition to socialised planned economy’ is the ‘spontaneous distribution of economic resources among the various branches of production through the law of value’. Thus, ‘Conscious distribution of economic resources through the plan is now the decisive characteristic of the new production relations.’ But, commodity-money relations still continue to play a part in Russia, especially in determining shares of the ‘given consumption fund.’ Consumer goods still retain the commodity form. Thus production is governed by the plan, but consumer distribution by the market. These two, competing sets of laws (plan and market) correspond to two different class interests: on the one hand, the class interests of the proletariat (the plan) and on the other hand those of the bourgeoisie and of the classes and strata working on the basis of private enterprise and private profit. [21] Although the law of value still operates at the level of consumer goods, and thus has an influence on the Russian economic system, it does not rule the economy.
The Soviet regime has a ‘dual character’: it is
‘socialistic, in so far as it defends social property in the means of production, bourgeois, in so far as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom.’ [22]
Such a regime, Trotsky suggested (and Mandel repeats) must be intrinsically unstable. The bureaucracy’s situation, Trotsky suggested, is like that of a sphere on the point of a pyramid: it must roll down, and soon, either to the side of socialism (via a workers’ revolution) or to the side of capitalist restoration.
‘Two opposite tendencies are growing up out of the depth of the soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norm must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system.’ [23]
Trotsky’s analysis was constructed in the midst of the very turbulent events of the late 1920s and the 1930s. In the process, Trotsky altered some of his key formulations from one period to another. This is apparent in respect of several issues: the definition of a workers’ state – and thus of a ‘degenerated workers’ state’; the means by which the bureaucracy’s rule might be ended; the existence of otherwise of ‘planning’ in Russia; and the character and dating of ‘Thermidor’ in Russia. The issues are interrelated.
(1) In 1931, Trotsky insisted that the system in Russia should stil1 be characterised as a “workers’ state’. His grounds for arguing this were – in terms of method – the classic Marxist ones:
‘The recognition of the present Soviet state as a workers’ state not only signifies that the bourgeoisie can conquer power only by means of an armed uprising but also that the proletariat of the USSR has not forfeited the possibility of subordinating the bureaucracy to it, of reviving the party again, and of regenerating the regime of the dictatorship – without a new revolution, with the methods and on the road of reform.’ [24]
Empirically, this account is already without foundation: by 1931 the NEP had been abolished, and the Five-Year Plan launched. The Stalinist faction in the party had become totally triumphant, the remaining vestiges of independent trade unionism had been destroyed, wages had been slashed, draconian labour legislation had been introduced, opposition was being criminalised, etc. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of method, Trotsky’s formulation is different from that which comes later, in Trotsky’s writings of the mid-1930s (The Revolution Betrayed, etc.). Here, in 1931, what makes Russia a ‘workers’ state’ is the continued possibility that the workers can take control of society again, without the need to take the road of revolution.
(2) In October 1933, Trotsky abruptly changed his position. Till then, he had resisted calls for the formation of a new Communist Party, urging the Opposition to work for reforms from within the existing party. Now, however, with the Left Opposition totally excluded from the party, both nationally and internationally, no ‘constitutional’ ways were left open. The victory of Hitler in Germany convinced Trotsky that the Communist International was now totally bankrupt.
‘After the experiences of the last few years it would be childish to suppose that the Stalinist bureaucracy can be removed by means of a party or soviet congress. In reality, the last congress of the Bolshevik arty took place at the beginning of 1923, the Twelfth Party congress. All subsequent congresses were bureaucratic parades. Today, even such congresses have been discarded. No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands af the proletarian vanguard only by force.’ [25]
Initially, Trotsky spoke only of ‘measures of a police character’, which he did not define. But, by the mid-1930s, Trotsky was calling for a new revolution in Russia. The Revolution Betrayed ended with a declaration of the inevitability of such a revolution.
‘... the further course of development must inevitably lead to a clash between the culturally developed forces of the people and the bureaucratic hierarchy. There is no peaceful outcome for this crisis. No devil yet voluntarily cut off his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will not give up its positions without a fight. The development leads obviously to the road of revolution.’ [26]
(3) In evaluating the development of their own revolution, the Bolsheviks regularly looked for analogies to the events of the Great French Revolution of the late 18th century. Thus, in early 1921, Lenin had compared his situation with that of Robespierre in 1793–4, in the period when he had been contemplating the introduction of ‘‘ NEP. So too, the Oppositions were on the constant lookout for the moments of degeneration of the French evolution, in particular for ‘Thermidor’ and ‘Bonaparte’. (On the 9th Thermidor (27 July 1794) the Jacobin dictatorship was overthrown by the Convention and replaced with a more right-wing regime, from 1795 the Directorat. This presided over a political and social reaction, and paved the way for Bonaparte’s dictatorship from 1799.) One of the reasons that Trotsky resigned the position of Commissar for War in 1925 was to remove suspicions that he was out to play the role of the Soviet Bonaparte.
Trotsky had announced the danger of a ‘Thermidorean reaction’ for quite some time. In the 1920s, the “Democratic Centralists” (a left opposition group, led by V.M. Smirnov) had declared that Thermidor had already happened, that the working class had already lost power and the conquests of the October Revolution had already been liquidated. At that time, Trotsky had opposed their conclusions.
Indeed, he had seen the victory of the Stalin group over Bukharin and the ‘right’ in 1928–29 as a blow against the danger of Thermidor. He attacked those who condemned Stalin’s regime as Thermidor triumphant. [27] The real danger of Thermidor, he thought, came from the ‘right’ in the shape of he danger of an alliance of kulaks and NEPmen. Hence his advice to his followers that they should ally with Stalin against Bukharin if necessary, but never with Bukharin against Stalin. Thermidor Trotsky defined as a process of civil war and counterrevolution, by which power passed from one class to another. The state still held the means of production, and the bourgeoisie had not got hold of them.
In 1934–5, however, having already concluded that only a revolution could purge the Russian bureaucracy, Trotsky revised his whole conception of Thermidor. The “Democratic Centralists” had been correct in having seen Thermidor as an accomplished fact, though the lessons they had drawn had been incorrect. The initiation of the purge trials and the terror following after the murder of Kirov in 1934, plus the swing in the Comintern to the (right) politics of the ‘popular front’ now convinced him that the regime was ‘Bonapartist’, with Stalin as the equivalent of Napoleon I. Since, historically, Bonaparte came after Thermidor, it must be that Thermidor had already happened. It had begun in 1924, but had been a slow and not immediately perceptible process:
‘Today it is impossible to ignore the fact that in the Soviet Revolution as well, a shift to the right took place a long time ago, a shift entirely analogous to Thermidor, although much slower in tempo and more masked in form ... Socially the proletariat is more homogeneous than the bourgeoisie; but it contains within itself an entire series of strata which become manifest with exceptional clarity following the conquest of power, during the period when the bureaucracy and a workers’ aristocracy connected with it, begin to take form. The smashing of the Left Opposition implied in the most direct and immediate sense the transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class. The year 1924 – that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.’ [28]
But, if Thermidor had already happened, and a Bonapartist regime existed in Russia; and if a revolution was now needed to remove the regime – what was left of the workers’ state? In terms of the previous definitions Trotsky had used, the answer must be: Nothing at all.
In the mid-1930s, however, Trotsky did not draw the conclusion that the workers’ state in Russia had been destroyed. Rather, he changed his definition of a workers’ state, and changed his idea of Thermidor. To deal with the latter first: Thermidor, which had been defined as a process of counter-revolution, by which another class came to power, was now re-defined as a process of ‘reaction within the revolution’. No longer involving civil war etc, it was now a slow and masked process.
Thermidor was a reaction, but one based still on the achievements of 1917: the bureaucracy still based itself on the dictatorship of the proletariat. As for the second, the definition of a workers’ state, this no longer rested on the question of the rule of the proletariat itself. What counted now was the existence of nationalised property. As long as that was maintained, Russia remained a ‘degenerated workers state’:
‘The nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitutes the basis of the Soviet social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined.’ [29]
How could the working class still be said to be the ruling class in Russia, in the conditions of the Stalin period? Trotsky here drew on an analogy with the rule of capital, which has proved capable of remaining the dominant social principle under a whole variety of political regimes:
‘The social domination of a class (its dictatorship) may find extremely diverse political forms. This is attested by the entire history of the bourgeoisie from the Middle Ages to the present day. The experience of the Soviet Union is already adequate for the extension of this sociological law – with all the necessary changes – to the dictatorship of the proletariat as well ... Thus the present day domination of Stalin in no way resembles the Soviet rule during the initial years of the revolution. But this usurpation was made possible only because the social content of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy is determined by those productive relations that were created by the proletarian revolution. In this sense we may say with complete justification that the dictatorship of the proletariat found its distorted but indubitable expression in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.’ [30]
Thus, on the one hand, a new layer of extremely privileged bureaucrats and the like has emerged in Russia, their rule personified by Stalin – a layer amounting, indeed, to a new aristocracy:
‘It is time ... to recognise ... that a new aristocracy has been formed in the Soviet Union. The October Revolution proceeded under the banner of equality. The bureaucracy is the embodiment of monstrous inequality. The Revolution destroyed the nobility. The bureaucracy creates a new gentry. The revolution destroyed titles and decorations. The new aristocracy produces marshalls and generals.’ [31]
But this aristocracy is still, in a sense, an aristocracy of labour. The nature of the state it rules is still a “workers’ state’, in so far as this ‘new aristocracy’ still defends nationalised property Hence the revolution against the bureaucracy would be a ‘political’ revolution, but not a ‘social’ revolution.
‘It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms. History has shown elsewhere not only social revolutions which substituted the bourgeois for the feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, without destroying the economic foundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1830 and 1848 in France, February 1917 in Russia, etc). The overthrow of the Bonapartist caste will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in itself it will be confined within the limits of political revolution.’ [32]
(4) Russia represented, at base, the continuation of planned economy’, although with the distortions associated with the retention of the commodity form in the distribution of consumer goods. Such is Trotsky’s argument in 1936.
Yet, a few years earlier, he had argued that there was no planning in Russia precisely because planning has to be democratic in form, since it demands a continuous process of mass correction by workers, who have to be free to point out the faults in planning or in a particular aspect of a plan. Otherwise is merely irrational administration. [33]
(5) Here, it is norma1ly assumed, the story stops. After 1936, Trotsky has a definite theory of the character of Russian society, to which he holds until his death in 1940 at the hands of a Stalinist agent. It is at this point, with the characterisation of Russia as a ‘degenerated workers state’, that Trotsky’s epigones stop, at any rate.
Yet it is clear that up to the moment of his death, Trotsky remained uncertain. At one time it was a matter of principle for him what one called Russia: thus membership of the Left Opposition was conditional on the acceptance of the theory of the degenerated workers’ state. But later, Trotsky was opposed to a split with the ‘anti-defencists’ (those who argued that there was no case for the defence of the Soviet Union by revolutionary socialists, on the grounds that it was no longer a workers’ state, degenerated or otherwise).
In his book, Stalin, he moves towards a new evaluation of the Russian bureaucracy, as a ruling class. Thus he writes:
‘The substance of the Thermidor was, is and could not fail to be social in character. It stood for the crystallisation of a new privileged stratum, the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class. There were two pretenders to this role: the petty bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself. They fought shoulder to shoulder (in the battle to break) the resistance of the proletarian vanguard. When that task was accomplished a savage struggle broke out between them. The bureaucracy became frightened by its isolation, its divorcement from the proletariat. Alone it could not crush the kulak nor the petty bourgeoisie that had grown and continued to grow on the basis of the NEP; it had to have the aid of the proletariat. Hence its concerted efforts to present its struggle against the petty bourgeoisie for the surplus products and for power as the struggle of the proletariat against attempts at capitalistic restoration.’ (my emphasis, CB) [34]
This formulation does not sit squarely with Trotsky’s earlier account. Here the bureaucracy is seen as struggling with the petty bourgeoisie ‘for the surplus products’ and trying to present this struggle as a fight by the workers against capitalistic restoration. Previously, this was not a matter of ‘efforts to present’ this struggle in this way: Trotsky had taken it for granted that this was the content of the struggle. The formulation is significant, given Trotsky’s own formal definition of the class struggle in another work of his last period:
‘The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-produce. He who owns surplus-produce is master of the situation owns the wealth, owns the State, has the key to the Church, to the sciences and to the arts.’ [35]
In an article which was found in an unfinished state on Trotsky’s desk after his death, the following remarks appear:
‘The nationalisation of railways and oil fields in Mexico has of course nothing in common with socialism. It is a measure of state capitalism is a backward country which in this way seeks to defend itself on the one hand against foreign imperialism and on the other against its own proletariat. The management of railways, oil fields, etc., through labour organisations has nothing in common with workers’ control over industry, for in the essence of the matter the management is effected through the labour bureaucracy which is independent of the workers, but in return, completely dependent on the bourgeois state. This measure on the part of the ruling class pursues the aim of disciplining the working class, making it more industrious in the service of the common interests of the state, which appear on the surface to merge with the interests of the working class itself. As a matter of fact, the whole task of the bourgeoisie consists in liquidating the trade unions as organs of the class struggle and substituting in their place the trade union bureaucracy as the organ of the leadership over the workers by the bourgeois state. In these conditions, the task of the revolutionary vanguard is to conduct a struggle for the complete independence of the trade unions and for the introduction of workers’ control over the present union bureaucracy, which has been turned into the administration of railways, oil enterprises and so on.’ [36]
The formulations in the opening sentences of this discussion are entirely new for Trotsky. Might they hare been forerunners of a new theoretical formulation? We shall never know. What is clear is at they are not easily compatible with his account of nationalised industry in Russia as the evidence for a ‘workers’ state’.
It would, obviously, be ridiculous to make too much of any of this. Trotsky himself seems to have remained convinced that the regime in Russia was very unstable. And that very instability of the regime, he suggested, provided a crucial reason for not calling the bureaucracy a ruling class: its collapse was imminent:
‘A totalitarian regime, whether of Stalinist or fascist type, by its very essence can be only a temporary transitional regime. Naked dictatorship in history has generally been the product and symptom of an especially severe social crisis, and not at all of a stable regime. Severe crisis cannot be a permanent condition of society. A totalitarian state is capable of suppressing real contradictions during a certain period, but it is incapable of perpetuating itself. The monstrous purges in the USSR are most convincing testimony of the fact that Soviet society organically tends towards ejection of the bureaucracy. Symptomatic of this coming death agony, by the sweep and monstrous fraudulence of his purge, Stalin testifies to nothing else but the incapacity of the bureaucracy to transform itself into a stable ruling class. Might we not place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we affixed to the Bonapartist oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few years or even a few months prior to its inglorious downfall?’ [37]
The future of the ‘Bonapartist’ regime would most certainly only be a brief one. Its future could be posed in terms of a definite alternative:
‘... either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie within the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property (state ownership, CB) and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.’ [38]
Trotsky’s characterisation of Russia as a “degenerated workers’ state”, together with his arguments for this formulation, are no longer simply the property of the revolutionary wing of the socialist movement, nor of “Trotskyism”. The arguments have been taken up by a wing of the reformist, “Euro-communist” current in the West European Communist Parties, who – precisely because they wish to demonstrate their “democratic” credentials – wish to distance themselves, at least partially, from the regimes in Russia and other East European countries. The arguments have also been deployed by conventional academic sociologists and political scientists.
I shall argue that Trotsky’s characterisation of Russian society is quite inadequate. Indeed, those who still hold to it today are seriously impeded from understanding, not only modern Russia, but the whole tendency of world development.
As we have seen, Trotsky’s reasons for calling Russia a “degenerated workers’ at changed in the 1930s. His criteria alter: and one set of criteria are very different from the other. According to his first approach, what made Russia a “workers’ state” was the control which the working class exerted over the state. Hence a “degenerated workers’ state” was one where, although direct control over the state has fallen out of the hands of the working class, it can still be recovered by means of (relatively) peaceful reform. The institutions through which the working class can exercise direct control over the state still exist, and all that is required is that the workers use those institutions fully.
According to the second approach, however, what makes Russia a “workers’ state” is the continuing existence of nationalised property in industry. Trotsky no longer assumes that the workers can win control by means of reforms: he insists that a revolution is needed. The continuance of state property, alone, is now the criterion for a “workers’ state.”
The two approaches are contradictory, and incompatible. The first one is completely in line with previous Marxist theorising about the social character of state power; the second is not. Yet it is the second approach which has become identified with “Trotskyism”, and which must obviously be the focus of discussion.
If we follow the second approach, Marxist theory must be revised. The classic Marxist tradition must be wrong in some of its fundamental assumptions. For instance, The Communist Manifesto of 1848 declared that “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class.” In line with this thought, Marx and Engels declared that the Paris Commune of 1871 was an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (i.e., it was a “workers’ state”). Yet the Paris Commune nationalized nothing. Indeed, the 1917 revolution in Russia, and the Bolshevik dictatorship of 1917–18 could not be seen as anything to do with a “workers’ state”, for it was not till some time after the October uprising that the means of production in industry were statified. And the biggest extension of state ownership occurred under Stalin, from 1929 onwards, when the peasants lost their land and the private sector in small manufacture and in trade was wiped out.
According to this second approach of Trotsky’s, the working class can be the ruling class in society, without having any direct control over the means of production or the state. Indeed, the working class is explicitly declared to need a revolution to win such control. The sole ground for declaring that the working class is still the ruling class is that the state legally owns the means of production. Thus the working class can be a ruling class without having any power.
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky considers two possible futures for the Russian regime. The first is that the Stalinist bureaucracy is overthrown by a revolutionary socialist party; the second is that a bourgeois party overthrows the ruling Soviet caste. In the first case, he suggests, the party would begin with the restoration of democracy in the trade unions and Soviets, and with the restoration of freedom of Soviet parties. It would purge the state apparatus, place massive limits on inequalities in income, open up public life to free discussion, etc. But, as far as property relations are concerned, revolutionary measures would not be needed – planned economy would be maintained, although with major reforms. In the second case, a bourgeois party would find plenty of servants for itself in the existing bureaucracy. It might purge the state apparatus, but not as thoroughly as a revolutionary party would. Its chief task would be the restoration of private property in the means of production. Hence, Trotsky concludes, a workers’ revolution would be a ‘political’ revolution only; while a bourgeois counter-revolution would be a ‘social counter-revolution’. The conclusion, of course, is entirely consistent with his argument that state property defines Russia as a (degenerated) workers’ state.
Let us leave aside the (perhaps metaphysical) question as to whether, in terms of Marxist theory, there can be a ‘political revolution’ in a workers’ state. Such events, as Trotsky says, are relative commonplace in the history of capitalist class society. Classically, reference can be made to the French ‘revolutions’ of 1830 or 1848: here, while the form of government changed to greater or lesser degree, the form of the state remained the same. In Engels’ term, the state remained ‘special bodies of men, prisons, etc.’ independent of the people and serving the capitalist class. Similarly, and more extremely, with Hitler’s access to power in 1933. The institutions of the state, and their independence from popular control, remained broadly the same.
As Trotsky remarks, were a ‘bourgeoisie’ to come to power in Russia, it could use the existing state institutions, the police, the regular army, be prison system, etc.
What of a workers’ revolution in Russia? It clearly could not use the GPU, the regular army, the bureaucracy, either as a means to come to power, nor as a means of holding power. It would, in Lenin’s phrase, have to smash the existing state institutions, and develop new ones (workers’ councils, people’s militia, etc) suitable to its rule. Trotsky avoids this question by saying ‘Such a party would begin with the restoration of democracy in the trade unions and the Soviets. But there are no trade unions and Soviets in Russia. Even the non-revolutionary workers’ movement in Poland, Solidarity, in 1980 has been forced to develop new trade unions, not to reform the state’s official ‘trade unions’. A workers’ revolutionary party in Russia would face the task, not of reforming the existing state institutions, but of destroying them and replacing them with quite different institutions. It is difficult to see how a state that must be smashed by the working class could be a ‘workers’ state’.
The argument that, just as capitalism is compatible with a variety of forms of political rule (e.g. military government, fascist government, ‘bourgeois-democratic’ government, etc.), so too socialism is compatible with a variety of state forms is one that Trotsky used, and which have been taken up by other writers following in his footsteps – e.g. David Purdy of the Communist Party of Great Britain. [39] (Poor old Trotsky must be spinning in his grave at the thought of some of his new-found supporters) The clear implication of this argument is that ‘socialism’ has no necessary connection with any form of working-class power an idea which has certainly gained a good deal of currency since the development of Stalin’s rule in Russia, but an idea, equally, which is very much opposed to the revolutionary Marxism of Marx himself, of Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and indeed Trotsky himself.
Indeed, Trotsky’s conclusion, that a merely ‘political’ revolution is needed in Russia – i.e. not a ‘social’ revolution – is a very dubious one. [A] The agrarian revolution, through which the feudal estates fell into peasant hands and through which the serfs became free peasants, was a social revolution. A revolution in Russia would, assuredly, involve the transformation of the collective farms into the real property of the collective farmers, and the ending of compulsory deliveries by the farmers to the state. Would not this be a ‘social’ revolution?
A ‘political’ revolution assumes that – while individuals, groups or ruling layers change – the same social class retains power. Those who now hold power in Russia, therefore, are of the same social class as the workers: the bureaucrats, the managers, the heads of the police apparatus, etc are workers. Hence, there is no class struggle in Russia. The trouble with this conclusion is that it is the conclusion drawn, not by Trotsky, but by Joseph Stalin – whom Trotsky attacked savagely for this nonsensical assertion.
Trotsky’s argument depends on the validity of the assertion that the ruling bureaucracy in Russia does not constitute a ruling class, but only a ‘parasitic caste’. Will this argument stand up?
First, the term ‘caste’ is a very inappropriate term. A class is, in Marxist terms, a group of people occupying a definite place in the process of social production, in opposition to another class. A caste on the other hand, is a juridical group. Castes and classes, in fact, may overlap. A caste is an extreme version of Max Weber’s ‘status group’. A caste is the outcome of the relative immobility of the economy, of a rigid division of labour and a very slow rate of development of society’s productive forces. Hence, typically, the caste system is a feature of a relatively static society, such as pre-industrial and pre-capitalist India. It is hardly an appropriate term for the group of party leaders and officials, managers and bureaucrats who steered the Russian economy through the fantastic convulsions and economic growth of the period of forced industrialisation and forcible collectivisation of agriculture. A caste is a rigidly structured group, resistant to social mobility, whereas in the 1930s – the period of Trotsky’s analysis – the bureaucracy experienced an immense turnover of personnel in the purges. It was never a clearly demarcated group of people, marked off from the rest of the population by juridical and legal privileges.
Never mind: the terminology is not important. Trotsky was casting around for an image or analogy through which he could express the fundamental idea, which was that the ruling group in Russia was not a class. It is this idea which has to be considered.
Much more significant is Trotsky’s characterisation of the bureaucracy as ‘parasitic’. The bureaucracy, he insisted, played no independent role in production. Its only specific ‘interest’ as a group lay in is concern with its material privileges: it had an interest in maintaining inequalities in the sphere of distribution. Russian management, Mandel repeats, is fundamentally concerned to “maximise income” for itself (Critique, 3, p. 26). Mande1 also asserts that ‘the maximisation of private consumption interests of the management bureaucracy is ‘the main motor for the realisation of the plan.’ (Ibid., p. 12) Thus, the bonuses etc available to managers who fulfil and over-fulfil the plan targets are a kind of incentive system which keeps the plan rolling along.
Now there is no question but that the Russian bureaucracy is materially privileged. This is widely documented, and is the subject of considerable complaint by ordinary Russian citizens. It is also the source of many subversive jokes in Russia and the other East European countries. What seems more doubtful, however, is the idea that the bureaucracy’s interests in material privilege explain their behaviour. The reality of the situation appears to be, surely, that they play a very important role in the whole social reproduction process. It is not surprising that those who control the process of production in Russia, who formulate the plan targets and enforce them on the rest of society, who extract surpluses from the workers and collective farmers and determine how these surpluses are to be used, should also ‘compensate’ themselves for their trouble with a much higher standard of living. But they can only do so, precisely because they do control the production process, formulate and enforce plan targets, extract surpluses, determine investment patterns, and so on. And such of this activity of theirs cannot be explained in terms of their interests in material consumption for themselves.
The central objectives of the Five Year Plans, ever since 1928, have been concerned with the expansion of heavy industry, of the accumulation of means of production. What the Russian working class was forced to expand was not the production of furs and perfumes and Rolls Royce cars, but steel mills, tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons, chemicals plants and the like. No economy – not even Hitler’s Third Reich – has ever so totally subordinated all other production goals to the single-minded pursuit of the expansion of capital goods industries, no other economy has ever so strongly enforced the ‘guns not butter’ economy on its population. The Russian bureaucracy under Stalin forced down the living standards of the great mass of the working class and the rural population alike, in the interests of crash industrialisation. None of this can possibly be explained in terms of the bureaucracy’s interest in mere ‘material privilege’ and ‘luxury’. Why, after all, did Russia succeed in becoming the world’s second-ranking industrial power? How did economic development happen? Was it achieved in spite of the ruling bureaucracy? As Ticktin remarks (Critique, 1, p. 35): ‘Growth does not happen mystically’. For such an enormous process of industrialisation to be carried on, and the whole economic and social life of Russia to be so totally subordinated to it, someone had to direct that process, and that someone was the ruling order. Far from playing no role in the process of production, the Russian bureaucracy clearly played an absolutely fundamental role.
The issue is not simply that the ‘elite’ in Russia gets consumer privileges (though of course it does) but that the ‘elite’ is in control of the economic goals of the society. In any case, the manager’s interests are not simply those of getting bigger bonuses: success in stepping up production in his factory gives the manager the chance for promotion, to a position with more power. That matters is his position from which privileges flow. The great majority of the surpluses produced by the Russian labour-force do not flow into luxury production or acquisition: they are re-invested in further economic expansion. The surplus product is administered by the bureaucracy, and the workers have no say in this administration. When Mandel asks, ‘Why doesn’t the “central administrative elite” admit workers’ control and social control over the planning mechanism, if not because it is afraid of losing its material privileges?’ he supplies a silly answer to a good question. Is ‘fear of losing material privileges’ the only reason why the military wing resists the development of consumer goods industries, which might slow down the Russian arms industries?
To emphasise merely the privileged position of the bureaucracy in the field of consumption and distribution of consumer goods is to ignore, totally, questions about the content of the ‘plan’ which the bureaucracy enforces on Russian society. Ticktin’s comment seems perfectly apt:
‘In so far as they act in their own self interest it is mediated by their occupation which amounts to administering the society. A member of the capitalist class acts in his own interests when he accumulates surplus value. The essential point is that they perform a certain social function in production which leads to the formation of a production relation ... they do perform an essential role in the existing system. If they were removed there would be either total collapse or another system.’ (Critique, 1, 1973, p. 3)
In terms of their function, in short, it is difficult to see how it can be denied that the Russian rulers form a class, in opposition to other classes – in particular, in opposition to the working class in industry and the collective farmers. They are much more than mere ‘parasites’.
In any case, while the bureaucracy does play a role in the process of distributing consumer goods (unequally) among the Russian citizenry, it is odd for a Marxist to focus on distributional relations. It was Marx’s argument – in contradistinction to ‘bourgeois political economy’ – that the starting place for an understanding of relations of distribution was the social relations of production existing in a society:
‘Distribution is itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specific kind of participation in production determines the specific form of distribution, i.e. the pattern of participation in distribution ...
‘In the shallowest conception, distribution appears as the distribution of products, and hence as further removed from and quasi-independent of production. But before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is: (1) the distribution of the instruments of production, and (2) which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the different forms of production. (Subsumption of the individuals under specific relations of production.) The distribution of products is evidently only a result of this distribution, which is comprised within the process of production itself and determines the structure oi production. To examine production while disregarding this internal distribution within it is obviously an empty abstraction.’ [40]
In line with this, we can then ask the following questions about the role of the Russian bureaucracy in the economy:
‘Does the bureaucracy only administer the distribution of the means of consumption among the people, or does it also administer the distribution of the people in the process of production? Does the bureaucracy exercise a monopoly over the control of distribution only, or over the control of the means of production as well? Does it ration means of consumption only or does it also distribute the total labour time of society between accumulation and consumption, between the production of means of production and that of means of consumption? Does not the bureaucracy reproduce the scarcity of the means of consumption, and thus certain relations of distribution? Do the relations of production prevailing in Russia not determine the relations of distribution which comprise a part of them?’ [41]
And the answers to all these questions must surely be, ‘yes’. In which case, in terms of Marxist thought, we have undeniably declared the Russian bureaucracy to play the role of a ruling class. It plays a distinctive role, in opposition to and in domination over, other classes, within a definite system of social production and reproduction.
This conclusion, that Russia has a ruling class, has met with various objections, to which we must turn in a moment. First, let us clear up one potential confusion between the argument here, and that put forward by M. Djilas in The New Class. Djilas also suggests that there is a class in power in Russia, but defines it as follows:
‘The new class may be said to be made up of those who have special privileges and economic preferences because of the administrative monopoly which they hold ... Membership in the new party class or political bureaucracy is reflected in larger economic and material goods and privileges than society should normally grant for such functions.’
Here the emphasis falls – as in Trotsky’s and Mandel’s analysis – on the ‘perks of office’ as the key element in the definition of the ‘new class’. As Alec Nove [42] points out, this approach is associated with a quite restricted, and narrow, definition of the surplus product in Russia – the surplus is that part of production that the ‘new class’ diverts to its own personal use. In reality, despite the difference in terminology (what Trotsky calls a ‘caste’, Djilas calls a ‘class’), Djilas’s formulation is not very different from Trotsky’s. On the other hand, in the conception for which I am arguing here, the ‘surplus’ includes all the ‘profit’ (including the turnover tax) generated by productive labour and appropriated by the state. This surplus is used for a variety of purposes, ranging from the construction of hospitals and schools, through industrial investment, to the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is the production, extraction and use of this total surplus product that is crucial; it is this which is monopolised by the party apparatus, the bureaucracy, the ruling group, the elite, the ruling class, or whatever term we prefer.
One objection to the idea that there are classes in Russia, and thus that there is a ruling class, comes from the ‘Weberian’ school of sociology. Thus Parkin [43] argues that Eastern bloc countries are not class stratified because political rather than market criteria determine distribution patterns. Similarly, Giddens [44] argues that because the economy is subordinated and under the control of the polity the market is not allowed free play and thus ‘class structuration’ cannot occur. The market is not the agency of distribution of rewards, hence these societies are not class societies. Similarly Goldthorpe:
‘In Soviet society the economy operates within a monistic or totalitarian political order and is, in principle at least, totally planned, whereas in advanced Western societies political power is significantly less concentrated and the economy is planned in a far less centralised and detailed way. From this it results that in the West economic, and specifically market forces act as the crucial stratifying agency within society. They are, one could say, the major source of social inequality. And consequently, the class situation of individuals and groups, understood in terms of their economic power and resources, tends to be the most important single determinant of their general life-chances. That is why we can usefully speak of Western industrial society as being class stratified. However in the case of Soviet society, market forces cannot be held to play a comparable role in the stratification process. These forces of course, and differences in economic power and resources between individuals and groups have, as in the West, far-reaching social and human consequences. But, one would argue, to a significantly greater degree than in the West, stratification in Soviet society is subject to political regulation; market forces are not permitted to have the primacy of the degree of autonomy in this respect that they have even in a managed” capitalist society.’ [45]
The difficulty with this approach is not that the authors in question are incorrect in their empirical assessment of the situation. But, they are working entirely within a Weberian framework. In that framework, as Weber himself emphasised, the term ‘class’ is indissolubly tied to the term ‘market’. In non-market situations, the typical form of stratification is the ‘status-group’ (German: Stand, or ‘estate’). The whole ‘Weberian’ discussion of stratification is focussed on the sphere of distributional inequalities, rather than on relationships within production. By definition, therefore, the absence of markets immediately means that there is an absence of classes. Hence Weber, quite consistently with his theory, declares that slaves did not constitute a ‘class’ in his (restricted) sense. This whole ‘Weberian’ argument is irrelevant, in a sense, to the discussion here, since the very terms of the discussion are quite different: strictly, Weberianism cannot even recognise the issue of exploitation, the production and use of surplus product, etc. [B] It would also be entirely logical for a consistent Weberian to deny the existence of ‘classes’ in medieval Europe (and especially in the countryside), in Greece and Rome (except where trade relations are the focus of attention), in Inca Peru and Pharaonic Egypt, etc., etc.
The centre of Trotsky’s argument for the “workers’ state’ character of Russia is his account of property relations. Private property in the means of production has not been restored, he says, hence – although “degenerated” – the regime still retains some of the gains of the 1917 revolution and is still a “workers’ state”. Because private property has not been restored in Russia, the rulers of Russia cannot be counted a class. Relations between the bureaucracy and the working class cannot be class relations, cannot be relations of exploitation. Hence Trotsky’s use of the term ‘caste’ to define the bureaucracy, and his account of its relation to society as one of ‘parasitism’.
Must there be private property – in the sense of property belonging legally to individuals – for there to be class relations and class exploitation? Is state property evidence of the absence of classes? The answer, surely, is no.
In the Middle Ages, in Europe, the largest landowner was the Catholic Church. The Church held enormous tracts of land, on which hundreds of thousands of peasants worked. The relations between the Church and ‘its’ peasants were exactly the same a as those existing between the owners of the feudal manors and their peasants. By means of labour-services, rent in kind and rent in money, both Church and feudal lord alike forced the peasantry to contribute surplus labour and surplus products. Both Church and lord exploited the peasantry. Both were feudal. Yet no bishop or cardinal of the Church had any ‘private’ property rights. They exploited the peasantry by virtue of their office in the Church, which was the collective owner of the land, and the collective exploiter of the rural population. The bishop or cardinal could not bequeath his property rights, which attached to his office, to his children – indeed, he wasn’t even supposed to have any children! In the sense in which Trotsky uses the term ‘private property’, the Church lands were not private property. Yet they were clearly organised on the basis of feudal exploitation. It thus appears that feudal relations of production were capable of expression in terms of two juridically distinct forms of property: one private, the other institutional. In this case, what is fundamental are the relations of production; the juridical relations are secondary. From the standpoint of the peasantry, and of their struggle against their lords, the juridical distinction is a very secondary one.
Within Marx’s writings, the idea of class society without “private ownership” is clearly recognised. If it is not developed much, it is quite likely because Marx (and Engels) took it for granted. What Marx termed the “Asiatic mode of production” – a mode of production by no means confined to Asia – is identified and discussed. It is a notion that can usefully be applied to a variety of civilisations, including Egypt under the Pharoahs, Sumerian civilization, the pre-Hellenic Greek states, Inca Peru, etc. Also, within what Marx terms the Ancient mode of production (that characterising the classical period of Greece and Rome) slavery took both “private” and “state” forms – the former in Athens, the latter in Sparta.
It is, of course, true that questions of private rather than state or institutional ownership have been given considerable emphasis in Marxist theory. Several reasons for this may be identified. First, Marx developed his theory and method in the course of a study of western societies, in which – both in pre-capitalist Europe, and in the capitalist society of his own time – private ownership appeared to be the major social and economic institution around which social conflicts were structured. (Though it is still remarkable how little importance Marx gave to the question of juridical ownership in the three volumes of Capital, his master work.) Secondly, the historical fate of “Marxism” has to be considered. After Marx and Engels died, “Marxism” became the creed of the (reformist) Second International, of social democratic parties who identified the expansion of state activity and state ownership with the expansion of "socialism”. And the Russian regime itself (due to its peculiar origins in a workers’ revolution) adopted “Marxism” as a state ideology, in which it was obviously convenient to draw the essentially apologetic assumption that “class antagonism can emerge only from conflicts around ownership”: there is no private ownership in Russia, ergo Russia is a society characterised by social harmony, ergo anyone who fundamentally disagrees with the regime is a “deviant” element.
Engels, it is true, constructed his account of the rise of class division and of the emergence of the state totally around the notion of the development of private property. His discussion, however, is totally centred on European developments, saying not a word about “Asiatic” production; and his account was constructed before the emergence of the archaeological evidence concerning the pre-Hellenic Greek civilisations of Mycenae, etc. [46]
Both Marx and Engels, however, recognised that class exploitation can exist within both private and institutional (state) forms – and, crucially, in respect of capitalist societies. Both of them discuss the concept of ‘state capital’. [47] It was Marx’s argument that to try to discuss ‘private property’ in isolation from the social relations of production was to attempt discussion of meaningless abstractions. This was the heart of his critique of Proudhon’s attempt to define private property:
‘In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing less than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart – an abstract eternal idea – can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence.’ [48]
In respect of the analysis of ‘ownership’, we may also draw on the observations of writers in the ‘Althusserian’ school (a school, admittedly, whose work has been somewhat lacking in general value). Although not original in their arguments, writers like Poulantzas, Carchedi and Bettelheim have correctly emphasised that the analysis of class in terms of legal ownership relations is fundamentally sterile. Poulantzas, for example, in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, insists that the bourgeoisie must be defined, not in terms of the formal legal categories of ownership, but in terms of the substantive dimensions which characterise the social relations of production. Of these, Poulantzas distinguishes two dimensions of especial significance:
On these grounds, Poulantzas concludes that the managerial salariat in western capitalist industry should be counted among the members of the bourgeoisie, even though ‘economic ownership’ and ‘possession’ are partially dissociated. [50] On exactly the same grounds, we may count the ruling stratum in Russia as a ruling class.
Nonetheless, those who oppose the application of the term ‘class’ to the situation of the rulers of Russia and other East European societies (and, by extension, to China and other ‘Third World’ countries) continue to emphasise the absence of private ownership of the means of production as if it were the crucial question. Thus, for example, Mary McAuley:
‘One of the characteristics of a ruling class – as spelt out by Marx – is its tendency to perpetuate itself, to pass its wealth and privileges on to its children.’ [51] [C]
and
‘The inheritance of wealth and property is accepted by Marxists as one of the features of a class society, one of the means by which class divisions are preserved.’
To which one has to say, quite simply, that Mary McAuley has muddled up Marxist and Weberian modes of analysis.
It is, of course, true that the individual member of the ruling group in Russia does not own the means of means of production in Russia. Hence be definition, he cannot pass this on to his children. In this individual sense, clearly there is not a hereditary relation to property or to position. (It might be noted that this makes the use of the term ‘caste’ especially inappropriate.) Brezhnev’s son will not become the party’s General Secretary when Leonid kicks the bucket. All he will inherit will be a rather useful set of social connections, a very favourable set of educational experiences, and a bundle of consumer privileges – but not a portfolio of stocks and shares in Russian industry. The whole privileged stratum in Russia does pass on its social advantages to its children, much as Social Classes I and II in Britain do, but obviously without the inheritance of property in the means of production. To the degree that, since Stalin, the ruling stratum has attained greater stability and security, this inheritance of social and educational advantage has become more marked (just as the rate of social mobility has slowed down).
In any case, this is not fundamentally the issue. In Britain, the chairmen and directors of nationalised industries cannot pass on their positions to their children, yet on any count they would be included by “Marxists” in the British “ruling class”.
The key question remains that of the social relations of production, not those of distribution or of recruitment to ruling positions. The question of how individuals enter the ruling group is secondary in significance to the question, what do they do as rulers, and what are their relations with the rest of society?
In Russia, the state owns the means of production. The decisive question in this circumstance, is what is the nature of the state, what are its political processes; and its power relations, etc – for these are, with state ownership, an essential determinants of the relations of production. If the state is the legal repository of the means of production, who ‘owns’ the state? What is at issue is not the position and situation of the individual bureaucrat, but that of the ruling group as a collectivity. This ruling group, beyond a doubt, disposes of the means of production in Russia, maintaining the majority of society in a condition of dispossession. The point is made very clearly by Claude Lefort:
‘... the bureaucrats form a class only by reason of the fact that their functions and their rules differentiate them collectively from the exploited classes, only because they are interlinked with a directing centre which decides what is produced.’
It is because the production nations of Russian society are dominated by the state, with workers reduced to simple ‘executants’ of orders, that the bureaucrats have a class position:
‘It is not as individual actors that they weave the network of class relations; it is the bureaucratic class in its generality ... by reason of the existing structure of production which converts the activities of individual bureaucrats (privileged activities among other such) into class activities ... The bureaucratic community is not guaranteed by the mechanism of economic activities; it is established by the integration of the bureaucrats around the state, in the total discipline with regard to the directing apparatus. without this state. Without this apparatus, the bureaucracy is nothing.’ (Claude Lefort, Elements d’une critique de la bureaucratie, Geneva 1971, cit. Alec Nove, Is there a ruling class in Russia? in Political Economy and Soviet Socialism, 1979, p. 202.)
What we have in the case of the system in Russia etc. is not a state which ‘represents’ a ruling class – in the sense that Marxists have argued (often rather crudely) that the state in Western capitalism represents the interests of a (relatively separate) capitalist class – we have rather a state which is the ruling class. It is the state itself which directly exploits the working population, extracting surplus products from them, disposing of those surplus products as it sees fit, and maintaining its power over the society it rules and exploits. What the precise social character of that ruling class is, of course, remains still to be determined (see below).
It may be objected, of course, that the precise boundaries of this ‘class’ are difficult to determine. It would be ridiculous to treat every petty clerk and official as a member of the ‘ruling class’. Many such officials are not even ‘privileged’ in material terms by comparison with the better-paid skilled workers, especially those working in the (privileged) defence industries. Since the whole state mechanism is organised as a pyramidal bureaucracy, it is clearly those at the ‘top’ of the pyramid who most clearly form – as individuals – the members of the Russian ruling class. There is one, centrally administered hierarchy controlled by the party leadership, in which personal status and power depend on rank. The centralised, disciplined party selects its own cadres, This function, as Alec Nove points out, is carried out by the personnel or establishment department of the party Central Committee. In this light, we can broadly define the personnel of the ruling class in Russia as those holding appointments deemed significant enough to figure on the Central Committee’s establishment list – the Nomenklatura, or, quite literally, the ‘establishment’:
In the USSR, despite distinctions between party, government, social organisations, etc., there is an important sense in which all are part of one great single hierarchy. The common link is the system of nomenklatura. This is the great list of appointments of any importance in any sphere of Soviet life and a list of persons fit to hold them, together with the designation of the party committee in whose patronage the given appointment is. The party’s personnel departments assign people to jobs in all the subhierarchies. It is as if the establishment division of the British Treasury guided or approved all appointments, from the editorship of a provincial newspaper or a trade union secretaryship in Scotland up to a ministerial appointment and down to a managerial post in the Midlands. [52]
Thus, it would be reasonable to treat the boundaries of the nomenklatura as the boundaries of the ruling class. In any case, the fact that the definition of boundaries between one class and another is empirically difficult in Russia is neither here nor there: social science has exactly the same kinds of problems with boundary definitions in respect of the analysis of classes in Western societies. Imprecision in the definition of margins is not an argument against class analysis; it is merely an accepted area of difficulty in conducting such empirical analysis.
To return to Trotsky. Part of his argument was that Russia was a society in ‘transition’ from capitalism to socialism, whose future was still undecided. The bureaucracy’s rule represented, for Trotsky, the growing danger that Russia might experience the restoration of capitalism (meaning, for Trotsky, the restoration of private ownership of the means of production). The Stalinist bureaucracy represented the first step towards such a capitalist restoration:
‘Without the aid of a proletarian revolution in the West, he (Lenin, CB) reiterated time and again, restoration is unavoidable in Russia. He was not mistaken: the Stalinist bureaucracy is nothing else than the first stage of bourgeois restoration.’ [53]
As a ‘transitional’ society, Mandel suggests, Russia has less ‘structural stability, or fixity’ than one of the historically progressive modes of production. It may regress to the old system (private capitalism) or advance to the new (socialism under workers’ power). [54] Trotsky’s whole account of Russia, similarly, was founded on a powerful sense of its massive instability: he compared. it, indeed, to a pyramid standing on its head, certain to topple over either in the direction of workers’ revolution or in the direction of capitalist restoration. The war, he predicted, would settle its fate:
‘In the heated atmosphere of war one can expect sharp turns towards individualistic principles in agriculture and in handicraft industry, towards the attraction of foreign and “allied” capital, breaks in the monopoly of foreign trade, the weakening of governmental control over trusts, their conflicts with workers, etc. In the political sphere these processes may mean the completion of Bonapartism with the corresponding change or a number of changes in property relations. In other words, in the case of a protracted war accompanied by the passivity of the world proletariat the internal social contradictions in the USSR not only might lead but would have to lead to a bourgeois-Bonapartist counter-revolution.’ [55]
Part of Trotsky’s argument against calling the bureaucracy a class was precisely his expectation that the existing system could not last in Russia for long. Yet more than forty years have passed since Trotsky murder, and the system has survived and expanded. Its internal instability, on which Trotsky’s theory is predicated, looks decidedly absent!
The whole analogy between the bureaucracy and ‘Bonapartism’, on which Trotsky’ s account rested, was plausible at one time. The idea that the state in Russia was balancing between great autonomous social forces, especially the working class and peasantry, living off the contradiction between these social forces and maintaining its privileged position thereby, does (broadly) fit a period in post-1917 Russian history. It makes sense – for the 1920s. This was the period when the state was in a relation of permanent tension with the masses of the independent peasantry, when (especially before 1926, and the shift towards industrialisation) the state was not imposing any particular production goals on Russian society other than simple economic ‘recovery’. It does not make sense after 1928, when the state systematically began to attack the peasantry, and especially from 1929-30, when the state took away the peasants’ land. Nor does it make sense after 1928, when the First Five-Year Plan began to be operated, and especially from 1929, when the Plan was ratified and then had its targets raised. Neither of these developments – the forcible collectivisation of agriculture, or the forced industrialisation – shook the power of the central political apparatus of Russia; rather, that apparatus strengthened its control over society through these developments.
Is Russian society ‘transitional’? Are its institutions – as in a classic situation of ‘dual power’ – ‘grouped around antagonistic power-centres’ whose relations with each other ‘are not regulated by legitimate and universally recognised mechanisms but by a more or less open struggle’? Is Russia on the brink of a restoration of private capitalist ownership? Such a view, perhaps, could be upheld in relation to Russia in the 1920s, when a disastrous imbalance between town and country, between industry and agriculture, clearly could not be maintained for ever. But not thereafter. Forced collectivisation and industrialization gave the state power its own economic base, forcing into existence a division of labour and a set of class relations in Russia which – despite the shocks of the Second World War – proved capable of being integrated into a unified system of social institutions, a pattern of social relations of production which have to date demonstrated their capacity to reproduce themselves. It is surely the relative stability of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia which needs to be emphasised, not its permanent instability. From the end of the 1920s, the Russian bureaucracy can no longer be adequately represented as ‘balancing’ between the working class and the peasantry: it attacked both, simultaneously, without an attack on one class involving it in concessions to the other. Both classes were deprived of their particular means of institutional defence against the regime’s exactions: the peasantry lost their control over the land, and the working class lost the tattered remnants of its trade unions and legally sanctioned protections of working conditions.
In this light, Trotsky’s argument that the maintenance of a state form of property in Russia is due to the bureaucracy’s fear of the working class appears extraordinary:
‘It (the bureaucracy) continues to preserve State property only to the extent that it fears the proletariat. This saving fear is nourished and supported by the illegal party of Bolshevik-Leninists, which is the most conscious expression of the socialist tendencies opposing that bourgeois reaction with which the Thermidorean bureaucracy is completely saturated. As a conscious political force the bureaucracy has betrayed the revolution. But a victorious revolution is fortunately not only a programme and a banner, not only political institutions, but also a system of social relations. To betray it is not enough. You have to overthrow it.’ [56]
Somehow, the working class has been strong enough to force the bureaucracy not to legalise private property, yet that same working class was not strong enough to prevent the loss of its entire right to independent trade unions, not strong enough to prevent its standard of living from being massively depressed, not strong enough to stop millions of its numbers from being sentenced to long sentences in slave labour camps ... The argument is ridiculous, yet is necessary to Trotsky’s assertion that the existence of state property is a proof of the existence of a “workers’ state”.
The truth of the matter is that in Russia, where and ‘politics’ are fused together inextricably, the political expropriation of the mass of the population is also its economic expropriation. With state property absolutely predominant, political and economic power relations are one and the same.
It is sometimes alleged, in support of the “workers’ state’ hypothesis, that Russia has a ‘planned economy’. But does it? There are, it is true, people employed as ‘planners’. And, they issue directives to industries. But, does this amount to ‘planning’? On some occasions Trotsky himself seemed to believe so, on others not. What is clear is that ‘planning’ as an organised activity is of declining significance in the Russian economy. Each successive ‘Plan’ in the 1930s was shorter than the previous one. Since 1945, indeed, there is no evidence that any kind of ‘plan’ has in fact been constructed, in the sense of a detailed specification of inputs and outputs. (Cf. Grossman in Problems of Communism, March–April 1976). In the 1930s, the Plans themselves were not even internally consistent, even in terms of the gross magnitudes they assumed (cf. Hunter, Slavic Review, vol. 32, 1973). The First Five Year Plan, to cite a particularly glaring instance, assumed a rise in popular living standards The Plan targets, in any case, have never been implemented: while it has been characteristic that planned growth in production of means of production has been quite regularly exceeded [D], planned growth in housing and in means of consumption has not been anything like achieved. All that can be claimed for the Russian economy, with any truth, is that it has grown, though with increasing difficulty, and not by any means as fast as the best performances in the capitalist west (e.g. Japan, West Germany); and that the ‘planners’ maintain an unyielding and unplanned commitment to heavy industry and armaments as priority sectors, to whose growth everything else is subordinated. The Russian economy may reasonably be called a non-market administered economy, but by no means a planned economy.
In any case, to treat the existence of a ‘plan’, without reference to its content, is hardly a demonstration of the “workers’ state” character of the economy. After all, Hitler’s destruction of the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe was a ‘planned’ operation, carried out with bureaucratic meticulousness. The whole argument about the ‘planned’ character of the Russian economy totally ignores the crucial issue: to what ends was ‘planning’ carried out, in what ‘interest’?
Trotsky’s analysis have an air of unreality at times. In the early 1930s, he still refers to the existence of ‘capitalist’ tendencies among the peasantry, at the very time that millions were dying of starvation, and the state was exacting massive ‘tribute’ from the collective farms, exporting grain taken from the farms, etc. He praises the achievements of the Five Year Plan, its expansion of the productive forces in Russia, without connecting that very expansion with the fantastic level of exploitation required to achieve it. Given the mistaken character of Trotsky’ s analysis, it is small wonder that the larger part of his supporters in Russia in practice ‘capitulated’ to Stalin, in the utterly mistaken belief that in carrying out a breakneck industrialisation of Russia, Stalin was following the programme of Trotsky’s Left Opposition. Seeing the danger of a capitalist restoration based on the peasantry as the chief danger, they approved of the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Seeing the guarantee of the ‘workers” character of the state in state property, they saw Stalin maintaining and extending state property; if they disapproved of his methods, they found his aims correct. No wonder that they were largely disoriented. Among the oppositionists, its was especially those, like Rakovsky, who disagreed with Trotsky, and saw a new class emerging on the basis of state property, who refused to capitulate. [E]
Those who still maintain Trotsky’s position today find themselves, willy-nilly, placed into a situation where they have, partially, to be apologists for the Russian regime. Particular features of Russian society are treated as ‘fundamental’ distinguishing marks. Thus Mandel declares that ‘Permanent job security and the absence of a labour market are not just side issues or some secondary aspect of the social system. They are part of the basic relations of production in the USSR’ (Critique, 3, p. 26). Apart from the fact that Mandel is wrong in supposing there is no unemployment in Russia (it is extensive, in the backward regions and small towns – cf. Mervyn Matthews, Class and Society in Soviet Russia), it would be wrong to treat this situation as peculiar to Russia. According to Ticktin (Critique, 6, p. 37) Spain – which few would want to call a “workers’ state”! – also has a law compelling employers to keep their workers on unless they are found other jobs. Job security in Japan is also very extensive. In Europe vs. America (1970, p. 31) Mandel asserted that, in Russia, ‘Invention and scientific discovery, the technological revolution and industrial innovation, have almost been synchronised’ – a statement which would nearer the truth if the word ‘almost’ were replaced with the word ‘not’. Russia, more than western capitalist countries, has immense difficulty in implementing technological change, for the social relation governing Russian industry provide powerful disincentives to managers to take the risks associated with innovation: hence Russian imports of advanced western technology, and hence Russia’s crisis of productivity. In the 1950s, Mandel was even bold enough to assert ‘The Soviet Union maintains a more or less even rhythm of economic growth, plan after plan, decade after decade, without the progress of the past weighing on the possibilities of the future ... All the laws of development of the capitalist economy which provoke a slowdown in the speed of economic growth are eliminated.’ (Quatrième Internationale, 1956, cit. C. Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, 1974, p. 254) This theme is absent from Mandel’s more recent writings on the subject, and no wonder: the Russian rate of growth has slowed down immensely, it has been apparent for some years that it suffers from cyclical crises of stagnation and boom, the rate of profit on Russian investment is dropping fairly steadily, and the whole economic mechanism is moving inexorably into the grip of a long-term stagnation. (See below). The alleged superiority of the Russian economy, on any measure yet proposed, remains to be proved.
Trotsky’s theory, in short, appears to be very seriously defective. In the period of Trotsky’s own lifetime, it was already seriously faulty. After his death, however, its weaknesses became very glaring.
As we have seen, Trotsky expected, on the basis of his assumption of the instability of the regime, that the Stalinist bureaucracy could not survive the shock of war. Yet, in reality, the regime emerged from the war greatly strengthened, and with Stalin’s personal prestige raised still higher by the war victories over Hitler’s armies. State property had not been overthrown, nor had the workers even threatened the regime with revolution. As Stalin’s armies drove west, whole new countries were drawn into the net of the Russian empire. The territory of the USSR itself was expanded into Eastern Poland. And, in the countries of Eastern Europe which were ‘liberated’ by the Red Army, regimes were established along identical lines to that in Russia. The significance of this for Trotsky’s theory was immense. For the cardinal point, for Trotsky, had always been that the regime in Russia had been established as the result of a workers’ revolution in 1917, which had afterwards degenerated. But now, in Eastern Europe, there were regimes established along exactly the same lines as Stalin’s in Russia, but without workers’ revolutions. If these were “workers’ states”, then workers’ states could be established without working class revolutions, in which case Marxism was no longer a theory of workers’ revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy would have to be declared to be progressive rather than retrogressive, etc. If they were not workers’ states, then there was no ground left for believing that Russia itself was a “workers’ state”. In 1949, in China, the Communist Party came to power, again without a revolution, thereby adding to the problem a country with a population of 600 millions. Trotsky’s followers fell into weird confusions, first declaring the regimes of Eastern Europe to be military dictatorships, and then inventing a new category, ‘deformed workers’ states’ to account for them. Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, broke off relations with the official Trotskyist movement, declaring that the developments in Eastern Europe had shown that Trotsky’s analysis no longer fitted the facts of the situation, and that Trotsky himself would have stuck to his revolutionary guns, and changed his theory. Since then, the problems have further accumulated: numbers of Third World countries have statified production, without any sign at all of working class revolutionary activity, and ‘deformed workers’ states’ have been proclaimed in Vietnam, Burma, Iraq and various other countries, including of course Cuba (and recently Nicaragua). The whole theory has fallen apart, along with the Fourth International.
The tragedy of Trotsky’s theory is the way he lost his theoretical bearings in the late 1920s. One of the saddest things about his writing on Stalinist Russia is how inferior, theoretically, it is to his own brilliant work on Tsarist Russia. In his work on the earlier period, he recognises – more clearly and more sharply than anyone else had done – the precise role of the Tsarist state itself in speeding up the process of industrialisation, in shaping Russian society in line with the pressures exerted on it by its external relations with the more advanced capitalist powers. It was in the context of his theorising of Russian development under the Tsars that he developed his general theoretical account of ‘combined and uneven development’. Yet all those brilliant insights disappear when he comes to consider the Stalinist regime.
Why? Fundamentally, I think, because he was mesmerised by the 1917 revolution, by the first successful workers’ revolution in history. He was mesmerised, too, by the fact that the state ownership of industry, which had followed the Russian revolution of 1917, and had been assumed in the 1920s to be part of the revolution’s ‘socialist’ achievements, was still maintained. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s [1*], he assumed that the state ownership of industry was something that could only be achieved through a workers’ revolution; hence it must be counted as one of the ‘gains’ of a workers’ revolution. The mistake is understandable: most ideologues for capitalism in the inter-war period would have assumed the same. Yet Trotsky, like capitalist ideologues of the period, was an inadequate political economist: he neither saw, nor understood, the development of statised means of production in the West (until, perhaps, his very last article, cited above, in which he referred to state ownership in Mexico). almost to the very end of his life, he assumed that state property was, somehow, an aspect of ‘socialism’, that the continuance of state property per se in Russia must be, somehow, a manifestation of some remnant of workers’ power, that state property and the existence of a ruling class were incompatible, that – though a revolution was needed to bring down the Stalinist bureaucracy – the social content of such a revolution would somehow be different from the social content of the revolution he also looked for in the West. In his time, Trotsky, more than any other man, contributed enormously to a critical understanding of the real situation in Russia; but the effort was fundamentally flawed by ‘one serious limitation – a conservative attachment to formalism, which by its nature is contradictory to Marxism that subordinates form to content.’ [57]
The conclusion, I think, is inescapable: Russia is a class society, in the full Marxist sense of that term. There are fundamentally two main classes in Russian society, each standing in a different, and opposed, relation to the means of production. One of these classes forces the other to produce surpluses, which it appropriates and disposes of.
But then, what sort of class society is it?
>A. Ernest Mandel, one of Trotsky’s chief postwar epigones, gets very close to admitting this (Critique, 10–11, 128), as he desperately tries to maintain the distinction in a series of rather barren conceptual separations:
‘The concept “political revolution” certainly does not mean “revolution only in the realm of political rule”. It means: revolutions which do not involve the rule of a new class, replacing the old one, which involve changes in economic relationships but no fundamental changes in the economic structure (one could say system of production (Productionweise) but this concept is inapplicable to the transitional societies).’
He further elaborates: what is needed is the overthrow of the bureaucracy’s monopoly of power and its ‘control over the social surplus product’. He defends the idea of ‘political revolution’ against theories of ‘cultural revolution’ (à la Mao Tse-Tung) which leave untouched political power relationships. which is okay, except that it leaves untouched the original argument, by Trotsky, that the ‘social’ content of the workers’ state has already been achieved. Hillel Ticktin (Ibid., p. 135) remarks on Mandel’s difficulties, with obvious delight: ‘Mandel ... has indeed crossed his Rubicon by declaring that the political revolution is also social and economic ...’
B. For a useful critique of the whole ‘Weberian’ approach, see Rosemary Crompton and Jon Gubbay, Economy and Class Structure, Macmillan, 1977.
C. Out of interest, I wrote to Mary McAuley asking her to cite ‘chapter and verse’ for the “spelling out” she attributes to Marx, as I was unaware of this discussion by Marx. In her reply, she stated that he could no do so. Additionally, she stated that she had now changed her mind about Russia, and had accepted: the arguments of Rudolf Bahro, that Russia was ‘best understood as form of “Asiatic” society. (On Bahro, see below.)
D. The exceeding of Plan targets is sometimes taken as a sign of the superiority of the Russian economy, when actually it is a sign of its planlessness, especially in combination with under-fulfilment of other targets.
E. Alec Nove (A Note on Trotsky and the ‘Left’ Opposition, in Political Economy and Soviet Socialism, 1979 (p. 56), cites a declaration sent by Rakovsky and others to the 1930 Party Congress:
From a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations, Lenin’s definition of our form of government, we are developing into a bureaucratic state with proletarian-communist relics. Before our very eyes there has been and is being formed a large class of rulers, with its own inner subdivisions, growing through calculated co-option (through bureaucratic appointments or fictional elections). What unites this peculiar sort of class is the peculiar sort of private property, tamely, state power ... “The bureaucracy possess the state as private property”, said Marx in Critique of Hegel’s state law.
1*. In the mimeographed version “1950s”, but from the context it is clear that it should be “1950s”.
10. Lenin, 1921, cit. T. Cliff, Lenin, Vol. 4. p. 126.
11. Leon Trotsky. The class nature of Soviet society, cit. B. Knei/Paz, Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, p. 288.
12. Trotsky, The class nature of the Soviet state, London 1967, p. 13.
13. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 249–50.
14. Trotsky, The class nature of soviet society, cit. Knei-Paz, p. 89.
15. Ernest Mandel, Critique, 3, p. 25.
16. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 112.
17. Mandel, Critique, 3, p. 16.
18. Ibid., p. 26.
19. Mandel, Critique, 12, p. 117.
20. Mandel, Critique, 3, p. 9.
21. Ibid.
22. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 54.
23. Ibid., p. 244.
24. Leon Trotsky, Problems of the development of the USSR in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1930–31, p. 225.
25. The class nature of the Soviet State, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933.
26. The Revolution Betrayed, p. 287.
27. See Knei-Paz, op. cit., pp. 395–6.
28. The workers’ state, Thermidor and Bonapartism, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934–5.
29. The Revolution Betrayed, p. 248.
30. The workers’ state, Thermidor and Bonapartism, op. cit., pp. 166–7.
31. Trotsky, I Stake My Life!
32. The Revolution Betrayed, p. 288.
33. Trotsky, Writings, 1932–33, p. 224.
35. Trotsky, The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, p. 9.
36. Trotsky, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, New Park, 1968, pp. 15–16.
37. Trotsky, The USSR In War, In Defence of Marxism, pp. 16–17.
38. Trotsky, The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International.
39. For “Euro-communist” acceptance of Trotsky’s arguments, see. e.g., David Purdy, The Soviet Union: State Capitalist or Socialist (published by Communist Party of GB) or Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State. Purdy cites Mandel as his key authority. For academic writing, see the work of David Lane (footnote 2, above).
40. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 95–6 (Penguin).
41. T. Cliff, Russia: A Marxist Analysis, London 1964, p. 138.
42. Alec Nove, op. cit. (footnote 3).
43. F. Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order.
44. A. Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies.
45. J. Goldthorpe, Social Stratification in Industrial Societies in P. Halmos, ed., The Development of Industrial Societies, Sociological Review Monograph 8, October 1964; reprinted in Bendix and Lipset, ed., Class Status and Power, 2nd ed.
46. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. There is a very useful critique of Engels by a French Marxist anthropologist, possibly Godelier or Terray. but I have (apologies) temporarily lost the reference.
47. Engels, in Anti-Dühring. Marx, most explicitly, in his critique of Adolph Wagner (in T. Carver, ed., Marx: Texts on Method, p. 200).
48. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
50. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism: the definitions are on pp. 18–19 and the discussion is on pp. 116–30, 180–1. See also Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period 1917–23, Preface.
51. Mary McAuley, op. cit., pp. 309–10.
52. Alec Nove, History, Hierarchy and Nationalities: Some Observations on the Soviet Social Structure in Political Economy and Soviet Socialism, pp. 8–9.
53. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 429.
54. Mandel, Critique, 3, p. 6.
55. Trotsky, War and the Fourth International, cit. Cliff, Russia: A Marxist Analysis, p. 41 – my emphasis, CB.
56. The Revolution Betrayed, p. 238.
57. Cliff, op. cit., p. 145.
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