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Theories of Russia
Among those theories which assert that Russia is a class society, three different positions can be distinguished. These positions are sometimes confused with each other, though each is actually distinct from the others. The operative assumptions of each of the three approaches are different. [F]
First, there are those theories we shall call ‘state capitalism’, and which are associated, pre-eminently, with the writings of Charles Bettelheim. Elements of this approach also appear in the writings of Amadeo Bordiga, and in the account of Russian society provided by members of the Chinese Communist Party after the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet split. At the centre of this approach is an argument that capitalism has been restored, or has become dominant in the USSR and the East European satellites, on the basis of capitalist market relations within these countries.
Second, there is the theories which deny that Russia is capitalist, but also deny that it has anything in common with socialism. (Thus it rejects the “degenerated workers’ state” position.) Some writers in this camp (e,g, Bruno Rizzi, Max Shachtman, Antonio Carlo) call the form of society existing in Russia “bureaucratic collectivism”; others employ different terminology (e.g. Rudolf Bahro refers to ‘actually existing socialism”, some Yugoslav writers refer to “statist society”, Castoriadis calls it “bureaucratic society” etc). What these writers hold in common is that Russia and her satellites represent a new form of class society, which cannot be represented by the terms ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’ at all. Some extend their argument to other developing countries; others, in particular those who distinguish between Russia and China (treating Russia as a class society, but China as different), do not.
Third, there are the theories which we shall call ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’, associated with the work of Tony Cliff, C.L.R. James, and Raya Dunayevskaya. According to this approach, the character of Russian society cannot be grasped if Russia is considered in isolation from the rest of the world. Internally (in contra-distinction to the first approach of Bettelheim etc.) market relations do not predominate. But, in terms of is relations with the rest of the world – and especial in terms of its military competition with the West – the system is part of world capitalism, and can only be understood as a capitalist part of that system. This theory, quite explicitly in the case of Cliff’s work, draws on the tradition of Trotsky (in particular his idea of ‘combined and uneven development) but draws radically different conclusions from Trotsky’s.
We shall discuss the three theories in the order in which we have introduced them.
Bettelheim’s argument is developed in a number of works, some still ‘in progress’. His key theoretical formulations appear in Economic Calculation and Forms of Property. [60] His general conclusion in relation to Russia and Eastern European societies, that they have reverted to capitalism, is developed historically in his Class Struggles in the USSR, a work who first two volumes, covering the periods 1917–1923 and 1925–1930, have so far appeared. [61]
Marxists have regularly asserted that between capitalism and communism there lies a period of transition. There is no immediate leap from one mode of production to another. Rather, there is a more or less long-drawn-out period of struggle between the two forms. It is on this transition period that Bettelheim’s analyses are focused.
The character of this transitional period, and the pattern of its development, is not reducible to the mechanical working out of some law of development. In particular, what determines the pattern of development is not simply the level of development of the productive forces, as a ‘vulgar Marxism’ asserts. [G] Rather, the character of the transition period is determined by the specific outcome of class struggle. If you like, what men and women actually do, how they succeed or fail in making new forms of social relations predominant in society, is the crucial question. A period of transition is one in which, while the possibility that a new mode of production may be established through the class struggle exists, that development is by no means guaranteed: rather the possibility also exists that the society may revert to the earlier mode of production. It is this latter development which Bettelheim believes to have occurred in Russia. In the historical account which he has offered to date, the primary emphasis in explaining this reversion to capitalism falls on the theory and practice of the Bolshevik Party, whose ”Marxism” he finds to be seriously defective – above all, in its ‘economistic’ reading of social development.
A key distinction between capitalism and communism lies in the mode by which the overall social process of production is governed. Under capitalism, production is dominated by the “law of value”; under communism, production is governed by the decisions of the associated producers, according to a plan. The dominance of the “law of value” in capitalist society is ensured by a particular structure of social relations of production, founded in the production of commodities. Production is carried on in separate, independent enterprises, related to each other through competition and exchange. There is no overall determining centre (democratic or otherwise) through which the overall development of production is shaped. Rather, each independent unit, or enterprise, competitively pursues its own interests. The inter-relations between these units, or enterprises, are determined by an essentially blind, or anarchic in the strict sense, set of laws independent of the wills of the various participants. Although capitalist production is social, in the sense that through it the interdependence of individuals is in practice asserted and maintained, the form of this social production is one that lies beyond the control of the participants in the process.
Additionally, capitalism is characterised by the separation of the direct producers (the working class) from the means of production. Not only do the workers produce goods whose social character is of commodities (that is, goods which not only have a character as values’ for others, but also have a character as ‘values’ – that they are systematically compared with other commodities on the basis of the socially necessary time taken to produce them); their separation from the means of production places them in a situation, vis-à-vis those who ‘own’ the means of production, in which they can be forced to produce surplus-value, i.e. to produce commodities of greater value than the value of their labour-power. Capitalism is thus a system of social production in which relations of exploitation are combined with relations based on the law of value, enforced on the participants by the competitive relations existing between the units, or enterprises, within which the production process occurs.
It is Bettelheim’s argument that capitalist relations have been restored in modern Russia. The mere legal abolition of private ownership of the means of production in Russia (the feature emphasised by Trotsky, for example) is not decisive: what matters is the continuance and reinforcement, within Russia, of social relations within and between state enterprises which take the same form as those characteristic of capitalism.
Between state enterprises, Bettelheim suggests, there continue to exist commodity relations; and, between these enterprises and the working class, there continue to exist relations of wage labour, whereby surplus value is produced by the workers and appropriated by these who – in economic terms, if not in juridical terms – ‘own’ those enterprises. A class of non-labourers appropriates the surplus-labour produced by the class of labourers. The system of state enterprises in Russia is the collective private property of a ‘state bourgeoisie’. The ‘double separation’, characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, is found in Russia: the workers are separated from their means of production whose possession is in the hands of the managers and directors of the enterprises in which they work, and labour-power enters the production process in the form of a commodity so that labour is separated from labour-power; and, the enterprises are separated from each other in the sense that the organisation of production takes place independently at the level of each enterprise, the inter-relations between these enterprises taking the form of commodity relations, based on monetary calculations.
Tendencies in this direction – towards the restoration of capitalist relations – were present in the Russian economy from the time of the time of’ the 1917 revolution. They have now become predominant. Proposals by ‘reform economists’ in Russia and Eastern Europe for increasing use of ‘market’ mechanisms represent a further continuation of the process of restoration of capitalist relations.
Bettelheim is by far the most sophisticated of the writers who propose this particular ‘state capitalist’ theory of Russia. Until the remainder of his historical account is published, we shall have to await full clarification of his reading of the decisive moment at which the restoration process became the predominant one. This question, as Carlo has noted, is one whose answers remain rather ambiguous. It is not clear, for example, whether the period of Stalin’s personal rule in Russia, from 1929 to 1953, is a period in which the capitalist restoration had already occurred, a period in which capitalist and socialist tendencies were still at war, or indeed a period in which socialist relations were predominant and after which the decisive transformation of Russia in a capitalist direction occurred. In some ‘Chinese’ arguments, the decisive transformation is held to have occurred after Stalin’s death, and to be due to ‘Kruschevite revisionism’ – a phenomenon carried much further by the leaders of Yugoslavia (the chief bête-noire of the Chinese in the great period of Chinese polemics against Russia) and by the ‘reformers’ in Eastern Europe. [63]
Not only is there a degree of ambiguity in this approach regarding the moment, or process, of ‘restoration of capitalism’ in Russia, but there is a serious lack of empirically based discussion. Bettelheim’s own work dealing with the present is cast at a very high level of abstraction, and his ‘conjunctural’ work has, in its published form, only reached the end of the New Economic Policy Period in 1929. His thesis that capitalist relations of production have become dominant in the USSR remains, currently, at the level of an assertion.
Bettelheim’s historical account of the development of the rule of the ‘state bourgeoisie’ in Russia has not yet been completed. His second volume ends in 1929, as the New Economic Policy came to an and, and as the Communist Party, under Stalin’s leadership, launched itself into the period of mass collectivisation of agriculture and crash industrialisation. Nonetheless, it is already apparent that general theoretical formulations are guiding Bettelheim s work. He does not fall into the mistake of some of the ‘Chinese’ theorists and attribute all the failings of the regime to ‘Kruschevite revisionism’. He doe’s not appear to be an unqualified admirer of Joseph Stalin, although we still have to await his definitive judgment on the 1930s and after. Nonetheless he does write as an admirer of Chairman Mao, and in particular of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period in China (1966–67).
In his first volume, he documents the decline of the soviets, the growth of a state bureaucracy the majority of whose personnel were inherited from the previous Tsarist regime, the re-emergence of the secret police, and the concentration, within the single ruling party, of power in the hands of a small group of party functionaries. The circumstances of the ‘First Period’, for Bettelheim, thus opened the way to a development of a new ‘state bourgeoisie’.
What was crucial in the development of this ‘state bourgeoisie’ was the prevalence within the Bolshevik Party of an ‘economistic’ reading of Marxism. What Bettelheim terms ‘economism’ is broadly the same as the ‘vulgar Marxism’ referred to at the beginning of this section. According to this interpretation, the motor of history is the development of the productive forces. On this interpretation, carried to its logical conclusion, the development of a classless communist society will depend on technological progress and economic growth: social relations will change, in consequence of the transformation of the productive forces, and in conformity with them. Bettelheim suggests that virtually the entire party leadership, with the exception of Lenin, held to this interpretation of Marxism. Thus they underestimated the importance of ideological and political issues in the transition to communism, and neglected the emerging ‘state bourgeoisie’ within the Soviet state apparatus itself, and – above all – neglected the danger that this represented. They thought the key problem was the securing of economic growth under state control.
Only Lenin, especially in the last months of his life, fully recognised the problem. According to Bettelheim, in handful of articles and notes, Lenin re-evaluated the New Economic Policy, and re-evaluated the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in a much more positive way, seeing in the development and maintenance of the worker-peasant alliance the basis for a transition to communism. Thus, in a sense, the Lenin of 1922–23 was a crucial forerunner of Mao.
What happened in the 1920s was that the Bolshevik leaders – right and left alike, in different ways – proposed political lines which led to a breakdown of the worker-peasant alliance, thereby provoking a crisis which was finally ‘resolved’ by the forced collectivisation and crash industrialisation. The heart of Bettelheim’s explanation of the crisis of the 1920s thus lies in the ‘political mistakes’ which were ‘due to the feebleness of the Party’s roots in the countryside and also to ideological reasons which led the Party ... to underestimate in practice the aid that should have been given to the peasant masses, a to concentrate nearly all its efforts on industry.’ [64]
The Russian development is thus viewed through the prism of Bettelheim’s reading of Chinese developments:
‘China’s example shows that it is not necessary (and indeed that it is dangerous) to aspire to build first of all the material foundation of socialist society, putting off till later the transformation of social relations, which will thus be brought into conformity with more highly developed productive forces. China’s example shows that socialist transformation of the superstructure must accompany the development of the productive forces and that this transformation is a condition for truly socialist economic development. It shows, too, when the transformations are carried out in this way, industrialisation does not require, in contrast to what happened in the Soviet Union, the levying of tribute from the peasantry, a procedure which seriously threatened the alliance between the workers and the peasants.’ [65]
I shall criticise two aspects of Bettelheim’s account: his thesis that the Russian economy today is ‘state capitalist’ in the sense in which he uses the term; and his account of the process by which the ‘state bourgeoisie’ which he sees in Russia came to power. Neither aspect of his theory, I suggest, is at all satisfactory.
At the centre of Bettelheim’s account of the ‘state capitalism’ of Russia is the argument that the various industrial and other enterprises inside Russia are basically similar to western capitalist enterprises, in that they produce commodities; whose relations with each other are governed by the law of value and expressed in terms of money prices; that the enterprises are ‘independent’ of each other; that workers sell their labour-power to the managers of these enterprises, who exploit them; that the main difference between these enterprises and those in the west is the merely formal juridical difference that the enterprises are state-owned. In terms of the actual social relations of production, however, the predominance of commodity production relations between the enterprises, the role of money and the existence of the wage relation between the worker and the enterprise means that – within the Russian economy, considered on its own – capitalist relations now predominate.
As it is formulated by Bettelheim, this theory does not stand up as an adequate account of the internal organisation of the Russian economy, which is simply not assimilable to the model of a capitalist market society.
Are the enterprises in Russia ‘independent’ in the sense that Bettelheim means? Not one empirical study of the modern Russian economy supports such an idea. The enterprises do not set their own prices, or the wages they pay their workers; they do not determine the size 0f their accumulation funds; they do not determine their suppliers, their buyers, or their products. The managers of the Russian enterprises do not have the power to determine these things as autonomous agents, as they should do if Bettelheim’s account were to be at all accurate. In practice, Bettelheim plays down this aspect of the question, and focuses attention rather on the role of bonuses paid for enhanced production, on the use of financial measures as a means of discipline employed by the planners, and control over the enterprise through the banking mechanism. He sees in what the Russian planners term ‘socialist emulation’ a restoration of capitalist relations of competition.
But the reality is that the financial bonuses are not the motor of economic development. According to Ticktin (Critique, 6, p. 23), they amount to no more than about 5 per cent of workers’ pay. Similarly, strictly financial disciplines over the conduct of the enterprises are weak: the key indicators to which managers have to conform are still those of production realised and sold, and – since most goods are still in short supply – these targets are only marginally different from the physical output targets imposed by the planners in the Stalin period.
A factory manager is less interested in his financial bonuses than he is in achieving the targets set for him by the central planners; it is by achieving the plan targets, and winning accolades from the right people, that he may hope to win promotion and thus obtain access to greater privilege and power, What characterises his situation, fundamentally, is not his ‘autonomy’ but his dependence on his superiors, his place in a bureaucratic administrative hierarchy.
The distribution of resources, the relations between enterprises and so on are governed, not by ‘market’ mechanisms, but by administrative decisions, passed down from on high. There is an element of bargaining between planners and enterprise managers, but it is a form of bargaining between levels of a single hierarchy, not the ‘bargaining’ of a market place. In the bureaucratic hierarchy, bargaining is a process between superior and inferior, concerning the content of the instructions to be given and the stringency of control exercised; in a market, by contrast, bargaining is a process conducted between equals. In the period of Stalin’s rule, the administrative mechanism was highly coercive: the economy was organised on the basis of fear and repression, Today the fear of death is not a major motive for managers, and in this sense the carrot of promotion is emphasised more than the stick of the prison camp. But the shift from stick to carrot is not the same as the rise to predominance of market relations.
In Soviet law, it is true, some enterprises, in particular the kolkhoz (collective farm), are legally autonomous. However, the law here performs a masking more than revealing function: the kolkhoz is better understood as a state enterprise than as an autonomous entity. Apart from anything else, it is difficult to imagine a genuinely autonomous enterprise agreeing to sell its produce to the state at prices below the cost of production, as occurred under Stalin. Indeed, the very formation of the collective farms on a mass scale in 1930 was – in reality – the abolition of the autonomy of the peasantry, through the forcible appropriation of their property by the state. There is it is true, still a real market in agricultural (and especially horticultural) produce, especially that produced on the peasants’ (limited) private plots – and these tiny plots are, in reality, much more productive than the big state and collective farms. Nonetheless, this market is very limited in its scope. The kolkhozes were also allowed to sell their surplus products (those not required on the farm, and not taken by the state at low forced prices) on the ‘free kolkhoz market’, but in 1957 only 4.9 per cent of the food-products destined for the non-rural population were sold on the free market. [66] The real situation is not that the farmers act as ‘co-operators’ interested in the development of ‘their’ business, but as (highly alienated) state workers, who prefer to work on their allotments than on ‘their’ land.
Additionally, if as Bettelheim maintains, the enterprises in Russia act as autonomous capitalist units, it is difficult to see how some of them could – as they do – regularly operate at a ‘loss’. That is, in price terms they do not recover the costs of production by selling the goods they produce. The reality is that the price system in Russia, as a totality, is controlled from the centre, and incomprehensible without simultaneous reference to the system of taxes and subsidies. It is difficult, indeed, to see how the term ‘commodities’ can be applied to the products of Russian enterprise, if – like Bettelheim – the limit of the analysis is the set of internal price relations within the Russian domestic economy. In point of fact, this objection applies as much to Mandel’s argument as to Bettelheim’s: consumer goods, by and large, do not conform to the idea of ‘commodities’ any more than do the products of heavy industry. Carlo (op. cit., p. 21) refers to an example which makes the point quite well: the Russian plan called for the production of a type of shoe which Russian consumers disliked, these consumers preferring a different kind of shoe. Yet the efforts of a consumer advocate to get the shoe style changed failed, and old. shoes continued to be produced, and remained unsold. The ‘consumers’ strike’ did not have the effects one would expect in a market society: wages and prices and profits did not fall, the shoe-manufacturing enterprise did not collapse. Sooner or later, the planners must have judged, the shoeless consumer would be forced – in the absence of any other source of footwear – to buy the shoes they didn’t want.
Likewise, the Russian economy considered in isolation does not conform to the ‘market’ model in another crucial respect: the situation of the work-force. There is nothing in Russia which really corresponds to a ‘labour market’ as understood in the west. For a long period, there were extensive legal restrictions on the rights of workers to change their jobs (most obviously in the case of the millions in the forced labour camps run by the political police, but even for ‘free’ workers job-changing without permission was subject to criminal legislation, internal passports, work books, etc.). When workers do change their jobs, they work for a different branch of the same employer, the state.
At the beginning of the 1930s, full employment was achieved in Russia. In these circumstances, one would expect to see wages rising: in Russia, the shift to full employment was associated with a major cut in real wages. They remained below 1928 levels, despite a huge increase in production, until Stalin’s death. It seems clear that the wage dynamic is quite different from that in the west. In the west, wages are controlled, inter alia, by the mechanism of unemployment; in Russia it is administrative mechanisms that determine wage levels, movement of labour between different activities, etc. If a western capitalist model is the test of the existence of capitalist relations in the Russian domestic economy, then, as Carlo remarks, there are not really ‘wages’ in the Russian economy. (op. cit., p. 27)
The conclusion appears inescapable: Bettelheim’s argument that capitalist market relations govern the development of production within the Russian economy cannot be sustained. True, the economic reformers of the 1960s and 1970s have argued for the increased use of market mechanisms in the Russian economy, but the reforms have not in reality had a major impact on the relations within or between enterprises. The Russian economy remains a highly centralised, administered economy, in which money, prices, profits, wages and the like play a different role from that played in a western capitalist economy.
Finally, in terms of the existing published writings of Bettelheim, his attitude to the period of Stalinism proper remains ambiguous. The logic of his argument is that the tendency for capitalist relations of production to become predominant has strengthened since Stalin’s death. Does this mean that the Stalin period was one in which socialist relations were more predominant? Does this mean, in other’ words, that the period in which terror and coercion played a greater role than they now do was preferable? We may get a clearer answer to this question when the third volume of Bettelheim’s history appears. In the meantime, Bettelheim’s argument is open to just this interpretation, especially given his own history as a loyal member of the French Communist Party for many years.
As we have seen, Bettelheim’s history is focused on the theoretical errors of the Bolsheviks, in particular on their ‘economism’. From the standpoint of Marxism, Bettelheim is correct in condemning ‘economism’. It is less clear, ho ever, that the standpoint of his criticism is itself adequate.
The passage quoted above, in which Bettelheim compares Russian developments with those in Mao’s China reveals a certain tendency to slide from ‘the transformation of social relations’ to ‘transformation of the superstructure’. Without wishing to engage in Marxist dogmatics, the slide is significant for Bettelheim’s theory. Bettelheim ‘conflates the relations of production with the superstructure – and especially ... with ideology’. [67]
There is, of course, a good deal of ambiguity in Marx’s own treatment of the question, but it does appear that he regarded the relations of production as the motor of historical change. That is, Marx’s ‘motor of history’ was the pattern of social relations existing between the direct producers and the owners of the means of production. And, since the object of Marx’s historical theorising was the forms of class society, the fundamental role in historical development was attributed to the class struggles emerging around the relationships of exploitation by one class of another. The starting point for historical analysis is the specific form that exploitation takes:
‘The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself, and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element ... It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure.’ [68]
This is not a ‘technological determinism’ (or, in Bettelheim’s terms, an ‘economism’), as is best seen with reference to Marx’s concrete analyses. Thus, in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx argues that it was the emergence of capitalist relations of production which themselves engendered the technological transformations associated with the industrial revolution, and not vice versa. Industry, if you like, did not produce capitalism; capitalism produced industry. Thus far, we are in entire agreement with Bettelheim.
However, Bettelheim’s rejection of ‘economism’ leads him to treat the productive forces as a mere effect of the relations of production. The logic of this position is that ‘communism’ can be created in any material-economic setting whatever. All that matters if that the will to do it should exist, and that the ‘correct theory’ guide the process. This seems to be a very different idea from that of Marx and Engels, who saw the development of capitalism, and the immense forward thrust which capitalism gave to the development of human productive powers on a world scale, as a necessary precondition of communist society. Capitalism’s creation of a world market, its immense technological achievements therein, and its development of a new kind of exploited class, the modern working class, were – for Marx and Engels – the historic justification of this mode of exploitation: it alone prepared the way for the possible development of socialism/communism. Without that development, they insisted, ‘privation, want, is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored.’ [69]
In this light, the crucial condition for the socialist success of the socialist revolution of 1917 was that it should spread to the advanced capitalist countries of the west – as Trotsky had insisted from 1905, in his theory of ‘permanent revolution’, and as Lenin likewise repeated over and over again after 1917. It was on the world stage that capitalism had created the preconditions for socialist development – not on the single, isolated and backward stage of Russia alone. There is not a word of this in Bettelheim’s 1,100 pages. The German revolution is mentioned only once in the entire two volumes. Nothing is said of the Bolsheviks’ enthusiasm at the overthrow of the Kaiser in November 1918, the enthusiasm with which the Bolsheviks greeted the hope of a revolution in Germany in 1923, the development of the Communist International. Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’ is taken for granted, and indeed – against all the evidence to the contrary – foisted onto Lenin too.
Bettelheim treats the development of Russia as if it were somehow hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, and as if the material level of development in backward Russia were quite irrelevant to its evolution. What mattered, alone, was the will of the participants, and the ideas they held. The problem of the ‘weakness’ of the Russian proletariat was not ‘numerical’ but ‘ideological’. [70]
In the framework of ‘socialism in one country’, there were two possible lines of development, evidenced in the debates of the 1920s. Either the system of social relations that characterised the New Economic Policy must be continued (broadly, the policy of Bukharin and the ‘right’), on the basis of ‘snail’s pace’ economic growth; or there must be an industrialisation drive based on capital-intensive heavy industry (Stalin’s final policy solution). Bettelheim, who accepts the idea of ‘socialism in one country’, clearly favours the former, ‘Bukharinist’ solution, for he opposes the extraction of ‘tribute’ from the peasantry and opposes the extraction of surplus-value from the workers.
But, within this framework, there is a massive problem – precisely the problem which meant that Bukharin was defeated. The world capitalist powers were not likely to allow the Soviet state to develop a disarmed, bucolic ‘socialism in one country’. There was an objective basis to the fears expressed by Stalin and others about the dangers of war with the imperialist powers. After all, Russia was invaded by foreign armies in the Civil War period, faced a hostile diplomatic situation all through the 1920s and 1930s, and was again invaded by Hitler’ s armies in the Second World War. ‘Socialism in one country’ was permanently threatened from without. Given ‘socialism in one country’, Stalinist industrialisation was the logical policy.
Bettelheim does not discuss any alternative to ‘socialism in one country’. Yet, in Germany in 1923 and after 1929, in China in the 1925–7 period, in France and in Spain in 1936, revo1utionary possibilities in other countries did exist. And they were thrown away in large measure due to the interventions of the Russian Communist Party leadership. Russia’s isolation was partly self-created and self-reinforced. [71]
On the basis of the productive forces already developed by world capitalism, socialism was possible. In isolated, backward Russia, it was not, whatever the theoretical sophistication and the will of anyone in Russia. Bettelheim’s admiration for Mao’s China – an even more backward country, and one whose social revolution in 1949 was not in any meaningful sense a workers’ revolution – forbids his recognising this. (More recently, Bettelheim’s hopes in China have been dashed: the new leadership has abandoned any illusions in ‘ideological struggle’ and socialism at a snail’s pace, in the face of the country’s perilous international situation and in particular the threat from the highly industrialised Russia.)
Bettelheim’s characterisation of the Russian revolution is all a piece with his account of the capitalist restoration process. Thus he writes:
‘The October revolution was unlike all previous revolutions, except the Paris Commune, by virtue of the fact that it was carried out through the guidance of proletarian ideas.’ [72]
Was it the character of the ideas guiding it that led Marx and Engels to celebrate the Paris Commune? Far from it – indeed, they measured their distance from the ideological stances of many of the Commune’s leaders. It was, rather, the political structure created by the Commune which they stressed: the election of all officials, their recallability, the arming of the people, etc. Similarly with Lenin’s account of the soviet in Letters From Afar, or his recovery of Marx’s revolutionary political doctrine in State and Revolution. What mattered in the revolutionary Marxist tradition was the creation by workers of political institutions through which they could exercise direct power. The same themes recur in the writings of Trotsky and Gramsci.
This conception of working-class power, of Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat’, is central to the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Political structures like the Paris Commune, or the Soviets, wore seen as the institutional forms through which the working class might itself achieve its own self-emancipation, by its own efforts. [H] In such a perspective, the role of a revolutionary party was to encourage the workers to take the step of creating this political form and to to use it to seize power for themselves.
This conception is different from Bettelheim’s. What is central in his conception is not the direct exercise of power by actual workers, but rather the ideas inculcated into the masses by those who control the state machine. It is the ideas of the party, not the practice of the workers, which is decisive:
‘The Bolshevik Party (was) the party whose ideology, political line, style of leadership, capacity to develop the alliance between the working class and the peasantry and, consequently, relations with the masses, constituted the ultimate guarantee of the proletarian character of the ruling power.’ [74]
Lest we be in any doubt, Bettelheim hammers his argument home:
‘The working-class members of a proletarian party may be relatively few (especially in a country where the working class itself is not large) without that circumstance damaging its proletarian character, which is determined by its ideology and political line.’ [75]
What matters in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution is not fundamentally the isolation and backwardness of the Russian economy, the paralysis of its Soviets, the atomisation of the working class, but the inadequacies of the ideas in the heads of the ruling party. The whole theoretical formulation is thus characterised by an extraordinary degree of idealism, whose practical side is a voluntarism very distinct from the tradition deriving from Marx. Bettelheim’s position is more reminiscent of that of Schapper and others, whom Marx attacked at the final meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist League in September 1850:
A national German approach has replaced the universal conception of the Manifesto ... The will, rather than the actual conditions, was stressed as the chief factor in the revolution The word “proletariat” has been reduced to a mere phrase, like the word “people” was by the democrats ... In place of actual revolutionary development one would have to adopt the revolutionary phrase. [76]
>F. One example of the confusion is provided by Binns and Haynes. In an otherwise very useful article [58], they attack Antonio Carlo’s critique of ‘state capitalism’ [59] as if it were a critique of the third approach. Yet a reading of Carlo reveals that the sole object of his critique is the first approach. He appears, indeed, unaware of the third approach, which does not figure in his discussion or his (very extensive) footnotes. Carlo’s article, besides being an exposition of the second approach, is best read as a useful critique of Bettelheim, etc.
G. ‘Vulgar Marxism’, of course, is rooted in a particular reading of Marx himself. Particular (and rather one-sided) formulations of Marx’s – for example, Marx’s remark in The Poverty of Philosophy that the hand-mill gives you the feudal lord, and the steam-mill gives you the capitalist – provide the foundation for this kind of view. It is expressed most sharply, in the formulations of a number of theorists of the “Second International” [62] and in Joseph Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Stalin, for example, writes:
‘First the productive forces of society change and develop, and then, “depending” on these changes and “in conformity with them”, men’s relations of production, their economic relations, change ... however much the relations of production may lag behind the development of the productive forces, they must, sooner or later, ome into correspondence – and actually do come into correspondence with – the level of development of the productive forces, the character of the productive forces.’ (p. 31)
H. If one wanted a single sentence that summed up the political ideas of Marx, it might well be the opening remark of the Provisional Rules that Marx drafted for the First International, and which the Geneva Congress ratified in September 1866: ‘... the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ [73]
58. Peter Binns and Mike Haynes, New theories of eastern European class societies, International Socialism, 2 : 7, winter 1980.
59. Antonio Carlo, The Socio-Economic Nature of the Soviet Union, Telos 21, 1974.
60. Charles Bettelheim, Economic Calculation and Forms of Property, translated by John Taylor with an introduction by Barry Hindess, London: Routledge, 1976.
61. Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR. First Period: 1917–1923, Second Period: 1923–1930, both volumes translated by Brian Pearce, Harvester, 1976 and 1978.
62. For a useful critique, see Lucio Colletti, The Marxism of the Second International in Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, New Left Books, 1972.
63. Cf. Carlo, op. cit., p. 2.
64. Bettelheim, Second Period, pp. 107–8.
65. Bettelheim, First Period, p. 42.
66. Carlo, op. cit., p. 37.
67. Alex Callinicos, Maoism, Stalinism and the Soviet Union, International Socialism, 2 : 5, summer 1979, p. 82.
68. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow 1962, p. 772.
69. Marx/Engels, The German Ideology, Marx/Engels, Collected Works, V, p. 49.
70. Bettelheim, Second Period, p. 313.
71. See, for example, F. Claudin, The Communist Movement (Penguin, 1975).
72. Bettelheim, First Period, p. 9, my emphasis, CB.
73. Marx, The First International and After, Penguin, 1974, p. 87.
74. Bettelheim, First Period, pp. 103–4.
75. Bettelheim, Second Period, p. 331.
76. Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, Penguin, 1973, p. 341.
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