Workers World, Vol. 1 No. 1
Every class conscious worker, every socialist and communist will greet with joy the great advances of the Soviet Union and the new gains made by the workers and peasants in the land of the great October Revolution. For the Soviet Union, in spite of the many serious deformations, is still the fortress of the world proletariat – beacon light to all the oppressed. And its great technological successes are a tremendous source of inspiration for all who strive for a socialist world.
Therefore, when Khrushchev declared in his summary speech at the 21st Congress that “this Congress ... marks our country’s entry into a new historic period of development, the period of the extensive building of a communist society,” it was cause for jubilation everywhere among class conscious workers.
While Khrushchev did not define the new period in concrete terms, all had reason to believe that it was going to be a higher, better, more developed period of socialist construction. The magnitude of the Seven Year Plan is enough to evoke the admiration of all the peoples of the world and the envy of the enemies of socialism and the Soviet Union.
The economic plan however, bold, imaginative and far-reaching in scope as it is, deals with production targets mainly. Such plans of course are not new in the Soviet Union.
We take pride that it was Trotsky who proposed the first comprehensive plan for the industrialization of the Soviet Union, a plan which was subsequently adopted by Stalin, in complete contradiction to his own previous position on the subject.
The great big question, however, that Khrushchev tried to but couldn’t evade at the Congress, and which the Soviet working class has been looking forward to with great anticipation, was not the plan for production (this they assume as a matter of course), but the plan for a more equitable distribution of the national income.
It has long, long been forgotten in the Soviet Union of the Stalinist era that a vital and absolutely indispensable aspect of socialist planning is the rational and equitable division of the national income in accordance with the existing level of the productive forces and technological equipment. For if, as Khrushchev says, the USSR is entering a new period – and an extensive one, as he puts it, in the building of “a communist society” – than the question of the division of the national income among the social groups in the Soviet Union is all the more on the order of the day.
Khrushchev assures us at the beginning of his speech of the necessity of giving priority to heavy industry. But there was never any dispute among genuine Marxists that that should be so. How much and to what extent can only be a tactical question depending on the level of the productive forces, the international situation, etc. But when it comes to the question of consumer goods, workers must know the character of the goods – articles for mass popular consumption – or Dachas for the elite?
Precisely put, the issues are these: Is the economic gulf between the social groups in the Soviet Union narrowing or widening? As one Five Year Plan succeeds another and as the sum total of the goods increases from year to year, is the gulf between the mass of the people and the privileged strata becoming wider, and are steps being taken to narrow it?
On this key question, a report to a congress of the Soviet Communist Party has long been overdue. It, in fact, has not been given attention since the days of Lenin and Trotsky.
It was presumed, however, that when the Soviet government announced late last year that it was at last taking an accurate census of the population (which incidentally hasn’t been done since 1939) that this was for the purpose of presenting the census results to the 21st Congress. This of course would be done, it was assumed, with a view towards examining not merely the bald statistical aggregates of the various Union Republics with respect to population, but the income status, that is, the real economic position of each social group in the Soviet Union, beginning with the humblest unskilled worker, the lowest paid, all the way up to the top of the pyramid, the loftiest group on the summit of the Soviet hierarchy; to the “socialist millionaires,” be they on the wealthier collective farms, at the head of giant factories, in the army or among the elite of the intelligentsia.
Unfortunately, one would look in vain throughout the seven-hour-long speech of Khrushchev, plus his summary, for any presentation of these vitally necessary statistics. Oh, yes, there are the statistics on production, on steel, on oil, on gas. And they are all very necessary and very good, especially if accurate. But with respect to income the report is strangely silent.
It is not because Comrade Khrushchev was unaware of the problem. On the contrary, his report shows evidence that he all too clearly understood that it was the problem at the Congress. Comrade Khrushchev shows his understanding by a diversionary comparison with the USA.
“In the United States,” he says, “the capitalist class appropriated more than half the national income, while making up only about one tenth of the country’s population.” How true! How true! As if the Congress or the workers have any doubt on that score!
“But in the USSR,” he continues, “the working people receive about three quarters of the national income for the satisfaction of their material and cultural requirements. The rest of the national income, which likewise belongs to the working people, is used to expand socialists production and for other social needs” True enough again. But that is not the issue, as Comrade Khrushchev knows very well.
The basic issue is who gets what share of the national income and in what proportion. What does the janitor, the sweeper, the gardener, the artist, the lathe hand, the assembly man, the industrial manager, the scientist – what do they get – what proportion of the national income goes to each group? Comrade K, who by this time has already consumed at least five of his seven hours, at last comes to the point.
“In articles and lectures,” he tells us, “some scientific workers allege that distribution according to work signifies application of bourgeois law to a socialist society. They ask whether the time has not come to shift from this principle to equitable distribution of the social product among all working members of society.”
Then with the bluntness characteristic of him, and with the confidence that he will not be contradicted, at least at this Congress, he answers: “We cannot agree with this.”
Whoever those unnamed “scientific workers” may be and however inaccurately they may formulate the theoretical presentation of the question of the distribution of the national income, we think they are on the right track.
We send them our heartiest congratulations for courage and fortitude. They reflect (no matter how vaguely) the left opposition in Soviet society – the opposition of the broad masses – against the privileges of bureaucracy. Their question is evidence that the social trend in the Soviet Union is at last being reversed – from right to left.
Heartened by the tremendous technological successes of the USSR, the mighty rise of Communist China, the momentous surge of the colonial revolution, the economic depression in the capitalist world, advanced Soviet workers are criticizing the bureaucracy from the left. The pendulum has at last started to swing in the other direction in the Soviet Union itself.
This is the kind of “thaw” we were looking forward to, not the Pasternak kind, the kind that the bourgeoisie and the Social Democratic lackeys of all types have been so loudly acclaiming.
Last updated: 11 May 2026