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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 24, 14 June 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The revision of Marxism, publicly launched by the Kremlin in 1942, has become more avowed. Stalin’s “Red Professors” are today openly indicting Marx and Engels for a whole number of “errors.”
Marx and Engels were “wrong” in declaring that with the introduction of socialism, the law of value would no longer operate. They were “wrong” in maintaining that under socialism all distinction between mental and physical labor would disappear. They were “wrong” in maintaining that with the destruction of skills, all wage differentials would likewise disappear, and that socialist society would reward its members on the basis of the axiom, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And so forth.
This sweeping attack on many of the basic Marxist propositions is contained in the new periodical Voprosi Ekonomiki (Problems of Economics), published by the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union.
The whole purpose of this revisionism is to provide a. “theoretical” justification for the enormous discrepancies between the living standards of the mass of the workers and that of the parasitic privileged bureaucracy.
The Stalinists pretend that Russia is “socialist,” In reality, Russian economy is a transitional one, far closer to capitalism than to socialism. The October Revolution laid the social foundations for the transition to socialism, but this has not been accomplished. Nor can it be achieved within the framework of a single country.
When Marx and Engels, and after them Lenin, spoke of socialism, they invariably meant a world system that would encompass from the outset two or more advanced countries. They had in mind a productive apparatus far surpassing that of any capitalist country. Under socialism, there will be an immense increase in labor productivity; a reduction in working hours, replacement of primitive modes of production in every sphere by collective and perfected labor, and so on.
None of this exists in present-day Russia. Her Industry far from surpassing that of advanced capitalist countries, still lags behind them. Productivity of labor in Russia remains far below even present-day Western Europe. Primitive modes of production still prevail in one sphere after another.
Under these conditions of economic backwardness, it goes without saying that the “law of value” continues to operate, even if in sharply modified forms. The correct conclusion is that Russia cannot therefore be considered as a “socialist” society. But to acknowledge this is to proclaim the bankruptcy of Stalin’s notorious theory of “socialism in one country.” The Kremlin understandably prefers to declare Marxism “outmoded” and to peddle instead the same anti-Marxist vulgarities as do the apologists of capitalism.
An example of this is the Stalinist glorification of the division between mental and physical labor. Marx, Engels and Lenin pointed out time and again that this division is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production, and not a law of “human nature.”
On the one hand, capitalism converts the worker into a mere appendage of the lifeless mar chine. On the other hand, capitalism makes of science and technology a productive force distinct from labor, pressing them into the exclusive service of capital. It is modern industry that completes the separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labor.
The Stalinists have taken this division of labor inside the capitalist factory and have proclaimed it to be one of the conquests “of the political economy of socialism created by Lenin and Stalin.”
Lenin’s name is dragged in fraudulently. Like Marx and Engels, Lenin recognized that modern industry, even under capitalism, recognizes no form of production as final, but must continually revolutionize production. Modern industry necessitates variations of labor, fluency of function, undermining in one sphere after another skills, and above all, the artificial distinctions between manual and mental labor. Socialism will complete this process.
Modern industry, Marx correctly pointed out, drives society “under the penalty of death to replace the detail worker of today ... by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labors, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.” (Capital, Vol. I, p. 534)
Socialism alone is capable of accomplishing this.
The Stalinist bureaucracy obstructs the cultural development of the Soviet masses, and thereby of Soviet industry. That is why the Kremlin needs these new “theories” to justify its plundering of the economy for the aggrandizement of the privileged bureaucracy.
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