the period of transition by jehan van den hoven

7/25/2019 The Period of Transition by Jehan van den Hoven

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PROBLEMS OF THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

Jehan van den Hoven

Published in the magazine Bilan no 28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38

Part I

The title of this study should not lead anyone to the conclusion that we're going to startpeering into the mists of the future or sketching out a solution to the many and complex tasks

which will confront the proletariat when it has become the ruling class. Such a project wouldnot be in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan. We will leave it to the

"technicians" and the recipe-mongers or to the self-proclaimed "orthodox" marxists to indulge

in such anticipations, to stroll down the byways of utopia, or to offer the workers formulaewhich have been emptied of any class content.

For us it can never be a question of inventing panaceas which are valid once and for all andwhich can be adapted to any historic situation. Marxism is an experimental method and not a

game of guesses and forecasts. It has its roots in a historic reality, which is a moving,

contradictory, process; it is nourished by past experience, tempered and corrected by the

present, so that it can be enriched by further experience to come.

By synthesising the events of history, marxism has shown the true meaning of the state, laid

bare of all idealist prejudices; it has developed the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat

and affirmed the necessity of the transitional proletarian state. But although it is possible to

define the class content of such a state, we are as yet still limited to a mere outline of its social

forms. It has still not been possible to situate the principles for running a proletarian state on a

solid basis, or to clearly draw the lines of demarcation between party and state. Thisimmaturity inevitably weighed heavily on the character and evolution of the Soviet State.

But it is precisely the task of those marxists who have survived the shipwreck of the workers'

movement to forge the theoretical weapons which will make the future proletarian state an

instrument of the world revolution and not a cog in the wheels of world capitalism.

This contribution to that theoretical task will examine:

a) the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises;

b) the necessity of the proletarian state;

c) the social and economic categories which will inevitably survive in the transitional period;

d) finally, certain requirements for a proletarian management of the transitional state.

The historical context of the proletarian revolution

It became axiomatic to say that capitalist society, overflowing with a productive capacity

which it can longer make full use of, drowning in a flood of commodities which it can't sell,

has become a historic anachronism. From this it is but a short step to conclude that thedisappearance of capitalism must open up the reign of abundance.


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In reality, capitalist accumulation has reached the extreme limits of its progressive evolution

and the capitalist mode of production is nothing but a fetter on historical progress. This

doesn't mean that capitalism is like a ripe fruit which the proletariat simply has to pluck in

order to find true happiness; it simply means that the material conditions exist for constructing

the base (and only the base) of socialism, for preparing the ground for a communist society.

Marx said that: "The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the

antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour

and actual labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed

up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system ofclass antagonism".2 In his Anti-Duhring Engels asserted that the existence of a society

divided into classes: "was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted

development of production in former times" and from this he deduced that "if, upon thisshowing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given

period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production.It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces". 3

It is clear that the final stage of capitalist development does not correspond to "the complete

development of modern productive forces" in the sense that all human needs can now be

satisfied. But what we do have today is a situation in which the persistence of class

antagonism not only stands in the way of any social development, but actually leads to the

regression of society.

This is what Engels was getting at when he said that the: "abolition of

classes...presupposes...the development of production carried out to a degree at which

appropriation of the means of pro-

duction and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of

culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only

superfluous, but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development".4And,

when he added that capitalist society had reached this state and that we now had: " the

possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an

existence not only sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence

guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties"there can be no doubt that he was envisaging the possibility of moving towards the full

satisfaction of needs and not saying that we already had the material means for immediately

achieving this.

As Engels said, the liberation of the productive forces: "is the one precondition for an

unbroken, constantly accelerating development of the productive forces, and therewith for a

practically unlimited increase of production itself".5 Consequently the period of transition

(which can only unfold on a world scale and not within one state) is a political and economic

phase which will inevitably be characterised by the inability of production to satisfy all

individual needs, even when we take into account the prodigious levels which the productivity

of labour has already achieved. The suppression of capitalist relations of production and of

their antagonistic expression makes it possible to immediately begin providing for essentialhuman needs (if we leave out the necessities of the class struggle which could temporarily

reduce the level of production).


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To go beyond this requires an incessant development of the productive forces. The realisation

of the formula "to each according to their needs" will come at the end of a long process,

which will go forwards not in a straight line but through a winding course of contradictions

and conflicts, and in conjunction with the world-wide development of the class struggle.

The historic mission of the proletariat is, as Engels said, to lead humanity "from the kingdomof necessity to the kingdom of freedom"; but the proletariat can only carry out this mission if it

analyses the nature and limits of the historic conditions in which this act of liberation takes

place, and applies this analysis to the whole of its political and economic activity. The

proletariat cannot abstractly pose socialism against capitalism, as though they were twoentirely independent epochs, as though socialism was not the historic prolongation of

capitalism and fatally scarred by it, but something clean and new which springs form the

virgin womb of the proletarian revolution.

It wasn't because of indifference or negligence that the founders of marxism didn't go into the

details of the period of transition. But Marx and Engels were the antithesis, the living

negation, of the utopians. They didn't try to construct abstract schema, to imagine thingswhich could only be resolved scientifically.

And in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg, who made an immense theoretical contribution to marxism,

still felt it necessary to point out that: "For from being a sum of ready made prescriptions

which only have to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social

and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the

future...(socialism) has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force against property,

etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot".6

In his preface to CapitalMarx had already indicated that: "When a society has discovered the

natural laws which regulate it own movement (and the final purpose of my book is to reveal

the economic laws of motion of modern society), it can neither overleap the natural phases of

evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees. But this much, at least, it can do; it

can shorten and lesson the birth pangs."

A policy of proletarian management, therefore, can only envisage the general tendenciesand

orientation of economic development, while historic experience (of which the Russian

revolution is a gigantic though incomplete example) can provide the proletariat with an

understanding of the social forms suitable for the implementation of its economic programme.This programme will only have a socialistcontent if it follows a way which is diametrically

opposed to capitalism - if it aims at a constant and progressive elevation of the livingconditions of the masses, and not at holding them down or lowering them.

***

If we want to understand the revolution not as an isolated phenomenon but as a product of anhistorical development, we must relate it to the fundamental laws of history - to the dialectical

movement generated by the class struggle, which is the living substance of historical events.

Marxism teaches us that the causes of revolutions are not to be found in philoso-

phy, but in the economy of a given society. The gradual changes that occur in the mode ofproduction and exchange, spurred on by the class struggle, inevitably culminate in a


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revolutionary "catastrophe" which tears through the envelope of the existing social and

productive relations.

In this respect the 20th century is for capitalist society what the 18th and 19th centuries were

for feudal society - an epoch of violent revolutionary convulsions engulfing the whole of

society.

In the epoch of bourgeois decadence, then, proletarian revolutions are the product of the

historical maturity of society as a whole, links in a chain of events which, as history since

1914 has shown, can easily alternate with defeats of the proletariat and wars.

The victory of one proletariat, although the immediate result of particular circumstances, is

definitely part of a whole: the world revolution. For this reason there can be no question of

assigning an autonomous development to this revolution because of any social or

geographical peculiarities.

Here we come up against the problem underlying the theoretical controversy which ledRussian centrism (and subsequently the Communist International) to put forward the theory of

"socialism in one country". We are referring to the interpretation of the unequal development

which has been a constant factor in historical evolution.

Marx observed that economic life was in some ways analogous to biological processes. Once

life has transcended a given period of development and gone from one stage to the next, it

begins to obey other laws, even though it is still dependent on the fundamental laws which

regulate all manifestations of life.

It's the same for each historical period, which has its own laws, even though history as a

whole is regulated by the laws of dialectical evolution. For example, Marx denied that the lawof population was the same in all times and all places. Each stage of development has its own

particular law of population and Marx pointed this out when refuting the theory of Malthus.

In Capital, in which he dissected the mechanisms of the capitalist system, Marx didn't dwell

on the many uneven aspects of its expansion, because for him: "What we are concerned withprimarily is, not the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms which

arise out of the natural laws of capitalist production, but these laws in themselves, the

tendencies which work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal. A country in

which industrial development is more advanced than in other simply presents those others

with a picture of their own future".7From this passage we can see clearly that what has to beconsidered as the fundamental element is not the uneven development of the different

countries which make up the capitalist system - as though there was some kind of law

ensuring the historical necessity of uneven development - but rather the specific laws of

capitalist production, which regulate the whole of society and which are themselves

subordinated to the general laws of dialectical evolution.

The geographical milieu explains why the historical evolution and the specific laws of asociety manifest themselves in varied and uneven forms of development, but it cannot explain

the historical processitself. In other words, the geographical milieu is not the activefactor in

history.


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Marx pointed out that while capitalist production is favoured by a moderate climate, this is

merely a potential factor which can only be made use of in historical conditions which are

independent of geographical conditions. "It by no means follows that the most fruitful soil is

the most fitted for the growth of the capitalist mode of production. This mode is based on the

dominion of man over Nature...It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the

temperate zone, that is the mother country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil butthe differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons,

which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in thenatural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capacities, his

means and modes of labour".8

The geographical milieu is thus not the primordial element which determines the way

different countries will develop. If we locate this development in the sphere of geographical

conditions, and not in the context of the general historical laws of a whole epoch, then we

would have to come to the conclusion that each country has developed in an autonomousmanner, independent of any historical context.

But history has only unfolded because of the intervention of men acting (with the exception of

primitive communism) within a framework of antagonistic social relations, which have varied

according to the historical epoch and which have imposed a particular form on the class

struggle: slave against master, serf against landlord, bourgeois against feudal lord, proletariat

against bourgeois.

Obviously this doesn't mean that various pre-capitalist social formations - Asiatic, slave,

feudal - always succeed each other in a mechanical way and that their specific laws have a

universal validity. Such a pattern of evolution was ruled out by the fact that these social

formations were all based on modes of production which by nature were very progressive.

Each of these societies was unable to expand beyond a certain geographical radius (e.g. the

Mediterranean basin in classical antiquity), while outside this radius other modes of

production could exist, in a more or less evolved manner, and under the influence of various

factors, of which the geographical factor was not the most essential.

But, with the arrival of capitalism, the whole course of history broadens out. Although

capitalism inherited a historic situation characterised by considerable differences in

development, it did not take it long to overcome these differences.

Dominated by the need to accumulate surplus value, capitalism appeared on the historicalarena as the most powerful and progressive mode of production ever seen, the most expansive

of all economic systems. But although it was characterised by a tendency to universalise its

mode of production and although it partially succeeded in creating a world in its own image, it

never completely destroyed all previous social formations. Rather it annexed them, sucked

them dry, or pushed them aside.

We have already expressed our opinion (see "Crises and cycles") on the perspective of the

advent of a pure and balanced capitalist society, which Marx is supposed to have put forward;

we don't want to go back over this here, since the facts of history have eloquently refuted not

Marx's pseudo-predictions, but the hypotheses of those who have used it to reinforce

bourgeois ideology. We know that capitalism entered into its epoch of decomposition beforebeing able to complete its historic mission because its internal contradictions developed faster


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than the system could expand. But capitalism was still the first system of production to give

rise to a world economy, which is characterised not by homogeneity and balance, which

would in any case be contrary to its nature, but by a strict interdependenceof all its parts. It is

this which, in the final analysis, subjugates the whole world to the laws of capital and to the

yoke of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

The development of capitalist society, spurred on by competition, has produced this complex

and remarkable worldwide division of labour which can and must be perfected and purified

(this is the task of the proletariat) but which cannot be destroyed. It is not called into question

at all by the phenomenon of economic nationalism, which, with the general crisis ofcapitalism, appears as a reactionary manifestation of the exacerbated contradiction between

the universal character of the capitalist economy and this division into antagonist national

states. In fact, this is further confirmed by the stifling atmosphere created by the existence of

what might be called obsidian economies. Under the cover of an almost hermetically sealed

protectionism, we are seeing a prolific growth of industries built up on the basis of enormouswaste expenditure, the development of war economies which exact a heavy tribute from the

living conditions of the masses. These are economically unviable, parasitic growths whichwill be eliminated in a socialist society.

A socialist society is obviously inconceivable without this global division of labour.

The interdependence and reciprocal subordination of the various spheres of production (which

is today confined within the framework of bourgeois nations) is a historic necessity, and

capitalism has taken this to the highest possible level, both from the economic and political

point of view. The fact that, once this social structure appears on a world scale, it is shaken by

a thousand contradictory forces, does not mean that it doesn't exist on this scale. It is based on

a distribution of the productive forces and of natural resources which is the product of thewhole historical development. It is not at all dependent on the desire of imperialist capitalism

to counter-act the strict interdependence of all the regions of the world by retreating behindnational frontiers. If capitalism is attempting this mad project today, it is because it is being

driven by its own contradictions, but it can only do this by destroying the riches which

concretise the surplus value produced by generations of workers, by precipitating a gigantic

destruction of the productive forces into the holocaust of imperialist war.

The international proletariat cannot afford to ignore the laws of historical evolution. Once a

section of the proletariat has made its revolution, the price of the theory of "socialism in one

country" is the abandonment of the worldwide class struggle, and thus the defeat of that

revolution.

***

The idea that uneven development is a historical law giving rise to the necessity of

autonomous national development is a denial of the concept of society as a worldwide

phenomenon.

As we have shown, uneven economic and political development, far from being an "absolute

law of capitalism",9 is simply a sum of phenomena determined by the specific laws of the

bourgeois system of production.


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In its period of expansion, capitalism, through a tortuous and contradictory process, tendedto

even out inequalities of development, whereas now, in its regressive phase, the necessities of

its evolution have led to a deepening of these inequalities: the advanced capitalisms suck the

backward countries dry and destroy any possibility of their development.

The Communist International sees this retrograde and parasitical development, and concludesthat "uneven development is augmented and accentuated even further in the imperialist

epoch"; it thus puts forward its theory of "national socialism", by pointing out the

impossibility of a world proletarian revolution as asimultaneousact, and confusing national

socialism and a revolution which breaks out in a national framework.

In order to back up these arguments, it elaborates on certain of Lenin's writings, notably his

article of 1915 "On the Slogan for the United States of Europe" (Against the Stream) where he

said that "Uneven economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism.

Hence it follows that the triumph of socialism is to begin with possible in a few, or even asingle capitalist country."10

Trotsky has dealt quite adequately with these falsifications in The Third International After

Leninand we don't need to refute them again here.

But all the same, Trotsky, seeking to follow Marx and Lenin, thinks that it is possible to use

the "law" of uneven development - which he also makes into an absolutelaw of capitalism -

to explain both the inevitability of the revolution assuming a national form and also why it

should first break out in the backward countries: "The uneven, sporadic development ofcapitalism gives the socialist revolution an uneven and sporadic character, but the advanced

degree of mutual interdependence between all countries means that it is both politically and

economically impossible to build socialism in one country"11and again that: "the prediction

that Russia, a historically backward country, could undergo a proletarian revolution before

an advanced country like England, was based entirely on the law of uneven development."

First of all, although Marx recognised the necessity of national revolutions, he never invoked

a law of uneven development, and he always made it clear that the necessity for national

revolutions derived from the fact that society was divided into capitalist nations, which was

simply the corollary of the fact that it was divided into classes.

The Communist Manifestosays that: "Since the proletariat must first of all acquire politicalsupremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself thenation, it

is, so far, national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word."12In the Critique of theGotha ProgrammeMarx goes on say: "It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at

all, the working class must organise itself at home as a classand that its own country is the

immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not in substance, but as

the Communist Manifestosays in form'."13

When the national struggle breaks out into a proletarian revolution, it shows that it is the

product of the historical maturation of the social and economic contradictions of capitalist

society as a whole. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a point of departure, not the final

goal. It is an expression of the worldwide class struggle, and can only live by remaining part

of that struggle. Only in the sense of this continuous revolutionary process can we talk about a

"permanent" revolution.


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Although Trotsky absolutely rejects the theory of "socialism in one country" and considers it

to be reactionary, the fact that he bases his argument on the "law" of uneven development

leads him to distort the significance of proletarian revolutions. This "law" is incorporated into

his theory of permanent revolution which, according to him, consists of two basic theses: one

based on a "correct" conception of the law of uneven development, the other on a precise

understanding of the world economy.

If, during the imperialist epoch the various expressions of uneven development are the result

not of the specific laws of capitalism (whose effects are intensified by the general crisis of

decomposition) but of a historical law of uneven development which has the character ofnecessity, it is impossible to understand why the effects of this law should limit themselves to

national revolutions which begin in the backward countries. Why shouldn't they also permit

the development of autonomous economies, i.e. of "national socialism"?

By ascribing a preponderant importance to the geographical milieu (because this is what

happens when you make uneven development into a law) rather than to the real historical

factor - the class struggle - you are opening the door to a justification of a "socialism" basedon the physical possibilities of independent development. As far as Russia is concerned, this

means opening the door to centrism.

In vain Trotsky accuses Stalin of "making a fetish of the law of uneven development and

declaring it as a sufficient condition for the build up of national socialism" because,

beginning from the same theoretical premise, he must logically come to the same conclusions,

unless he arbitrarily stops half way. Trotsky said of the Russian Revolution that: " it was the

greatest of all expressions of the unevenness of historical development; the theory of the

permanent revolution, which predicted the October cataclysm, was itself based on this law."

The backwardness of Russia can to a certain extent be used to explain why the revolution had

to jump over the bourgeois phase, although the essential reason for this was that it took place

in a period when the national bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. But

the real significance of this backwardness was expressed on the political level, because the

historic impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie was accompanied by an organic weakness

which was aggravated by the pressures of imperialist conflict. In the chaos of the imperialist

war, Russia was revealed as the weak link in the imperialist chain. The world revolutionbegan in the place where conditions were favourable for the proletariat and the building of its

class party.

***

To conclude the first part of this study, we would like to look at the theory of countries being

"ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, a theory which is especially favoured by the "evolutionary

socialists" but which has found some echo in the thought of the communists of the opposition

when it comes to defining the character of the Russian Revolution or seeking the origins of its

degeneration.

In his preface to the Critique of Political EconomyMarx summed up his position on what it

meant to say that a phase of social revolution had arrived at a level of maturity: "No social

formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been

developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before thematerial conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.


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Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer

examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions

for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."14This means that

the condition of maturity will always have its repercussions on the whole society regulated by

the dominant mode of production. Moreover, the notion of maturity can only have a relative,

not an absolute, meaning. A society is "ripe" to the extent that its social structure and juridicalframework have become too narrow in relation to the material forces of production which it

has developed.

At the beginning of this study we underlined the fact that although capitalism has powerfullydeveloped the productive capacity of society, it has not succeeded in developing the

conditions for an immediate passage to socialism. As Marx indicated, only the material

conditions for resolving this problem exist "or are at least in the process of formation".

These restrictions apply even more strongly to each national unit in the world economy. All ofthemare historically ripe for socialism, but noneof them are ripe in the sense of possessing all

the material conditions needed for the building of an integral socialism. This is true whateverlevel of development they may have reached.

No nation on its own contains all the elements for a socialist society. The idea of national

socialism is in diametrical opposition to the international nature of the imperialist economy, to

the universal division of labour, and the global antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the

proletariat.

It is a pure abstraction to see socialist society as a sum of complete socialist economies. The

world-wide distribution of the productive forces (which is not an artificial product) makes it

impossible both for the "advanced" countries and for the "backward" countries to complete

the transition to socialism within their own borders. . The specific weight of each of the

countries in the world economy is measured by the degree to which they are reciprocally

dependent, not by how independent they might be. England, which is one of the most

advanced sectors of capitalism, a country in which capitalism exists in an almost pure form,

could not operate in isolation. Facts today show that, even when only partially cut off from

the

world market, the productive forces begin to break down. This is the case with the cotton and

coal industries in England. In the U.S.A, the automobile industry can only go into decline if itis limited to the home market, no matter how vast the latter is. An isolated proletarian

Germany would soon see its industrial apparatus breaking down, even if it initiated a hugeexpansion of consumption.

It is thus an abstraction to pose the question of countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for

socialism, because on these terms you would have to say that neither the advanced countries

nor the backward countries were mature enough.

The problem has to be posed in the light of the historical maturation of social antagonisms,

which in turn results from the sharpening conflicts between the productive forces and the

relations of production. To limit the question to the material factors at hand would be to take

up the position of the theoreticians of the Second International, of Kautsky and the German

Socialists, who considered that because Russia was a backward economy dominated by atechnically weak agrarian sector, it was not ripe for a proletarian revolution, but only for a


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bourgeois revolution. In this their conception was the same as that of the Russian Mensheviks.

Otto Bauer declared that the proletarian state inevitably had to degenerate because of Russia's

backwardness.

In theRussian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg remarked that, according to the conception of the

social democrats, the Russian revolution ought to have stopped after the fall of the Tsarism."According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the

dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian

labour movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its

further course, and all disorders it has suffered, are pictured as purely a result of this fatefulerror."

The question as to whether Russia was or was not ripe for the proletarian revolution can't be

answered by looking at the material conditions of its economy, but at the balance of class

forces, which had been dramatically transformed by the international situation. The essential

condition was the existence of a concentrated proletariat - despite the fact that it was a tiny

minority in relation to the huge mass of peasant producers - whose consciousness expresseditself through a class party powerfully armed with revolutionary ideology and experience. We

agree with Rosa Luxemburg that: "The Russian proletariat has to be seen as the vanguard of

the world proletariat, a vanguard whose movement is the expression of the development of

social antagonisms on a world scale. What is happening in St Petersburg is the result of

developments in Germany, England, and France. It is these developments which will decide

the outcome of the Russian revolution, which can only achieve its goal if it is the prologue to

the revolution of the European proletariat." Certain comrades of the communist opposition

have however, based their appreciation of the Russian revolution on the criterion of economic

"immaturity".

In his study "Classes in Soviet Russia", comrade Hennaut takes up this position. In his

interpretation of those statements of Engels which we looked at earlier, Hennaut sees them ashaving a particular significance which can be applied to a given country, rather than as

referring to a whole social order that has reached the historic limitations of its development. If

this were the case, Engels would obviously be contradicting what Marx said in his preface to

the Critique of Political Economy. But as we shall see, this is not the case. According to

Hennaut, it is the economic factor and not the political factor which is most important when

we are trying to establish whether or not a proletarian revolution is possible. He says: "if we

apply them to the present period of human history, these considerations (of Engels) can only

mean that the seizure of power by the proletariat, the maintenance and use of this power for

socialist ends, is only conceivable where capitalism has already cleared the path forsocialism, i.e. where it has given rise to a numerically strong proletariat which comprises, ifnot the majority, then a powerful minority of the population, and where it has created a

developed industry which is able to stamp its seal on the further development of the whole

economy." Further on, he stresses that: "In the final analysis it was the cultural and economic

capacities of the country which determined the final outcome of the Russian revolution when

it became clear that the proletariat outside Russia wasn't ready to make the revolution. The

backward state of Russian society had to make all its negative sides felt." But perhaps

comrade Hennaut might have added that, whether we like it or not, anyproletarian revolution

that tries to draw its "legitimacy" from the material conditions in one country will be drawn

irresistibly into the trap of "national socialism".


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We repeat that the fundamental condition for the life of the proletarian revolution is its ability

to link up on a world scale, and this consideration must determine the internal and external

policies of the proletarian state. This is because, although the revolution has to begin on a

national scale, it cannot remain indefinitely at that level, however large and wealthy that

nation might be. Unless it links up with other national revolutions and becomes a world

revolution it will be asphyxiated and will degenerate. This is why we consider it an error tobase one's arguments on the national conditions of one country.

On the basis of these political considerations we can arrive at an understanding of the "leap"

the Russian revolution made over the various intermediary phases. The October revolutionshowed that in the epoch of imperialist decadence the proletariat cannot stop at the bourgeois

phase of development, but must go beyond it by taking the place of a bourgeoisie incapable of

carrying out its historic tasks. In order to attain this objective, the Bolsheviks did not spend

their time drawing up an inventory of the productive forces at their disposal, but based their

activity on an evaluation of the balance of class forces.

Again, this leap was not conditioned by economic factors, but by political ones, since the onlyway the Russian revolution could give rise to a material development of the economy was by

linking up with the world revolution. The "immaturity" of the backward countries - which

makes such "leaps" necessary - as well as the "maturity" of the advanced countries, must all

be incorporated into the same process of the world-wide class struggle.

Lenin gave a clear answer to those who reproached the Bolsheviks for having taken power. "It

would an irreparable error to say that, because there is an obvious imbalance between our

economic strength and out political strength, we shouldn't have taken power! To argue in

such a way you have to be blind, you have to forget that such a balance will never exist and

can't exist in any process of social revolution, and that it is only through a whole number ofexperiences, each one of which will be incomplete and marred by a certain imbalance, that

the triumph of socialism can be realised by the revolutionary co-operation of the workers ofall countries."

No matter how "poor" a proletariat might be it does not have to wait for the "richer"

proletariats to make its own revolution. The fact that such a revolution might encounter many

more difficulties than would confront a stronger proletariat is undeniable, but history doesn'toffer other alternatives.

The historic epoch of bourgeois revolutions led by the bourgeoisie is over. The survival of

capitalism has become an obstacle to progress, and thus also to the development of thebourgeois revolution, since we are now faced with a saturated world market. Moreover, the

bourgeoisie can no longer win the support of the working masses like it did in 1789; even as

early as 1848, 1871, and 1905 in Russia, it was unable to do this.

The October revolution was a striking example of one of these apparent historical paradoxes;

it showed a proletariat completing a short-lived bourgeois revolution but then compelled to

realise its own objectives in order to avoid being strangled by imperialism.

The Russian bourgeoisie had been weakened from birth by western capital's domination of the

economy. The price of keeping Tsarism going was that a considerable portion of the national

revenue was soaked off by foreign capital, and this was an obstacle to the economicdevelopment of the Russian bourgeoisie.


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1905 was an attempted bourgeois revolution marked by the absence of the bourgeoisie. A

highly concentrated proletariat already appeared on the scene as an independent revolutionary

force; this forced the politically impotent liberal bourgeoisie into the arms of the feudal

autocracy. But the bourgeois revolution of 1905 couldn't end in a victory for the proletariat,

because although it was a product of the convulsions caused by the Russo-Japanese war, it

wasn't accompanied by a maturation of social antagonisms on an international scale. ThusTsarism was able to receive financial and material aid from the whole European bourgeoisie.

As Rosa Luxemburg said, "The Revolution of 1905-1907 roused only a faint echo in Europe.

Therefore, it had to remain a mere opening chapter. Continuation and conclusion were tiedup with the further development of Europe".15 The revolution of 1917 arose in a more

developed historical situation. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

Lenin traced its successive phases: "First, with the whole' of the peasantry against themonarchy, against the landlords, against medievalism (and to that extent, the revolution

remains bourgeois, bourgeois democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the

profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise anartificial Chinese Wall between the first and the second, to separate them by anything else

than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor

peasants, means monstrously to distort Marxism, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its

place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist

proletariat by means

of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie as compared

with medievalism."16

The dictatorship of the proletariat was the instrument which made it possible first to completethe bourgeois revolution, then go beyond it. This is the explanation behind the Bolshevik

slogan "land to the peasants", which - mistakenly, in our opinion - was opposed by RosaLuxemburg.

With Lenin, we say that: "...the Bolsheviks...strictly differentiated between the bourgeois-

democratic revolution, and the socialist revolution: by carrying the former to its end, they

opened the door for the transition to this latter. This was the only policy that wasrevolutionary and Marxian".17

(Bilanno. 28, March-April 1936)

1Collected Works, Vol.21.

2The Poverty of Philosophy. Collected Works, Vol. 6.


4Ibid.

5Ibid.

6The Russian Revolution


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7Preface to the first German edition of Capital.

8Capitalvol. 1, Part V, Chapter XVI "Absolute and relative surplus value".

9Programme of the 6th Congress of the CI.

10Collected Works, Vol. 21.

11The Third International after Lenin.




15The Russian Revolution.


17The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

Part II

In our introductory study, we tried to show that there is not and cannot be a direct

simultaneity between the historicmaturity of the proletarian revolution and its material andcultural maturity. We are living in the epoch of proletarian revolution because social progress

can now only take place after the disappearance of the very class antagonisms which, in whatwe might call the prehistory of the human race, have been the motor-force of all progress until

now.

But the collective appropriation of the wealth developed by bourgeois society simply does

away with the contradiction between the socialformof the productive forces and their privateappropriation. It is simply the sine qua non for the further development of society. In itself

it doesnt lead automatically to a higher stage of development. In itself it doesnt contain all

the constructive solutions of socialism, nor does it immediately wipe out all forms of social

inequality.

The collectivisation of the means of production and exchange is not socialism - it is a point of

departure, a fundamental precondition for socialism. It is still only a juridical solution to

social contradictions and doesnt eliminate all the material and spiritual deficiencies that the

proletariat will inherit from capitalism. In a sense history will surprise the proletariat and

force it to carry out its mission in an unprepared state which no amount of revolutionaryidealism and dynamism can immediately transform into an ability to resolve all the

formidable and complex problems the revolution will pose. Both before and after the conquestof power, the proletariat will have to make up for the historical immaturity of its

consciousness by relying on its party, which will remain its guide and educator in the period

of transition from capitalism to communism. At the same time the proletariat will only be able

to overcome the temporary insufficiency of the productive forces bequeathed to it bycapitalism by having recourse to a state, to an:


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evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose

worse sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off

at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social

conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.[1]

The necessity to tolerate a state during the transition period between capitalism andcommunism derives from the specific character of this period, which Marx defined in his

Critique of the Gotha Programme:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developedon its own

foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in

every respect, economically, morally and intellectually,still stamped with the birth marks of

the old society from whose womb it emerges (our emphasis).[2]

Later on we will examine these birth marks when we analyse the economic and social

categories which the proletariat will inherit from capitalism and which are going to have to

wither away alongside the proletarian state.

It would obviously be a mistake to cover up the mortal danger which the survival of this

instrument of servitude, this state, will pose to the proletarian revolution, even though its a

workers state. But to conclude that the revolution is bound to degenerate simply because this

state will exist would be to ignore the dialectic of history and to abandon the revolution itself.

Similarly, to delay the unleashing of the revolution until the masses have fully acquired the

capacity to wield power would be to run away from the reality of the historical problem, to

negate the necessity of the transitional state and of the party. This idea is the logicalaccompaniment to the notion of basing the revolution on the maturity of material

conditions, which we examined in the first part of this study.

Later on we will consider the problem of the ability of the proletarian masses to run the state

and the economy.

The state: instrument of the ruling class

While the victorious proletariat will be forced by historical conditions to tolerate a stateduring a more or less prolonged period, it is important that it understands what kind of state

this will be.

The marxist method allows us on the one hand to uncover the meaning of the state in class

society, to define its nature; and, on the other hand, by analysing the revolutionary

experiences of the proletariat last century, to determine what attitude the proletariat must have

with regard to the bourgeois state.

Marx and above all Engels succeeded in ridding the idea of the state of all idealistexcrescences. Laying bare the real nature of the state, they showed that it was nothing but an

instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class of a given society; that its only

function was to safeguard the economic and political privileges of this class: through coercion

and violence, its role was to impose the juridical rules which corresponded to the forms of

property and mode of production upon which these privileges were based. They also showedthat the state was the expression of the domination of the majority of the population by a


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minority. The backbone of the state, the concrete expression of the fact that society was

divided into classes, was its armed force and coercive organs, which were placed above and

against the mass of the people, and which prevented the oppressed class from maintaining its

own spontaneous forms of armed defence. The ruling class could never tolerate the

existence of an armed force of the people alongside its own instruments of repression.

To take just one example from the history of bourgeois society: in France the revolution of

February 1848 armed the workers who were now a power in the state (Engels). The

bourgeoisie had but one concern: to disarm the workers. So it provoked them by liquidating

the national workshops and crushed them during the June uprising. Again in France, afterSeptember 1870, a national guard mainly composed of workers was formed to defend the

country.

almost at once the antagonism between the almost completely bourgeois government and

the armed proletariat broke into open conflictTo arm Paris was to arm the revolution.Thierswas compelled to realise that the supremacy of the propertied classes was in constant

danger so long as the workers of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was toattempt to disarm them.[3]

Thus came March 18th and the Commune.

But once it had penetrated the secret of the bourgeois state (whether monarchical or

republican, authoritarian or democratic) the proletariat still had to clarify its own policy

towards this state. The experimental method of marxism gave it the means to do this.

At the time of the Communist Manifesto Marx clearly recognised the necessity for theproletariat to conquer political power, to organise itself as the ruling class, but he was less

clear about the fact that the proletariat had to create its own state. He had already foreseen that

all forms of state would disappear when classes had been abolished, but this remained a

general and somewhat abstract formulation. The French experience of 1848-51 provided

Marx with the historical evidence which allowed him more firmly to grasp the idea of the

destruction of the bourgeois state, but it did not enable him to trace the contours of the

proletarian state which would arise in its place. The proletariat had appeared on the scene as

the first revolutionary class in history destined to annihilate the increasingly centralised police

and bureaucratic machine, which all exploiting classes had used to crush the exploited masses.

In his 18th BrumaireMarx stressed that up till now all revolutions perfected this machineinstead of smashing it.[4] The centralised power goes back to the absolute monarchy; the

rising bourgeoisie used it to struggle against feudalism; the French revolution simply rid it ofits feudal vestiges, and the First Empire completed the formation of the modern state. A

developed bourgeois society transformed the central power into a machine for oppressing the

proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx explained why all previous revolutionary

classes had conquered the state instead of destroying it: the means of production and of

exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built up, were generated in feudal society.[5]

Having gradually conquered economic power, the bourgeoisie had no need to destroy a

political organ in which it had already installed itself. It didnt have to do away with thebureaucracy, the police, or the armed forces, but simply to subordinate these instruments of

oppression to its own interests, because its political revolution was only a juridical

replacement of one form of exploitation by another.


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Proletarian state and bourgeois state

In contrast to this the proletariat is a class which expresses the interests of humanity rather

than any particular interest; it cannot therefore embed itself in a state based on exploitation.

The proletarianshave nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to

destroy all previous securities for, and insurance of, individual property.[6]

Despite its limitations, the Paris Commune was the first historical response to the question of

the difference between the proletarian state and the bourgeois state. The rule of the majority

over a minority deprived of its privileges eliminated the need for a specialised bureaucratic

and military machine in the service of particular interests. The proletariat replaced this

machine with its own armament - to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie - and a political

form which allowed it to progressively assume the task of managing society In this sense the

Communewas no longer a state in the proper sense of the word (Engels). Lenin stressed

the fact that the Commune had the gigantic achievement of replacing certain institutions byinstitutions in principle essentially different.

Nevertheless, the proletarian state still has the essential character of all states. It is still an

organ of coercion and, although it ensures the rule of the majority over a minority, it can stillonly express the temporary impossibility of doing away with bourgeois right. In Lenins

phrase it is a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie, and unless it is constantly subjected to

the direct control of the proletariat and its party it will always tend to turn against the class.

***

The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, already developed in the Manifesto butfinding a historical elaboration in the Commune of 1871, juxtaposed the idea of the

destruction of the bourgeois state with that of the withering away of the proletarian state.

With Marx, the idea of the final disappearance of the state can be found in embryonic form in

The Poverty of Philosophy; it was mainly developed by Engels in The Origins of the Family

andAnti-Duhring, while later on Lenin commented on the problem brilliantly in his State and

Revolution. The fundamental distinction between the destruction of the bourgeois state and

the dying away of the proletarian state was rigorously drawn by Lenin and we dont have to

go into it here, especially because our previous considerations have dealt with any doubt

about this question.

What we must keep in mind is that the hypothesis of the withering away of the state is bound

to become the touchstone of the content of proletarian revolutions. We have already indicatedthat the revolution breaks out in a historical milieu which obliges the proletariat to tolerate the

existence of a state. But this can only be: a state in the process of withering away, that is, a

state so constituted that it begins to wither away from the start and cannot but wither away

(Lenin).

The great achievement of marxism is to have shown irrefutably that the state has never been

an autonomous factor in history, but is simply the product of a society divided into classes;

the existence of classes preceded the state, and the latter will disappear when classes

themselves disappear. After the dissolution of primitive communism the state has always

existed in a more or less developed form, since it is inevitably superimposed on any form of

exploitation of man by man; but at the same time it will inevitably die out at the end of aperiod of historical evolution which will make all oppression and constraint superfluous, since


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bourgeois right will have been eliminated and, in Saint-Simons phrase, politics will be

entirely reabsorbed into the economy.

But marxist science has still not elaborated a solution to the problem of how exactly the state

will wither away, a problem which is directly linked to the question of the relationship

between the proletariat and its state.

The Commune was the first attempt to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat and was an

experience of enormous importance, but it couldnt avoid defeat and confusion, because, on

the one hand, it took place in a period of historical immaturity; and, on the other hand,

because it lacked the theoretical guide, the party. It can thus provide us only with a vague

outline of the relationship between the state and the proletariat.

In 1875, in the Critique of the Gotha ProgammeMarx was still posing the question: what

transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? [Marx is talking

about the period of transition here - ed. Note] In other words, what social formation will

remain in existence there that are analogous to the present functions of the state. Thisquestion can only be answered scientifically,and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the

problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state (ouremphasis - ed. note).[7]For Marx, the Commune was: a thoroughly expansive political form,

while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressiveit was the

political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of

labour.[8]

The Commune simply provided a framework for solving the fundamental problem of the

education of the masses, who had the task of progressively freeing themselves from the

burden of the state and ensuring that the state would finally disappear with the creation of a

classless society. In this sense, the Commune was a signpost on the road to emancipation. It

showed that although the proletariat could not immediately do away with the system of

delegation, it had to: safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring

them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. And, for Marx: Nothing could

be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage [in the

election of deputies - ed. note] by hierarchic investiture.[9]

The theoretical elaboration of the problem had to stay at this point. Forty years later, Lenin

was unable to go any further in this sphere. In State and Revolutionhe was limited to a fewsummary and even banal formulae which emphasised the necessity to: transform the

functions of the state into functions of control and checking that are so simple that they can becarried out by the enormous majority of the population and little by little by the entire

population.[10]

Like Engels, he was limited to the assertion that the state would disappear in an era of real

freedom, as would democracy, which would have lost all social meaning. As for the exact

process whereby all the habits of servitude left over from capitalism would be eliminated,

Lenin said that: the question of the concrete way in which the state will die out remains an

open one, since we dont have the historical data that would allow us to settle it.[11]

Thus the problem of the management of a proletarian state and economy in the interests of the

international revolution remained unsolved. In October 1917, when the Russian proletariatembarked upon the most crucial of historical experiences, the class found that it lacked the


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political principles to define the relationship between the state and proletariat. The Bolsheviks

inevitably suffered from the crushing weight of this theoretical deficiency.

The power of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition

Taking a step back and looking at the Russian experience, it seems probable that if theBolsheviks and the International had been able to acquire a clear vision of this fundamentalquestion, the reflux of the revolution in the West, despite being a considerable obstacle to the

October revolution, would not have altered the latters internationalist character and provoked

it to break with the world proletariat by straying into the impasse of socialism in one

country.

But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider

the Soviet state as an evil inherited by the proletariat whose worst sides the victorious

proletariatcannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible, but as an organism which

could be completely identified with the proletarian dictatorship, i.e. with the party.

The result of this important modification was that the foundation of the dictatorship of the

proletariat was no longer to be the party, but the state; and through the ensuing reversal of

roles the latter found itself in a course of development which led not to the withering away of

the state but to the reinforcement of its coercive and repressive powers. Once an instrument of

the world revolution, the proletarian state was inevitably converted into a weapon of the

global counter-revolution.

Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to

counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, theRussian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the

proletariat, sterilised them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution

devoured its own substance.

Even in Lenins thought, the idea of the dictatorship of the state began to predominate. At

the end of 1918, in his polemic against Kautsky, (The Proletarian Revolution and the

Renegade Kautsky[12]) he was unable to distinguish between two conflicting concepts: the

state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He replied resoundingly to Kautsky on the

definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on its basic class meaning (all power to the

soviets), but he made a connection between the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state and

crush the ruling class and the idea of transforming the proletariats organisations into state

organs. Its true, however, that this position wasnt an absolute for Lenin, since he wasreferring to the period of civil war, of the overthrow of bourgeois rule, during which time the

main function of the Soviets was to be instruments of oppression against the bourgeoisie and

its state apparatus.

The enormous difficulty in finding the right answer to the question of the relationshipbetween the state and the proletariat, a question which Lenin was unable to resolve, derives

from this dual, contradictory necessity: the need, on the one hand, to retain the state, an organ

of economic and political coercion controlled by the proletariat (and thus by the party), while

at the same time ensuring a greater and greater participation of the masses in the running and

administration of the proletarian social order, even though this participation can for a whole

period only take place through state organs, which by their very nature tend to lead tocorruption.


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The experience of the Russian revolution shows just how difficult it is to produce a social

climate which will allow the maximum development of the activity and culture of the masses.

The controversy about democracy and dictatorship centres round this problem, whose solution

is crucial to the success of future proletarian revolutions. Here we should emphasize the fact

that despite Lenin and Luxemburgs differences about proletarian democracy, they showeda common pre-occupation - the desire to create the conditions for an incessant expansion of

the capacities of the masses. But for Lenin the concept of democracy, even proletarian

democracy, always implies the oppression of one class by another - whether it is the rule of

the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, or the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.And as we have said democracy will disappear with the abolition of classes and the state,

i.e. when the concept of freedom becomes a reality.

Against Lenins idea of a discriminatory democracy, Luxemburg (in the Russian

Revolution)defended the idea of unlimited democracy, which for her was a precondition

for: the unobstructed participation of the popular masses in the dictatorship of the

proletariat.[13] This could only be realised through the total exercise of democraticfreedoms: unlimited freedom of the press, full political freedom, parliamentarism (even

though later on, in the Spartacus programme, the future of parliamentarism was subordinated

to the needs of the revolution).

Luxemburgs overriding concern not to see the organs of the state machine getting in the way

of thepoliticallife of the proletariat and its active participation in the tasks of the dictatorship

prevented her from grasping the fundamental ro le of the party, since she ended up opposing

the dictatorship of the class to the dictatorship of the party. However, she had the tremendous

achievement of showing the difference in social context between the rule of the bourgeoisie

and the rule of the proletariat, as Marx had done for the Commune: the class rule of thebourgeoisie has no need for the political instruction and education of the mass of the people,

or at least for no more than an extremely limited amount; but for the dictatorship of theproletariat, it is the vital element, the oxygen without which it cannot live.[14]

In the programme of Spartacus, she dealt with the crucial problem of the education of the

masses (which has to be solved by the party), saying that: history is not going to make our

revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions. In those revolutions it sufficed tooverthrow that official power at the centre and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority.

But we have to work from beneath.[15]

The inability of the Bolsheviks to maintain the state in the service of the revolution

Caught up in the contradictory process of the Russian revolution, Lenin nevertheless

continued to emphasize the need to pose a proletarian corrective: organs of workers

control, against the corrupting tendencies of the transitional state.

In his report to the Congress of Soviets in April 1918, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet

Government, he underlined the necessity to constantly supervise the functioning of the

Soviets and the Soviet power:

There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into

parliamentarians, or else into bureaucrats. We must combat this by drawing allmembers ofthe Soviets into the practical work of administration.[16]


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In order to achieve this Lenin said it was necessary:

to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, and all steps that

are taken in this direction -the more varied they are, the better - should be carefully recorded,

studied, systematised, tested by wider experience and embodied in law. Our aim is to ensure

that every toiler, having finished his eight hours task in productive labour, shall performstate duties without pay; the transition to this is particularly difficult, but this transition alone

can guarantee the final consolidation of socialism. Naturally, the novelty and difficulty of the

change lead to an abundance of steps being taken, as it were, gropingly, to an abundance of

mistakes, vacillation - without this, any marked progress is impossible. The reason why thepresent position seems peculiar to many of those who would like to be regarded as socialists

is that they have been accustomed to contrasting capitalism with socialism abstractly, and

that they profoundly put between the two the word leap.[17]

The fact that in the same report Lenin was led to justify giving dictatorial powers to

individuals was the expression not only of the grim contingent situation which gave rise to

War Communism, but also of the contradiction between a necessary coercive regime imposedby the state machine, and the need to safeguard the proletarian dictatorship, to immerse the

regime in the growing activity of the masses.

The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the

dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely

executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in

order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet

government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy.[18]

But three years of civil war and the vital necessity to restore economic life prevented the

Bolsheviks from finding a clear political solution to the problem of the relationship between

the proletariat and state organs. Not that they were unaware of the mortal dangers which

threatened the whole development of the revolution. The programme of the 8th Congress of

the Russian Party in March 1919 talked about the danger of a political rebirth of bureaucracy

within the Soviet regime, despite the fact that the old Tsarist bureaucratic machinery had been

destroyed from top to bottom. The 9th Congress in December 1920 also dealt with the

question of bureaucracy. And at the 10th Congress, which saw the beginning of the NEP,Lenin discussed the question at great length and came to the following conclusion: that the

economic roots of the Soviet bureaucracy were not implanted in the military and juridical

apparatus as in the bourgeois state, but that they grew out of the services; that the bureaucracy

had sprung out of the period of War Communism and expressed the negative side of thisperiod. The price paid for the necessarily dictatorial centralisation of this period was the

increasing authority of the functionaries. At the 11th Congress, after a year of the New

Economic Policy, Lenin vigorously emphasised the historic contradiction involved in the

proletariat being forced to take power and use it before being fully prepared ideologically and

culturally:

We have sufficient, quite sufficient political power, we also have sufficient economic

resources at our command, but the vanguard of the working class which has been brought tothe forefront to directly supervise, to determine the boundaries, to demarcate, to subordinate

and not be subordinated itself, lacks sufficient ability for it. All that is needed here is ability,

and that is what we do not haveNever before in history has there been [such] asituation.[19]


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Concerning the state capitalism that it was necessary to put up with, Lenin urged the party

thus:

You Communists, workers, you, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which

undertook to administer the state, must be able to arrange it so that the state which you have

taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to. Well, we have lived through ayear, the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we

wanted this past year?How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that

guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the

direction someone else desired[20]

By saying that the task was to build communism with non-communist hands Lenin was

only restating one of the fundamental problems of the proletarian revolution. By pointing out

that the party had to lead an economy managed by others in the direction that itwanted it to

go, he was simply showing that the function of the party is not the same as that of the state

machine.

The safeguard of the Russian revolution, the guarantee that it would stay on the tracks of the

world revolution, was therefore not the absence of all bureaucracy - which is an inevitableexcrescence of the transition period - but the vigilant presence of proletarian organs in which

the educational activity of the party could be carried out, while the party itself retained a

vision of its international tasks through the International. Because of a whole series of

historical circumstances and because of a lack of indispensable theoretical and experimental

equipment, the Bolsheviks were unable to resolve this basic problem. The crushing weight of

contingent events led them to lose sight of the importance of retaining the Soviets and trade

unions as organs which could be juxtaposed to the state, controlling it but not being

incorporated into it.

The Russian experience doesnt allow us to see the extent to which the Soviets could have

been, in Lenins phrase, the organisations of the workers and the exploited masses which

will allow them to organise and govern the state themselves; the extent to which they could

have concentrated the legislative, the executive, and, the judiciary into themselves if

centrism had not emasculated their revolutionary potential.

In any case, the Soviets appeared as the Russian form of the dictatorship of the proletariat

rather than having an international validity. What makes them an acquisition from theexperimental point of view is the fact that during the phase of the destruction of Tsarist

society, the soviets were the backbone of the armed self-organisation which the Russianworkers put in place of the bureaucratic and military machine and the autocracy, and then

used against the reaction of the dispossessed classes.

As for the trade unions their function was altered in the process of the degeneration of the

whole apparatus of the proletarian dictatorship. In his Infantile Disorder (early 1920) Lenin

underlined the importance of the trade unions: by means of which the Party is closely linked

up with the class and with the masses, and by means of which, under the leadership of the

Party, the dictatorship of the class is exercised.

After the seizure of power: the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the

old way, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they areand will long remain an indispensable school of Communism and a preparatory school


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that trains the proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the

workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country

to the working class (and not to separate trades), and later to all the working people.[21]

The question of the role of the trade unions really came into its own at the end of 1920.

Trotsky, basing his position on his experience in the sphere of transportation, considered thatthe unions had to become state organs responsible for maintaining labour discipline and the

organisation of production. He even went so far as to propose that the unions be done away

with, claiming that, in a workers state, they simply duplicated the tasks of state organs!

The discussion gathered pace at the 10th Congress of the party in March 1921 under the

pressure of immediate events (Kronstadt) Trotskys ideas were opposed both by the Workers

Opposition led by Shliapnikov and Kollontai, who called for management of production by

the unions, and by Lenin, who considered that the statification of the unions was premature

and that since the state is not a workers state, but a workers and peasants state withnumerous bureaucratic deformations, the unions had to defend the workers interests against

such a state. But Lenin emphasised that his disagreement with Trotsky was not over aquestion ofprinciple, but simply over contingent considerations.

The fact that Trotsky was defeated at this Congress did not mean that the confusion about the

role of the unions under the proletarian dictatorship had been cleared up. In fact the theses of

the 3rd Congress of the CI repeated this confusion, on the one hand saying that: before,

during, and after the seizure of power, the unions remain a broader, more massive, more

general form of organisation than the party, and in relation to the latter, to some extent play

the part of the circumference to the centre.

And also that: the communists and sympathising elements must form within the unions

communist groupings entirely subordinated to the communist party as a whole.

While on the other hand saying that: after the seizure and strengthening of proletarian

power, the activity of the trade unions will be concerned mainly with the tasks of economic

organisation and they will dedicate nearly all their energy to the building of the economy on

a socialist basis, thus becoming a truly practical school of communism.

We know that, after this, the unions not only lost any control over the management of

enterprises, but also became organs responsible for stimulating production and not for

defending the interests of the workers. In compensation for this, trade union leaders were

recruited into the administration of industry and the right to strike was maintained in theory.But in fact strikes broke out in opposition to the trade union leadership.

***

The clearest criterion which marxists can use to back up their affirmation that the Soviet state

is a degenerated state, that it has lost any proletarian function and has become an instrument

of world capitalism, is the historical evolution of the Russian state between 1917 and 1936. Inthis period the state, far from tending to wither away, has become stronger and stronger, a

process which could only lead it to becoming an instrument of oppression and exploitation

against the Russian workers. This is an entirely new historical phenomenon, the result of an

unprecedented historical situation: the existence within capitalist society of a proletarian statebased on the collectivisation of the means of production, but one in which we are seeing a


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social process determining a frenzied exploitation of labour power; and at the same time this

exploitation cannot be ascribed to the domination of a class which has juridical ownership of

the means of production. We do not think that this social paradox can be explained by

saying there is a bureaucracy which has become a ruling class (from the standpoint of

historical materialism, these two notions mutually exclude each other); it can only be seen as

the expression of a policy which has delivered the Russian state into the hands of worldcapitalism, whose laws of evolution are driving it towards imperialist war. In the part of this

study dedicated to the question of the management of the proletarian economy, we will comeback to the concrete aspects of this essential characteristic of the degeneration of the Soviet

state, which has meant that the Russian proletariat is at the mercy not of a national exploitingclass but of the world capitalist class. Such a political and economic relationship obviously

contains within it all the conditions for the restoration of capitalism in Russia in the turmoil of

a new imperialist war, unless the Russian proletariat, with the aid of the international

proletariat, manages to overthrow the forces which threaten to lead it into another massacre.

Bearing in mind what we have said about the historic conditions in which the proletarian state

is born, it is clear that the withering away of this state cannot be seen as an autonomousprocess limited to the national framework, but only as a symptom of the development of the

world revolution.

It became impossible for the Soviet state to begin withering away as soon as the party and the

International stopped seeing the Russian revolution as a step towards the world revolution and

assigned to it the task of building socialism in one country. This explains why the specific

weight of the state organs and the exploitation of the Russian workers have increased with the

development of industrialisation and the economy; why the liquidation of classes has led

not to a weakening of the state, but to its reinforcement, as expressed by the re-establishment

of the three forces which have always been the backbone of the bourgeois state: thebureaucracy, the police and the standing army.

This phenomenon in no way indicates the falsity of marxist theory, which bases the

proletarian revolution on the collectivisation of the productive forces and on the necessity for

a transitional state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is simply the bitter fruit of a

historic situation which prevented the Bolsheviks and the International from imposing an

internationalist policy on the state, and which on the contrary made them the servants of the

state against the proletariat by leading them onto the path of national socialism. In the face of

economic difficulties which confronted them, the Bolsheviks were unable to formulate a

policy which would have immunised them from confusing the apparatus of repression (which

should only have been used against the dispossessed classes) with the class organs of theproletariat, which should have exercised control over the administration of the economy. Thedisappearance of these organs obliged the proletarian state, in its efforts to carry out a national

programme and keep the economic apparatus going, to use its repressive organs against the

proletariat as well as against the bourgeoisie. The state, that necessary evil, turned against

the workers, despite the fact that, while the principle of authority will have to be recognised

during the transitional phase, bureaucratic coercion can never be justified.

The whole point was to try not to widen the gap between the political and cultural immaturity

of the masses and the historic necessity for them to run society. The solution that was aimed

at, however, tended to exacerbate this contradiction even further.


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We are with Rosa Luxemburg in saying that in Russia the question of the life of the

proletarian state and the building of socialism could only be posed and not answered. It is up

to the marxist fractions today to draw from the Russian revolution the essential lessons which

will allow the proletariat to resolve the problem of the world revolution and of the building of

communism in the next revolutionary wave.

[1]. Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works,

Vol. 27.

[2]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.

[3]. Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works,

Vol. 27.

[4]. 1852. Collected Works, Vol. 11.

[5]. 1848, Collected Works, Vol. 6.

[6]. Manifesto. Ibid.

[7]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.

[8]. The Civil War in France, 1871, Collected Works, Vol. 22.

[9]. Ibid.

[10]. 1917, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.25.

[11]. Ibid.

[12]. 1918. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28.

[13]. In:Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder press 1970.

[14]. Ibid.

[15]. Speech to the founding congress of the German Communist Party in Rosa Luxemburg

Speaks.

[16]. 1918. Collected Works, Vol.. 27.

[17]. Ibid.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP (B) , 1922. Collected Works,

Vol. 33.

[20]. Ibid.


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[21].Left-wing communism: An infantile disorder, 1920. Collected Works, Vol. 31

Part III

The stigmata of the proletarian economy

Marxism always bases its analyses and perspectives on dialectical materialism and not on

idealistic aspirations. Marx said that "even when a society has got upon the right track for the

discovery of the natural laws of its movement - and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to laybare the economic law of motion of modern society - it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor

remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal

development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs".[1] In the same way, the

proletariat, having taken society through a "leap" as a result of its political revolution, cannot

help but put up with the natural laws of evolution, while at the same time doing all it can to

speed up the process of social transformation. If it is to achieve its historic goals, the

proletariat has to ensure that the intermediate, "hybrid" social forms which arise in the phase

between capitalism and communism wither away; but it cannot abolish them by decree. Thesuppression of private property - even if it's a radical step - does not ipso facto get rid of

bourgeois ideology or bourgeois right: "The traditions of the dead generations weigh like anightmare on the brains of the living".[2]

The persistence of the law of value in the transitional period

In this part of our study we will be looking at some length at certain economic categories

(labour-value, money, wages), which the proletarian economy will inherit from capitalism

without the benefit of an inventory. This is important because there has been a tendency(we're thinking i

the period of transition by jehan van den hoven

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