Marx and the Soviet State

Marx and Engels never believed that their millennium could be brought about on earth by the will of the few and imposed on man generally. The society they envisaged must result from a ‘natural evolution’ and their theory only showed men how to behave, how to recognise favourable conditions – that is, if the material basis on which such a society is possible exists – and eventually how to act so as to hasten its advent in such circumstances. This they called  the materialist conception of history. The ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this Marx never asserted.

The Leninists, Maoists and Trotskyists call themselves Marxists and of course proclaim their theory to be true communism. In reality, however, it has nothing to do with Marx. In their form of society, the producers have no control or administrative power whatever over production, so that the picture thereby painted represents a strange version indeed of Marx's concept of the association of free and equal producers. For Marx it is not the state which is conceived as being the leader and administrator of production and distribution, but far rather it is the producers and consumers themselves to whom these functions would fall. The reformists and ‘revolutionaries’  turned his theory completely upside down. The struggle for social reforms and the transformation of the various branches of industry into state or municipal enterprises meant for them a steady approach towards socialism. What becomes apparent is that this nationalisation can only lead to the construction of state capitalism, in which the state emerges as a single vast employer and exploiter. Despite their veneer of Marxist terminology, Bolshevik  reality can be easily identified with everything abhorred, criticised and fought against by Marx and Engels all their lives.

 A British worker, employed in a state-owned industry is still  a ‘wage-earner’ in the Marxian sense of the word, and still ‘exploited’. His opposite number in the old USSR (where ‘the system of wage labour and exploitation has been abolished’, as Stalin pretended) earned less, worked longer, had trade unions which existed only to squeeze more and more work out of him, and had the prospect of being sent to a gulag if he protested against his lot; yet he, according to Soviet ‘Marxism’, represented the most ‘advanced, emancipated and free’ worker in the world (as the pretence continued). To justify this, one must first accept the Soviet distinction between an amount of unpaid labour which is ‘surplus value’ when it is the British state which is the beneficiary, and the same amount of unpaid labour which is not ‘surplus value’ when the Russian state is on the receiving end – a subtlety that would perhaps not have been very well received by Marx.

Marx and Engels aspired to a free association of completely free men, where no separation between ‘private and common interest’ existed: a society where ‘everyone could give himself a complete education in whatever domain he fancied’. For ‘man’s activity becomes an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master’ when there is ‘a division of labour’; everyone must then have a profession, that is a ‘determined, exclusive sphere of activity’ he has not chosen and in which ‘he is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence’. In their socialist society, on the contrary, a man would be given ‘the possibility to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner’, as he chose (‘The German Ideology’) It is clear that there was not the slightest relation between Marx’s vision of the future society and the Russian system and nor was the slightest sign in the Russian regime of any future development towards the communism of which Marx and Engels desired.

Was it true that the ‘people as a whole’ own the means of production in Russia? The answer, according to the Leninists was and still predominantly ‘yes’, but according to Marx’s conception can only be ‘no’.
For in Russia there is an intermediary between the direct producer and the conditions of production, and this was the state, that is, the working-class = the Communist Party = the commissars, apparatchiks, nomenclature plus the rest of the party leadership. It is true, there was no private ownership of the means of production, and it is the state which is the owner. But state property is no more socialism for the workers are still not the masters of their labour conditions and remain separated from the production process. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution...  'neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital... The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme.'(Anti-Dühring, Engels) The fact is that in the USSR the state was the owner of the conditions of production – ‘the general capitalist’ – and the direct producers are wage-earners, that therefore the relations between them according to Marx are still the relations between capital and labour, between employer and proletarians.

There is no difficulty in discovering that all the characteristics of the capitalistic system of exploitation are to be found in the Russian system of relationship between the state, owner of the means of production, and the direct producer, the worker. It is true that they are ‘rather pushed to an extreme’ in this ‘most advanced form of state capitalism’. The state pays the labour it employs with wages, and ‘wages... by their very nature always imply the performance of a certain quantity of unpaid labour on the part of the labourer’ (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25/1), that is ‘surplus value’.

It is also true that the 1917 Revolution abolished the right to private property and reduced the difference between highly-paid and ill-paid workers  but it did not bring equality. Stalin’s constitution was created to protect the bureaucracy’s newly-acquired wealth, it reintroduced the right to private property and the right to inheritance which was not paid for out of the ‘surplus value’ of the working class, but are the product of the personal labour of the elite - if we were to believe the propaganda.

When Lenin and his party of ‘professional revolutionaries’ took power, they were faced with innumerable  problems they they had inherited. It was a question of life and death for the Bolshevik government to succeed where its predecessors had failed, that is, to install a capitalist society, and it must be admitted that they succeeded. When Lenin declared that ‘if we introduce state capitalism in approximately six months’ time... within a year Socialism will have gained a hold and have become invincible in our country’ (Left-Wing Childishness and Petty-Bourgeois Mentality), he was once more talking nonsense. Indeed, it took much longer than six months to introduce ‘state capitalism’, and socialism must await another revolution. The Communist Party followed the classic process of primitive accumulation which Marx studied, and described in Capital a century ago and they called them 5-year Plans.

Marx and Engels are often faulted for the ‘errors’ of their predictions but credit where credit is due in the foresight they showed in the Russian situation. Marx wrote to Mikhailovsky:
‘Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch [on primitive accumulation]? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. This is all...’ (1877)

 Engels argued against Struve’s assertion that ‘the evil consequences of modern capitalism in Russia will be easily overcome as they are in the United States’, and  reminded Danielson, ‘that the United States are modern, bourgeois, from the very origin...’, whereas in Russia a ‘pre-civilisation gentile society, crumbling to its ruins’ was the basis ‘upon which the capitalistic revolution – for it is a real social revolution – acts and operates’. Thus, he told Danielson, ‘the change, in Russia, must be far more violent, far more incisive and accompanied by immensely greater sufferings than it can be in America’ (17 October 1893). For the industrial revolution in Russia ‘cannot take place’, he asserted, ‘without terrible dislocation of society, without the disappearance of whole classes and their transformation into other classes; and what enormous suffering and waste of human lives and productive forces that necessarily implies, we have seen on a smaller scale in Western Europe’ ( our emphasis). Russia’s history bears witness to the accuracy of their forecasts.

Marx borrowed the formula the dictatorship of the proletariat from Blanqui. But the meaning he gave it was completely different. It was in the Paris Commune that they saw the form of government closest to their conception. Marx and Engels never possess any contempt for democracy. They did not wish to destroy it, but to enlarge and perfect it.

 Engels in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s Civil War in France: it was a ‘new and truly democratic’ form of government. It showed how the ‘transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states’, could be avoided. And the means, it is interesting to note, were (i) ‘election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time, by the same electors’ of all administrative, judicial and educational officials; (ii) ‘an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism’ by reducing the wages of the high officials to the level of those of the workers.