What was the USSR?

“Abolition of the wages system” was, for Marx, “the revolutionary watchword” 

The original role of money, before the development of capitalism, was to serve as a medium, a standard that made easier the exchange of one commodity for another. But under capitalism, this medium of exchange has taken a life of its own. For the capitalist, the aim of production is not to produce goods to exchange and to use, but instead it is a compulsory drive to accumulate capital through exploitation–simply put, to make more money.

Once money becomes the aim of production, labour power has to become a commodity. In other words, a worker’s labour power can be bought and sold. Besides the fact that people must be legally free – that is, not slaves owned by others or serfs tied to the land – the labourer must have lost all means of production and thus all ability to produce either for consumption or exchange for himself. An example of this is peasants being driven off the land. Labour power as a commodity is the necessary complement of the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalists.

Only by buying the worker’s labour power can the capitalist make profits. Workers produce more than what the capitalist pays them in wages and benefits. This is the basis of exploitation of the workers. What the workers produce over and beyond the socially necessary labor for keeping themselves and their families alive and working is surplus value. Surplus value is the only source of profits and is ripped off by the capitalists.

While under socialism labour power is no longer a commodity, we are not thus equating it to labour power in the serf-like conditions of the past. The context is modern society, a complex, highly productive and healthy society compared to the past periods. And in a socialist society not only do you no longer sell your labour power to the capitalists, but high consciousness is required for you to be concerned about the overall production and be one of the masters of your own country. You are no longer the exploited class, but the ones who run the country. The difficulty will be a democracy on a far greater scale with far more people participating than ever before. It will be the first time the vast majority become the rulers rather than the ruled. That’s why socialist revolution has to be so thoroughgoing, so far-reaching, and is so difficult.

Whatever the claims, the Soviet Union was not remotely socialist in the authentic sense of the word: workers’ control and popular democracy for the common good. Soviet Russia was an authoritarian state-capitalist and bureaucratic despotism that had little to do with Karl Marx and other socialists’ dream of capitalist class society being replaced by “an association, in which the free development of each is the conditions for the free development of all” – a “true realm of freedom” beyond endless toil and necessity. Workers produced surpluses that were appropriated and distributed by others: the council of ministers, state officials who functioned as employers. The Soviet Union was actually an example of state capitalism in its class structure….by describing itself as…socialist, it prompted the definition of socialism to mean state capitalism.

There were basically four distinct contending positions  on the class character of the Soviet Union:
1. The Soviet Union was socialist;
2. The Soviet Union was in transition to socialism;
3. The Soviet Union was a new exploitative mode of production;
4. The Soviet Union was state capitalist.

 Some have argued that the existence of many capitals competing in the market is the essence of Marx’s concept of capitalism. This is wrong. The exploitation of wage labour by capital and the extraction of surplus value is the essence of capitalism. Surplus value is the source of all profit. The unending search for surplus value, for profit, is the motive force of capitalist production. The government is an executive committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist class as a whole. The industries are still run for profit by committees composed of members of the state bureaucracy. They intensify the exploitation of the working class.

Under capitalism labour power is a commodity because the worker enjoys a double freedom. He is free in a sense which the slave or the feudal serf was not, to sell his labour power to any employer who is willing and able to buy it. But, he is also free in the sense that he is dispossessed of and separated from the means of production. That means that he has no real choice but to sell his labour power to some employer or other. It also means that he lacks directive power and control over the means of production. He must constantly face the consequences of decisions taken by the owners of capital and their agents. And in order to come to grips with the means of production to earn a living he must accept a subordinate role within the labour process. So how was Russia different? In the USSR the worker was free to sell his labour power to a wide range of employers, for there are many enterprises, but had no real choice but to sell his labour power to some employer or other. True, during much of the Stalin era the State made strenuous efforts to deprive workers of their freedom to change jobs, but even under Stalin’s reign of terror these were only partially effective and have long been superseded by “normal” capitalist practice.

 Some may say but there are no owners of capital. All enterprises are state owned. There are indeed no individuals with legal title to bits of Moscow Metro. But how does this affect the position of the worker? He lacks directive power and control over the process of production. He is confronted by an employer and “must accept a subordinate role in the labour process”. He is in the same position as a worker employed by the previous National Coal Board or British Rail (which also had no shareholders) or for that matter as a worker employed by ICI or GEC – with this important difference: unlike the British worker, the Soviet worker has no effective trade union rights.

The worker in the USSR, then, sold a commodity, his labour power, in the same way as any other worker in, say, the USA. Nor is he paid in rations like a slave or in a share of the produce like a serf. He is paid in money. What does he do with this money? He spends it on commodities, on goods produced for sale. We mention this rather obvious point because  capitalism is a system of commodity production and implies, although he is not reckless enough to state, that commodity production has disappeared in the USSR. In short, the dominant mode of production in the USSR includes, as an essential feature, wage labour; a wages system in the strict marxian definition of that term. That is indisputable.  But wage labour implies capital just as slavery implies slave holding (individual or collective).

We socialists are up against the fact of life that a new generation has to be convinced afresh that socialism does in fact represent a superior system for the peoples, that Marx’s idea of the eventual withering away of the state is not a pipe-dream, but a realistic if very rough sketch of the future state of human society.  Only when people believe these things again, and only by  reason and persuasion can we hope to convince them, not by repeating the same old, tired slogans, can we re-ignite the imagination and vision of the working class.