State Capitalism And World Revolution

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• Publisher: Pm Press E Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781604860924
• eBook ISBN: 9781604868913
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

60 years ago, CLR James and a small circle of collaborators set forth a revolutionary critique of industrial civilisation. So insular was the political context that the documents of the signal effort never reached public view. Happily, times have changed. Readers have discovered much, even after all these years, to challenge Marxist (or any other) orthodoxy. They will never find a more succinct version of James' general conclusions than State Capitalism and World Revolution. In this slim volume, James and his comrades successfully predict the future course of Marxism.

IX

Yugoslavia

WE HAVE TO remind orthodox Trotskyism that it did not support the European movement for national liberation when the masses were in motion. Now it proposes to support the national state of Yugoslavia in the struggle for national independence against the Kremlin. This is the state which suppressed the mass movement, subordinated it to the movements of the Russian Army and kept it from making contact with the European mass movement. The policy stands on its head.

In reality it is the criterion of state-property which explains this consistently false policy. Unless it is a question of nationalized property vs. private property, orthodox Trotskyism cannot see and interpret the movement of the proletariat. The moment nationalized property is involved, it starts looking for the mass pressures and actions to explain this nationalization.

Compare with this the policy of “Johnson-Forest.” Whereas in 1943 the Shachtmanites plunged headlong into the liberation movement under the slogans of struggle for democracy and national independence, “Johnson-Forest” took the position that the proletariat and the party should enter the national liberation movement and struggle for proletarian power under the general slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe.¹ Thus, right from the beginning, we posed the struggle inside the Yugoslav movement against the national policy of Titoism. That is still the basis of our position today.

For orthodox Trotskyism, on the other hand, then as now, the Socialist United States of Europe remains an abstraction. The International is now busily debating when the revolution took place in Yugoslavia. Characteristically, it does not occur to the debaters to ask themselves how this highly exceptional, extremely silent revolution took place unnoticed by the leaders of the revolutionary movement. That would be bad enough. But in 1945 or 1946 or 1947 (etc., etc.) this revolution presumably took place unnoticed by the proletariat in the surrounding countries of Europe and the rest of the world.

However, what concerns us now is the situation in Yugoslavia.

Extensive documents have been published by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) itself. “Johnson-Forest” do not for one single moment take these documents as true representations of the history of Yugoslavia for the last ten years. As well accept the documents of Stalinist bureaucrats as the history of Russia. But they are the basis of the politics and discussion of all tendencies in the Fourth International today. We accept them therefore to the degree that in themselves, they represent, if not the history of Yugoslavia on the whole, a clear representation of the theory and politics of the Yugoslav leaders.

Titoism is pure conscious consistent Stalinism. Having a model in both the theory and practice of Russia already established, Titoism has been able to achieve in a few short years the counter-revolutionary climax which it took Stalin nearly two decades to accomplish. Stalin had to struggle against the traditions and remnants not of capitalism but of Leninism. Tito began as a finished Stalinist.

The Trade Unions in Yugoslavia

Stalinism in Russia provided the CPY with the model for disciplining the workers by transforming the trade unions from organs of struggle by the workers into organs of mobilization of the workers to speed up production. The CPY explains why it destroyed the trade unions as militant class organizations of the working class:

Under the conditions in the new Yugoslavia, after the nationalization of industry, and as a result of the quick tempo of socialist building, the workers’ class is no longer a class of bare-handed proletarians which must fight a daily political and economic struggle, which must fight for more bread. This class today—in alliance with the other working masses—holds the authority—holds the greater part of the means of production, and its future depends in the first place on itself, on its work, and on its unity with other toilers, on the mobilization of all toilers in socialist building.

This is the exact opposite of Leninism. It is pure Stalinism. The independence of the working class, its struggles to protect its material and spiritual interests, its leadership of the other working masses, its determination of policy—all these are the mortal enemy of the one-party bureaucratic administrative state and in the sacred name of nationalized property, all these are to be destroyed.

To achieve this statification of the trade unions, the CPY “liquidated the old guild-like dispersion of the union organizations, united manual and intellectual workers into one organization, and mobilized them in the building of the country, in the building of socialism.”

This unity of manual and intellectual workers is a sure sign of the Labor Front of the “corporate state.” It is a means of subordinating the workers to the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and administrators. Management spies, Stakhanovites, time-study men—the whole apparatus of supervision and domination is brought into the trade unions. They become the representatives of the state inside the unions. The trade unions then have the task to “develop the new relationship of the working class and the working masses in general toward work … organize socialist competition and shockwork, rationalization and innovation … fight for work discipline, to improve the quality of work, to guard the people’s property, to struggle against damage, against absenteeism, against careless work and similar things.”

While carrying on these disciplinary functions the trade unions are “to explain to the working masses that such a struggle is in their own interests, in the interest of the working masses in general.” Cripps and Attlee, in capitalist Britain, would consider three-fourths of their troubles solved if they could instruct the British labor unions, suitably poisoned with “socialist intelligentsia,” to carry out the economic plans of the state. Tito, the Stalinist in the one-party bureaucratic administrative state, considers that it is his right to instruct the trade unions accordingly, and all because the property is state-owned.

The Titoists leave the workers in no uncertainty as to what all this means. It is resistance to speed-up which is involved. “It is necessary to point out that in many trade union organizations there are still many remnants of social-democratic conceptions and opportunism which is manifested on the one hand in resistance to fulfillment of the plan and in resistance to realistic norms, to competition, and on the other hand in exaggerated demands in regard to pay.”

To these miserable elements no mercy will be shown. As in Stalinist Russia, the basis has been laid for war to the end against them by placing them in the realm of social-democratic, i.e., capitalist ideology, in opposition to socialist building. They are the enemy.

The organizers of increased production, on the other hand, are the cadres. These have caught on quickly because as the whole history of industry shows, that is not hard to learn. In fact (this was written by Kardelj in 1948), they had too “correctly grasped the organizing role of the trade unions in production.” “In practice, in carrying out the economic-organizational tasks of the trade unions, our trade union cadres often go to extremes.” They “forgot” certain “other equally important tasks.” And what did they forget? They simply forgot “concern for the welfare of the workers, struggle for better living conditions for them and work on the political elevation of the working masses.”

And why is such forgetfulness harmful and why must it be corrected? Is it because only by this means will a new economy superior to capitalism be developed? Not at all. It is because not to be concerned about these things would weaken the respect of the proletariat for the state authority.

The trade unions are the “direct organizers of the struggle of the working class for the increase in production.” But “the workers must feel that their trade union organization is concerned with their welfare.” Imagine the denunciations that would fall from orthodox Trotskyism on the head of Reuther if he dared to say, as indeed he would not at this stage, that it is the business of Reutherite cadres to make the workers “feel” that the union is concerned with their welfare and working conditions. But transfer private property into state-property, and forthwith this becomes “proletarian policy.” This is Stalinism and nothing else but Stalinism.

Lenin insisted on the need for the proletariat to protect itself against its own state. The CPY labels resistance by the proletariat to fulfillment of the plan as “incorrect,” “unfriendly,” “backward.” This is typical Stalinist phraseology and in Russia is accompanied by keeping millions in the forced labor camps where these backward elements are “reeducated.” The Titoists ask for “healthy criticism by the working masses through the mass organizations as regards the work of the state organs, economic and social institutions, etc.” The phrasing is accurate and well-chosen. Individual workers and groups of workers must not complain. They can only criticize through the mass organizations, i.e., through the trade union cadres. Resistance to speed-up, for example, leads to the conclusion that one “does not want to see where the real interests of the working class lie.” It is obvious that criticism by such a worker would be unhealthy, unhealthy for the state and no doubt unhealthy for this “irresolute,” “unfriendly” and “backward” worker.

The Mode of Labor in Yugoslavia

Competition is the Titoist method for intensifying the speed of production. Again Stakhanovism in Stalinist Russia provided the model for the CPY.

On New Year’s Eve in 1947 Marshall Tito boasted that “this spirit of competition has begun to penetrate into our state administration and other institutions as well.” The bureaucracy introduced its own special type of incentive pay. By great activity in speed-up and shockwork, a worker could get out of the proletariat altogether and join the bureaucracy. As the Titoists explain: “Factory and workshop department heads, and often directors of factories and enterprises are being culled from the ranks of shockworkers.”

The factory directors selected in this manner provided the nucleus for the stratification in production, formalized in the New Five-Year Plan of 1947. Again the administrative plan of Stalinist Russia provided the model. The CPY consciously organizes production according to the principle of the hierarchy in production which, as we have explained, Marx analyzed as the heart of capitalist authority. In introducing the Five-Year Plan it writes: “Planned economy of itself imposes the need of a planned distribution of labor-power, the planned training and development of technical cadres.”

The creation of “our people’s, our socialist intelligentsia,” which Stalin had to wait until the 1936 Constitution to systematize, is organized by Tito after a few years of power.

Article 14 of the New Five-Year Plan of 1947 is entitled “Work and Cadres.” It reads:

1. To ensure a steady increase in the productivity of work by introducing the greatest possible mechanization, new methods of work, new technological processes and norms of work, by improving the qualifications of the workers, and by thoroughly utilizing working hours” (emphasis added).

There must be no waste of time of the workers at work. The passage goes on to repeat the Stalinist theory with regard to the intensification of the rate of exploitation: “thus creating the conditions for an increase of wages and better remuneration for workers of all categories. In connection with this to perfect a system of progressive payments for work over and above the norm, as well as a system for premia for engineering and technical staffs, for the fulfillment of the plan” (emphasis added).

Not only the planning of incentive pay for the workers. Planning of incentive pay also to the bureaucracy in order to inspire them to intensify the exploitation of the workers.

The Plan calls for special training of an expanded administrative cadre:

3. to ensure the increase of the cadres with secondary professional training from 65,000 in 1946 to 150,000 in 1951, effecting this by opening new technical secondary schools and enlarging existing ones….

4. to ensure an increase in the number of experts with university qualifications to an average of 5,000 annually…. To carry out a planned enrolment in all faculties and professional schools, thus providing the most important sectors with the necessary cadres.

For Yugoslavia as for Stalinist Russia, this social inequality is not a question of enjoying cultural privileges over and above those of the workers. The purpose of the Plan is to “direct all technically trained intelligentsia toward creative work,” i.e., to devise new methods for the administration of the proletariat against the very conditions of large-scale production. The Titoists, having enunciated the magic phrase, state-property, think they have no such problems.

The political economy of Titoism is the political economy of Stalinism.

Stalinist theory within the last decade, for reasons that we have explained, has developed the idea that the law of value also exists in socialism. The CPY follows this faithfully, claiming that the law of value is “fully under control” because there is “state control” and “market regulation.” Like the Stalinists, they claim that there is “no surplus value in the socialist sector” because there is no private appropriation of surplus labor. Then comes a remarkable sentence. We are told: “Surplus labor has the odd property that it can be materialized in new instruments of labor which make for greater productivity in labor: hence a spiral tendency.”

The Marxist general law of capitalist accumulation consists precisely of the terrible effects upon the proletariat and ultimately upon production of this very “spiral tendency” of “surplus labor.” The “oddity” of this surplus labor under capitalism, as distinguished from previous societies, is precisely its materialization into instruments of labor which dominate over the proletariat. Kidric’s description of the process as “odd” merely highlights the obvious. The main aim of the bureaucracy is identical with that of the bourgeoisie under private property capitalism: the acceleration of this spiral tendency of materializing surplus labor into new instruments of labor for the intensification of the rate of exploitation.

At the same time Kidric knows from his Russian model that “socialist accumulation” consists not only of exploitation, but also of the state “sharing” the workers’ wages through taxation. Kidric states that “so long as there is surplus labor on the one hand … and forces of production on the other which are not so developed as to make it possible to raise the standard of living as we should like to, to build new factories, implements of labor, etc., to the extent and in the place where we should like to, there exists a possibility of incorrect usage, a possibility of incorrect distribution of surplus labor.”

This is not mere talk about economic theory. It is the justification for adding to the exploitation of the workers in the process of production, the most merciless method of taxation the modern world has known. In the New International of December 1942 and January-February 1943, Forest has made a study of the turnover tax in Stalinist Russia and has shown how this tax, levied chiefly on consumption goods of the poor, supplied 60% to 75% of the national budget. The tax was graduated, the highest tax was on bread, leading to a tenfold increase in the sale price. One of the lowest taxes in the consumption goods field was on silk, and it was a mere one percent on means of production goods. It is upon this model that there was fastened upon the Yugoslav people in 1947 the turnover tax on goods, a “typically socialist form of socialist monetary accumulation tried out in practice in the Soviet Union.” As a result of this turnover tax, “state accumulation has grown in 1947 to 276% as compared with 1946.”

Speed-up in production, planned organization of cadres to utilize thoroughly the working hours of the proletariat, accumulation of surplus value, domination of new instruments of labor over the proletariat—this is the mode of production in Yugoslavia; and from this is inseparable the one-party administrative state and the party of the bureaucracy.

The One-Party Bureaucratic-Administrative State of the Plan

The Yugoslav Communist Party leaders have known from the beginning that they have one “basic problem—the problem of authority.”

After the invasion of German Fascism, there never was such an opportunity in the world so far in which to establish a genuine Soviet state. But the CPY, faced with the destruction of the old bourgeois state and seeing further that it would face the revolutionary proletariat and the revolutionary masses, from the very beginning set out to establish the most powerful bourgeois state that it could. It established “a unified state authority”—“from top to bottom … firmly linked into one unified system on the basis of vertical ties between the various branches of state authority and administration and the lower organs, whose duty it is within the framework of the competence of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Booktitle
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note to the 2013 Edition by Paul Buhle
• Fully and Absolutely Assured (C.L.R. James’ Foreword to the 1986 Edition)
• Introduction to the Fourth Edition (1986) by Paul Buhle
• Preface to the Third Edition (1968) by Martin Glaberman
• Author’s Preface to the Second Edition (1956)
• Authors’ Introduction to the First Edition
• I. What is Stalinism?
• II. The Stalinists and the Theory of State Capitalism
• III. Lenin and State Capitalism
• IV. Rearming the Party of World Revolution
• V. The Class Struggle
• VI. The Theory of the Party
• VII. Methodology
• VIII. Leninism and the Transitional Regime
• IX. Yugoslavia
• X. Some Political Conclusions
• XI. Philosophy and State Capitalism
• Glossary