Marxism and 'Really Existing Socialism'

A. Nove

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136463891
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The late Alec Nove explores the relationship between Marxist ideas and the Soviet reality and presents a methodology for understanding Soviet type societies.

Marxism and “Really Existing Socialism”

ALEC NOVE

University of Glasgow, Scotland

1. CRITERIA

What is the connection between the Soviet system, as developed under Stalin and as modified since his death, and the socialism envisaged by Marx? That there are differences is, of course, both obvious and inevitable, and this for several reasons. Firstly, Marx nowhere systematically set out any “blueprint” of a socialist future, and indeed considered such exercises to be futile and even reactionary. His refusal to give any detailed description of a future world was no doubt part of his sincere conviction that his ideas on socialism were quite distinct from those whom he called utopian socialists. Secondly, Marx has been dead for over a hundred years, and even his most fervent and uncritical admirers would agree that this great man could not foresee all that was to come, computers to nuclear weapons included. Quite evidently he would have modified his doctrines in the light of experience, including the experience of socialist planning. Thirdly, since he could not modify his doctrines after his death, we must, unless we are uncurable dogmatist believers, perform this task ourselves: which of Marx's ideas on socialism appear to be contradictory or unreal, given the experience of “really existing socialism”? Only then might it be possible to develop a critique of such socialism in marxist terms. To take a simple example, there is in Marx the belief that under socialism the division of labour will be transcended (aufgehoben). In the USSR the reverse has been the case, in respect both of the horizontal (specialization, professionalization) and the vertical (hierarchical) division of labour. How far, we may ask, was this development the inescapable consequence of industrial development under state auspices, and, if so, does this not provide a basis for a criticism of Marx rather than of Soviet practice?

This brings me to the heart of the whole question of appropriate criteria, in judging both Soviet reality and the validity of marxian doctrine. To take another example to which we will return, what does Soviet experience tell us about the validity of the doctrine of historical materialism? In the introduction to my Economic History of the USSR, I quoted Lenin: “Politics cannot but have dominance over economics: to argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism”. A Soviet critic cited that passage, and accused me (not unfairly) of omitting a subsequent passage in which Lenin spoke of “politics as concentrated economics” [39, p. 21]. Of course the two are closely linked, particularly where the state owns and manages the economy, but to interpret Russian history since 1917 in terms of any species of economic determinism (even “in the last instance”) really does require an illegitimate leap of imagination—at least in my opinion.

But let us look first at how “socialism” or “communism” was understood by Marx and Engels, and by marxists of the post-Stalin period.

Marx himself made no clear distinction between “socialism” and “communism”, and the notion that one was the lower stage of the other first made its appearance after the Russian revolution (it was not an invention of Stalin. Bukharin, Trotsky, Preobrazhensky used such phrases too). Of course, Marx appreciated that full socialism/ communism would not appear overnight, that there would be a transition period, a lower stage—of which more in a moment. However, socialism and communism for him were virtually synonyms, to be used interchangeably.

Let me briefly (too briefly?) set out what Marx's vision contained. Probably the most thorough collection of its contents, with appropriate references, is to be found in Bertil Oilman's article, in Critique, n° 8. The key elements were:

a)

Abundance. Capitalism has at least potentially overcome the problem of creating a sufficiency of productive potential to meet all reasonable needs. Capitalist relations of production are acting as a brake on the development of productive forces. Remove that brake, and production and productivity would rapidly increase. It is on this basis that we will see the end of acquisitiveness, selfishness, the struggle of each against each. Attempts to create socialism amid relative poverty would reproduce “the old rubbish”.

b)	Overcoming “commodity fetishism” and the market Private property in means of production, the separation of production units from each other, requires ex post validation of the value of commodities through the process of sale and exchange, through the market. The relationship between men takes the form of relationship between things. Under socialism, labour power will be applied directly by the “associated producers” to the tasks of satisfying society's needs for goods and services. It will be possible to calculate the number of hours of human effort required, and to relate this to the social utility of what is produced, without a detour via exchange-value and the market. “There can be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by united individuals of total production on the basis of exchange value, of money” [34, pp. 138–9].
c)	Elimination of the wages system and of money. Since calculations of cost are to be in labour-time, and there will be no purchase-and-sale, money will wither away as a medium of exchange. Under fully-developed socialism/communism there will be realised the aim of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. In the transition period, however, when people's consciousness is not yet fully socialist (and abundance is not yet achieved), people will be “paid” according to their work. It is not clear if work is to be measured in hours, or whether differential rewards are envisaged for work of different quality or intensity. In any case, pay will not be in money but in non-circulating tokens, presumably denominated in hours and minutes.
d)	Elimination of the division of labour and of alienation. Educated, all-purpose human beings will interchange jobs. There will be no need for hierarchy, or where it is needed the task of coordination/command can be taken in turn. The causes of alienation will be overcome. There will be no professional bureaucracy, officers, etc.
e)	The withering away of the state. The state being essentially an organ of class oppression will no longer have any purpose. Since there will be no class conflict, no special repressive machine will be needed, therefore laws, judges, police, become unnecessary.
f)	Planning, undertaken in the advance knowledge of needs and of available means, will be a simple matter. It is the market, the separation of producters from the product and from each other, that makes it all so complicated. There will be a huge saving arising out of the waste (faux-frais) in the circulatory sphere, which Marx treated as unproductive.
g)	The proletariat, in liberating itself, will end class oppression and bring into being a classless society.

As is clear from successive versions of his reply to Vera Zasulich, Marx took very seriously the notion of a primitive communist society that once existed, in which there was an organic fusion of the individual with society. (Whether there ever was such a society is a question I will not discuss.) His socialism/communism involves a restoration of this organic fusion, but of course on the basis of the highest modern technique and the full development of the productive forces. This explains, as Agnes Heller has rightly pointed out, why Marx devoted no attention to the rather vital questions of how decisions are to be taken (on the economy or on anything else) and how differences of view are to be reconciled: “there will … be no group interest or conflict of interests” [21 p. 130].

Already at this stage the attentive reader will have noted this author's belief that Marxian socialism and “really existing socialism” diverge largely, but certainly not exclusively, because of the utopian-romantic aspects of Marx's vision. Utopian visions have their important role to play, in inspiring action and sacrifice. But by definition they are unrealisable, and this renders those who fail to realise them immune from the criticism of not having achieved the impossible. But let us now look at the socialist ideas of marxists after Marx, and before Soviet experience could have taught any lessons.

August Bebel had worked closely with Engels, and, though not himself an intellectual “heavyweight”, can be seen as representative of much social-democratic opinion in pre-1914 Germany, a time when the party was considered to be orthodox-marxist in its ideological stance. For some reason the most systematic exposition of his view on socialist planning is to be found in his Woman under socialism (Die Frau im Sozialismus).

The complexities of real planning in a modern industrial society was not understood by him. Such phrases as “child's play”, the belief that socialist man would take the needed decisions on the basis of readily-available information, anticipate similar statements by Russian revolutionary theorists, which will be cited in a moment. Clearly Bebel derived from Marx and Engels the belief that a classless, socially coherent society will be one without conflict over resource allocation. To cite Bebel again: “The gratification of personal egoism and the promotion of the common weal go harmoniously hand in hand and coincide”.

Kautsky was another of the associates of Engels in his last years, and more of a theorist than Bebel, with whom he collaborated closely. It is not clear whether he ever read, or took seriously, Enrico Barone's pioneering work on “The ministry of production in a collectivist state”, which was published in 1908 and put highly pertinent questions about how calculations could be made in an imaginary socialist commonwealth. Kautsky also envisaged a socialism without markets, which led him to envisage a number of relatively autarkic socialist societies (since it would be necessary to keep trade to a minimum). True, he specifically disavowed utopias, and, in one of his works (Die soziale Revolution) envisaged the use of prices in the “circuit of commodities”. Oskar Lange saw in this an important contribution to economic theories of socialism, but since Kautsky imagined that price ratios “historically given” (i.e. derived from the capitalist past) would be used, it really does not seem that he saw any active allocative role for prices. Acknowledgments are due to T. Kowalik and P. Sutela for drawing attention to these aspects of Kautsky's thoughts. And in his article on the Erfurt programme Kautsky wrote that “in a socialist society, which is after all just a single giant industrial enterprise, production and wages must be organized in a planned way, like in a modern large industrial enterprise”. The reference to “wages” is interesting: it implies money, though Kautsky did not enlarge on this point. His notion of socialist economy as one gigantic enterprise does have some marxian roots, and, as we shall see, Lenin saw things this way too. But Kautsky was committed to parliamentary democracy, as the political way towards achieving socialism under conditions of universal suffrage, and on this issue he clashed very sharply with Lenin after the Bolshevik seizure of power.

Lenin's pre-1918 ideas on the economics and politics of socialism should be well known, and it may therefore be unnecessary to dwell on them for long. The following would seem to be the key elements in the present context. Firstly, there is his concept of the role of the revolutionary intelligentsia in bringing specifically socialist ideas to the working class which, left to itself, would not go beyond “trade unionism”, i.e. demands for economic betterment. Thus they would seek higher wages, not the abolition of capitalism and of the wages system as such. While Lenin was criticised by Rosa Luxemburg, who had a greater belief in the virtues of working-class spontaneity, it has been pointed out (notably by Harding [20]) that similar ideas had been expressed by both Kautsky and the menshevik theorist Axelrod. Secondly, there was Lenin's concept of the party. Here again it is noteworthy that Plekhanov at first took his side, and it may well be that the disciplined, conspiratorial elite concept was largely the result of the peculiar circumstances of Tsarist Russia. It will be necessary to trace the route by which this concept of the party became the rather different notion of the one-party state. Just as Lenin's well-known article on “party literature”, which when it was written (in 1905) referred to the duties of party members in a situation when there were other parties and other literatures, became a justification for imposing partiinost’ on everybody. But this is to run ahead. His authoritarian concept of the party was linked with a very strong emphasis on the dictatorial aspect of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

The third element of Lenin's ideas was the oddly libertarian politics which are to be found in State and Revolution, which contrast strangely with the authoritarian Lenin. He imagined that everyone will be able to run their own affairs “without compulsion, without subordination, without that special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state”. In the State and Revolution, surprisingly, the Party is not even mentioned. Oddly enough, he cited, in that same work, Engels's remark to the effect that “wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself”. Yet here, and in such works as “Will the Bolsheviks retain state power” and “The coming catastrophe”, he insisted that capitalism had “so simplified” the organization and planning of production and distribution that any literate and numerate person can perform these functions in turn. “To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service, all under the leadership of the armed workers, that is our immediate (sic) task”, he wrote in State and Revolution, in 1917. Like Kautsky before him, he imagined socialist industry as a kind of huge single enterprise, managed somehow by society as a whole. His study of the German war economy convinced him that if the Kaiser's government could control the economy and the big cartels, so could a proletarian government. So a fourth characteristic of Lenin's view of socialism is (following Marx) a gross oversimplification of the task of planning, a lack of any grasp of economic problems, as distinct from those of engineering and accountancy. He was quick to learn, but there was much he had to learn.

Bukharin had attended lectures in economics in Vienna. But he too, both in the ABC of Communism which he wrote with Preobrazhensky, and in his Economics of the Transition Period [8], seemed blissfully unaware of economic problems under a future socialism. “The factories, workshops, mines and other productive institutions will all be subdivisions, as it were, of one vast people's workshop, which will embrace the entire national economy of production”. This means that “everything must be precisely calculated. We must know in advance how much labour to assign to the various branches of industry; what products are required and how much of each it is necessary to produce; how and where machines must be provided … The communist system of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use … The work of production will be effected by the giant cooperative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we will no longer have commodities, only products. These products are not exchanged for one another; they are neither bought nor sold”—and so on [6, pp. 114, 116]. Money is to wither away. Such ideas as these were typical of the Bolshevik party outlook in the period of 1917–20, and found their reflection in the party programme adopted in 1919.

Of course what was actually going on during the period of so-called war communism was vastly different. The peasants were subject to requisitioning, a centralized authoritarian system allocated resources, representative bodies (soviets, trade unions) were placed firmly under party control or were simply dissolved. It seemed to many at the time and since that this was due to dire emergency. But some important features of “war communism” were the result of ideological fervour and illusions, as several of the protagonists were later to admit. Thus hyper-inflation was greeted by some comrades, Preobrazhensky for instance, as a positive step in the desired elimination of money on the road to communism. And Trotsky defended militarization of labour not just as a necessary emergency expedient, but as an integral part of the whole transition period to communism, when the higher consciousness of the workers would make compulsion unnecessary, and Bukharin agreed with him.

By the time the civil war was won, thousands of party officials had become accustomed to the brutal exercise of power, to arrests of all and any political opponents, to requisitioning and terror. Many were dismayed by the adoption by the 10th party congress of policies which became known as NEP (indeed, the full implications of NEP did not become clear until some months after the congress). It was recognised that this represented, in Bukharin's words, “the collapse of our illusions”. A compromise proved necessary with the hated petty-bourgeoisie. Lenin called it a “retreat”. No one equated NEP and socialism. When, in 1925, the Stalin-Bukharin majority put forward the slogan of “socialism in one country” it was presented as a realisable aim, not as an attained reality. Even Trotsky found it hard, until after his exile, to deny the possibility of “building” socialism in Russia.

It was Zinoviev in particular who denounced the notion of “socialism in one country” as doctrinal heresy. At least until after his exile, Trotsky was more ambiguous. True, they had hoped for world revolution. It had not happened. Russia stood alone. But it was “the sixth of the world”. It had immense resources. Having made the revolution, how could the aim of building a socialist Russia be rejected? As Bukharin argued, then it would appear tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Marxism and “Really Existing Socialism”
• Index