The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period

Nikolai Bukharin, J. Tarbuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136505072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

For many years a neglected figure, Nikolai Bukharin has recently been the subject of renewed interest in the West. Now regarded as a leading Marxist theorist, Bukharin's work has wide appeal to those interested in Soviet history and Marxist economics as well as to those concerned with theories of development and socialist economies.

Part I

The Theory of the
Dictatorship of the
Proletariat¹

Foreword

In the final analysis any theory has practical roots, but if this is true of science it is even more true of the social sciences. They are a driving force of which everyone is aware and this clearly affects Marx’s position that ‘a theory also gains in strength, if it attracts the masses’.

But for a theory to set the masses on the right course, it must itself be the right theory. And for a theory to be correct it must satisfy certain general ‘methodological’ requirements. One such requirement for socio-theoretical constructions is that of historicity. This means that it is essential to understand the special and unique features of any period of social development. The senseless repetitions of ‘eternal truths’, the rancid rumination befitting the scholarly cows of liberalism are downright sickening to the spirit of genuine social science.

However, neither bourgeois scholars nor the empty wind-bags from the ‘living corpses’ of the abortive Second International are able to assimilate what is in essence a highly revolutionary, dialectical viewpoint. Kautsky is a typical specimen of this school.

With the onset of the age of imperialism, when history presented the working class with the task, first, of understanding the new chain of events and, second, of responding to it in some way or other, Kautsky completely lost his head and the pitiful babble, the innocent (and, at the same time poisonous) pink water with which he sprinkled the German proletariat, proved in theory a prostitution of Marxism and in practice led to complete apostasy. He completely misunderstood the nature of the imperialist epoch, its specific character. He regarded imperialism as a mere historical accident, a kind of ‘sin’ of capitalist development and a pathological phenomenon which could be cured by the exorcisms and formulae of the arbitration courts and disarmament – formulae borrowed from pathetic bourgeois pacifism. The result is well known: it was Kautsky who threatened the workers with a ‘hostile invasion’ and blessed the policy of the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] – base policy of ‘defending’ a robber bourgeois fatherland.

Now, once again a new historical era is beginning. The curve of imperialist development, which had been consistently rising, is beginning to fall catastrophically. The epoch of the decay of capitalism is coming and it will be followed directly by the dictatorship of the proletariat, born amidst the pangs of civil war.

For cowardly and base souls this is a period of even greater ‘discomfort’, when everything deteriorates, everything old, corrupt and obsolete, where there can be no place for the theory or practice of the Buridanov donkey and where it is necessary to make a choice and act. And once again we see that Kautsky, who spent the war indulging – though in moderation – in licking the boots of generals and preaching ‘caution’, is now engaged in the noble task of attacking the Bolsheviks and pouring slops on to the Soviet Republic, since this meets with the approval of the authorities. If we exclude his – sit venia verbo – ‘views’ logically, we again reveal his complete inability to analyse the question historically, to approach it, not from the standpoint of trite phrases, but from the standpoint of revolutionary dialectics.

The Soviet Republic – the greatest achievement of the proletariat – must be considered as a form of dictatorship of the proletariat, as a special form of state power, which is inevitable in a certain historical period, whether Messrs Dan, Kerensky, Kautsky and the SPD want it or not. But in order to understand the historical validity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is first essential to ventilate the question of the state in general.

1 A General Theory of the State

Even if we stick to the platitudes of purely theoretical appraisals, it is noticeable what a huge, retrograde step many ‘outstanding’ thinkers took during the war in just this field. What was earlier, and deservedly, designated impudent, idle talk now appears to be of paramount value in today’s market of militant ‘studies’. Grown men prattle like two year olds. The inarticulate sounds which the Scheidemann-ites [SPD] and the Dan-ites of the world now make are the best proof of this. So the reader should not complain about us, if to begin with we endeavour to recall some ‘forgotten’ words. There are an infinite number of different definitions of the state. We shall disregard all those theories which regard the state as possessing some kind of theological or metaphysical essence, ‘a super-intelligent origin’, ‘realization of a spiritual concept’ and so forth. Nor are we interested in the numerous theories of the lawyers, who examine the matter from the narrow standpoint of formalistic, legal dogmatism, andsss go round in a vicious circle defining the state in terms of the law and the law in terms of the state. Such theories do not impart any positive knowledge because they lack a sociological foundation, they are suspended in thin air. The state can only be understood as a social phenomenon. A sociological theory is, therefore, essential and Marxism provides just such a theory.

From the Marxist viewpoint the state is the most common organization of the ruling class, the basic function of which is to defend and extend the conditions of exploitation of the enslaved classes. The state is a relationship between people, and moreover – since we are talking about classes – it is a relationship of supremacy, power and enslavement. It is true, as long ago as 2500 BC the famous Babylonian code of Hammerabi declared that ‘the aim of a ruler is to safeguard the law of the land and to destroy what is wicked and evil so that the strong may not harm the weak’.² In its essence, this idyllic, high sounding nonsense is still being handed to us in all seriousness, even now.³ This ‘truth’ is analogous to the assertion that the aim of the employers’ associations is to increase workers’ wages. In reality, in so far as there is a consciously regulated organization of state power, in so far as one can, therefore, speak of the formulation of aims (which already presupposes a certain degree of social and state development) these aims are determined by the interests of the ruling classes and only by them. So-called ‘generally useful functions’ are merely the condition sine qua non, the necessary conditions for the state to exist, just as the aim of any bourgeois economic organization (and this is the aspect we would emphasize: the aims of the organization) is not production as such, or in itself, but the acquisition of profit and super-profit, although without production human society could not survive. The ‘socially useful’ functions of the bourgeois state are, therefore, the conditions for the most protracted and successful exploitation of the oppressed classes, primarily the proletariat. Two factors determine the evolution of these functions: first, the direct personal interests of the ruling classes (without railways the development of capitalism is impossible – hence the building of the railways; excessive degeneracy in a nation deprives the state of its necessary human military material [i.e. conscripts] – hence sanitary measures etc); in the second place, considerations of strategy against the oppressed (so-called concessions under pressure from below) – where the lesser evil, from the governing strata’s angle, is preferred. In both cases the principle of an economy of ‘strength’ operates with a view to creating the best conditions for the exploitation process. The interests of the ruling class, which are merely concealed behind the pseudonym of the interests of ‘the nation’, ‘the whole’, ‘the people’ and so on, are the governing principle behind the behaviour of the state authority. The state is everywhere the organization ‘of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which thanks to the state becomes the politically ruling class too, thereby acquiring for itself new means for the control and exploitation of the enslaved class’.⁴

As the generalized reorganization of the ruling classes, the state comes into being in a process of social differentiation. It is the product of a class society. In its turn, the process of social stratification is the derivative of economic development and by no means the simple result of naked force on the part of conquering groups of foreign origin, as some economists and sociologists (e.g. Gumplovitch and Oppenheimer), who in substance merely repeat the notorious Diihring on this point. This is how Franz Oppen-heimer defines ‘the historical state’: ‘Inform’, he writes, ‘it is a legal institution, imposed on the conquered group by the victorious group. In content it is the systematic exploitation of the subordinate group/⁵ ‘Classes are, and can only be, created by political means.’⁶ Thus, according to Oppenheimer, the classes are merely modified groups of victors and vanquished, and not the legitimate child of economic development at all. Their emergence is associated exclusively with ‘non-economic factors’. In this theory of ‘the origins of classes’ and the state only one thing is correct – that actual history is a history of robbery and violence. But this is not the end of the matter for, in reality, neither ‘legal institutions’ nor a certain type of production relations can come into being and hold their ground if, in the economic development of a given society, there is insufficient soil for them. In particular, the basis for the emergence of classes and their consolidation as the main social category is economic differentiation with the growth of the division of labour and private property .⁷

Logically, the formation of classes by no means presupposes conquest, and history gives us instances of the formation of classes without conquest, such as the formation of the state in North America. Certainly, North American feudalism and the supremacy of the landed aristocracy is generally under-estimated as an embryo.⁸ However, the evolution of capitalist relations in America is completely misunderstood from the standpoint of the ‘pure theory of conquest’.

The apparent radicalism of analogous theoretical constructions has highly apologist roots, for here the assault is directed not at the foundations of a commodity economy – private property – but only as the monopolistic form of the latter, as though this monopolistically modified form were not the logical and historical sequel to the elementary form of a simple commodity economy. As a matter of fact, the state, like the classes, ‘is by no means a force imposed on society from without … it is, on the contrary, a product of this society at a certain stage of its development’.⁹

If the characteristic attribute of a state, its ‘essence’, is to be seen in the fact that it is the universal organization of the ruling class, then the truth is that the state is an historical category. Such was the view of Marx and Engels. Just as capital, according to Marx, is not a thing, namely the means of production as such, but a social relationship, expressed in things, the ‘essence’ of the state lies not in its technical-administrative role, but in the relation of the state, which is concealed beneath that administrative-technical shell.¹⁰ But since this relation of the state is an expression of the class structure of society, the state will therefore disappear with the disappearance of classes. Thus the state not only has an historical beginning but an historical end too. ‘Even radical and revolutionary politicians/ wrote Marx as he exposed the narrow viewpoint of his contemporaries, ‘look for the root of the evil not in the nature (Wesen) of the state but in a definite form of the state, which they wish to replace with another state form.’¹¹ Even more decisively Engels said: ‘All socialists are agreed that the state, and with it political power (Autorität), will disappear by virtue of the coming social revolution, in other words, that social functions will lose their political significance and become simple administrative functions watching over social interests.’¹²

In Anti-Dühring, Engels declares that the state must ‘die off’ (absterben). In The Origin of the Family, he relegates the state to the future society’s museum of antiquities ‘along with the bronze axe and the spinning wheel’. These quotations (and they could, of course, have been augmented) are not random: on the contrary. The specific features of the Marxist method are apparent here, a method which regards social phenomena, not as eternal and immutable categories, but as transient phenomena, which arise and disappear at definite stages of social development. Thus this is not a question of terminology, as some critics would have it, just as there is no terminological dispute in the argument: is a savage’s stick capital or simply a stick? ¹³ For Marx, the critical yardstick, the logical fundamental division, was the difference in the types of relations between people, and not fetishistically misconstrued ‘outward appearances’. Strictly speaking, Marx’s object was to understand social development as a process of uninterrupted change in these types (socio-economic structures), and this is also how he approached the question of the state as the political expression of a broad economic category, in a class society. And just as bourgeois economists, whose viewpoint is static and unhistorical, cannot understand Marx’s specific viewpoint on economic categories, neither can bourgeois lawyers and sociologists understand the Marxist view of the state. ‘Marx’s theory,’ said Gumplovitch, for example, ‘contains a new, and to a considerable extent, correct understanding of the state.’ But … ‘the terrible mistake of socialism is rooted in his belief that the state will make itself superfluous.’¹⁴ That’s what the ‘radical’ Gumplovitch has to say. His colleagues cannot now (ex officio) understand Marx.¹⁵

Thus a communist society is a stateless society because it is a classless society. But if communism denies the state, then what does the conquest of state power by the proletariat signify? What is meant by the dictatorship of the working class, which Marxists have discussed and do still discuss so much? The answer to this question is given below.

2 The Necessity of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

A small preliminary observation: to what limits the apostasy of one-time socialists can go is clear from the special pamphlet Kautsky published against the Bolsheviks (Die Diktatur des Proletariats).

In this elaboration of his renunciatory thought we find, amongst other things, such truly classic passages as ‘Here (i.e. for the justification of their dictatorship N.I.B.) they (the Bolsheviks) opportunely remembered a remark about the dictatorship of the proletariat which Marx once made in 1875 in one of his letters.’ ¹⁶ For Kautsky, the entire doctrine of the dictatorship, which Marx himself saw as the basis for the theory of revolution, was reduced to an empt...