Class Theory and History

Capitalism and Communism in the USSR

Stephen A. Resnick, Richard D. Wolff

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136704406
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Russische Geschichte

Class Theory and History takes an ambitious and ground-breaking look at the entire history of the Soviet Union and presents a new kind of analysis of the history of the USSR: examining its birth, evolution, and death in class terms. Utilizing the class analytics they have developed over the last three decades, resnick and Wolff formulate the most fully developed economic theory of communism now available, and use that theory to answer the question: did communism ever exist in the USSR and if so, where, why and for how long? Their initial, and controversial, conclusion: Soviet industry never established a communist class structure. This conclusion then leads to the hypothesis that the USSR and provate capitalism in the United States to discuss the future of private capitalism, state capitalism and communism.

Part 1

Communism

Chapter 1

A General Class Theory

This chapter presents what neither Marx nor Engels ever provided: a systematic, nondeterministic class analysis of communist societies. To be clear, Marx, Engels, and others within and without the Marxian tradition did produce diverse conceptualizations of communism, and they still do.¹ Indeed, the idea of communism as the “good life” existed for centuries prior to the works of Marx and Engels. Consider, for example, the believers for whom true Christianity arrived only when individuals renounced their worldly property and affirmed the distribution of material wealth to others on the basis of their needs.² Closer but still before Marx and Engels, the “utopian socialists” argued for establishing communal societies ruled by reason and good will in contrast to the anarchy and greed they saw in the ruthless capitalism of their day.³

We hold that all theorizations of communism so far have lacked two key qualities. First, no systematically nondeterminist (i.e., antiessentialist) perspective has been applied to define and elaborate a concept of communism. Secondly, no class perspective has been applied where class refers to the social organization of surplus: how it is produced, appropriated, and distributed in a distinctively communist way. Such a nondeterminist, class conceptualization of communism was missing not only from theorizations but also from the socialist and communist movements associated with them.

In part 1 of this book, in order to focus on developing the basic class analysis, we treat socialism and communism as roughly synonymous. However, toward the end of chapter 2 we will show how that class analysis enables and implies a new understanding of the profound differences between socialism and communism and the consequences of those differences. Parts 2 and 3 develop still further the differences between communism and socialism.

Among non-Marxist accounts of communism, the absence of class analysis—in its surplus labor definition—is not surprising. However, it is initially puzzling within Marxian conceptualizations since they usually do refer to class. But closer inspection shows that Marxism includes multiple, different notions of class and hence of class analysis. For us, one of the most significant contributions of Marx was conceptualizing class as the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus within society (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 3). Yet this conceptualization has never yet been used to theorize that particular society—communism—that Marxists themselves have preferred. The existing Marxian treatments of communism, as we show below, used exclusively other, different concepts of class, those defined in terms of property and power rather than surplus. Thus they reached conclusions about communism, socialism, and the history of the USSR radically different from the conclusions of this book.

We believe that the absences of the surplus labor notion of class and of nondeterminist reasoning within most Marxian conceptualizations of socialism and communism have imposed profound costs on the diverse movements favoring them over the last century. Those absences helped to thwart the revolutionary potential of the regimes these movements sometimes created: a possible transition from a capitalist to a communist class structure. Those absences contributed, as we show in part 3 below, to the widespread belief that the Bolshevik revolution had established either communism or at least a socialist transition to communism. We do not share that belief, since we do not agree with the conceptualizations of class upon which it depends. We reject both the criticisms that find Soviet socialism and communism to have “failed” and the defenses that affirm that socialism or communism “succeeded” in the USSR. For us, the communist or socialist alternative to capitalism never prevailed there.

In this and the following chapters, we offer a definition and theorization of communism and socialism that differs radically from those prevailing among both their proponents and detractors. This different theory yields a correspondingly different way to interpret events occurring within regimes claiming to have produced socialism or communism. We shall illustrate this difference by focusing on what most have considered to be the preeminent socialist/communist revolution in the twentieth century—that which occurred within the USSR.

The first section of this chapter presents the basic terms of our theory of communism with some attention to how it differs from other major theories, especially the traditional or classical Marxian view. Despite our rejection of the latter’s typically deterministic rendition of capitalism (in which inner economic laws of motion inevitably entail the revolutionary action of the proletariat), we nonetheless respond to that discourse in a specific way. Our analytical focus on class, conceived as the appropriation and distribution of surplus labor, and our commitment to over determination (rather than a determinist approach), comprise our responses to the different analytical approaches that have prevailed within the complex, contested history of Marxism (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 1 and 2).

The Classical Tradition

Before we use our concepts of class and overdetermination to construct a new Marxian view of communism, it will be useful to summarize traditional notions of socialism and communism, especially on the Left. Common to most are two characteristics: collectivity and classlessness (Bernstein 1961; Bettelheim 1976b, 1978; Bottomore 1990; Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 1969; Dobb 1966; Engels 1969a; Kautsky 1971; Lenin 1969; Marx and Engels 1978; Muqiao 1981; Preobrazhensky 1966; Sweezy and Bettelheim 1971, 1985a, 1985b; Tugan-Baranowsky 1966). Collectivity characterizes a society devoted to fostering its social nature more than its private. For example, socialist/communist societies collectively establish and secure communal rather than private rights of ownership to property, above all to the means of production. They promote conditions of collective intervention in the economy. Collective planning replaces individuals’ private-market decisions in regard to the distribution of resources—means of production and labor power—and of produced wealth. Culturally, there is the hegemony of a collective over a private, individualistic consciousness in regard to notions of equity, fairness, and the “good life” for all citizens. Politically, true democracy arrives, meaning that power rests securely in the collective hands of the people.

Classlessness, in the traditional view, characterizes a society that has eliminated its class divisions understood in terms of inequalities in the distribution of property and/or of political power. Placing (1) collective rights of ownership in the hands of those whose work yields the wealth of society and (2) effective power in the democratic collectivity of citizens removes the ultimate causes—unequal property and power distributions—of class divisions.

In the language of classical Marxism, posed most clearly in Engels’s Socialism: Scientific and Utopian and Kautsky’s Class Struggle, the essence of a socialist society becomes its achievement of a fully collectivist power both over the means of production (including labor power) and the distribution of wealth.⁴ The classical authors tended either to equate socialism and communism or to see the former as a way station to the latter. In this century socialism and communism became concepts and labels distinguishing often warring factions among the critics of capitalism—although the basic foci on collectivity and classlessness remained common to all. By contrast, our class analysis changes and therefore differentiates the two terms in a new way.

In the traditional view, the socialist/communist revolution, by transforming private to fully social (collective) ownership, eliminates capitalism. Capitalism’s pri-vateness, in this view, had become a fetter on human history. While it had developed great new production techniques (socializing masses of people in great factory and office conglomerations), it could not realize their potential to generate wealth. The reason was private ownership and its attendant markets, profit motives, and so forth. To secure their private profits and unequal distributions of wealth, income, and political power, the capitalists systematically blocked the full utilization of the very means/forces of production they had developed.

For these classical writers, the socialist/communist revolution thus restores a social harmony (correspondence) between the forces of production (technology) and the relations of production (property distribution). That restoration, a new socialist/communist economy, then determines its superstructure of communist politics and culture. The new economy, having socialized productive property, permits the forces of production to renew their march forward, thereby ushering in an age of plenty. The classical theorists conclude, in direct contrast to Adam Smith’s alternative Utopian vision, that it is socialism/communism, and not capitalism, that finally will liberate human society from poverty and its social consequences.

For Lenin (1969), this revolution enables as well the withering away, but not yet the complete disappearance, of the state. For although its singular cause—class division—has been eliminated (because the private ownership of the means of production was abolished), “bourgeois rights” still remain. Lenin meant that in the first stage of postcapitalist society, the distribution of wealth would depend on the labor performed by each worker. Only later could the basis of distribution become individual needs—the definition of a specifically communist society. In the initial post-capitalist “first phase of communist society,” a fundamental inequality remains in society: despite radically different individual needs, rewards nonetheless depend on individual labor performed. Since this distribution is not based on needs, it breeds tension and conflict in all societies where it occurs. Managing these creates the need for a transitional state.

True communism or the “higher phase of communist society” awaits, for Lenin, the unfolding of socialism, defined as the lower phase. Socialism’s historic role is to enable the pouring forth of vast wealth from the no-longer-constrained socialized forces of production and to create a new human being finally liberated from the alienation bred by capitalism. Only when the higher phase has been achieved, when the constraints of capitalist poverty and capitalist human nature are finally broken, will there be the elimination of the underlying need (cause) of a state. Only then can Marx’s famous aphorism apply and be extended from the economic to include also the political and cultural aspects of social life: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

The classical tradition’s view of communism has received its challenges over the years. Perhaps the most important, from a leading Marxist theorist at the beginning of this century, was Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1961). His emphasis shifted from property distribution (the relation of haves to have-nots) to power distribution (the relation of rulers to ruled). The central issue became democracy.⁵ Whether or not aware of Bernstein’s arguments, many subsequent writers conceived communism to be a society that embodied full equalization of power, i.e., “true” economic, political, and cultural democracy for its citizens. Power largely displaced property in definitions of class and hence of the difference between capitalism and communism.

Although most writers affirmed that collectivity and classlessness defined a communist society, their different interpretations of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Bernstein, Lenin, and others produced different conceptions of communism/socialism. Some emphasized property distributions while others stressed matters of politics and democracy. These differences often coexisted within the same groups, parties, and individuals, stimulating debates in the growing left movements. Sometimes they erupted into fierce oppositions and played central roles in splits within the movements.

For example, most leftists defined communism in terms of more or less collectivized ownership of the rights to the means of production and more or less democracy. To these notions of collectivity, others (e.g., Engels 1969a; Kautsky 1971) added the collectively planned (rather than market) distribution of resources and products. For them, removing private ownership of the means of production removed the need for as well as the desirability of private markets as means of distribution.

Replacing markets by collective distributions managed by state agencies became a definitive signature of socialism/communism over capitalism. Yet other formulations (e.g., Lenin 1969; Sweezy and Bettelheim 1971) moved this discussion in somewhat different directions. For them the key issue was whether effective state power really (and not just formally) lay in the collective hands of workers. Defined as true democracy, that became the criterion of genuine socialism as a transition to communism. In their view, much more important than collective ownership of the means of production and collective mechanisms of distributing output, the essential issue concerned who within the collective possessed effective power (over wealth, the state bureaucracy, workers, cultural life, and so on).

Increasingly, across the twentieth century, the terms of debate over socialism and communism shifted. While there was a continuing focus on property and production, the emphasis increasingly settled on power and democracy. These became the more fundamental, focal criteria of whether or not a society was socialist/communist.

Interestingly, the shift to concern with how power is distributed in society was echoed in non-Marxian accounts of socialism and communism. For example, Nove (1983) proposes a “feasible socialism” that prioritizes the distribution of power in society and its consequences.⁶ His socialism combines workers’ collectivized rights to the means of production with a competitive market economy. The bad sides of markets (business cycles and unequal income distributions) would be offset by state planning and collectivized property ownership. These two kinds of collective interventions represent what is good about socialism. Socialism’s bad sides (power concentrated in an omniscient state’s planning board) would be swept away by decentralizing power into the individual hands of market-related buyers and sellers. Nove’s notion of socialism—the “good life”—offers Engels’s collectivized property ownership, but now tempered by Bernstein’s full economic democracy and Smith’s competitive markets.

Our Basic Terms

We differ with all these writers from whom we have learned much. Because we understand Marx’s social theory—and especially his class analytics—differently, we produce a different notion of socialism and communism. The notion of class we glean from Marx is neither defined as nor derived from unequal distributions of property or power. Such factors, although interactive with any society’s class structure, are nonetheless fundamentally different from it.

By class we mean, in the first place, a process in society where individuals perform labor above and beyond (“surplus” to) that which society deems necessary for their reproduction as laborers (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 3). In simplest terms, one part of the population does such necessary and surplus labor and receives back the fruits of the necessary labor for their own reproduction. These laborers deliver the fruits of their surplus labor—the “surplus”—to another part of the population that then distributes it to still another part. A class analysis in this sense classifies individuals in a society in terms of their relationship to this surplus. It asks who performs the necessary plus surplus labor, how is this socially organized, and how does the organization of the surplus impact the larger society? Secondly, a class analysis asks who first receives the surplus from the laborers, to whom do these receivers then distribute it, for what purposes, and how do these distributions affect the larger society? The analysis is particularly concerned with whether it is the same or different groups of people who respectively perform, appropriate, and/or receive distributions of the surplus. It is likewise interested in exploring the interdependence among these groups and how multiple, different organizations of the surplus may coexist within a society. Finally, after specifying a society’s arrangements for producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus—i.e., its class structures—this kind of analysis explores how nonclass processes of society (political, cultural, and so on) interact with the class processes in a mutually constitutive way.

This concept of class defined in surplus labor terms is very different from the other concepts that have prevailed in discussions of socialism and communism to date. As we noted, in such discussions class has typically meant a grouping of individuals within a community according to the property they own or the power they wield.⁷ Our writings have emphasized the theoretical and political consequences that flow from these alternative definitions of class (Resnick and Wolff 1986, 1987). In our judgment, many class analyses have missed completely the unique surplus labor notion of class offered by Marx and thus could not appreciate how alternative systems of surplus labor shape society differently. Too many agendas for social change have excluded the transformation of how surplus labor is produced, appropriated, and distributed. The history of the USSR exemplifies the disastrous consequences of such exclusions for the project of moving beyond capitalism.

The second key difference between our approach and those prevailing in the debates over capitalism, socialism, and communism concerns the issue of determinism. As argued elsewhere, we have found persuasive a consistent, if minority, perspective within Marxism (associated especially with Lukacs, Gramsci, and Althusser) that rejects determinism (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 2). Thus, one aspect of society is not the ultimate determinant of the others. A superstructure of politics and culture is not reducible to being the effect of an economic base.

The goal of social analysis is not to find the key, determinant cause or causes that ...