On that day 300,000 to half a million workers set down their tools and marched in the largest industrial cities in North America. 80,000 in Chicago, 10,000 in Detroit, New York, St. Louis, etc. If an action of this size happened today, 4 to 6 million would be on strike and 100s of thousands in the streets.

In Milwaukee 7 strikers and witnesses were killed by State Militia and 4 more by Police in Chicago.

On May 4th a rally held to protest the shootings itself turned violent when police waded into a peaceful crowd and someone threw a bomb into the police line. Shooting broke out and 7 police and at least 4 workers were killed. According to contemporary newspaper reports, most of the police died from other police fire.

In the aftermath, 7 labor leaders who organized the rally were arrested for murdering the police. Because of the men’s anarchist politics 6 were sentenced to hang and 4 were executed, including one who had been at home with his children at the time of the rally. This Haymarket Affair and subsequent trial was followed throughout the world. It is widely held as one of the worst cases of judicial injustice in American history.

In 1890, Sam Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), requested that the Socialist International call an international day of action agitating for an 8 hour work day. The International agreed and called for international rallies to be held on May First to commemorate the strike of 1886. This is the origin of Mayday as International Labor Day.

Which Labor Day?

Many incorrectly claim that Mayday is the original Labor Day as opposed to the one held on the first Monday of September in Canada and the US. The September Labor Day had been celebrated for at least 4 years previous to the General Strike of 1886. It was developed by US rank and file unionists inspired by the strike for the 8 hour day held in Toronto in the 1870s (see section on Canada).

So the two labor holidays have much in common and should be considered equally legitimate since they were both motivated by a desire to have “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours for what we will” (from a labor song “Eight Hours“).

The beasts that graze the hillside,
And the birds that wander free,
In the life that God has meted,
Have a better life than we.
Oh, hands and hearts are weary,
And homes are heavy with dole;
If our life’s to be filled with drudg’ry,
What need of a human soul.
Shout, shout the lusty rally,
From shipyard, shop, and mill.

Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will.

In other words, both Mayday and Labor Day should be reminders of the need of working people to capture the good things in life.

What happened?

The strike of 1886 was a flop. While working hours dropped to 40 hours a week in some skilled trades where unions could control job conditions easily, the increase in unskilled factory work kept working hours at 50-60 per week until the 1930s. It took the desire for post-World War 2 industrial peace to establish the 40 hour week for some years in the 1950-60s.

Today the average workweek in the US is 46 hours and there is an increase in poorer workers working multiple jobs to get by. This explains why nearly a third of Americans work more than 50 hours a week. Compare this to the legal maximum of 45 hours the British Empire established for Plantation slaves.

Read it and weep

• On average, modern Americans work longer than plantation slaves in the 1800s.
• Families need close to 2 wage workers to survive vs. 1.3 in the 1880s. So the total amount of work needed to maintain a household has risen.
• It’ has taken us 128 years to lower the working week from 60 hours to 46. At that rate, it would take us another 54 years to attain the 8 hour day.
• Using the “Unskilled Wage Index” the $175 a year factory workers earned in 1886 Chicago would be equivalent of $22,180 today. This is just above what Auto parts workers were being offered in Detroit recently.

Conclusions?

Why is it that despite all the struggles, the marches, the organizing, we are in a similar place as we were in 1886?

The WSP argues it is because we have not learned the lessons of the first Mayday and Labor Day. We cannot get the ‘life’ our class wanted in the 1880s by confronting the bosses with petitions, pickets, pistols or pipe bombs. Each of those strategies assumed we needed bosses, first of all, and second of all, bosses who could be intimidated into lessening our poverty.

As Marx first showed, and as we have argued since our inception as a political movement in 1904, in capitalism the rich grow richer and all workers can do within capitalism is slow that process down. It is capitalism as a whole system – wages, profits, markets – which needs abolishing. The murder or intimidation of one ruthless boss will not help us. Nor will the formal change of the social structure at a particular workplace into a collective. We need to see the enemy in its entirety, as a class, and only then might we make decisions to free ourselves from wage slavery and improve the conditions of our lives around the world.

Mayday 2010

In 1886 strikers carried banners which stated a simple truth:

“Labor creates all wealth, All wealth belongs to labor.”

Working people need to learn and understand that truth. The capitalists need us, capitalism needs us, we do not need them.

The rich will continue to get richer and we will continue to march on Mayday until a majority of us decide that enough is enough. Sure, let us support those who try to defend or increase their wages, but let us also face a major fact: in the long term we will get no more from capitalism than what it takes for us to merely survive.

Capitalism is killing us and it is killing the world.

There is enough for all, and a decent life can be had, only when socialism, a worldwide society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, is established.

Abolish the Wage System!

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Up until 1789 France was an Absolutist state ruled by a king who claimed that his total power to rule had been granted him by god. All the top posts in the army, the government, the civil service, the church and the judiciary were reserved for the members of a hereditary nobility. The population was in fact divided into three “orders” or “estates”: the clergy, the nobility and the rest – over 95 per cent of course – known simply as the Third Estate.

Relics of Feudalism

The vast majority of the population – some 22 or 23 million out of a total population of 25 million – were peasants who worked and lived on the land. Very few were serfs actually tied to the land or a master. It has in fact been estimated that between 30 and 40 per cent of the land in pre-1789 France belonged to peasants. But all peasants, whether landowners, tenants or share-croppers, had to pay feudal dues in money and in kind to the lord of the manor as well as tithes, payable in kind, to the church. They were obliged to use the lord’s mill, bread oven and wine press rather than have their own and to allow him to hunt freely on their land. And they were tried and judged in a court presided over by him or his appointee for minor offences and all disputes with him or among themselves concerning land matters.

These were all survivals from feudalism, though it would be inaccurate to describe French society on the eve of the revolution as feudalism. Capitalism had long been developing there and in fact many of the lordships of the manor had been bought by rich non-nobles from the towns as an investment for the income this procured them.

Nor was the nobility any longer really feudal. By this time they had become transformed into an exclusive group which, by virtue of their noble status, enjoyed various tax exemptions and a privileged access to the top posts in the state, a fact that was particularly resented by rich people of non-noble origin – the bourgeoisie – who were to provide the leadership of the French Revolution.

This – the upper echelons of the Third Estate, or non-noble rich people – is the easiest definition that can be given of the bourgeoisie. Some were merchants, others manufacturers, still others professional people, in particular lawyers of various sorts. Below them, in the towns, were the sort of people who in Paris were known as the sansculottes, literally “”those without breeches”, or people who wore trousers rather than the knee-breeches and stockings then worn by the rich and those who aped them. These were the small shopkeepers and providers of various services, the master artisans and their journeymen who one day hoped to become masters themselves. Those who were condemned to a life-time of dependence on selling their labour power for a wage to a manufacturing employer were relatively few and were concentrated in certain industries and towns. One estimate puts their number at as low as 600,000.

Obstacles to Capitalist Development

Pre-1789 France is best described as a country in which capitalism had been developing within a framework of political and social institutions inherited from feudalism, which had become an obstacle to its further development. The question that then arose was: how were these obstacles to be removed? By reform from above or by revolution from below? Some of the king’s advisers and administrators were aware of what was required. The conscious economic aims of the revolution (see inset) had in fact been worked out by a group of French Rationalist Philosophers who called themselves économistes or physiocrates. They held that there were natural laws governing the production and distribution of wealth just as there were other laws of nature and that governments should let these economic laws operate spontaneously. Hence their slogan laissez-faire which strongly influenced the similar idea put forward by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations that appeared in 1776. A number of royal officials, including ministers, had been Physiocrats, but had come up against all sorts of resistance in trying to carry out reform from above.

Aims of the 1789 Revolution

POLITICAL: To establish equality between all property-owners by abolishing the privileges enjoyed by a section only of them, the nobility. To establish a constitutional government responsible to an assembly of property-owners elected on a restricted, property franchise.

ECONOMIC: To abolish internal customs duties and establish a national market. To abolish guild and government restrictions on entry into particular trades and businesses and establish freedom of enterprise and laissez-faire. To end feudal dues and tithes levied on agricultural property; rent, interest and profit to be the only legitimate forms of non work income.

Largely as a result of its failure to reform itself, by the 1780s the royal government had got into such financial difficulties that bankruptcy threatened. To raise more taxes it was obliged to call a meeting of a feudal institution that had last met in 1614, the States General in which representatives of the three estates into which society was legally divided met to discuss the king’s demand for further taxes. In August 1788 the government announced the calling of a meeting of this States General for May 1789. In the intervening period the members of the various estates were to meet all over France to draw up a list of their grievances and demands to submit to the king. The rich members of the Third Estate of the towns used the opportunity not just to complain about the tax exemptions accorded to the clergy and the nobles and to call for a fairer sharing of the burden of taxation among the rich, noble as well as non-noble. They also demanded a Constitution that would allow the representatives of the Third Estate to dominate the States General and turn it into an assembly representing the whole “nation”. This aim was openly expressed in an immensely influential pamphlet that appeared in 1789 called What is the Third Estate?, written by Abbé Sieyès. Sieyès answered the question by arguing that the Third Estate was everything; it, and it alone, constituted the nation, the nobility being nothing but useless and privileged parasites:

“The nobility …is truly a nation apart, but a bogus one which, lacking organs to keep it alive, clings to a real nation like those vegetable parasites which can live only on the sap of the plants that they impoverish and blight. The Church, the law, the army and the bureaucracy are four classes of public agents necessary everywhere. Why are they accused of aristocratism in France? Because the caste of nobles has usurped all the best posts, and takes them as its hereditary property. Thus it exploits them, not in the spirit of the laws of society, but to its own profit.”

Thus spoke the bourgeoisie when it had a revolution to carry out.

The session of the States General was opened by the King, Louis XVI, in May 1789. The representatives of the Third Estate soon showed themselves to be in a militant mood, in June turning the States General, as planned, into a National Assembly and later into a Constituent Assembly, or a body charged with drawing up a constitution for France.

The Bourgeois Revolution

This wasn’t quite what Louis XVI and some of his advisers had intended and they began to think in terms of dissolving the Assembly. The king dismissed his reforming chief minister and troops were sent to surround Paris. Popular reaction was not long in coming. The bourgeoisie formed themselves into an armed “National Guard” while, on 14 July, the sansculotte crowds stormed the Bastille. Power in Paris passed into the hands of the armed, revolutionary bourgeoisie.

July 14 has traditionally been regarded as the date that the French Revolution, as the seizure of power by the bourgeoisie, took place. Another, perhaps better, case can be made out for 6 October of the same year. This was the date when, following a march of women, accompanied by members of the National Guard, from Paris to the royal palace at Versailles to demand bread, the king was forced to recognise the power and legitimacy of the National Assembly by accompanying it back to Paris. The old royal administration then collapsed throughout France and power at regional and local level also passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

In October the Constituent Assembly abolished all internal customs duties. In fact all indirect taxes were abolished. This presented the new regime with a financial problem – how to raise money to finance its activities? – that was solved by the confiscation and sale of the estates belonging to the church. Most church lands fell into the hands, not of the peasants who had been working them, but of rich bourgeois from the towns. The church was not in fact opposed to this measure as, in return, the clergy were to be maintained by the state as civil servants. But the Constituent Assembly went on to insist, not only that the priests should swear like all other civil servants an oath of allegiance to the constitution, but also that bishops should be elected in the same way that mayors and judges were going to be. This proved too much for the Pope who, in May 1791, put an anathema on the French Revolution which still influences the attitude of Catholic historians to the revolution to this day. But its importance at the time was that it meant that the bulk of the Catholic Church went over to the counter-revolution.

Representative Government for Property Owners

The Constitution was finally promulgated in 1791. It provided for France to be a constitutional monarchy, with the king as the hereditary head of the executive having the same sort of powers as the President of the USA. Although it did not remain in force for long it was a model constitution for the rule of the bourgeoisie, as the non-noble section of the property-owning class in society. Its preamble proclaimed in revolutionary terms the complete abolition of the aristocracy:

“There is no longer any nobility, nor peerage, nor hereditary distinction, nor distinctions between orders, nor feudal regime, nor hereditary justices, nor any order of knighthood …”

The Constitution also incorporated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that had been adopted by the National Assembly in August 1789. Despite the declaration that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”, the Constitution went on to draw a distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens based on property as measured by the amount of tax paid. To be a simple voter, this was set at a relatively low level but some 40 per cent of the adult male population found themselves without the right to vote (as did all women). But this was not the only property qualification. The members of the legislative assembly were not elected directly by the voters; these latter voted for “electors” who in turn elected the deputies. There was a higher qualification to be chosen as an elector and an even higher one to be allowed to sit in the assembly.

The abolition of the distinction between noble and non-noble property owners and provision for a constitutional government responsible to an assembly of property owners elected on a restricted franchise was in fact the openly declared aim of the French Revolution from the start. It was proclaimed in the Constitution of 1791 and emerged again in 1795 to survive until Napoleon seized power in 1799. Between 1792 and 1794, however, the revolution, under the impact of both an external war and an internal civil war, was to take a more radical turn but one which turned out to be no more than a detour.

The Jacobin Dictatorship

War was declared on Austria, which had taken the side of the overthrown aristocracy, in April 1792 and in July Prussia declared war on France, leading to the invasion of the country by Austrian and Prussian troops. The King, however, continued to maintain contacts with Austria and Prussia. As the invading armies advanced on Paris popular discontent over the economic and political situation broke out, leading to the storming of the royal palace and overthrow of the king on 10 August 1792. France was not declared a Republic until September, after the defeat of the invading armies at Valmy on the road to Paris, but this date marked the effective end of the monarchy. In December Louis XVI was put on trial for treason, found guilty and executed in January 1793. Thus, as in England in 1649, a king claiming to rule by divine right found out the hard way that this was not so.

A new Constitution was drawn up putting power into the hands of a national assembly elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. This democratic aspect, however, remained a dead letter as the new assembly allowed one of its subcommittees, the Committee of Public Safety, to assume full powers to organise and mobilise the war effort. After another uprising in Paris at the end of May power passed into the hands of the Jacobins, the most militant section of the revolutionary bourgeoisie whose best-known leader was Maximilien Robespierre.

One of the first things that was done under the new regime was to settle the land question. A law – that of 17 July 1793 – decreed the abolition of all feudal dues without compensation. The principle of the abolition of feudal dues had been proclaimed as long ago as August 1789, but had provided for this to be done by the peasants buying these rights from the lords of the manor. Naturally the peasants were not satisfied and peasant unrest, in the form of refusal to pay and the burning of chateaux and feudal title deeds, continued. The Committee on Feudalism of the various national assemblies was in an embarrassing position because the beneficiaries of feudal rights were not all nobles but included many rich members of the Third Estate.

It was never the intention of those who carried out the French Revolution to abolish the private ownership of land or to break up the big estates of the rich and divide them among the peasants. That would have been a flagrant violation of the “rights of property” which the revolution proclaimed and, under a law passed on 18 March 1793, advocating it was in fact made an offence punishable by death. As far as the land question was concerned, the aim was to abolish the burden of feudal dues on agricultural property. This meant that ground rent was considered to be a perfectly legitimate form of income and the Committee on Feudalism tried to pass off many feudal dues as being a form of ground rent. The peasants, however, would have none of this and, through keeping up the pressure, eventually obtained the abolition of feudal dues in a revolutionary way: by their pure and simple abolition without compensation and the public burning of the title deeds which had granted them. The anarchist Kropotkin in his book on The Great French Revolution regarded this as the revolution’s main achievement.

The rule of the Jacobins is generally remembered for the Terror, though in fact its main action was the prosecution of the war and the successful repulsion of the invading armies. The two were connected since the Jacobin government had to deal with counter-revolutionaries at home working in league with the invading powers. The Terror soon developed, however, into a suppression of all opposition on the grounds of the need for absolute unity to “save the nation”.

It was not just royalists, priests and other avowed counter-revolutionaries who were guillotined as traitors, but also all others who, for one reason or another, opposed the Jacobin government on some issue, from leftwing sansculotte groups like the Enragés to moderate but still revolutionary republicans like Danton. Suspicion grew that Robespierre was working to establish his own dictatorship. There was probably some truth in this as Robespierre and his supporters did believe in the necessity of a dictatorship to purge the people of aristocratic ideas and attitudes and to lead them to the Republic of small-scale property owners that they saw as the ideal society, and they did toy with the idea of the dictatorship of a single person to achieve this.

The Jacobins were in fact the Bolsheviks of the French Revolution just as the Bolsheviks were the Jacobins of the Russian Revolution. This affinity was consciously recognised by Lenin and Trotsky and is to this day by their followers, as the following from an SWP publication shows:

“The Jacobins were the only possible leadership capable of successfully defending the revolution. We should defend them against both revisionists and ‘left’ utopian critics” (Socialist Worker Review, May 1989)

A similar position is taken up by the so-called “Marxist” school of historians of the French Revolution, including their doyen Albert Soboul. Their books, and his in particular, remain worth reading but in so far as they “defend” the Jacobins are not a proper nor an adequate application of the materialist conception of history. Applied to the French Revolution, this would seek to analyse the economic factors that determined it rather than to defend or attack the political role played by some or other group or person in the course of it.

Whatever may have been Robespierre’s reasons for justifying the dictatorship of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, the bulk of the members of the national assembly (and indeed some members of the Committee itself) supported it as a necessity to win the war, both external and internal, and were ready to relax it once this had been achieved, as it had been by the summer of 1794. This was fatal for Robespierre who was overthrown on 27 July (9 Thermidor, according to the revolutionary calendar) and guillotined with his immediate followers the next day.

The Right to Unequal Property Ownership Re-asserted

The overthrow of Robespierre and the Jacobins marked the end of the radicalisation of the French Revolution and a return to its original aim of establishing a constitutional government by and for property owners. The only difference with 1791 was that this was now to be achieved within the framework of a Republic rather than of a constitutional monarchy. The Republican Constitution of 1795 reintroduced the property qualifications for being an “active” citizen, an “elector” and a deputy.

The Jacobins too had been defenders of the “sacred right of property”. Where they differed from the Thermidorians (as those who overthrew them were called) was that they were not prepared to defend the existing degree of inequality of property ownership. For them property ought to be based on work and their ideal was a France in which every Frenchman would own his own farm or workshop and be able to maintain himself and his family out of the results of his own work without having to go out and work for wages for someone else. This ideal, which can only be described (using the term correctly for once) as “petty bourgeois”, was an impossible one in the context of the capitalist society that had been developing in France, as was neatly revealed by an exchange that took place in the national assembly in September 1794, at a time when the Jacobins were still in power. After a Jacobin deputy had expounded the ideal of every Frenchman owning his own plot of land and working for himself, another deputy got up to speak on, according to the Minutes, “the material impossibility of transforming all Frenchmen into landholders and on the unfortunate consequences which in any event this transformation would bring”. The deputy explained: “Because, on this hypothesis, everybody being obliged to cultivate his own field or vineyard in order to live, commerce, crafts and industry would soon be annihilated”. In other words, a non-owning section of the population was needed to supply people to work for wages in capitalist commerce and industry.

But a Bourgeois Republic based on inequality and a Petty Bourgeois Republic based on equal property ownership were not the only two ideals thrown up in the course of the French Revolution. In 1795 and 1796 with Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals another ideal was put forward: common ownership and the abolition of all property, buying and selling and money. The conspiracy never really had much chance of success as it was infiltrated from the start by government spies and probably most of those involved in it favoured the Jacobin ideal of a Republic of small property owners (as well as the Jacobin policy of a dictatorship, which Babeuf favoured too) rather than common ownership and the abolition of all property, but the Conspiracy has left us with a magnificent document, written by Sylvain Maréchal, which we reproduce in this issue.

Political Failure, Social Success

Those who overthrew the Jacobins – the partisans of an unashamed Bourgeois Republic based on inequality of property ownership – were unable to establish a stable regime, mainly because most property owners turned out to favour a restoration of the monarchy and, in the end, a large number of bourgeois revolutionaries, including the Abbé Sieyès who had played such a prominent propagandistic role in preparing the seizure of power by the bourgeoisie in 1789, accepted the military dictatorship of General Napoleon Bonaparte as the only way of ensuring a stable government and preventing a royalist come-back. The seizure of power by Napoleon in 1799, and his subsequent self-proclamation as Emperor in 1804, meant that from a political point of view the French Revolution was a failure: it did not succeed in establishing a “representative government” along the lines of what had been achieved in America and which had been its original declared aim. It did, however, succeed in radically transforming the social structure of France in that all the remnants of feudalism (division of society into orders, feudal rights owed to lords of the manor) and all aristocratic privilege (tax exemptions, exclusive access for nobles to the top jobs in the government, civil service, army and church) were swept away without trace, never to return.

This was a real social revolution which emancipated the peasants from feudal exactions and which freed industry from the shackles of the guild system and created a national market for its goods by removing all internal customs posts and establishing a uniform system of weights and measures. And it opened careers in the government, army and civil servants to new men, of non-noble origin.

The achievement of the French Revolution was to abolish aristocratic privilege but it maintained, and consolidated, plutocratic privilege. After the revolution it was wealth as such and no longer noble status that constituted privilege. In short, it established a capitalist state in which the only distinction between people was the purely economic class distinction between those who owned property and those who did not. It paved the way for the last class struggle in history, which can only be ended by the victory of the propertyless class and the establishment of a classless, socialist society based on the common ownership of the means of production, as envisaged before their time by Babeuf, Maréchal, Buonarotti and others involved in the Conspiracy of the Equals of 1795-6.

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In August 1918 the Socialist Standard pointed out that, while there were industrial towns in Russia, the country was largely agricultural with about 80 per cent of the population still living on the land. The answer to the question whether “this huge mass of people” (about 160 million), which indeed included some industrial and agricultural wage slaves, was “convinced of the necessity and equipped with the knowledge requisite for the social ownership of the means of life?” was “No!”; beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claimed to be Marxian socialists there was no justification for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution.

Our analysis of the situation was based upon Marx’s definition of capitalism as a relation of wage-labour and capital and on the conditions necessary for that relation to be ended and replaced by socialism. Before “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production”, as the Communist Manifesto put it, can happen, there must be a sufficient development of the productive forces, and the class which has to sell its labour power in order to live – the working class – must fully understand what is involved and be ready to take the necessary political action.

The conditions envisaged by Marx to be necessary for the ending of capitalism and establishing socialism did not exist in Russia in 1917, so why have the events been claimed as socialist?

Russia in 1917

The country had suffered huge losses during the war against the more heavily industrialised Germany, the economy was in a mess and there were food riots. The Tsar had been forced to abdicate in March 1917 – while both Lenin and Trotsky were out of the country – and the situation was confused. There was a provisional government which included capitalist and landowning representatives. In July Kerensky became leader with support from the Committee of the Duma (the Russian parliament) but with increasing support from the councils of Workers and Soldiers – the Soviets. However he continued with the war despite its unpopularity.

There was widespread discontent with soldiers, workers and peasants reacting against the adverse conditions, which the Bolsheviks were able to take advantage of the discontent. They gained control of the Soviets using slogans like “All power to the Soviets”, and crucially “Peace! Bread! Land!” In other words, this was what the war-weary, hungry workers and peasants wanted – they were not after socialism. That there was not a majority ready for socialism would not have concerned Lenin. The situation fitted his vanguard theory that the working class by its own efforts is only able to develop trade union consciousness and needs to be led by professional revolutionaries. There were enormous difficulties including the backward state of the country and the civil war; also the expected uprisings in other European countries did not take place. The development of capitalism was all that could happen and the Bolsheviks as the new rulers would have no choice but to do their best to aid it.

That it was a minority revolution is illustrated by the way in which Lenin dealt with the political situation. The All-Russia Soviet Congress had met in November 1917 and had passed resolutions in favour of peace, ending landowners’ rights to possession of the land, and the setting up of a ‘workers and peasants’ government, headed by Lenin and dominated by the Bolsheviks, pending the election of a democratic ‘constituent assembly’.

However when the Constituent Assembly was elected the Bolsheviks did not have a majority and it was dissolved. Trotsky’s excuses for this are instructive – the election had taken place too soon after “the October Revolution” and news of what had taken place spread only slowly. “The peasant masses in many places had little notion of what went on in Petrograd and Moscow. They voted for ‘land and freedom’”. Precisely, for that, not socialism. So, not only did the Bolshevik takeover not have majority support, majority support for socialism not present either.

By the middle of 1918 the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) had firmly established its dictatorship and freedom of the press and assembly were restricted. The All-Russia Soviet Congress had ostensibly taken all power to itself but this was a façade. The Congress elected the 200 members of the Central Executive Committee but the credentials of delegates to the Congress were verified by Communist Party officials. Lenin claimed that what he called “Soviet Socialist Democracy” was “in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of the class is at times best served by a dictator” and this was approved by the Central Executive Committee in 1918 (Martov The State and the Socialist Revolution, p.31).

Labour discipline

Raising the productivity of labour was a priority. In an address before the Soviets in April 1918 (The Soviets at Work) Lenin declared that not only was it necessary to halt ‘the offensive against capitalism’, they also had to employ capitalist methods which included strict discipline at work. They should immediately introduce piece work and measures which “combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and valuable attainments in determining correct methods of work.” The previously stated aim of equal wages for all was abandoned and a “very high remuneration for the services of the biggest of the bourgeois specialists” was agreed. State control was seen as the “means to establish the control and order formerly achieved by the propertied classes” and he chided those who considered the “introduction of discipline into the ranks of the workers a backward step”.

In January 1920 the Bolshevik government abolished the power of workers’ control in factories and installed officials who were instructed by Moscow and given controlling influence. Democratic forms in the army had also been abolished.

The need to use capitalist methods to control and discipline workers in order to increase production, illustrates the absence of the absolute pre-requisite for socialism – the conscious participation of the majority of the working class.

State capitalism

In 1921 the Bolshevik government adopted a New Economic Policy. In proposing it Lenin argued that permitting some private industry and allowing peasants to keep surpluses were not dangerous for socialism. “On the contrary, the development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state (in other words ‘state’ capitalism of this peculiar kind) is advantageous and necessary in an extremely ruined and backward peasant smallholder country…in so far as it is capable of immediately improving the state of peasant agriculture.”

Our criticism of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks is not that they did not achieve what was not possible at the time, i.e. socialism. It is rather that they adjusted theory to suit the circumstances: seeing the necessity for capitalist development they claimed that state-monopoly capitalism was socialism. In Can The Bolsheviks retain State Power? Lenin wrote about the “big banks” as the “state apparatus” needed to bring about socialism. “A single state bank…will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus”.

It was also Lenin who said in The State and Revolution in August 1917 that the first phase of communism was usually called socialism, when Marx made no such distinction between the terms. (In the 1888 Preface Engels refers to the Communist Manifesto as the most international of all Socialist literature). In Marx’s conception of the first phase of communism there was still common ownership, an end to buying and selling, and no money. (Marx mentions the possibility of labour time vouchers despite their obvious drawbacks). What happened in Russia did not qualify even as a “first phase of communism”.

Contemporary Trotskyists still call their aim of state capitalism socialism. The former Militant Tendency (now called SPEW) think that nationalising 150 big corporations would express in today’s language the demand in the Communist Manifesto for the “abolition of private property”. They also support Lenin’s vanguard theory that a revolutionary minority can by their leadership turn protest movements into a ‘socialist’ revolution. So it is hardly surprising that they claim the events in Russia in 1917 to have been a socialist revolution, blaming the backward state of the country, civil war and Stalin for what went wrong.

Both Lenin and Trotsky thought that democracy was not appropriate to their situation. Having taken power in a minority revolution they had to rule by force. This included the use of secret police – the Cheka. Trotskyists excuse Lenin’s red terror on the grounds that it was the outcome of civil war necessity, likewise with the measures taken to deal with the problems of production. However, it was precisely the conditions and the absence of a majority for socialism that made capitalism the inevitable outcome.

The rule of Lenin supported by Trotsky paved the way for Stalin. The legacy of the Russian Revolution, of Lenin and Trotsky, is that socialism/communism has come to be identified with state capitalism. It was not a victory for the working class, but a tragedy since it brought socialism into disrepute and diverted attention away from the vital need to reject capitalism in whatever form.

PAT DEUTZ

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The speakers that I have listened to at Cooper Union with their declaimers of being apolitical and their talks of historical developments with a collection of “we,” “our,” and “us,” spoke as if the world were made of one homogeneous non-political mass of mankind rather than those who own little but the ability to work for wages. Such speakers never impressed me as understanding their subjects.

As to being apolitical, that is some kind of myth. Man has need for food, clothing and shelter and the manner in which these needs are obtained is political. Saying one is apolitical is like saying one has resigned from the human race.

The view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the mode of production and exchange; in the consequent divisions of society into distinct classes and in the struggles of these classes against one another is called “Historical Materialism.”

Rise of the Utopian Socialists

The reactions the industrial revolution with the end of the old institutions of serfdom and feudal agriculture brought about a group of “socialists” such as Saint-Simon, Francois Fourier, Robert Owen and Weitling.

Viewing the agonies, the poverty and misery of the workers in the shops, factories, mills and mines, these men interpreted it all as a matter for morality, justice, humanity, altruism and philanthropy instead of what it was – a matter of compulsion of a system of society called capitalism – a system based upon “free” wage workers and a master class which buys the only commodity these workers have to sell in order for them to live – their labor power. It, labor power, is bought for the purpose of creating commodities which will yield profit from the values over and above that of labor power.

Exploitation is not a personal matter, it is a social fact. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation manifested itself then, as it does now, as an antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

So great was the struggle both in Europe and America that Robert Owen and Francois Fourier established communities, phalanxes, groups and cooperatives in this country with the blessings of many Americans including Albert Brisbane, the father of Arthur Brisbane, chief editor for William Randolph Hearst. Horace Greeley, like Albert Brisbane, supported Fourier until, when we saw the phalanxes established by Fourier falling apart, he ran successfully for Congress and introduced a measure for free land which was enacted.

One Heman Kriege, in the New York Volk Tribune, wrote: “According to the notions of the Fourierites, the working men in their phalanx would do from inclination what, in his present work, he does to keep himself from hunger. It would become, in a sense, his religion to make the capitalist rich. For that end, everything should be so arranged that the working man would be well fed, well housed, well dressed, perhaps even better than the slave in the south.” Arthur Schlessinger Jr. in “The Age of Jackson” says: “Fourierism in a way was a scheme to perpetuate capitalism by incorporating feudal satisfactions in the work and status into the new process of production.”

Now the Utopian Socialist idea that all of the inequities were due to the wickedness in the hearts of men was not a too unpleasant thought for the bourgeoisie. The American evangelists Moody and Sanky carried on a regular schedule of revival meetings in England. They were the precursors of Billy Sunday, Amie Semple McPherson, Billy Graham. And the Moody-Sanky success in England paved the way for the Salvation Army. In England, later, Thomas Carlyle – who is always quoted as the one who called Economics the Dismal Science – with others formed what was called Christian Socialism, a contradiction in terms as are such contemporary expressions as Marxist guerila, socialist state, and national socialism.

Historical Materialism

Historical materialism is the repudiation of religion and mythology and the recognition that the political, religious, philosophical and juridical institutions arise out of and correspond to definite stages of history. This was a consistent view of Marx and Engels from 1848, in their Communist Manifesto through 1892 with Engels’ preface to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

The reason the first draft of scientific socialism was called the “Communist Manifesto” was to avoid confusion with Utopian Socialism. It was sketchy but precise and as Engels wrote in a preface of the Communist Manifesto in 1888 after observing the changes that had taken place since 1848: “But then the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.”

Here I must caution that the Communist Manifesto has nothing to do with what is now generally called Communist and which refers to Russia with its state capitalism, its K.G.B. – the counterpart of the F.B.I. – which the so-called Communists have used to their advantage in knocking off their dissidents. The “Manifesto” has no connection with those so-called Communists who, during the depression of the Thirties made it their business to disrupt peaceful meetings; the people who told workers that capitalism was collapsing, the ones who advocated every kind of reform from cheap bagels to better home relief; the ones who during World War II were staunch patriots after Hitler invaded Russia; who helped elect Jospeh McCarthy over LaFollette; who during the Johnson-Goldwater campaign suggested voting for L.B.J. as a “lesser of two evils.” The Communists would have us believe that what there is in Russia is “growing socialism” which will eventually become communism. And now we have a Chinese branch of that agony. Need I tell you how these organizations are peppered throughout with provocateurs to the detriment of the misguided individuals who have eyes but who see not?

Marx, in his preface to Critique of Political Economy discusses the Materialist Conception of History:

“In the social production which human beings carry on they enter into definite relations, which are determined independent of their will, productive relations which correspond to a definite evolutionary phase of the materialist forces of production. The totality of these productive relations forms the economic structure of society – the real basis upon which a legal and political superstructure develops with infinite forms of social consciousness. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their existence but conversely it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

The changes which human beings effect in the ways by which they satisfy their material needs are attended by changes in social forms, legal institutions, principles of state, scientific systems, moral and artistic ideas etc. But be it noted and it cannot be stressed too much that a scientific socialist never will agree that economic forces are the only forces that make history. What they have always contended is that among the factors of history, economic forces have the last word.

Revolt of the Godly

In Socialism: Utopian & Scientific Engels traces the role of the Catholic Church as the center of feudal Europe, the biggest feudal master, and shows how the class of merchant traders, financiers and manufacturers had to cast aside the Catholic Church in order to throw off the vestments of feudalism. Wycliffe, Knox, Martin Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Melancthon, notwhithstanding their claims, were the stirrings of the breakaway from the Church. One has only to compare the number of days of obligation in the Church then and now. Industrialism could never countenance 220 days of interruption of the profit system. Martin Luther cast his lot with the aristocracy and this godly man, at the time of the Peasant Wars, suggested that the peasants be boiled in oil. As for Calvin, the work ethic and predestination was the answer to the problem of slave and master.

Engels shows how the rising capitalist class of England compromised with the feudal aristrocracy in 1689 and had to struggle again for political supremacy in 1832 – the Bill of Franchise Reform.

The 1832 act which had excluded workers from the franchise lead to the Chartist Movement and the publication of the Peoples’ Charter of 1838 – “The first working men’s party of modern times.” (Engels)

To the Utopian Socialist, history was of no consequence – humanity had to be saved. As Engels put it, however, we do not belittle the efforts of St. Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen. We point out, rather, that they proclaimed not the emancipation of the working class that produces the wealth but some vague idea of emancipating humanity. A benevolent ruling class or society of pure reason and justice, independent of time and place, they believed could arise in any stage of history.

To the Scientific Socialists socialism derives from history and has its roots in the development of industry and technology and social consciousness. Only a conscious working class majority can establish socialism but they will do so because humans always solve social problems when the conditions or means for their solution are at hand.

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Until the advent of Marx the various interpretations of history might be listed under five headings – religious, political, hero, ideas, and war. The elaborations found under these headings make interesting reading but they all contain serious shortcomings. The war or military interpretation of history, for instance, fails to recognize that war, a phenomenon that has been present in all phases of human development, is a result rather than a cause of events. With the coming of Marx and his theory of the materialist conception of history, history took on new meaning – it became rooted in the material conditions of life.

This interpretation of history holds that in any given epoch the economic relations of society, the means whereby men and women provide for their sustenance, produce, exchange, and distribute the things they regard as necessary for the satisfaction of their needs, exert a preponderating influence in shaping the progress of society and in molding political, social, intellectual, and ethical relationships. In his Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, Edward Aveling, Marx’s son-in-law defines this theory:

“The materialist conception of history is that the chief, the fundamental factor in the development of any nation or any society, is the economic factor – that is, the way in which the nation, or the society, produces, produces and exchanges its commodities…

“Now, whilst it (the economic factor) appears to be the fundamental one, there are others developed from it and reflexes of it, that also play their parts, acting and reacting upon their parent, the economic factor, and one another. The art, the science, the literature, the religion, the legal and juridicial formulae of a country, although they all spring directly from economic conditions of the country, have to be reckoned with.”

The most complete and most significant statement of the main elements of the materialist conception of history are formulated in Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. There one learns that the subject matter of history is man himself, his economic and social conditions and not his ideas. The relations between men’s material conditions of life and their ideas are described in this general fashion by Marx: it is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines their consciousness. William Ebenstein in his Today’s Isms illustrates this concept:

“In a nomadic society… horses might be considered the principal means of acquiring and accumulating wealth. From Marx’s viewpoint, this foundation of nomadic life is the clue to its superstructure of law, government, and dominant ideas. Thus, Marx would say that those who are the owners of the greatest number of horses in such a nomadic society would also be the political cheiftans who make and interpret the law; they are also likely to receive the highest response and deference from the tribe’s members who own no horses. In the realm of ideas, the predominant social and cultural concepts would reflect the dominant economic position of the owners and horses. Even in religion the impact would not be missing. God might, for instance, be represented in the image of a swift and powerful rider, and the concept of divine justice and rule would be, in a sence, an extension and magnification of human justice as determined by the horse-owning chiefs.”

Even as the above horse-owning class determined the political, social, legal, and cultural institutions in its society, so, too, do we find, on looking back, that the landowners in a settled, agricultural society set its society’s values. Today in our industrial society the owners of the means of production are in the saddle and have been for the last two hundred years. No matter the formal and legal facades, this owning class, the capitalist class, rules contemporary society. This class conceives that “the ultimate purpose of the law, education, the press, and artistic and literary creation is to maintain an ideology that is embued with the sanctity and justice of capitalist property ownership.”

The misrepresentations and distortions of Marx’s writings are legion. They perhaps are paralleled only by the slanders and vilifications on Marx’s person. For instance, critics love to reproach Marx that the materialist conception of history disregards the influence of non-economic factors. This is not so. There is nothing in Marx’s theory to indicate such an assertion, though it is true that he failed sufficiently to safeguard himself against this charge, Engels repeatedly acknowledged that many interacting forces give rise to an historic event. Again, some critics would have one believe that Marx’s “materialism” is but a depiction of mans wish for monetary gain and comfort, of his desire for material goods, and this charge is sometimes coupled with the distortion that Marx was an advocate of the barracks, that is, the giving up of ones individuality and entrusting oneself to an all-powerful state bureaucracy. Again not so. Relative to this Erich Fromm writes in Marx’s Concept of Man:

This “description… fits almost exactly the reality of present-day Western capitalist society. The majority of people are motivated by a wish for greater material gain, for comfort and gadgets, and this wish is restricted only by the desire for security and the avoidance of risks. They are increasingly satisfied with a life regulated and manipulated, both in the sphere of production and of consumption, by the state and the big corporations and their respective bureaucracies; they have reached a degree of conformity which has wiped out individuality to a remarkable extent. They are, to use Marx’s term, impotent ‘commodity men’ serving virile machines. The very picture of mid-twentieth century capitalism is hardly distinguishable from the caricature of Marxist socialism as drawn by its opponents.”

The materialist conception of history is not only a theory about how to interpret history, but also a theory about how to make history. This theory was arrived at by Marx by applying the materialist world outlook to the solution of social problems. And in making this application materialism was no longer just a theory aimed at interpreting the world, of building a society free of the exploitation of man by man.

From our magazine The Western Socialist, Fall 1979

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Myanmar is ruled by a military dictatorship headed by Senior General Than Shwe and Vice-Senior General Maung Aye since the 1990s, but who themselves followed in the footsteps of the original general who established rule by a coup d’etat in 1962, General Ne Win. The latter began the military dictatorship and nationalization of major industries by the name of the Burma Socialist Programme Party. This party was Leninist to the core, and had nothing to do with socialism in the orthodox sense of a classless society. Perhaps Leninist would be an appropriate term in considering the Burmese military junta’s belief in a vanguard party establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat (meaning one OVER the proletariat rather than OF it), or perhaps one could also use the term Stalinist in referring to the extreme deprivations of the people, the important role of the army and secret police, and the strong cult of personality that the Burmese generals attempt to create. Privilege, power and wealth were and remain tightly controlled by the ruling elite.

In 1988, the country was swept by student-led demonstrations in March and June, and more widespread protests later that summer (in August) that led to security forces killing hundreds of demonstrators (known thereafter as the 8888 Uprising). However, in response to these protests, another General, Saw Maung, staged a coup d’état and formed the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) which declared martial law. It was this dictatorship that changed the name of the country from Burma to the Union of Myanmar. While free elections were held (the first in 30 years) in 1990, they were really a sham to appease the disgruntled population, as the hands-down winner of the election, the National League for Democracy that won 392 of the 489 seats, was prevented from taking office by the State Law and Order Restoration Council.

The UNICEF website describes the deplorable living conditions in Burma. It is one of the poorest nations in the world, with the average worker making $1500 a year compared with the United States average of $32,000. Most of the inhabitants live in small villages comprised of hut-like shelters. The working population tends to reside in or near Rangoon, the capital. The remainder of the population resides on the land, attempting to procure the means of subsistence from yielding small crops, however 37% of these have no land or livestock at all to generate such means of life. Poverty is so extreme that many families send their children to work. Women, desperate to bring in money for the family, are known to leave their children in others’ care in Burma while seeking wage-labor in Thailand. Street children are a common sight in Myanmar, and some turn to prostitution. Malnutrition among children is increasingly commonplace. Prostitution and drug use generate high rates of HIV and AIDS, while medical conditions that are frequent friends of poverty and unhygienic lifestyles like malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, and tuberculosis run rampant. This is a country in which millions are too poor to afford a grass mat upon which to sleep, so the entire family will often huddle together on a bed of packed earth.

The rural population lives in waterless and toiletless huts. Even in the cities, workers frequently reside in small and overcrowded brick houses. The ruling military tend to absorb most of the country’s budget, while health and education take distant places. Few children go to school in the preteen and teen years. Illiteracy is common.

These were the typical conditions of life for the dispossessed in Burma when the cyclone hit. Thousands of people living in the most desperate conditions were easy prey to severe weather. Even now, after the storm subsided, 400,000 troops were made to go to work immediately on the homes of the wealthy first, according to a May 6th article in the International Herald Tribune. Buddhist monks and some international charity organizations are the only entities presently busy trying to assist the millions affected especially by the tidal wave, other than the victims themselves. These monks were in the news eight months ago when they took part in peaceful anti-government demonstrations that led thousands to be jailed, and hundreds to be killed by the military by bullets, clubs, tear gas, and even torture.

Human life comes really cheap in Burma. Capitalism reduces most humans anywhere around the globe at any given time to expendable commodities to be bought and sold by the wealthy for profit, but our brothers and sisters in Burma have it much harder than most of us here in the United States. Shame on the television news stations or programs, with all the millions of dollars they could have put to good use in reporting the recent tragedy objectively, that resorted to the usual Spectacle about the thousands who died a violent death by violent weather and the usual claptrap urging us to become charitable in hard times. Instead, those of us with limited means like your friendly socialist reporter must hunt about the internet for scrips and scraps of information. The news these days is quickly approaching the level you encounter in a science fiction novel like Fahrenheit 451, a mere cartoon to amuse us, while thousands of miles away one million (that word does not do it justice, let me write it out thus: 1,000,000) of our fellow workers sit amidst their ruins, having already lost relatives and homes following the tidal wave, awaiting the second tidal wave of diarrhea and water-borne diseases, likely to affect millions of people, children being the most vulnerable. Another example of the cruelty imposed upon children by our capitalist system which this reporter will admit to getting particularly incensed about, especially in discussion with fellow Americans without class consciousness about to vote in four more years of capitalism in November when either Tweedledee or TweedleDum parties win.

A year and a half ago, another Spectacle was seen both in that country on television where it caused a minor scandal and abroad via a video on youTube. It was the story of the wedding of Thandar Shwe, the daughter of junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe, wearing a multi-million dollar stunning collection of diamond encrusted jewelry and clothing of the most extravagant nature. The wedding cost about $350,000, and the couple received gifts in excess of $50,000,000. The guests were all junta leaders and their families. This, of course, is the socialism that they are dedicated to promoting as an example of their strong socialist convictions, the sharing of their wealth amongst themselves the way the poor have had to learn the difficult task of sharing their poverty, their huts, their dying children, their diseases, and their recent bout of homelessness.

To the people of Burma, we offer our deepest sympathies after the terrible tragedy that befell you five days ago and continues to strike you now as you attempt to return to some semblance of human life again. We wish as socialists to express our solidarity with you across the globe. We also want to clarify for you the term “socialism,” so misused by the butchers who rule the country you reside in. Socialism, when NOT used by governments and dictators, means a worldwide society characterized by common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. This means that the production of all wealth would be controlled by the community, not by the state. In fact there would be no state at all, a term we understand to mean a military, legal and administrative apparatus that exists to take care of the interests of each country’s ruling class. Socialists, therefore, do not support either left-wing governments any more than they support right-wing ones. Rather, they insist upon a new paradigm in both understanding modern social problems as rooted in the control of the means of production by one class (by whatever political hue, it matters not), and in advocating a solution to those problems in the immediate institution of a truly classless society. Socialism will have neither dictators in power nor even liberal minded representatives, but rather a democracy so inclusive that the term “democracy” to characterize an entire social system (examples of democratic native societies notwithstanding) will begin to acquire real meaning for the first time in our human history. It will mean a society without wage labor in which wealth will be produced directly to meet needs.

Socialists certainly admire the bravery of the pro-democracy activists of Burma. They additionally understand that fellow workers of all nations will not be able to advocate the abolition of capitalism without also achieving minimal rights to organize and speak freely without facing intimidation and brutal treatment by the state. However, socialists do insist that a solution to the problems that befall the citizens of Burma will not be the mere increasing liberalization of that country, but the complete abolition of the market economy, and its replacement by a nonmarket economy based on production for use, and the free access of the wealth society produces.

It is this author’s contention that it is impossible to understand the events that led to the recent deaths of tens of thousands of humans in Burma without also understanding the state of dispossession of most of them that is characteristic of a capitalist economy, whether the government is as despotic as Burma’s or not. The role that poverty plays in this terrible drama will be all the more apparent as millions of affected individuals fail to receive the best that human science and ingenuity on the one hand, and economic resources and human care on the other, are able to muster for them in the wake of a potentially serious wave of malnutrition and disease, while the rich and powerful move to other locations and get back on their feet quickly because in our society it is ownership of property and money in the bank that does the walking.

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A study by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research, part of the United Nations University, discussed by CBC News in December, 2006, suggested that 1% of the world’s population owns as much as 40% of the world’s wealth. The study defined wealth as assets minus debts. They did so rather reasonably, in fact, because according to its authors “many people in high-income countries like Europe and the United States — somewhat paradoxically — are among the poorest people in the world in terms of household wealth because they have large debts.”

In the United States, it is most likely that the tremendous increase in wealth among the wealthy was at our laborious expense, that of Labor. The years of most dramatic increase in wealth in the United States have interestingly but not so surprisingly paralleled the decline in unionization since especially the 1970s. The “golden age” of unions that started around 1950 ended about twenty years later when membership started to decline from the 1945 rate of 35% to 30% by 1970. Thereafter, the decline became even more precipitous to the present 12% (according to a January 25, 2008 report on the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Unemployment increased dramatically in the 1990s (contributed in part by the wave of layoffs in the military contracting and airline businesses, the latter experiencing a further bout of firings of 10s of 1000s of workers in 2002), international competition increased with manufacturers more and more taking advantage of cheap, non-unionized labor in the Third World, or moving to the traditionally super-low-union Southern States of this country. This move of industry to the South and to rural areas in essence undermined the bargaining position of many unions (statistics from this paragraph derived from “Labor Unions in the United States” by Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on EH.net).

The basic facts of capitalism remained intact throughout the recent information and computer age, didn’t it? Profits and the grotesquely and disproportionately engorged quantities of wealth conferred upon the few can after all only derive from one source, the employed working class, whose value of its labor-power (the amount necessary to keep it going day after day, support its family, pay for its specialized training, and raise a new generation of workers for the owners’ future exploitation) is always less than the value of goods. The latter value of goods after all contains both labor and non-labor values within it, for example the cost of nails, pens and window panes, with even these costs of parts of the production reflecting the generation of values from the application of labor from an earlier phase in the evolution of the good, for example the application of labor by other workers to the metals that produced the nails, by other workers still to the petrochemical processes that generated the plastic for the pens, and by other workers elsewhere from another place and time to the combining of sand and soda that wrought the glass for the panes.

Our employers will always find ways to cut corners, lay us off if necessary to exploit cheaper Third World workers if it can’t exploit our cheaper brethren and sisters in the rural parts of this country, and undermine our ability to organize to protect the conditions of our work and the maintenance of the cost of our labor-power to reflect at least its value.

In short, the stupendous increase in wealth disparity between those of us who work and those who hire us can only originate in one thing: the improved ability of those who hire us to squeeze more unpaid values from us, the international working class who has no interest in “supporting the troops” of our employers, in recognizing any sense of patriotic fervor for the national boundaries we happened to be born into by coincidence, or in voting this November for the continuation of an economic order that exists only to exploit us at any turn for as much as it can get from us. And exploiting us is all that foul system will continue to seek so long as we nine to fivers or midnight shifters remain a passive, non-organized, class of employees too embroiled in our day to day exploited existence to find a little time on the side into organizing for our liberation from it, no less than did the slaves on the plantations a century and a half ago.

Those of us who can no longer afford the mortgages on “our” homes or who are struggling like mad to pay them off; those of us who are getting poorer and poorer compared to those who own almost everything; those of us who spend our entire lives in a nightmare of economic insecurity (all of us), poverty (most of us), or starvation and war (a sizable few of us), have only one shared, common, interest, and that is to regain our class consciousness.

When that happens we will immediately become more assertive in the workplace about what we want from our employers while we remain their chattels. But we will also then begin to notice our common interests in our workplace, among all of us in all workplaces, and among all of us around the entire globe, to begin working for the only future that makes sense for us – the complete and utter abolition of the wages system!

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Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers had written extensively on the concept of the state. In the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the government. The alternative, called by Hobbes the state of nature, was a thoroughly unpleasant life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

This, according to Hobbes, the state emerged to improve mankind’s lot. However, Engels, summing up his historical analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the State was a product of class society: “It is an admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.” As if to echo Engels, Marx pointed out that the state could not have arisen, let alone maintained itself, had it been possible to reconcile classes. According to Marx the state is an instrument of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.

Marx revealed that a definite level of development of labour productivity is essential before there is real opportunity for humans to exploit other humans. If people produce only the minimum of products required to maintain their physical existence and reproduction, any systematic appropriation of someone else’s labour is out of the question. The opportunity to appropriate someone else’s labour appears only when the productive forces have developed to the level at which the quantity of goods produced somewhat exceeds the minimum required to maintain the direct producers’ lives. The question then arises: Did Africa’s labour productivity reach a level that provided the opportunity for humans to exploit their fellow human beings? The answer is both no and yes. The appropriate answer to this question would enable us to determine the original of the state in pre-colonial Africa.

But it would be absurd to think of only the level of productive forces without the relations of production. Productive forces cannot be developed in a vacuum. People produce them jointly—in groups rather than on their own. People’s relationship to the means of production determine their position and place in the production and the mode of distribution of the products. Where one group of people makes its living by appropriating the labour of the other, then society is divided into the exploiter and exploited. The need to maintain this vampiric relationship of production leads to the rise of an apparatus of coercion and conditioning to systematically brainwash the exploited into accepting their exploitation as a normal condition of life or to crush their resistance.

Before private ownership

If this analysis of state and class is anything to go by then one cannot authentically talk of the state among some of the communities in Ghana before the 14th century. The predominant principle of social relations was that of the family and kinship associated with communalism. Among the Gur social groups in the Upper East Region of Ghana, for example, every member of the society had their position defined in terms of their relationship with their mother’s or father’s family. Leadership was based on religious ties to the Tindana, or custodian of the land, who ran the affairs of the people with a committee of elders chosen from all the families and clans of the territory. This committee administered land, the major means of production not as its personal property, but as the property of all the people in Gurum-Tinga (Gur land) who had the right to till it. Hunting, fishing and grazing grounds for animals were organised in a similar manner. No-one starved whilst others stuffed themselves with food and threw the excess away or sold it for profit. The basic economic law was that of providing the members of society with the necessary means of subsistence through communal ownership of the means of production.

The absence of private property in the means of production, of the division into classes and the exploitation of man by man excluded the need for a state. Production was essentially of use values; and there was no alienation of the producer from his means of production.
The fundamental flaw in the social organisation of the Gur however was that the position of the Tindana was supposedly sanctioned by the gods, and therefore permanent. This notion also applied to the elders of families and clans who served in the committee of elders. Only death could loosen their grip on authority. This meant that people occupying positions of trust could use their positions for personal gain, taking a significant share of communal property and becoming rich; indeed vestiges of private ownership of property began to rear its ugly head in the Gur community around the 16th century. However this development did not reach its fullest maturity before the violent intrusion of British colonial rule. To a very large extent, this explained why the British colonial government had to create chiefs in Gur land and use them as instruments of its policy of exploitation and dehumanisation.

It is also important to note that once African societies began to expand by internal evolution, and the instruments of labour were perfected, people obtained more means of subsistence than was essential for their survival. The restricted nature of communal property and the egalitarian distribution of products of labour that characterised people such as the Gur acted as a drag on the further development of the productive forces. The need for joint labour disappeared with the appearance of sickles, iron-tipped hoes, spears and arrows. What this meant was that the possibility of individual labour also emerged. But individual labour brought about private ownership, private ownership brought about inequality between the people; and rich and poor people emerged. In the Mali empire, for example, the dominant mode of production was feudalism even though the communal and slave modes of production had not completely died out. By the end of the 15th century there were both chattel and domestic slaves in Mali comparable to the feudal serfs in Europe. In Senegal Portuguese traders also found that there were elements in the population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency.

A cursory look at the socio-economic and political scene in Africa before colonisation does not reveal one dominant mode of production. Also it is not easy to compartmentalise the socio-economic formations and arrange them in a sequence as some writers do, because the social and economic terrain reveals considerable unevenness in development. There were social formations representing hunting bands, communalism, feudalism while other formations represented a mixture of these. It was upon these that colonialism was superimposed.

ADONGO AIDAN AVUGMA

First published Socialist Standard May 1999

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From Dave Perrin’s history of our companion party in the UK. the development of the WSPUS’ thinking developed on identical lines:

The World’s First Socialist Revolution?

When Jack Fitzgerald of the SPGB wrote in the Socialist Standard that the Russian upheavals of March and November, 1917 were by far the most important events of the First World War, he was stating an opinion which, with hindsight, seems a self-evident truth.1 But the extent to which these important upheavals would actually affect the SPGB itself, and the entire political tradition which had spawned it, could hardly have been appreciated or predicted at that time. As has already been noted, the practical debate within the working class movement before the Bolshevik seizure of power had centred on the efficacy of reformist and revolutionary strategies for the achievement of a social transformation. The Russian Revolution, however, seriously muddied these waters and brought to the world’s attention a political theory – Leninism – which, perhaps for the first time, sought to systematically reappraise and reinterpret Marxism rather than simply reject it outright in the pursuit of piecemeal reforms.

There had certainly never been any doubt that there was room for interpretation – indeed the SPGB showed at its foundation the type of synthesis possible between various strands of broadly Marxist thinking, its outlook and political strategy bearing the influence of such diverse elements as Kautsky and De Leon, Engels and Morris. But the Bolshevik Revolution went further than this and challenged some of the very foundations on which pre-1914 Marxism had been built. The perceived need to achieve mass socialist consciousness among the working class, the role of a mass socialist party as both a spur to, and an expression of, that consciousness, and the necessity of a developed economic basis of society for a successful socialist revolution, all came into question.

The apparent triumph of the Bolsheviks in backward Russia sent the Marxist movement into turmoil. Moreover, previously impotent political organisations across Europe and North America showed themselves to be more impressed by the sudden and unexpected Success of revolutionaries in the midst of bloody world war, than concerned for the event’s potential impact on core elements of Marxist theory as they had always understood them. Contrary to legend,2 the SPGB was initially affected by this feeling like other radical parties.

The SPGB’s reaction to the Bolshevik seizure of power contrasted with its position on the earlier, openly pro-capitalist, March Revolution. On that occasion the Socialist Standard clearly said that the revolution was:

… but another example of the capitalists using the discontent and numbers of the working class in Russia to sweep away the Feudal rules and restrictions so strongly symbolized in the Czar and the Council of Nobles, and to establish a system of government’ in line with modern capitalist needs and notions.3

The Socialist Standard’s first editorial commenting on the Bolshevik Revolution, however, did not proceed on the basis that the working class was ing used or manipulated in any way for the benefit of higher forces. Having prefaced its remarks with a note of caution regarding the scanty and possibly sleading information available to it, the Standard’s praise was fulsome enough:

Whatever may be the final outcome, the Bolsheviks have at all events succeeded in doing what all the armies, all the diplomats, all the priests and primates, all the perfervid pacifists of all the groaning and bleeding world have failed to do – they have stopped the slaughter, for the time being at all events, on their front. How much more than this they intended to do the future may reveal. They may have higher aims, yet to be justified by Success or condemned by failure; but is an astounding achievement that these few men have been able to seize opportunity and make the thieves and murderers of the whole world stand aghast and shiver with apprehension.4

The ending of the war, at least on the Eastern Front, was considered by the SPGB to be the principal success of the Bolsheviks, and an act directly in the rests of the working class. But as for the nature of the Bolshevik seizure of power itself, the SPGB was noticeably more cautious than its political rivals in ssing its supposedly socialist content. The Socialist Labour Party in particular, which had long harboured vanguardist ambitions, saw itself as the British embodiment of the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy, possibly even before its Russian success. Along with Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Suffrage Federation (WSF), the SLP had been represented at the Leeds Soviet Convention of June 3, 1917, and joined with the WSF in calling for workers’ and soldiers’ councils to be set up in Britain. After the Bolshevik takeover, The Socialist ran pieces such as The Triumph of SLP Tactics in Russia,5 claiming that its industrial unionism and desire to educate the mass of the working class in socialist ideas rested easily with the spirit of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The SLP and the anti-parliamentary WSF were not alone in their admiration the Bolsheviks and their declared aim of constructing the first socialist state – the conference of the British Socialist Party in the spring of 1918 also expressed support for the November revolution together with initial Bolshevik measures for the “reorganisation of Russia under the control of the working classes”.6 That the SPGB did not share many of these attitudes towards the new Russian regime Soon became clear when the Party’s early praise for the Bolshevik anti-war strategy had run its course.

What focused the SPGB’s attention above all were the lavish claims made on the Bolsheviks’ behalf by their supporters in Britain. The first detailed analysis of the Russian situation, written by Fitzgerald, appeared in the August 1918 Socialist Standard under the heading ‘The Revolution in Russia – Where It Fails’. It tackled the claims of the SLP by outlining why the Bolshevik takeover could not lead to the establishment of socialism in Russia. The article asked:

Is this huge mass of people, numbering about 160,000,000 and spread over eight and a half millions of square miles, ready for socialism? Are the hunters of the North, the struggling peasant proprietors of the South, the agricultural wage-slaves of the Central Provinces, and the industrial wage-slaves of the towns convinced of the necessity, and equipped with the knowledge requisite, for the establishment of the social ownership of the means of life?

 

Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred immensely more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the answer is ‘No!’ … What justification is there, then, in terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists.

In fact, as Buick and Crump have noted,7 the SPGB identified as many as five key reasons why the establishment of socialism in Russia by the Bolsheviks was impossible.

    •    First, as indicated above, the mass socialist consciousness demanded by the SPGB before a successful socialist revolution could take place was noticeably absent in Russia, as elsewhere. Fitzgerald seized on a remark by Litvinoff which suggested that the Bolsheviks did not really know the views of the entire working class when they seized control, only some sections of it such as the factory workers of Petrograd.
•    Second, it was not even the case that the working class was in a numerical majority in Russia, a society dominated by its peasant economy. How could a majority socialist revolution be carried out when, the workers were still in a minority and when the largest social class were the. largely illiterate peasantry? While illiteracy did not entirely preclude the spread of socialist understanding, it certainly made it more difficult. In any event, the peasants had long shown themselves more interested in ridding themselves of the heavy tax burden on land, and increasing the size of their plots, than in demanding common ownership.
•    Third, socialism could not exist in an economically backward country where the means of production was not sufficiently developed to support a socialist system of distribution.
•    Fourth, and crucially, it was not possible to construct socialism in one country alone, given the nature of capitalism as a world system with a world-wide division of labour. Isolated ‘socialism in one country’ would be doomed to failure, no matter how honorable the intentions of the revolutionaries involved.
•    The fifth reason advanced for the non-socialist nature of Bolshevik Russia by the SPGB went to the very root of its political differences with Bolshevism: socialism could not be achieved by following leaders.

Leninism and the Politics of the Vanguard

Lenin’s conception of the role of the political party in a proletarian revolution differed fundamentally from that of the impossibilist SPGB, and from the social democratic movement out of which it had emerged earlier in the century. While the Bolsheviks initially claimed to be part of this same social democratic political current, and though Lenin frequently used the terminology of Marx, Bolshevik theories on political tactics and party organization owed far more to the various strands of nineteenth century Russian revolutionary thinking embodied in the Populist movement.” Underlying these Populist theories was the basic assumption of vanguardism – “the doctrine that a given group’s emancipation depends crucially on some other, much smaller group’s leadership, guidance, or domination in some stronger form”! That such a vanguardist approach was deemed necessary was a product of Lenin’s belief that the achievement of a mass socialist consciousness in the working class was impossible before a proletarian revolution, when the dead-weight of capitalist ideology could be lifted. (In this sense, the basic assumption of Bolshevism was the same as that of reformist social democracy, differing only in the means adopted to achieve working class power.) Lenin strove to justify this assumption in What Is To Be Done?:

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass this or that necessary labour law, etc. The doctrine of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals… in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. 10

Throughout his political life, Lenin refused to accept that the working class “in the mass” could achieve a socialist understanding, arguing that socialist consciousness could only come “from without”. At the Congress of Peasants’ Soviets in 1918 he claimed that if revolutionaries had to wait for the intellectual development of the working class they would not see socialism for at least five hundred years. To avoid this calamity, a centralized and politically mature core of revolutionaries was necessary to initiate social change when the working class in the mass was not yet conscious of its interests – “the Socialist political party, that is the vanguard of the working class, must not allow itself to be halted by the lack of education of the masses.”11 This outlook, which undoubtedly reflected the undeveloped condition of the working class in Russia, was eloquently expounded by the Bolshevik apostle Karl Radek in Socialism From Science to Practice:

In no country can the revolution begin as the act of the majority… the most active are always the first to rise… the creative and impulsive force of the revolution is required to rouse the great body of the people to liberate them from. their intellectual and spiritual slavishness under capitalism, and to lead them. into a position where a defense of their interests can be made.12

This ‘minority action’ perspective clearly mirrored the nineteenth century anti-Tsarist view of Russian Populism, as elaborated, for instance, by Peter Tkachev:

A real revolution can only be brought about in one way: through the seizure of power by revolutionists… The revolutionary minority, having freed the people from the yoke of fear and terror, provides an opportunity for the people to manifest their revolutionary destructive power.13

Commenting on the apparent triumph of Bolshevik principles from its position in Britain, the SPGB claimed that the Bolshevik vanguardist outlook reflected the political and economic immaturity of Russia, and the minority position of the Russian working class. The Bolsheviks had taken the opportunity to seize power in a war-ravaged country promising ‘peace, land and bread’, but contrary to the rhetoric of their fervent admirers in Britain Bolshevik tactics had evidently failed to establish socialism and were most certainly inappropriate for the more developed capitalist states in Western Europe. Unlike groups such as the British SLP, who considered Bolshevism al exciting confirmation of the Marxist theory they had sought to promote in Britain, the SPGB recognized the theoretical dangers inherent in the Bolsheviks’ vanguardism and denied the applicability its supporters contended for it in Britain.14 It was a hostility spurred by the knowledge that key elements, orthodox Marxist theory were really being fundamentally challenged, rather than developed, and from a hitherto unexpected source. In ‘A Socialist View of Bolshevist Policy’ the SPGB commented:

Ever since the Bolshevik minority seized the control of affairs in Russia we have been told that their ‘success’ had completely changed Socialist policy. These ‘Communists’ declare that the policy of Marx and Engels is out of date. Lenin and Trotsky are worshipped as the pathfinders of a shorter and easier road to Communism.
Unfortunately for these ‘Bolsheviks’, no evidence has yet been supplied to show wherein the policy of Marx and Engels is no longer useful, and until that evidence comes the Socialist Party of Great Britain will continue to advocate the same Marxian policy as before… We shall insist on the necessity of the working class understanding socialism and organizing within a political party to obtain it.15

The SPGB saw Lenin’s vanguard ism as a fundamental denial of the basic socialist – and Marxist – proposition enshrined in Clause Five of the Party’s Declaration of Principles, that the emancipation of the working class “must be the work of the working class itself”. The SPGB was adamant that for a society of social ownership and truly democratic control to exist, the cooperation of the . majority of society was necessary, and there could be no cooperation without both understanding and agreement. There was certainly no question that a cooperative socialist society could be created by a minority vanguard party, and so Bolshevik tactics were quite useless from the socialist perspective – even dangerous, given the violent insurrectionary scenario promoted by Lenin and then fatally attempted by the Spartacists in Germany.

Almost alone in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the SPGB set about countering the view, supposedly hidden in the writings of Marx and Engels and revealed to the world by Lenin, that the correct path to working class emancipation lay in the vanguard of the working class rising up to smash the bourgeois state, then creating a ‘proletarian dictatorship’ replete, if necessary, with press censorship and the banning of other political parties. To the SPGB, Lenin’s ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ was not, as Marx had envisaged in his Critique of the Gotha Program, an expression of the democratic will of the great mass of the majority class in society, but a dictatorship of the vanguard party , over the working class and the peasants. Lenin was equated with the minority, conspirational theorists of the past – Blanqui, Buonarroti and Weitling – men who thought it madness to wait for mass political consciousness when revolutions could be created by hardened tacticians and conspirators. In an article in the Socialist Standard on Democracy and Dictatorship in Russia, the SPGB sought to demonstrate the Blanquism of the Bolsheviks by quoting Lenin’s proud claims from The New International of April 1918, that “Just as 150,000 lordly landowners under Czarism dominated the 130,000,000 Russian peasants, so 200,000 members of the Bolshevik party are imposing their proletarian will in the interest of the latter.”16 The SPGB counter-posed these views with the warnings of the mature Marx and Engels, who themselves had flirted with minority tactics as politically inexperienced individuals in the 1840s. Engels in . particular had become explicit in his warnings against the type of vanguard ism and elitism identified by the SPGB to be at the root of Bolshevik tactics, stating in his Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France 1848-50:

The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. Where it is a question of the complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they must act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required… even in France the Socialists realize more and more that no durable success is possible unless they win over in advance the great mass of the people. 17

Its arguments against the Bolsheviks’ vanguardist conception of revolution notwithstanding, the SPGB had to deal with a Bolshevik-inspired resurrection of the view that its ‘parliamentary’ road to socialism was outdated. Having studied the methods of the Bolshevik takeover, the opponents of the SPGB’s revolutionary strategy in Pankhurst’s WSF and in the groups that went on to found the Communist Party of Great Britain in December 1920, put an old argument in a new, improvised form – namely that the Russian example had shown that attempts to take over parliament and the capitalist state machine’ were almost entirely useless. Russia had demonstrated that the working class could set up its own organs of power in the form of workers’ councils (soviets). A justification for this view was given by Marx, it was said, in The Civil War in France, where notice was given that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”.18

The SPGB did not dispute, and had never disputed, this particular dictum of Marx. Its own Declaration of Principles expressly stated that the state machine that had been used by the capitalists to ensure their class domination of society would have to be “converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation” (emphasis added). What the SPGB disputed was the new interpretation put on Marx’s words in the light of the events in Russia. To the SPGB, creating new organs of working class power in opposition to the might of the capitalist state would be folly and was certainly not what Marx had in mind. Engels had settled the issue for the party in a letter to Bernstein, saying it was “simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralized state power before it can use it for its own purposes”.19

In recognizing the unique role played by the soviets in Russian society in the absence of legitimate bourgeois parliamentary government, the SPGB argued that they were a specific product of backward political conditions, and were used by the Bolsheviks, as the best organized and most effective political group, for their own purposes. They did not in themselves constitute bodies that could be of use to the working class in all situations. In an article entitled Parliament or Soviet? A Critical Examination, the Socialist Standard argued in the manner of the Communist Manifesto that the precise application of socialist principles would vary according to the degree of political and economic development reached in various countries, saying that it was absurd “to condemn or uphold the Soviet system irrespective of the conditions out of which it arose” and that by adopting the Soviet model for their constitution, the Bolsheviks had not invented a grand new system but had accepted an already established fact.20

Though the SPGB pointed out the electoral disparities that could make the soviet system open to manipulation 21 and denied its similarity to the Paris Commune, 22 it is noticeable that the SPGB was not as hostile to the idea of the working class organizing soviets in conditions of backward political development as were some of its opponents at the thought of using parliament and ‘bourgeois elections’ for socialist purposes in countries like Britain. To the SPGB, Russia did not prove its opponents’ contentions that soviets could be successfully set up in opposition to an established bourgeois parliamentary state, only that they could function as a partial substitution for one in a backward country lacking the means for democratic expression. As the Menshevik leader Martov had written, the Bolsheviks and their supporters had sought to detach the rise of spontaneous working class organs of democracy from the undeveloped political conditions that spawned them, proclaiming them as a ‘universal form’ to be used by socialist parties in all future revolutions:

As soon as the slogan ‘soviet regime’ begins to function as a pseudonym under the cover of which the Jacobin and Blanquist idea of a minority dictatorship is reborn in the ranks of the proletariat, then the soviet regime acquires a universal acceptation and is said to be adaptable to any kind of revolutionary overturn. In this new sense, the ‘soviet form’ is necessarily devoid of the specific substance that bound it to a definite phase of capitalist development. It now becomes a universal form, which is supposed to be suitable to any revolution accomplished in a situation of political confusion, when the popular masses are not united, while the bases of the old regime have been eaten away in the process of historical evolution. 23

For the SPGB, the ultimate irony (and justification for its position) occurred, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks – by now dubbed “the opportunist weathercocks” – abolished the power of workers’ councils in the factories in January 1920, and instructed their followers in the more advanced capitalist states to adopt the tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’, aiming not to smash the bourgeois state and transfer power to malleable councils of workers, but to capture control of the state machine without specific recourse to the ‘universal form’ of the soviet.” This proved to the SPGB that the real ‘universal form’ for the Bolsheviks was the dictatorship of the vanguard party. The soviets, originally thrown up as products of popular will and democratic intent under autocratic Tsarism, proved to be the dispensable means to this end.

The Economic Basis of Soviet Russia

The SPGB’s analysis of the economic foundation of Soviet Russia under the Bolshevik dictatorship rested on a firmly materialist basis. As socialism could not be established in backward, isolated Russian conditions where the majority of the population neither understood, nor wanted, socialism, the position of the Bolsheviks was judged to be a necessarily precarious one. A precipitous takeover of power had put the them in a position where the achievement of their ultimate goal of a communist society was not a realistic prospect. The Socialist Standard commented in A Socialist View of Bolshevist Policy that with socialism necessarily absent from the immediate political agenda in such a situation, “the minority in power in an economically backward country are forced to adapt their program to the undeveloped conditions and make continual concessions to the capitalist ‘World around them”,25 thus echoing the words of Marx in his Preface to the First Edition of Capital:

One nation can and should learn from others. Even when when a society has begun to track down the natural laws of its movement … it can neither leap over the natural phases of its movement nor remove them by decree. But it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs. 26

In the absence of world socialist revolution, there could only be one road forward for semi-feudal Russia – the capitalist road. With the virtual elimination of the small Russian bourgeoisie, it would be necessary for the Bolsheviks to develop industry through the state ownership of enterprises and the forced accumulation of capital. In The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written before the November revolution, Lenin had envisaged just such an approach to the Russian crisis. According to this document, Lenin saw that immediate measures required included nationalization of the existing banks and the formation of a single state bank, together with the nationalization of all insurance companies, the nationalization of the monopolies and all other key industrial concerns. The Socialist Standard took the opportunity. to again cast doubt on the supposed general applicability of Bolshevik actions – in this instance, the development of ‘state capitalism’ as a precondition for the establishment of socialism:

If we are to copy Bolshevik policy in other countries we should have to demand State Capitalism, which is not a step towards Socialism in advanced capitalist countries. The fact remains, as Lenin is driven to confess, that we do not have to learn from Russia, but Russia has to learn from lands where large scale production is dominant. 27

Lenin’s essential claim was that state-monopoly capitalism provided the necessary technical conditions for the advance to socialism. (The SPGB’s ire was raised further by apparent references from Lenin to the already ‘socialist’ nature of Russia, though such references were later exposed to have usually been incorrect renderings by overly enthusiastic translators of occasions when Lenin actually talked of ‘state capitalism’ .)27 In fact Lenin made the nature of the economic structure to be developed in Russia quite clear in April 1918:

What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control the capitalist’ classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us :.. state capitalism would-be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would be easy, would be within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralized, calculated, controlled and socialized, and that is exactly what we lack… Only the development of state capitalism, only the painstaking establishment of accounting and control, only the strictest organization and labour discipline, will lead us to socialism. Without this there is no socialism. 28

As the SPGB took great pains to point out to its opponents, Lenin hero admitted that the social formation in Soviet Russia was essentially state-capitalist, albeit under the guidance and control of an imperfect ‘proletarian state’. For Lenin, the nature of the revolutionary polity in such circumstances was the crucial determinant of the type of social system in existence. Without what Lenin termed “revolutionary democracy”, state capitalist monopoly would remain state capitalism. With workers’ control of production and control of the proletarian state by the vanguard party of the working class, however, socialism would be a reality. According to The Impending Catastrophe and How To Combat It, socialism was merely “state-capitalist monopoly made to serve the interests of the whole people”, a definition generally accepted by the organizations of orthodox, possibilist social democracy, who also viewed state-monopoly capitalism based on the nationalization of industry and state planning of the economy to be the foundation of a socialist system of society. Indeed, out of this arose the peculiar situation whereby Lenin attacked the ‘parliamentarist’ social democrats for advocating state capitalism without working class control, while Kautsky for the social democrats threw the charge back by accusing the Bolsheviks of advocating state capitalism in the form of a nationalized economy under the stifling rule of a vanguardist dictatorship. 30

As Lenin had commented, the precise aim of the Bolsheviks was to build up a form of state-monopoly capitalism on the German model, under the political control of a ‘revolutionary democratic’ state. Nationalization of key productive and distributive units was judged to be an essential prerequisite for the advance towards socialism, with Lenin writing in The State and Revolution that a “witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true… To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service … under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat – is our immediate aim.” 31 The SPGB viewed this as state capitalism, no matter what political conditions appertained. To the SPGB, nationalization and state direction of the economy was state capitalism in Germany, state capitalism when advocated by the British Labour Party, and most certainly state capitalism under the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. The existence of supposedly benevolent governments and ‘workers’ states’ could not in itself change the exploitative character of the economic basis of society. As for the German postal service under Bismarck being an example of embryonic socialism, Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific had ridiculed Bismarck’s extension of state ownership in the economy as “spurious socialism”, a description the SPGB was happy to endorse.

More than twenty years after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the SPGB was to show it remained unconvinced that state capitalism was really socialism even if presided over by those who proclaimed themselves socialist:

… the chief characteristics of Capitalism [in Russia) have not disappeared and are not in the process of disappearing. Goods are not produced for use but for sale to those who have the money to buy, as in other countries. The workers are not members of a social system in which the means of wealth production are socially owned and controlled, but are wage-earners in the employ of the State or of semi-State concerns, etc. The Russian State concerns are no more 'socially owned' than is the British Post Office or the Central Electricity Board, or any private company... The Bolshevik attempt to usher in Socialism by 'legal enactments' and by 'bold leaps' before the economic conditions were ripe, and before the mass of the population desired Socialism, has been a total failure. In course of time that failure will become obvious to the workers inside and outside Russia. 33

Capitalism, based on the separation of the producers from the means of production had not been abolished, nor could it have been. Production still took place as a system of exchange involving the circulation of capital. Capital was self-expanding at the point of production consequent on the exploitation of wage labour, and articles of wealth were still being produced for sale on the market with a view to the realization of surplus value. Indeed, much of the SPGB's early analysis of the economic basis of the Soviet system reflected a desire to demonstrate the similarities between Russian state capitalism and the British private enterprise based capitalism the SPGB was most familiar with. Until the late 19285 and Stalin's extensive programs of forced accumulation and the collectivization of agriculture, the SPGB tended to cautiously characterize the Soviet system as being a mixture of private and state capitalism. Articles in the Socialist Standard seized on official Soviet statements and publications showing the existence of rent, interest and profit in Russia, a striking confirmation to the SPGB that Russia was still a part of world capitalism and that the Russian workers were exploited by capitalists. One such piece in the Socialist Standard entitled Russia: Land Of High Profits pointed to increased Russian trade with the major capitalist powers, and the "staggering profits", on average 81 per cent for 1926-7, gleaned by the Concession Companies from the exploitation of Russian workers. 34 The SPGB mocked the 1917 Bolshevik slogan of 'Down with the foreign bondholders', saying that though the foreign bondholders had been well and truly 'downed' with the initial repudiation of the National Debt built up under Tsarism, they had been replaced with Russian bondholders - "a distinction without difference from the standpoint of the Russian workers". 35 The right of inheritance and massive income inequality served to further reinforce the Party's view that "Russian capitalism, although administered by the Communist Party dictatorship, reproduces almost down to the last detail the paraphernalia of the capitalist world as we know it here'? The SPGB had thought it likely right from the Bolshevik ascension to power that the new Russian rulers would have to compromise with the capitalist world, particularly to attract finance necessary for the schemes of forced industrialization undertaken, and to obtain much needed foreign currency. But despite the adoption of the New Economic Policy in 1921 and the move back towards some forms of small scale private enterprise, state capitalism in its various forms proved to be well and truly established in Soviet Russia, and the more open compromises with world capitalism entered into by the Communist Party in the 1920s were understandable given the task undertaken by the Russian rulers - to drag backward Russia into the twentieth century through the development of capitalist relations of production after the almost complete destruction of the tiny Russian bourgeoisie in 1917.

It was evident to the SPGB that under the guise of 'proletarian revolution', the Bolshevik dictatorship had taken over the historic role of a largely absent capitalist class. In this sense, the SPGB viewed the Bolshevik ascent to power as not so much a socialist revolution as a coup carried out by a political minority when the rule of Tsarist autocracy had already been overthrown pending the full development of bourgeois political democracy. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had put themselves in a position which Engels had warned against as far back as 1850, and the growth of state capitalism was the necessary consequence:

The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but on the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and upon the development. of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce on which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed from the class relations of the moment ... Thus, he necessarily finds himself in an unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interest of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.37

'Transitional Society' or 'Political Period of Transition'?

While the SPGB certainly took the view that' the 'Bolsheviks were "irrevocably lost", the Bolsheviks, together with their supporters in Britain, argued that those who failed to heed the lessons of the remarkable Russian triumph would be doomed to irrelevance. For a tiny organization on the fringes of the labour movement, however - and for all its alleged irrelevance - the SPGB's presence in the political arena was an important one. With the devastating split in the Socialist Labour Party in 1920-1, when over a third of the SLP membership joined with the British Socialist Party and other radical left-wingers to form the pro-Bolshevik Communist Party of Great Britain, the SPGB remained the one organization that could plausibly and persistently challenge the claims of Lenin's followers in Britain to be the bearers of a truly Marxist perspective. During the politically turbulent 1920s and 30s, the SPGB proved to be the Communist Party's harshest critic,' denouncing at every turn the "Leninist distorters of Marx", and in so doing provoking officially sanctioned verbal and physical abuse from Communist Party members. 38

To the SPGB, nowhere had Leninists distorted Marx more than on the question of the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into the future society based on common ownership. A whole new political vocabulary had arisen with the ascent of Lenin, Trotsky and then Stalin, and this had found principal expression in the phrase 'transitional society', a term employed with increasing frequency by the would-be Bolsheviks in the Communist Party of Great Britain. As the Russian experience had apparently demonstrated the impossibility of immediately replacing capitalism with communism, the CPGB argued for the necessity of a society in transition from capitalism to communism, which would exhibit features of both systems without being either. In this transitional stage, the working class through the active role of the vanguard party would be the ruling class in society, and would build up a socialist system, which, as frankly admitted by Lenin if not generally by his supporters, was really "state monopoly capitalism made to run in the interests of the whole people". While the wages system would still exist under this 'socialist system', it was claimed that the exploitation of the working class would not, and though buying and selling would continue, commodity production would be abolished with the adoption of a centralized plan of production. By way of justification, it was claimed that this transitional society was what Marx had referred to as the "political period of transition" between capitalism and communism. 39

The SPGB enthusiastically set about refuting these claims that Marx had advocated such a 'transitional society' or that the creation of such a system was a desirable working class aim in Russia or anywhere else. Nowhere, it was true, had Marx use the term 'transitional society' or referred to socialism as a transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism. On the contrary, both Marx and Engels had used the terms 'socialism' and 'communism' interchangeably to refer to a system of society based on common ownership, democratic control, and production for use. In his 1888 Preface to the Communist Manifesto, Engels had described why Marx in particular preferred to use the word 'communism', though there was no real difference in meaning between the two, with 'common ownership' and 'social ownership' being synonyms.40 Marx had certainly written of the 'higher' and 'lower' phases of communist society, but these were precisely phases of communist, and not some other, society. In both phases of communism/socialism, the wages system would have to have been abolished along with commodity production, the market, money and the state.

Any talk of a 'transitional' mode of production, often called 'socialism' by the Bolsheviks' supporters in Britain, was nonsensical to the SPGB. To them it was simply not true that communist relations of production could permeate capitalism in the same way that capitalism had slowly evolved out of, and eventually eclipsed, feudalism. Private property societies could permeate one another in such a manner, but the change from private ownership of the means of living to common ownership would have to necessitate a definite break in the form of a social revolution carried out by the working class capturing state power and using it to socialize production. The SPGB considered that the period in which the working class wields state power in order to establish socialism/communism corresponds to the "political period of transition" referred to by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, in which the economic basis of society is implicitly still capitalist. The length of this expressly political transition period would depend primarily on the level of development of the forces of production. Marx and Engels envisaged a lengthy political period of transition in their early years and a much shorter one when the productive forces had already developed to a sufficient degree to make the introduction of socialism/communism (initially with the labour-time voucher system of rationing) immediately possible. 41

The basically state capitalist program of measures advocated by Marx and Engels in 1848 in the second section of the Communist Manifesto was explicitly designed to raise the level of the productive forces "as rapidly as possible", but with the advent of the second industrial revolution Engels could already write in 1888 that no special stress was placed on these measures as "this program has in some details become antiquated". 42 By the twentieth century, this was most definitely the case, and in the eyes of the SPGB this meant that the political period of transition was reduced to being of a fairly negligible duration. This point was made most clearly by Gilbert McClatchie for the SPGB in an authoritative article in the Socialist Standard just after the Second World War. 43 Once a class-conscious proletariat had captured control of the state institutions of the various major countries of the world, common ownership could be almost immediately enacted. Hence the 'transition' to socialism could be said to take place under capitalism itself, with capitalism developing the forces of production to a sufficient degree to make a socialist society based on an abundance of wealth possible, while simultaneously providing the conditions which would give rise to, and then help to power, the socialist movement. The conditions foreseen by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto a century earlier whereby a politically mature working class came to power in the major industrial countries before the economic basis of society was ready to sustain a socialist/communist mode of production no longer applied, and therefore neither could the lengthy political period of transition when the working class would develop the productive forces under capitalism before socializing production. In the epoch of the truly world capitalism of the twentieth century, the SPGB judged that although a very short political period of transition between capitalism and socialism/communism was necessary to expropriate the bourgeoisie and socialize production, this no longer needed to be the more lengthy period countenanced by Marx and Engels in the mid nineteenth century. 44 As for a 'transitional society' between the two systems, this was a Leninist distortion never to be found in Marx and without any applicability for the socialist movement whatsoever.

The Capitalist Class in Russia

If, as the SPGB asserted, capitalism existed in the Soviet Union under the political dictatorship of the Communist Party, and not 'socialism' or some sort of 'workers' state', it was reasonable for the Party's opponents to demand who or what constituted the exploiting capitalist class there. 45 Clearly, the fledgling bourgeoisie had been expropriated after the Bolshevik seizure of power and no longer had private ownership rights and property titles to the rapidly developing means of production. As the SPGB pointed out, however, this did not mean that all investment was conducted through state channels and the SPGB devoted much time, especially in the inter-war period, towards publicizing the amount of investment by private capitalists in the Soviet economy. As one writer in the Socialist Standard commented:

... investment, in the National Debt, in the cooperatives, and in the trading concerns, etc. are forms of exploitation of the Russian workers. They, like the workers everywhere, carry on their backs a class of property owners, receiving incomes from property ownership.46

In the early years of the SPGB's analysis of Soviet Russia, the Party concentrated on the more peripheral, though not insignificant, forms of non-state ownership in the Soviet economy and the manner in which the Communist Party rulers were forced to compromise with investors and financiers from both inside and outside Russia. More significantly, the SPGB also argued that the capitalist nature of Soviet Russia and its necessary trading and investment relations with the rest of the capitalist world meant that it had a developing internal class system that was far removed from the amicable relationship between "the only two classes in Russian society, workers and peasants" referred to by Stalin in his statement on the new Constitution of 1936. The Socialist Standard claimed:

... this statement... dismisses the cleavage of interests between peasants and workers, and it leaves out of account, as if they did not exist, the elaborate arrangements by means of which an officially favored minority of Russian citizens can enjoy a very high standard of living, which stands in increasing contrast to the conditions of the great majority. In this, and in the investment system, and in the laws which permit the inheritance of property, Russia is facing a progressive differentiation into classes.47

Ammunition for the SPGB's view of the class nature of Soviet Russia was provided by supporters of the Russian dictatorship such as Reg Bishop in his book Soviet Millionaires,48 where it was claimed that the existence of 'rouble millionaires' was proof of economic success and the rapid progress of Russia under the Communists.

Inequality of wealth was a chief target of the SPGB and as the Russian state became even more centralized and dominant this increasingly necessitated an analysis of what under Stalin became the most noticeable source of privilege, the party/state machinery itself and the nomenklatura system based on it. The SPGB was not slow to attack the privilege and riches accruing to the top Communist Party bureaucrats, military officials and factory managers who were variously referred to as "the ruling clique", the "new bureaucracy" and "the ruling class". This latter term became the SPGB's standard reference to a Russian elite clearly privileged both in control of the means of living and in consumption. Strangely, however, it was not until well after the departure of Khrushchev that the SPGB systematically referred to this ruling elite as a specifically capitalist class. In earlier SPGB texts this was sometimes implied,49 but the Party always stopped short of actually labeling this privileged group openly 'capitalist'. This was, in fact, a fundamental contradiction in the SPGB's analysis that tended to mar the Party's otherwise clear critique of Soviet state capitalism. How could, for instance, a privileged ruling class in a major capitalist country, in the very epoch of world capitalism, not be a capitalist class? A ruling class, taken to mean a social class exercising control of the state machine through its hold on political power, could not rise to its dominant position in society divorced from the material conditions of production. Given the by now large-scale development of capitalist industry in Russia, the ruling class certainly was not the peasantry and explicitly not the working class, which had not in Russia or anywhere else won the "battle of democracy" and was not in a position to socialize production. As the SPGB itself had affirmed early on, the Bolsheviks in Russia had been forced by circumstances to take the capitalist road and to perform the historic functions of the capitalist class in their attempts to defeat backwardness through the development of industry and the forced accumulation of capital.

The failure of the SPGB to identify the Soviet ruling elite as a specifically capitalist class paradoxically stemmed from the view that capitalists lived off unearned income accruing from the exploitation of the working class which was consequent on their ownership of the means of living. The Russian ruling elite did not possess legal property titles to the means of production in Russia, and furthermore appeared to receive their income in the form of wages and salaries rather than in the 'holy trinity' of rent, interest and profit. To compound the Party's theoretical contradiction, many SPGB members therefore judged that the Communist Party bureaucrats were members of the working class dependent on the sale of their labour power - who also constituted a privileged 'ruling class' keeping the working class as a whole in subjection.

This issue of the nature of the Russian ruling class was not resolved until the SPGB's Annual Conference in 1969, when a motion was carried that "the ruling class in state capitalist Russia stands in the same relationship to the means of production as does the ruling class in any other capitalist country (viz. it has a monopoly of those means of production and extracts surplus value from the working class) and is therefore a capitalist class". 50 The proponents of the motion, generally younger members who had entered the Party in the 1960s, argued that the Communist Party bureaucrats, enterprise managers and other top officials performed the functions of a capitalist class in that they monopolized the means of living by only allowing others access to it via the operation of the wages system, and also accumulated capital out of the value created in the sphere of production by wage labour, a value greater in magnitude than that paid in wages and salaries as the price of labour power. Although it was not essential to their status, capitalists invariably had greater incomes on average than workers because of their privileged position in the productive process as the "functionaries of capital". These SPGB members argued that the state capitalist class, like the privately owning capitalist class in the West, was privileged in consumption, receiving bloated 'salaries' that were not the price of labour power but a portion of the total surplus value created by the working class. The state capitalist class in Russia was also judged to be privileged because of the multitude of benefits and perks open to them, including access to exclusive consumption outlets such as expensive shops and restaurants from which the working class was physically denied access. 51 The opponents of this view in the SPGB pointed out the extent to which private enterprise operated in Russia, with 'non-official' economic activity accounting for up to one quarter of the total. These members claimed that a private enterprise capitalist class certainly existed in Russia, and that to say that it was the bureaucracy who were the collective capitalists overlooked this. Indeed, it was prophetically argued that the long-term ambition of many in the bureaucracy was probably to convert themselves into a privately-owning capitalist class' on Western lines operating in a mixed state/private enterprise economy that would be more efficient than the then already stagnating Soviet system. 52 .'

Those who took this position and opposed the 1969 Conference motion, largely the older Party members with more formal and legalistically based definitions of the capitalist class, argued that both Marx and Engels had opposed the view that privileged managers and bureaucrats were actually capitalists. Edgar Hardcastle ('Hardy'), a member particularly revered by the membership for his extensive knowledge of economics and who had been an editor of the Socialist Standard for most of the period since the early 1920s, said that Marx and Engels had held that under state-owned capitalism the capitalists were forced out of control by salaried officials. 53 Engels had commented that although the transformation of enterprises into state concerns "does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces" and also that "the more [the state] proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit”, at the same time” All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function other than tearing off coupons, and gambling on the stock exchange… “54 Marx, too, had written of the progressive separation of the functions of the capitalist on the one hand as a manager, and on the other as “a mere owner, a mere money capitalist”, saying that “the manager’s salary is or should be simply the wage for a certain kind of skilled labour, its price being regulated in the labour market like that of any other labour.” 55 In one particularly apposite passage of Capital Marx had written that:

Capitalist production has itself brought it about that the work of supervision is readily available, quite independent of the ownership of capital. It has therefore become superfluous for this work of supervision to be performed by the capitalist. A musical conductor need in no way be the owner of the instruments in his orchestra, nor does it form part of his function as a conductor that he should have any part in paying the ‘wages’ of the other musicians. 56

Given the structure of the nineteenth century English industrial capitalism analyzed by Marx, it can hardly be surprising that he identified the capitalist class as the private owners of capital with legal property titles to the means of living. There was, though, a definite recognition on Marx’s part that even in the ’1840s a “new swindle” of dubious management and supervision was arising in joint-stock companies, the remuneration of which was not the price of labour power at all, and ‘wages’ in name only. Directors and managers were already beginning to use their position of control to command a portion of the surplus . value for their own consumption needs, with Marx wryly stating that “the wages of supervision are in inverse proportion, as a rule, to the actual supervision exercised by these nominal directors.” 57

As the majority in the SPGB pointed out, the view that. the Russian ruling bureaucracy simply carried out the role of managers and trustees clearly overlooked their emergence as a controlling class holding sole responsibility for the accumulation of capital, making key decisions about what to produce, how much to produce, where to produce it, and, if possible, the rate at which it should be produced. This controlling class could not be equated with the supervisors and managers referred to by Marx who received a wage based on the amount needed to produce and reproduce their labour power. On the contrary, this class of bureaucrats was using its position of control to perform the functions carried out by individual capitalists in earlier phases of capitalism’s development and to command a privileged income derived from surplus value. Though it did not have legal title to the means of production, and was not able to bequeath property, it was, as the proponents of the motion at SPGB Conference argued, clearly a possessing class of the type mentioned in the SPGB Declaration of Principles, exercising a “monopoly… of the wealth taken from the workers”.

The prevailing view in the SPGB came to be that the nature of a class could not be determined simply by legal forms or even by methods of recruitment (the Soviet possessing class was not recruited via inheritance but by other, more meritocratic methods, that have not been entirely unusual for possessing classes in history). 58 The Party, or certainly the vast body of its membership, ultimately concluded that although the state capitalist class did not have legal property titles to the means of production, it nonetheless constituted a capitalist class exercising a collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. What was judged to be of prime importance, therefore, was the social reality of capitalism rather than a particular legal form. The opponents of the theory of state capitalism, to the SPGB, had never been able to see beyond the latter.

State Capitalism as a Theory

While the SPGB was the first political group in Britain, and possibly the world, to identify the state capitalist direction taken by Russia under the Communist Party dictatorship, many others came to the same conclusion, if not always for the same reasons. Unlike the SPGB, most of these groups stood in the Leninist tradition or at least showed a willingness to. identify positive aspects of the Bolshevik takeover that could be applied by the socialist movement elsewhere in the future. In particular, the Leninist conception of socialism as state ownership and direction of the economy under the control of a vanguard party operating through the political medium of workers’ councils was readily accepted by most of these groups. Hence they only later ascribed a ‘state capitalist’ characterization to Russia when they judged that state ownership no longer coincided with ‘proletarian democracy’ and the power of the soviets. This was essentially the analysis initially put forward by ‘council communists’ such as Otto Ruhle who saw in the crushing of the soviets the rise of “commissar despotism” and state capitalism 59 (Ruhle himself later realized the inadequacy of this position and came to view nationalization and state regulation as intrinsically state capitalist). The largest ‘left communist’ group in Europe, the German KAPD, developed a similar perspective. It identified capitalism as the private (specifically non-state) ownership of the means of production, and, like the council communist Workers’ Socialist Federation in Britain, praised the Bolsheviks for their construction of socialism in the industrial centers of Russia. Later, the KAPD became critical of the Soviet system with the final crushing of the soviets and the introduction of the New Economic Policy, 60 which it thought heralded a ‘reversion to capitalism’.

Despite the initial excesses of left communist and council communist groups who invariably let their early admiration for the Soviet political form dominate their analysis, the worst example from the SPGB perspective of the conflation of socialism with state ownership plus ‘revolutionary democracy’ came from the Trotskyists. Ironically, the Trotskyist theories of state capitalism, being by far the most fragile, are the most well known. C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya from the American Socialist Workers’ Party were the first Trotskyists to break with Trotsky himself and identify the state capitalist nature of the USSR 61 though perhaps the most widely known theory was that elaborated by Tony Cliff and circulated as a discussion document within the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain in the period immediately after the Second World War, before being published as Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Cliff’s reasons for breaking with orthodox Trotskyism by identifying the Soviet Union as state capitalist were plain enough:

When I came to the theory of state capitalism I did not come to it by a long analysis of the law of value in Russia… Nothing of the sort. I came to it by the simple statement that… you cannot have a workers’ state without the workers having power to dictate what happens in society. 62

Cliff’s analysis was firmly rooted in the idea that the USSR was a form of ‘workers’ state’ before Stalin’s first Five Year Plan of 1928 established the bureaucracy as a new class consuming surplus value. Like all the Trotskyists that have followed him, Cliff did not identify the USSR as a society developing along state capitalist lines from 1917 but only from Stalin’s ascension to power under Lenin Russia was supposedly a society in transition from capitalism to communism, based on working class power. For Cliff, a perceived change of political controlled to a fundamental change in economic structure, to what in fact amounted to a ‘reversion to capitalism’. Perhaps surprisingly, those Trotskyists who remained faithful to Trotsky’s own view when in exile of Russia as a “degenerated workers’ state” made some of the most pertinent criticisms of Cliff’s analysis, particularly his conclusion that the economic structure of the Soviet system had changed in 1928 and had assumed a capitalist basis. Foremost among these critics was rival British Trotskyist Ted Grant:

If Comrade Cliff’s thesis is correct, that state capitalism exists in Russia today, then he cannot avoid the conclusion that state capitalism has been in existence since the Russian Revolution and the function of the revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society. For despite his tortuous efforts to draw a line between the economic basis of Russia before the year 1928 and after, the economic basis of Russian society has remained unchanged… money, labour power, the existence of the working class, surplus value, etc. are all survivals of the old capitalist system carried over even under the regime of Lenin… the law of value applies and must apply until there is direct access to the products by the producers.” 63

This conclusion was certainly rejected by Cliff and all the other Trotskyist state capitalist theorists, though not of course by the SPGB.

It should also be recognized that other elements emerged, primarily from the left communist tradition, who revised their analysis of Russia to such an extent that they were able to recognize that Russia under Bolshevik rule had never been anything but capitalist, in their view because of the backwardness of the economy and the isolated nature of the ‘proletarian revolution’. This was the view developed by those elements that emerged from the Italian left communist milieu after the Second World War, some of whom in political exile were to group together in the Gauche Communiste de France. The GCF’s journal, Intemationalisme, clearly expressed this perspective, arguing, very much in the manner of the SPGB before them, that events in Russia had shown that it is not enough for socialists to expropriate the private bourgeoisie, and to concentrate capitalist production in the hands of the state, if production itself is to continue on a capitalist basis:

The most far-reaching expropriation may lead to the disappearance of the capitalists as individuals benefiting from surplus value, but it does not in itself make the production of surplus value, i.e. capitalism itself, disappear. This assertion may at first sight appear paradoxical, but a closer examination of the Russian experience will prove its validity. For socialism to exist, or even a move towards socialism, it’s not enough for expropriation to take place: what’s essential is that the means of production cease to exist as capital. In other words, the capitalist principle of production has to be overturned. The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society’s members. 64

Today, many council communist, left communist and Trotskyist political groupings identify Soviet Russia, certainly post-Lenin, as having always been essentially state capitalist, and like the SPGB, they have applied their analysis of Russian society to other ‘socialist’ countries exhibiting similar features in Asia, Africa and Central America” 65 That the SPGB was not alone in identifying the capitalist nature of the USSR does not of course diminish its status as the one organization which promoted a state capitalist analysis of the events in Russia at the time of their happening, and not merely with the benefit of hindsight. What is more, the SPGB has remained one of the few organizations committed to such a critique of the USSR and similar regimes, never seeking to adopt or promote the Leninist vanguardism which so clearly led to that state capitalist outcome.

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