Did Stalinist Russia represent some new form of society not envisaged by Marx or Lenin? Clearly if Stalinism is not socialism, a society based upon the harmonious satisfaction of human needs, what does it represent? Some have looked at the Soviet Union, been repulsed by the Purge trials, the labour camps, the monstrous frame-ups, and the general totalitarian nature of the regime and drawn the conclusion that Stalinism is a new exploitative society with its own bureaucratic ruling class. There have been many descriptions given to this conclusion from ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ (Bruno Rizzi and Max Shachtman) to ‘state capitalism’ (Tony Cliff). In reality, these conceptions are all false from beginning to end.
The theory of state capitalism was based on the idea that the Stalinist political counter-revolution in Russia signified a new stage in capitalism. This did not differ in any essential way from ‘ordinary’ capitalism. The bureaucracy was alleged to be a new ruling class. The Soviet economy was supposed to obey the normal laws of capitalism, and so forth. However, such an argument immediately found itself entangled in a host of contradictions. To look no further, we must point out that, if the Soviet Union was capitalist (or state capitalist, it makes no real difference to the substance of the argument), then it had to have the same law of motion as capitalism – i.e., booms and slumps. However much you twist and turn, you will not find any such phenomenon. Thus, the adoption of a false theory necessarily leads to the abandonment of the basic standpoint of Marxism. Here we have a kind of capitalism which has succeeded in eliminating the fundamental contradiction of a market economy – a capitalism without unemployment, capable of developing the means of production at unheard-of rates of growth, uninterrupted by crises of overproduction.
Such a conclusion would inevitably require us to revise all the basic postulates of Marxism – if it were true. But it is not true. The whole conception rests upon a complete misunderstanding of the Marxist theory of the state, the class nature of society and the transitional period. The general schema of Marx and Lenin as to how the transition from capitalism to socialism would unfold is undoubtedly correct, in general. But the truth is always concrete. It is not possible to understand complex and contradictory social phenomena on the basis of theoretical generalities alone. These can provide a useful framework and starting-point, but one can only grasp the nature of the thing itself by a careful analysis of the facts and processes, in an all-rounded way, bringing out all the contradictory tendencies. By contrast, the attempt to marshal facts to justify a preconceived definition necessarily ends in an abortion.
What strikes one about the theory of state capitalism in all its varieties is its completely arbitrary character. Far from solving anything, it leads to a mass of new contradictions. Trotsky’s explanation of Stalinism as a deformed workers’ state, a form of proletarian Bonapartism, so much simpler and completely in accord with Marxist theory, closely corresponds to everything which we have witnessed in the USSR from the death of Lenin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. By accepting this standpoint, we do not need to revise the basic ideas of Marxism, which alone provide us with a scientific understanding and a guide to action in the new situation.
It is not possible to grasp a living, developing process by means of abstract definitions and formal logic. As Trotsky explained:
The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretisation, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say a succulence which to a certain extent brings them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc. (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, pp. 65-6.)
The theories of state capitalism in Russia go back a long way. The theory of bureaucratic collectivism to describe the USSR was put forward by Bruno Rizzi and Max Shachtman more than 50 years ago. In his book La Bureaucratisation du Monde, Bruno Rizzi explains: “In our opinion, the USSR represents a new type of society led by a new social class: that is our conclusion. Collectivised property actually belongs to this class which has introduced a new – and superior – system of production. Exploitation is transferred from the individual to the class.” (B. Rizzi, La Bureaucratisation du Monde, p. 31.)
Again: “In our opinion, in the USSR, the property owners are the bureaucrats, for it is they who hold force in their hands. It is they who direct the economy as was usual amongst the bourgeoisie; it is they who appropriate the profits to themselves, as was usual amongst all exploiting classes, and it is they who fix wages and the prices of goods: once again, it is the bureaucrats.” (Ibid., p. 56.) Rizzi concludes: “Exploitation occurs exactly as in a society based on slavery… The Russian working class are no longer proletarians; they are merely slaves. It is a class of slaves in its economic substance and in its social manifestations.” (Ibid., pp. 72-4.) Ironically, he later concludes that on the basis of increased productive development this bureaucratic collectivism will end up in a “classless society and socialism”.
For good measure, he also lumps in Hitler’s Germany as bureaucratic collectivist. The whole of Bruno Rizzi’s argument is completely unscientific. The Soviet bureaucrats were not property owners, in the sense of owning the means of production. They owned no stocks or shares. Nor could they hand down any property as such through inheritance. They certainly did not own the working class as the slave-owners of Rome owned their slaves. How such a class society could then develop into socialism remains a mystery. However, these outlandish ideas were taken up by James Burnham, who achieved fame as the author of The Managerial Revolution, which equated Stalinism with Fascism and the New Deal. Burnham also gained notoriety as an open advocate of atomic war against the USSR. At bottom, all this reflected the deep pessimism and despair of a layer of middle class intellectuals as a result of the defeats of the working class. The notion of bureaucratic collectivism, was more than a theory, it was the expression of the mood of this layer, which was most vividly conveyed by the nightmarish vision of the future in the pages of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Max Shachtman also adopted the theory of bureaucratic collectivism after breaking from the Trotskyist movement in 1940. “It is a cruel realisation of the prediction made by all the great socialist scientists, from Marx and Engels onwards, that capitalism must collapse out of an inability to solve its own contradictions and that the alternatives facing mankind are not so much capitalism or socialism as they are: socialism or barbarism. Stalinism is that new barbarism,” states Shachtman. (Max Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution, p. 32.) Shachtman also went so far as to maintain that the workers of the USSR were not workers at all, but slaves of the bureaucratic state. Despite this, at the time, he regarded this bureaucratic collectivism as more progressive than capitalism.
According to the resolution on Russia passed at the 1941 Convention of his organisation, the Workers’ Party: “From the standpoint of socialism, the bureaucratic collectivist state is a reactionary social order; in relation to the capitalist world, it is on an historically more progressive plane.” This was really an attempt by Shachtman to justify his accommodation to American petty bourgeois public opinion which had become deeply anti-Stalinist after 1939. Eventually, he shifted further to the right and ended up as a supporter of US foreign policy. The theory of bureaucratic collectivism subsequently fell into disuse as a description of the USSR.
The theory of state capitalism, on the other hand, continued to be put forward in certain quarters. Its most recent contemporary exponent is Tony Cliff in his book Russia: A Marxist Analysis (1964) republished as State Capitalism in Russia (1974). This work is based upon an earlier version entitled The Nature of Stalinist Russia published in June 1948. Given its theoretical weaknesses, and the criticism of this work made by ourselves at the time, its arguments were later modified. Initially, Cliff argued that Russia had undergone a transformation in 1928, the first year of the Five-year Plans, from a deformed workers’ state to state capitalism because it can conclusively “be said that with the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, the bureaucracy’s income consisted to a large extent of surplus value”. (T. Cliff, The Nature of Stalinist Russia, p. 45.)
However, this key argument was dropped after it was made clear to Cliff that from 1920 onwards, the bureaucracy had consumed a great part of the surplus value produced by the working class, legitimately and illegitimately. As Marx had correctly explained, in a workers’ state in the transitional period, the production of surplus value would be used for the speedy building up of industry and so prepare the way for the quickest possible transition to equality and then complete communism. No Marxist could maintain that the class nature of the Soviet state had changed because of this. Tony Cliff unceremoniously abandoned this argument without any explanation and subsequently developed new ones in an attempt to strengthen his theory of state capitalism. This summed up his whole eclectic approach to this question for the past 40 odd years.