We shall now proceed to build, on the space cleared of historical rubbish, the airy, towering edifice of socialist society.
In order to understand the evolution of the USSR and what is taking place today, it is necessary to first of all understand Karl Marx’s theory of socialism and how the Bolshevik government attempted to follow this conception. As opposed to the utopian socialist ideas of the likes of Robert Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier, Marxism is based upon a scientific vision of socialism. Marxism explains that the key to the development of every society is the development of the productive forces: labour power, industry, agriculture, technique and science. Each new social system – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – has served to take human society forward through its development of the productive forces.
The prolonged period of primitive communism, humankind’s earliest phase of development, where classes, private property, and the state did not exist, gave way to class society as soon as people were able to produce a surplus above the needs of everyday survival. At this point, the division of society into classes became an economic feasibility. On the broad scales of history, the emergence of class society was a revolutionary phenomenon in that it freed a privileged section of the population – a ruling class – from the direct burden of labour, permitting it the necessary time to develop art, science and culture. Class society, despite its ruthless exploitation and inequality, was the road that humankind needed to travel if it was to build up the necessary material prerequisites for a future classless society.
In a certain sense, socialist society is a return to primitive communism but on a vastly higher productive level. Before one can envisage a classless society, all the hallmarks of class society, especially inequality and scarcity, would have to be abolished. It would be absurd to talk of the abolition of classes where inequality, scarcity and the struggle for existence prevailed. It would be a contradiction in terms. Socialism can only appear at a certain stage in the evolution of human society, at a certain development of the productive forces.
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 504, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, by Marx. Henceforth referred to as MESW.)
In contrast to the utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century, who regarded socialism as a moral issue, something which could have been introduced by enlightened people at any time in history, Marx and Engels saw it as rooted in the development of society. The precondition for such a classless society is the development of the forces of production by which superabundance becomes feasible. For Marx and Engels, this is the task of the socialist planned economy. For Marxism, the historic mission of capitalism – the highest stage of class society – was to provide the material basis worldwide for socialism and the abolition of classes. Socialism was not simply a good idea, but was the next stage for human society.
The historical mission of capitalism was to eliminate feudal parochialism, to develop a modern industrial economy, and to create a world market with a new world division of labour. In so doing, it would create its own grave-digger, the modern proletariat. This scenario was sketched out by Marx and Engels 150 years ago, in the pages of the Communist Manifesto. The development of capitalism today bears out that prognosis. With the concentration of capital into the hands of a small group of capitalists, the peasantry has been largely eliminated, while the working class has assumed colossal proportions, becoming a majority of the population in the advanced and even many developing countries. Likewise, capitalism has created a world market to which all countries are inextricably bound. In reality the material basis for a socialist society, bequeathed by capitalism, has been in existence on a world scale since the outbreak of the First World War. Huge industries and factories that have grown into multinational corporations, if publicly owned and democratically planned nationally and internationally, could create a world of superabundance.
At present, the concentration of capital on a world scale is reflected by the fact that a mere 500 multinationals dominate 90 per cent of world trade. Today, just one company, ICI, has sufficient capacity to produce the world’s demand for chemicals. The same could be said of many branches of industry. However, capitalism has reached its limits as a progressive system. Private ownership and the nation state act as straitjackets which stultify the productive forces and serve to hold society back. Two world wars, which brought us to the verge of human extinction, organic mass unemployment and periodic slumps of over-production are testimony to this impasse. As an economic system capitalism had in the past revolutionised the productive forces; now it acts as a massive fetter on further progress. In its lust for profit, capitalism threatens to pillage the world’s natural resources and eventually destroy the planet. Only the international planning of the productive forces can take society out of this blind alley. Marx believed that the tasks of the socialist revolution would first fall on the shoulders of the working class of the economically and culturally advanced countries of Western Europe. In Trotsky’s words:
Marx expected that the Frenchman would begin the social revolution, the German continue it, the Englishman finish it; and as to the Russian, Marx left him far in the rear. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 47.)
It is not feasible for society to jump straight from capitalism to a classless society. The material and cultural inheritance of capitalist society is far too inadequate for that. There is too much scarcity and inequality that cannot be immediately overcome. After the socialist revolution, there must be a transitional period that will prepare the necessary ground for superabundance and a classless society. Marx called this first stage of the new society “the lowest stage of communism” as opposed to “the highest stage of communism”, where the last residue of material inequality would disappear. In that sense, socialism and communism have been contrasted to the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ stages of the new society. In describing the lower stage of communism Marx writes:
What we are dealing with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. (MESW, Critique of the Gotha Programme, by Marx, Vol. 3, p. 17.)
However, for Marx – and this is a crucial point – this lower stage of communism from its very beginning would be on a higher level in terms of its economic development than the most developed and advanced capitalism. And why was this so important? Because without a massive development of the productive forces, scarcity would prevail and with it the struggle for existence. As Marx explained, such a state of affairs would pose the danger of degeneration:
This development of the productive forces is an absolutely necessary practical premise [of communism], because without it want is generalised, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive. (MESW, The German Ideology, Vol. 1, p. 37, my emphasis.)
The sole reason for the international character of socialism is the international character of the capitalist system itself. No one country has the material basis for a new classless society, or could guarantee the complete elimination of scarcity and want inherited from capitalism. Even a Soviet America, despite its colossal economic power, could not immediately accomplish the leap to socialist society. It could not provide everyone with as much as they needed. A transitional regime would be necessary – a democratic workers’ state – the key task of which would be to speed up the development of the productive forces and eliminate the vestiges of class society. This workers’ state was described by Marx as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
This much-abused term of Marx and Engels simply meant the democratic rule of the majority, which would take the necessary steps to overcome the resistance of a minority of exploiters. It was based on an historical analogy with the dictatorship of ancient Rome, when, for a temporary period (in time of war) exceptional powers were granted by the Republic to the government. After the experience of Hitler and Stalin, the word ‘dictatorship’ has become discredited. It is identified in people’s imagination with totalitarianism – something which was very far from the minds of Marx and Engels. In Marx’s day, it was free from such connotations and was synonymous with the rule of the working class. In fact, from the Marxist point of view, the dictatorship of the proletariat is synonymous with a workers’ democracy.
“Between capitalist and communist society,” states Marx, “lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” As all the greatest Marxist theoreticians explained, the task of the socialist revolution is to bring the working class to power by smashing the old capitalist state machine. The latter was the repressive organ designed to keep the working class in subjection. Marx explained that this capitalist state, together with its state bureaucracy, cannot serve the interests of the new power. It has to be done away with. However, the new state created by the working class would be different from all previous states in history.