There was a remarkable symmetry between the crisis of world capitalism and Stalinism. Both the rule of the bureaucracy and the rule of the monopolies succumbed to arteriosclerosis. In both systems, we saw the proliferation of waste, chaos, and anarchy which held back the free development of the productive forces. Both sides pointed to the faults in each other’s systems. But neither was capable of playing a progressive role in developing society. In the West, the productive forces had grown beyond the limits of private ownership and the nation states. In the East, in the countries of proletarian Bonapartism, there was a crisis of bureaucratic control and planning. In addition, there was the aggravated crisis of imperialist exploitation of the impoverished countries of the third world. War and poverty are an inevitable accompaniment of the contradictions of the capitalist system.
The early Soviet state spent little on arms. The main strength of the Soviet Republic was in its internationalist policy and the support of the workers of the world, which destroyed the attempts to intervene militarily against the Bolsheviks in 1918-21. Whilst paying attention to the material requirements of the defence of the workers’ state, Lenin and Trotsky nevertheless insisted that the main priority was the improvement of the living standards and well-being of the mass of the population. In the last analysis, that was the real guarantee of the security of the workers’ state, in conjunction with the support of the international working class.
All this changed with the victory of Stalinist reaction. Limited and obtuse in its outlook, the bureaucracy looked to a massive programme of arms expenditure as a means of competing with imperialism in the world arena. It relied exclusively on diplomatic manoeuvres and military might. For the whole period of the cold war, military expenditure imposed a huge burden on the Soviet Union. Given the intensification of the arms race between Russia and the West, and the criminal conflict between the two rival bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing, expenditure on arms rapidly rose, devouring an ever-increasing proportion of the wealth produced by the Soviet working class.
This resulted in the formation of a powerful military-industrial complex in the USSR, with its own interests. A staggering 60 per cent of industrial output was earmarked, directly or indirectly, for the military sector, a monstrous incubus on the Soviet economy. As in the USA, the Soviet equivalent of the military-industrial complex spent colossal amounts of money in maintaining the vested interests and prestige of the military wing of the bureaucracy.
If this expenditure – both East and West – had been used for productive purposes, it could undoubtedly have solved all the economic and social problems of the terribly impoverished underdeveloped countries, the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union itself. But to imagine that this antagonism could be resolved through mutual ‘good will’ was to hark back to the ideas of the utopian socialists who believed that capitalists could be convinced by appealing to their ‘good will’ to adopt socialism. Foreign policy, as with home policy, reflected the vested interests of the imperialists on the one hand and the Stalinist bureaucracy on the other.
In 1961 alone there was a sharp 30 per cent increase in the military expenditure of the USSR. Fearful about the increase of American strategic weapons under the Kennedy Administration, the Soviet production of intercontinental ballistic missiles was stepped up from 50 to 200 a year by the mid-1960s. More missile-carrying submarines were commissioned. The surface fleet began preparing to compete with US forces on the oceans. Increasingly, with the intensification of the cold war, the arms race absorbed a massive amount of precious resources, and constituted a serious drain on the economy.
In Europe, the USSR had always had conventional military superiority, in numbers of men under arms and tanks. The production and development of nuclear weapons were seen as a means of overcoming this imbalance by the West. Although the estimates of military expenditure vary enormously according to the USA and the USSR, the figures for 1980 indicate a colossal burden on the economy. The Soviet figure for military expenditure was Rbs17 billion, or about $26 billion; the US figure for Soviet spending was $185 billion. The USSR figure is far too low, but the US estimate is also inflated. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a more reliable independent source of information, for the year 1980, the USSR spent $107 billion, while the USA spent $111 billion on arms.
For the defence of the USSR, Lenin and Trotsky relied mainly on revolutionary propaganda and an internationalist appeal to the world working class. The bureaucracy could not do that, because a revolutionary movement of the workers in the West would threaten the very basis of their rule. In any case, the hideous totalitarian one-party regime, with a sluggish economy bogged down by bureaucracy, had no particular appeal to the workers of the advanced capitalist countries – although the same was not true of the masses in the third world.
As time went on, defence expenditure became a crushing burden on the economics of the West as well as on the Soviet Union and its satellites. Nevertheless, the imperialist powers were not prepared to cut down the production of armaments too much through any agreement with the Soviet Union. A massive cut would have affected the military-industrial complex in the NATO countries. It would have reduced a vital market for those capitalist enterprises, which were paid to produce scrap metal by developing new weapons as old ones became obsolete. Under capitalism, any substantial cutback would seriously aggravate any developing economic crisis. Under Stalinism, it would transgress the interests and prestige of the military bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, their growing contradictions forced the imperialist powers to seek a ‘compromise’. All the imperialist powers felt the burden of arms expenditure and would have liked to cut the arms bill to some extent. In the Soviet Union, particularly during the Brezhnev era, investment on defence was up to 15 per cent of GNP, reducing spending on other sectors and slowing down growth. The attempt to reach détente with US imperialism through the SALT and other agreements was intended partly to cut down on wasteful military expenditure, partly a vain attempt to achieve global stability. Despite the underlying contradictions between two incompatible socio-economic systems, the two sides, dialectically, recognised that they needed each other. In reality, they leaned upon each other. The capitalists attempted to justify their system by pointing an accusing finger at the dictatorial regimes in the East, while the bureaucracy attempted to justify its privileged caste rule by pointing to Vietnam, unemployment and racism in the West.
Neither side had any interest in taking any serious action against the other. They tacitly recognised each other’s spheres of influence. Increasingly, they traded with each other. But that did not alter the real relationship between them. They still hated and feared each other. The fundamental antagonism between the capitalist world and the nationalised property forms of the deformed workers’ states had not been removed. And despite all the efforts to arrive at a modus vivendi and freeze world relations, the situation remained tense and uneasy. At any moment, the whole set up could be upset by explosions in one part of the world or another, bringing the underlying antagonisms to the fore.
President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in an astonishing interview in the New Yorker, which was reminiscent of the mad nuclear scientist film Dr. Strangelove:
It’s inaccurate thinking to say that the use of nuclear weapons would be the end of the human race. That’s an egocentric thought. Of course, it’s horrendous to contemplate, but in strictly statistical terms, if the United States used all of its arsenal in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union used all of its against the United States it would not be the end of humanity. That’s egocentric. There are other people on the earth. (Quoted by F. Halliday in The Making of the Second Cold War, p. 232.)
Even in the Reagan Administration, discussions took place within the military and government concerning the US capacity to destroy the USSR in the event of nuclear war. According to Colin Gray and Keith Payne:
Washington should identify war aims that in the last resort would contemplate the destruction of Soviet political authority and the emergence of post-war world order with compatible Western values… The USSR, with its gross over-centralisation of authority, epitomised by its vast bureaucracy in Moscow, should be highly vulnerable to such an attack. (Ibid., p. 52.)
These authors were later employed by the US government and their views became increasingly influential in the US defence establishment.
Of course, these opinions were not representative of the decisive sections of the ruling class, who understood that nuclear war is not a realistic option. Despite the widespread fears of a holocaust, there was no danger of a world war because under modern conditions a nuclear war between the superpowers would inevitably result in Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The capitalist class does not wage war for the sake of amusement, but to conquer foreign markets, raw materials and spheres of influence. A nuclear war would have led to mutual destruction and the end of the planet, which is precisely why it did not take place.
Recognising that developing the productive forces is the key to the stability of any society, Gorbachev aimed to reduce arms expenditure, in order to produce more consumer goods and boost the living standards of the increasingly restive Soviet people. That is why Gorbachev was prepared to concede more in negotiations with imperialism than he was offered in return. Another reason for the temporary détente between imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies in the 1980s was the dangerous social consequences of the super-exploitation of the ex-colonial countries.
The debt of the colonial countries to imperialism had reached $1300 billion. Rising interest rates and the widening gap between the relatively low price of raw materials and foodstuffs, the dominant form of production for the under-developed economies, and the relatively high price of the capital goods and industrial products, which are produced in the metropolitan countries, intensified the exploitation of the labour of the masses of the third world. This remorseless exploitation pushed them down into levels of poverty which were greater than at any time in the last 50 years. This was a formula for explosions and revolutions.