Abstract
In his major work on the U.S.S.R. and Stalinism, Trotsky had recognised that
Theoretically, to be sure, it is possible to conceive of a situation in which the bourgeoisie as a whole constitutes itself a joint stock company which, by means of its state, administers the whole national economy. The economic laws of such a regime would present no mysteries. A single capitalist, as is well known, receives in the form of profit, not that part of the surplus value which is directly created by the workers of his own enterprise, but a share of the combined surplus value created throughout the country proportionate to the amount of his own capital. Under an integral “state capitalism”, this law of the equal rate of profit would be realised, not by devious routes — that is, competition among different capitals — but immediately and directly through state bookkeeping. (RB, pp. 245–6)1
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Notes
N. I. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, London, 1972, pp. 9–14. This ostensible agreement between Lenin and Bukharin on a generalised ‘model’ of imperialism should not be allowed to obscure significant differences in their respective analyses: see Cohen (1974), pp. 34–7.
Martin Shaw, ‘The Theory of the State and Politics: A Central Paradox of Marxism’, Economy and Society, vol. III (1974), pp. 429–50. Notwithstanding its title, the arguments elaborated in this article rest upon the un-Marxist premise that, both in the West and in the Eastern Bloc, ‘the apparatuses of the state fulfil the same functions’. Shaw himself was until very recently a member of Cliff’s tendency, the International Socialists.
Marx attaches two different, but mutually complementary meanings to the concept of socially necessary labour-time in Capital, corresponding to different levels of analysis. The social character of labour is asserted with respect to a) the social average level of productivity for the manufacture of a given class of product, and b) the total mass of a given class of product required to satisfy the social demand. See, on this, Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London, 1977), pp. 89–95.
Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Vienna, 1910), p. 286, cited in SCR, pp. 198–9. Hilferding, it may be noted, in an article written in 1940, rejected the applicability of the concept of state capitalism both with reference to the Soviet economy and that of National Socialist Germany, preferring to characterise both as a form of ‘totalitarian state economy’: see Rudolf Hilferding, ‘State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy’, repr. in Verdict of Three Decades, ed. Julian Sternberg (New York, 1950), pp. 445–53.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (Moscow, 1954), p. 42, cited in SCR, p. 203. In the Penguin edition (used throughout this work) this is translated as follows: ‘Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other’ (CAP, I, 165).
Tony Cliff, The Nature of Stalinist Russia (R.C.P. Internal Discussion Document), 1948
cited in Ted Grant, The Marxist Theory of the State, 1949, repr. Tyneside, 1973), p. 11. This sentence is omitted from the later, book-length versions of Cliff’s work, which appeared in 1955 (Stalinist Russia), 1964 (Russia: A Marxist Analysis), and 1974 (State Capitalism in Russia).
There are in fact important differences between Cliff’s account of the theory and its subsequent treatment by Kidron. For the most extended version of the former, see Tony Cliff, ‘Perspectives of the Permanent War Economy’, Socialist Review, vol. VI, no. 8 (1957), pp. 5–6 (repr. in the collection of articles A Socialist Review, London, 1965, pp. 34–40). Kidron’s version of the theory is set out in Michael Kidron, ‘A Permanent Arms Economy’, International Socialism, no. 28 (Spring 1967), pp.8–12, which forms the basis of Chapter III of Kidron (1970). See also Chris Harman, ‘Marxist Economics and the World Today’, International Socialism, no. 76 (March 1975), pp. 29–36, a review of a collection of articles by Kidron published as Capitalism and Theory (London, 1970). Essentially, Cliff emphasises the capacity of arms expenditure to offset overproduction crises, while Kidron theorises its imputed ability to retard the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
See Geoff Hodgson, ‘The Permanent Arms Economy’, International, vol. I, no. 8 (January 1973), pp. 54–66; Phil Semp, ‘The Permanent Arms Economy’. Permanent Revolution, no. 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 16–32; and David Purdy, ‘The Theory of the Permanent Arms Economy — A Critique and an Alternative’, Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists (Spring 1973), pp. 12–34.
For a brief account of the nature of the Asiatic mode of production, see Mandel (1971b), pp. 116–39. Perry Anderson, in his treatment of it in Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), pp. 462–549, has questioned the coherence of Marx’s conception of this mode of production. In their discussion of it, Hindess and Hirst reject the concept per se, regarding it rather as being an ‘empirical generalisation’: see Hindess and Hirst (1975), pp. 178–220. In so doing they articulate a systematic refutation of Wittfogel’s elaboration of it. The latter has defined the ‘monopolistic position of the ruling bureaucracy’ as the ‘key feature’ of what he designates an ‘agrodespotic society’, characterising the October Revolution as having resulted in a transition from an agrarian to an industrial despotism, that is, to ‘an industry-based system of general (state) slavery’. (Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, 1957, pp. 400–1.) Recently, a Soviet dissident commentator has attempted to recast Wittfogel’s appraisal in the form of an analogy, arguing that the U.S.S.R., like ‘Asiatic’ society, is both sui generis and inherently static, representing a ‘diversion’ in the historical ‘sequence’ of modes of production. In contrast to what he conceives as being the characteristics of the Asiatic mode, he considers the Soviet social formation to be unstable and potentially self-liquidating.
See A. Zimin, ‘On the Question of the Place in History of the Social Structure of the Soviet Union (An Historical Parallel and a Sociological Hypothesis)’, Samizdat Register (London, 1976), pp. 116–47.
In the post-capitalist economy, the primary consideration governing the introduction of technological innovations is their potential for reducing necessary labour-time, which is by no means synonymous with the reduction of labour costs under capitalism. Hence, those changes which might appear to be ‘false rationalisations’ from the viewpoint of the ‘mixed economy’ could well be perfectly viable. See Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London, 1977) pp. 521–9.
See, e.g. Lewin (1974), pp. 119–21; and Dimitri K. Simes, ‘The Soviet Parallel Market’, Survey, vol. XXI, no. 3 (Summer 1975), pp. 42–52.
See, on this, Tom Kemp, ‘Class, Caste and State in the Soviet Union’, Labour Review, vol. VII, no. 2 (Summer 1962), pp. 42–54.
Indeed, so strong was this conviction that the economic historian L. Kritsman still found it possible to write, three years after the inauguration of the N.E.P., that ‘In reality, so-called “War Communism” constituted the first great experience of a proletarian-natural economy, an experience of the first steps in the transition to socialism’. (Cited in Richard Day, ‘Preobrazhensky and the Theory of the Transition Period’, Soviet Studies, vol. XXVII, no. 2 (April 1975), pp. 196–219.)
E. A. Preobrazhensky, From N.E.P. to Socialism: A Glance into the Future of Russia and Europe (London, 1973), p. 88. The work, as the title suggests, is a projection of what the author considered to be the probable future development of the Soviet social formation, being supposedly based on a series of lectures given in the year 1970; pp. 87–93 consist of an examination of the future role of money and exchange relations, together with an anticipatory account of their eventual disappearance.
Dobb has argued that collectivisation was an expedient to facilitate the mobilisation of sufficient agricultural surplus to maintain the level of real wages, keeping pace with the expansion of the industrial workforce (the urban population grew from thirty to around sixty million during the 1930s), while at the same time launching a massive programme of investment in heavy industry. (See Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, 6th edn, London, 1966, p. 225.) However that may be, it is clear that, in real terms, a vastly enlarged working class had to subsist on a total mass of consumer goods which was not only relatively, but indeed absolutely decreased. The peasants’ destruction of crops and slaughter of livestock, and the decline and continuing stagnation of agricultural production thereby engendered, reacted, as Deutscher has emphasised,
Notwithstanding the value of the theoretical insights developed by Preobrazhensky in The New Economics, it must also be recognised that the work placed an almost exclusive emphasis on internal accumulation, tending towards autarchy and, indeed, ‘socialism in one country’, thereby underestimating the importance of selective participation in international trade, backed by a growing technology and productivity in the relevant sectors of the economy. It is not surprising, therefore, that Trotsky’s collaboration with Preobrazhensky in the Left Opposition was not free from strain: see, on this, Day (1973), pp. 145–8. Preobrazhensky’s acclamation of Stalin’s ‘left course’ in 1928–29 was a clear demonstration of the implications of his problematic. As Avenas has remarked: ‘His position on economics led him to conceive of state policy as nothing but the result of the struggle between the two economic systems co-existing in N.E.P., a dangerously mechanistic way of viewing the problem’. (Denise Avenas, ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’, Part II, International, vol. III, no. 3 (Spring 1977), pp. 33–48.)
A similar appraisal might well be made of the work of Andrle, whose conclusions correspond very closely with those of Ticktin. See Vladimir Andrle, Managerial Power in the Soviet Union (Farnborough, 1976), pp. 145–53.
For Marx’s most systematic statements of his own methodology, see PP, pp. 90–110; the Introduction to the Grundrisse; and the Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’ s ‘Lehrbuch der politischen Okonomie’. The two last-mentioned are presented in new, annotated English translations in Terrell Carver, Karl Marx: Texts on Method (Oxford, 1975), and are also reproduced, respectively, in PGR, pp. 83–111, and Theoretical Practice, no. 5 (1972), pp. 40–64.
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© 1979 Paul Bellis
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Bellis, P. (1979). The Theory of State Capitalism and the Soviet Economy. In: Marxism and the U.S.S.R.. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04409-2_6
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