Back in the USSR
Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. By Stephen A Resnick and Richard D. Wolff. Routledge, 2002
"The exploitation of workers”, the authors contend, “prevailed across the entire history of the USSR. When one kind of exploitative class structure was overthrown, another soon took its place . . . The 1917 revolution displaced private capitalism in industry but established an enduring state capitalism there instead”.
This is the sort of thing we say but, as the authors point out, how you regard(ed) the former USSR depends on your definition of class and exploitation. According to them, those in the Marxist tradition have used two different criteria for defining class: one based on property (legal ownership) and one based on power (actual control). The first view (embraced by the official ideologists of the former regime and the Trotskyists and by many in the old Labour Party) is that capitalist class society is abolished when legal private property rights over means of production vested in individuals are abolished and replaced by state ownership.
Although a classless society will have to involve the ending of such legal private property rights, it is clear, if only from the experience of Russia, that this is not enough. Nor is it really a Marxian approach since it emphasies what the law (formal property relations) says rather than looking at what the underlying productive relations actually were. Hence the alternative definition: that class is defined in relation to who actually controls access to and the use of means of production. On this, arguably more Marxian approach, where there is state ownership the question arises of who controls the state; those who do would, in practice if not in law, be the owners of the means of production.
This second is the approach we came to adopt, arguing that Russia was not, and never at any time since 1917 had been, a classless society but a class society in which the workers were exploited by an exclusive group that controlled the state. In fact, it is the approach adopted by nearly all those who argue that Russia was, or became, state capitalist.
But, as Resnick and Wolff point out, it still leaves open the question of what a classless, socialist (or communist, the same thing) society might be. Some who use this argument say that Russia would have been socialist (or become socialist) if only the state had been democratically controlled by the population or if only industries had been controlled and managed by those working in them. We don't take this view because, for us, common ownership of the means of production implies the disappearance of production for sale and with it of markets, prices, wages and money itself. If Russia had retained these but become democratic it would still have been capitalist, even though a democratic state capitalism or a worker-managed capitalism would be an unrealistic utopia.
Resnick and Wolff use this ambiguity to criticise not just the “property” theory (the Trotskyist nonsense about Russia having been a “degenerate workers' state” is an easy target) but also the “power” theory and to advance their own “surplus” theory of class: that class structure is determined by who appropriates and distributes the surplus produced at enterprise level. If it's not the direct producers then there's exploitation of them by another class; if it is the direct producers then that's communism. That right from 1917-18 the surpluses of enterprises were appropriated by state officials is the reason they give for saying that Russia always was state capitalist. (We say it was because commodity production, the wages system and money never disappeared.)
This theory raises a number of difficulties, the first being the definition of communism. Because Resnick and Wolff concentrate on what happens at enterprise level their argument leads to the conclusion that communism can exist at enterprise level. This is, in fact, their argument; which makes producer co-operatives the typical communist organisation. Insofar as communism is equated with any kind of “common ownership” then such co-operatives could be called “communist” since the co-operative's assets and products are commonly owned by its members. In fact, in their detailed economic history of the USSR between 1917 and 1990 that takes up most of the book, the only example of “communism” they identify in Russia are the collective farms set up in the 1930s, on the ground that, legally, the surplus they realised was not directly appropriated by state officials but belonged to the farmers as a collective group.
Traditionally, however, “communism” has meant a communist society, i.e., a whole social system based on the common ownership of the means of living and their democratic control by all the people (when we ourselves talk of “common ownership” this is to be taken as shorthand for common ownership of all the means of production by society).
Resnick and Wolff are prepared to consider “communism” existing above enterprise level, by for instance whole industries being commonly owned by those working in them and even (as a theoretical limiting case) of all industry being commonly owned by all productive workers. So that, for them, a fully communist society would be one in which all enterprises and all industries would be owned by those working in them, so that it would be the producers who would not only produce the surplus but also appropriate it (i.e., it would belong to them as soon as it was produced) and, even if through delegation either to professional managers or to state officials, decide its distribution.
Such a society would have more in common with what the co-operative movement and syndicalists used to envisage than with what we understand by socialism or communism, especially as Resnick and Wolff envisage buying and selling relationships existing between the various commonly-owned enterprises and industries. Thus they talk about “communist” markets and even “communist” value, surplus value, price and profit—enough to make our hair stand on end and conclude that they are not talking about communism or socialism in the original sense of a society in which all the means of production and distribution are commonly owned and democratically controlled by all the people. Since in such a society what was produced would also be commonly owned by everybody (or by nobody, the same thing from another angle), the question that would arise would not be how and where to sell it but how to distribute it through non-market mechanisms. Value, prices, profits, wages, money, etc are capitalist economic categories that won't exist in socialism.
That Resnick and Wolff are thinking in terms of an economic system based on capitalist economic categories is also evident from their treatment of productive labour, which is behind their workerist position that the surplus(-value) produced in an enterprise should belong only to that enterprise's “productive” workers to the exclusion of its “non-productive” workers such as its purchasing, sales, cleaning and guarding staff.
Here again, they are employing a concept that is relevant only to capitalism. Under capitalism a “productive” worker is a worker who produces surplus value. This is because the aim of capitalism is to maximise the amount of surplus value produced. Thus, for it, only workers whose labour is exchanged against capital (as opposed to being paid out of income) are productive. This does not mean that other workers, paid out of someone's income, are not productive in the broader (and more normal) sense of productive of use-values. A tailor employed by a landowner or a capitalist to make him a suit still produces a suit even if they don't produce surplus value. Similarly, a civil servant by his or her work still provides a service (even if in many cases one that is only useful under capitalism). Anyone who works, whether for an employer, on their own account or as a volunteer, is productive insofar as they produce something, whether an object or a service, that is in some way useful to somebody. All such workers are productive of use-values.
Since socialism (communism) will be a society that will produce wealth solely in the form of use-values then everybody who produces any use-value will be productive, and there will be no sense in trying to distinguish those who, if society were still capitalist, would have been regarded as producers of surplus value. And even less sense in placing such producers in a privileged position with regard to other producers by allowing them the first say in how products should be distributed. That wouldn't be democratic and it's not socialist either. Socialism, we insist, is the common ownership of the means for producing and distributing wealth (i.e., use-values) by and in the interest of the whole community (including non-producers such as the sick and the old).
Adam Buick
Capitalism - Labouring In Vain
Krisis: Contributions To The Critique Of Commodity Society. (Chronos Publications, B.M. Chronos, London. WC1N, 3XX). 2002. 31 pages. £1.50p.
This pamphlet is a collection of essays from the German-based Krisis group, which has been developing its own take on Marx's critique of capitalism since the mid-1980s. Articles in various languages can be found at: www.krisis.org and may be of great interest to readers of the Socialist Standard.
In the essay Realists And Fundamentalists, Robert Kurz reminds us that:
“In 1992, the US economist Gary S. Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize for the theorem that even outside of the market, all human behaviour is aligned with cost-benefit viewpoints and can be mathematically depicted, even love” (P.15).
How have we come to a point where such unscientific and deeply alienated nonsense is given “intellectual” house-room; and what does this tell us about contemporary society? The answer of the authors of this pamphlet is one we would agree with: that this form of society (namely capitalism) is now historically bankrupt. But it is not dead, and in its ongoing, profit-hungry intrusion into every facet of human activity and experience it is dissolving everything, including human relationships, into something it calls “the economy”.
The big problem facing humanity, according to the Krisis group, is that capitalist society has effectively reduced all human activity to the category of “labour”. Or at least all activity that is “marketable”: that can be exploited to yield surplus value. However, with the technological productive powers humanity has produced under capitalism, much of this “labour” (what you and I have to do to make ends meet) is becoming more and more redundant. This creates a crisis for humanity, but only for so long as we continue to live in a society in which access to the means of subsistence is dependent on the sale of our minds and bodies to an employer for a wage. In a society based on a “to each according to their needs” basis, however, this abundance of productive power would be a positive benefit, freeing up human time and creativity in a way which may seem hard for us to imagine in these dark days.
A problem with this pamphlet is its acceptance of the bourgeois/leftist definition of “socialism” as a failed system of state planning. That said, Kurz is on our wavelength when he writes that the only way to stop the 21st-century turning into a bloodbath for humanity is to “formulate socialism anew and no longer in a state-run economic form. Only in this way is it possible that history will open itself again” (P.19).
The other big problem is Krisis's seeming rejection of class struggle, and of the working class as the agent for achieving the new society. They seem to see the class struggle as part of a process which has helped fetishise “labour”, and thus purely as an aspect of capitalist development, rather than the process which will transcend capitalism. We simply cannot accept this. We have to ask who, if not the working class as a conscious movement, is in a position to achieve the abolition of capitalism? If not the class struggle (which we all experience as part of the realities of our lives in a class society), then what process or motive force in the contradictory, conflict-ridden world of capitalism holds the seeds of humanity's emancipation? The authors seem to take a super-pessimist view of the working class, and it is perhaps this that causes them to dismiss our class as a revolutionary agent as much as any actual theory. In this they very much reflect the “death of the working class” spirit of the ideological age.
The workers, they argue, are largely enthusiastic participants in capitalism's fetishisation of wage labour:
“. . . in the crises of labour society, ordinary people (i.e. the subjects formed by capitalism) turn out to be the main obstacle for the abolishment of the prevailing fetish system. They do not want to stop working … The Titanic must not sink; the passengers want the music to keep playing” (P.5).
Oh, really?! We may prefer selling the best part of our days in return for a more or less crappy wage rather than exist on a pittance and see our dependents go without, but this hardly adds up to positive enthusiasm for wage slavery. Utter loathing of the “labour society” is familiar to anyone who has held down a job for any length of time. Even in countries like the UK, which were among the first to be colonised by the capitalist system, the state still has to go to extraordinary lengths to indoctrinate and discipline us into even a superficial acceptance of the capitalist “facts of life”. Alongside Work, School and Prison are still the other two parts of the bosses' holy trinity and always will be, as long as capitalism continues. True, working class resistance in itself is not going to be enough to change the world, as long as we don't consciously work for the revolutionary end of capitalism itself. But the fact that the working class has not at this point in time organised itself for this revolutionary end is no reason to reject “ordinary” people out of hand.
Where we do agree entirely is with the conclusion the Krisis group reaches about the only real solution to the barbarism humanity faces:
“The inescapable historical task is the negation of the negative mode of social reproduction itself, i.e. the liberation of the production of wealth from the restrictions of the modern commodity-producing system” (From article “Marx 2000” on).”
Or: wealth must be produced and distributed to meet our human needs, rather than to perpetuate an outdated capitalist mode of production which now offers nothing but misery and fear to the vast majority.
BM
