The Soviet State (part 2)
The Russian State is powerful. Russian workers would be the first to agree with this, for their dependence upon the State as their employer is the measure of the State’s power over them. Again, the Communists may not agree that there is anything undesirable in this, but what did Lenin write about it in his book State and Revolution? “While the State exists there is no freedom, when there will be freedom there will be no state.”
There cannot be much of Lenin’s sort of freedom in Russia today, when the State has its fingers in every pie. Consider, for example, the Twenty Year Plan, recently published (Moscow, 1961) amidst much clamour, which promised free housing, transport and food to the Russian workers sometime between now and 1980. When this programme (a better word for it than “Plan”) is stripped of the ballyhoo, there is no difficulty in seeing it for what it is—a familiar document of Capitalism.
In Management of the National Economy and Planning, the statement: “The sphere of material production is the main sphere in the life of society” is the key to the situation which is illustrated by the following quotations:
“The Party attaches prime importance to the more effective investment of capital, the choice of the most profitable and economical trends in capital construction, achievement everywhere of the maximum growth of output per invested rouble, and reduction of the time-lapse between investment and return. It is necessary continuously to improve the structure of capital investments and to expand that portion of them which is spent on equipment, machinery and machine tools.” (Page 71).
“It is necessary for enterprises to play a substantially greater part in introducing the latest machinery.” (Page 73).
These passages leave no doubt that the Soviet government is as much concerned as any of its counterparts with the need to accumulate capital. And capital accumulation, let us remember, means capitalism. It means Capitalism in Great Britain and the U.S.A.—and the U.S.S.R. How is the Russian worker to be persuaded to pull his weight in making “more effective use of capital investment” and the rest? Why, in just the same way as the British or American worker is sometimes persuaded :
“In the process of Communist construction economic management will make use of material and moral incentives for high production figures.” (Page 73).
And to do all this, there is the intricate machinery of checkers and chasers, money grubbers and ledger slaves, all being urged to work harder and better:
“There must be a continuous improvement in rate setting, the system of labour payments and bonuses, in the financial control over the quantity and quality of work, in the elimination of levelling, and the stimulation of collective forms of incentives raising the interest of each employee in the high efficiency of the enterprise as a whole. It is necessary in communist construction to make full use of commodity-money relations in keeping with their new meaning in the Socialist period. In this, such instruments of economic development as cost accounting, money, prices, production costs, profit, trade, credit and finance play a big part.” (Page 74).
The only reference to Communist society in this section is as follows:
“When the transition to one Communist form of peoples’ property and the Communist system of distribution is completed, commodity-money relations will become economically outdated and will wither away.”(Page 74).
This is not explained until the next section of the programme:
“The task will be effected by (a) raising the individual payments of working people according to the quantity and quality of their work, coupled with reduction of all retail prices and abolition of taxes paid by the people; (b) increase of the public funds distributed among members of society irrespective of the quantity and quality of their labour, that is, free of charge, (education, medical treatment, pensions, maintenance of children at children’s institutions, transition to cost-free use of public amenities, etc.) “(Page 75).
This list is amplified later to cover housing, public services, public transport, holiday homes, public catering (mid-day meals).
Taxes
The programme may be ponderously worded, but its implied promises to abolish taxes, reduce prices and make public amenities free, are the stuff which wins by-elections in countries like England. Apart from that, what are they worth? The “abolition of taxes paid by the people” is only possible where the State is the sole realiser of surplus value, so that it can utilise part of the surplus for the running of the public services. Talk of “free services” is misleading and meaningless, because either the State has to pay the workers in wages to cover these services, or provide them directly, which may be cheaper because it can centrally plan and allocate expenditure. The State can budget more or less exactly because it knows that its expenditure is to be taken from existing and known funds, and not from an unknown income, such as fares payments, gas and electricity consumption.
Every “free” State service is a cost to the State as a whole. The plan for public catering, connected as it is to the prices the Soviet State must pay to the collective farms (Kolkhozes), is obviously meant to be financed in part, at any rate, in this way:
“It is essential that the level of state purchasing prices encourages the Kolkhozes to raise labour productivity and reduce production expenses, since greater farm output and lower production costs are the basis of greater incomes for the Kolkhozes.” (Page 68).
Now the main part of production expenses is made up of wages, so that if this section means anything, it is that the Russian farm workers will be expected to produce more for the same pay. A finer example of capitalist sophistry would be hard to find. This applies, too, on the industrial field:
“Technical progress and better production organisation must be fully utilised to increase labour productivity and reduce production costs at every enterprise. This implies a higher rate of increase in labour productivity as compared with remuneration, better rate fixing, prevention of loss of working time, and operation on a profitable basis in all sectors of production.” (Page 62).
Anyway, prices are only to come down (if at all) under certain circumstances:
“Prices must, to a growing extent, reflect the socially-necessary outlays of labour, ensure return of production and circulation expenditures and a certain profit for each normally operating enterprise. Systematically, economically justified price reductions based on growth of labour productivity and reduction of production costs are the main trend of the price policy in the period of Communist construction.” (Page 75).
And the entire programme is summed up by a passage which would be applauded at any Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Mansion House:
“It is necessary to promote profitable operation of enterprises, to work for lower production costs and higher profitability.” (Page 74).
Commodity production
This would be approved in the City of London because in this country wealth is produced for profitable sale—that is, it takes the form of commodities. The Russian State is urging the “. . . profitable operation of enterprises . . .” because in the U.S.S.R. also, wealth is produced as commodities. Stalin, as we saw in part 1 of this article, admitted that the Soviet Union “. . . has not abolished commodity production . . .” and went on, as he had to. to hedge this statement round with qualifications. But Marx was quite clear on the matter. The opening words of Capital read: “The wealth of a community in which the Capitalist mode of production prevails, appears as an immense collection of commodities.”
Marx’s analysis is still valid. Commodity production means Capitalism, whether it is in this country or anywhere else, including Russia.
What can we conclude from the Twenty Year Plan and from the other evidence which seeps through the Iron Curtain? The Soviet Union seems to be trying to become an ever-bigger monolith of an intensely automated, super-efficient, high-powered production machine. Such a nation must generate something of a momentum and values of its own. The Russian workers are caught up in a system which dictates its own terms. The Russians believe that this is Communism and presumably will go on believing so until Capitalism itself wakes them up.
Then they will realise that all the talk about the “all-round, harmonious development of the individual” and a “truly rich spiritual culture” (page 97) is so much humbug. Such concepts cannot flourish in a society that glories in production norms, because it produces people with a production norm mentality.
Alienation
The culture of a people is inseparable from its work. But Capitalism, in Russia and elsewhere, separates work from culture; for most of its people, work is an expenditure of their labour power which they must go through to get their living wage. It has nothing to do with culture and this fact is one of the chief reasons for social illness in a highly industrialised society. The shortening of the working day and the intensification of labour go hand in hand. But the increasing mechanisation and automation of industry must create a void between the worker and the object of his work; and what sort of culture came out of a void? “What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour?” says Marx. “. . . the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., that it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself.” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), Moscow, 1959, page 72.
It is the intention of the Soviet Union to outpace the United States in production; the only way to do this is to outpace them in the techniques of exploitation; but the result of this in America has been this very alienation—in an aggravated form—that Marx wrote about in 1844, and has been further commented upon by others since then.
The British constitution (what there is of it) does not say that the United Kingdom is a capitalist State, but we know that it is because the evidence says so. In the same way, whatever the Soviet: Constitution may say, the evidence says that Russia is a capitalist nation. As long as it remains so, the anomalies and problems of Capitalism will be visited upon its people.
We will not need a constitution to tell us when Socialism is established, because Socialism is a world in which “the Government of people is replaced by the administration of things,” where the whole object is to make men and women masters of themselves—for they have had masters too long.
I. D. J.