What was Built in the Soviet Union

By way of introduction to our discussion of what was or came to be built in the Soviet Union, I would like to share these two relatively recent statements from Paul Sweezy:

I have no doubt whatever that the Russian Revolution and the ones that followed—with a few obvious exceptions like the Iranian revolution—were genuine socialist revolutions with deep roots in an international movement that traces its origin back to the first half of the nineteenth century. The parties and their leaders who headed the revolutionary struggles were for the most part seasoned Marxists whose mission in life was to overthrow an unjust and exploitative system and to replace it with one based on the principles of socialism as expounded by Marx and Engels and their followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under these circumstances the revolutonary regimes that came to power were clearly socialist in character, and any attempt to deny or obscure this well established fact is a falsification of history.

After the revolutionary seizure of power comes the struggle to shape the post-revolutionary society….My central thesis, reudced to its barest essentials, is as follows: All the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century took place under extremely unfavourable conditions and against the fierce resistance of the leaders of the capitalist world from which they had broken away. The new revolutionary regimes were able to overthrow and expropriate the old rulers, and to this extent they succeeded in laying the foundation for a socialist society. But the life-and-death struggle to develop and protect the embryonic new society gave rise—whether inevitable or not remains a matter for debate—to a military-style cleavage between the leaders and the people which in time, and against the will and intentions of the original revolutionaries, hardened into a new self-reproducing system of antagonistic classes. This was obviously not a restoration of capitalism: that would have been the result of a victory of the counter-revolution, not of a development clearly internal to the revolutionary regime itself.

In the Soviet Union this process lasted roughly for a decade-and-a-half, coming to a climax with Stalin’s purges of the mid-30s that wiped out what was left of the old Bolshevik Party. The character of the post-revolutionary society was now established—neither capitalist nor socialist, an authoritarian class society with state ownership of the main means of production and central planning….

Again:

….to my way of thinking, the problem of the revolutions of the twentieth-century is that they did not bring to power the proletariat orgnaised as a class. What they did bring to power is tightly organised revolutionary parties drawn from elements of various sections of society. Those parties expropriated the traditional bourgeoisie but did not do away with the capital-labour relation as such. They substituted the state for the private capitalists as the employer of labour, unifying the many capitals which had grown up independent of each other in the course of capitalist history. That is not to say that all units of capital were put under one management, of course—only that all the separate managements became subject to the same ultimate authority, which now assumed the life-and-death powers that had previously been exercised by the impersonal forces of the market.

The question then arose of what we should call these states. They weren’t socialist, but were they capitalist? Charles Bettelheim and I had an exchange on this point, among others, that lasted a period of some years. Bettelheim thought that we should call the Soviet Union a capitalist society, but I thought that would introduce into our analysis preconceptions, expectations, and biases which would inevitably influence our findings and cause much confusion. To my way of thinking, the power, prestige, and privileges of the Soviet rulers did not derive from the ownership of private wealth but from unmediated control over the state apparatus and hence over total social capital. The Soviet Union, though a class society and not the socialist society it claimed to be, had none of the economic laws of motion comparable to those of capitalism. For example, there was nothing like the chronic unemployment typical of the West.

To proceed with our discussion, the Soviet Union was not a capitalist society for the simple reason that, appearances apart, it did not share in all the essential features that characterise capitalism. A capitalist economy, analytically speaking, is characterised by three interlinked and interacting features which determine its essential nature and functioning:

(1) Ownership of the means of production by private capitalists; (2) separation of the total social capital into many competing or potentially competing units; and (3) production of the great builk of commodities (both goods and services) by workers who, owning no means of production of their own, are obliged to sell their labour power to capitalists in order to acquire the means of subsistence. Of these, the Soviet system shared only the third feature with capitalism which however did not make it a capitalist system....

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IN the Soviet society it was entirely the other way around, the state was the master of economy. This was indeed the most important difference between capitalism and the Soviet social formation. With the establishment of state control over it, the economy lost the ‘auto-nomous’ character it has in capitalism, and the overwhelming dominance of capital through the market was replaced by the direct rule of a new ruling class which derived its power and privileges not from ownership and/or control of capital but from the unmediated control of the state and its multiform apparatuses of coercion. Supporting the new rulers at the top were subordinate interest groups, specially created political and economic institutions, and an accommodating ideology—all of which influenced the patterns of accumulation. But no blind forces of a capitalist economy were at work, which had been in large measure eliminated. In other words, the ultisation of society’s surplus—though produced, as under capitalism, by a propertyless working class—was no longer governed by laws that govern it under capitalism—the laws of value and capital accumulation. It was subject to no economic-structural logic, no ‘laws’ of any kind, including the so-called ‘laws of socialism’. It was governed instead by overall planning which, even as it makes for greater transparency in economy is also primarily a matter of politics, of mora or less open or hidden class struggles. In other words, the historically unique set of socio-economic relations which determine the specific form of the economic-political nexus under capitalism no longer existed in Soviet society. It had been replaced by a different one which, since it lacked an autonomous economic base and its ruling class did not have a structural location, role or responsibility within the economy but controlled it from above or outside, was not capitalist. It was rather, or formally at least, akin to that which existed in feudal and other exploitative pre-capitalist societies.

That is why it is not possible to analyse the Soviet-type society in terms of ‘capitalism’ or its ‘laws of motion’. It was not subject, like capitalism, to economic-structural compulsion to accumulate for the sake of accumulation, either at home or abroad. There was no economic necessity for it to polarise the society within into antagonistic classes or to go imperialist without, to exploit and despoil other national economies or plunder and ravage global economic resources as is the case with capitalism. War though terrible is also, as Lenin said, ‘terribly profitable’ for capitalists, but it was not so for the Soviet-type economy. The Soviet Union indeed detested the Cold War imposed on it because, as Professor Pessen said, ‘it condemns them to continuing deprivation’. Political or idelogical needs or compulsions, however understood or inter-preted, are different from the economic-structural needs or compulsions of capitalism, though their pursuit may have a similar trajectory and consequences. The Soviet Union indeed chose to go in for massive capital accumulation, seeking literally ‘to drive barbarism out of Russia by barbaric means’ (though it also involved extraordinary heroism and dedication on the part of the Soviet people and Communists). But this was the result of a deliberate political choice by the rulers, a choice compelled by the need to industrialise as rapidly as possible in order to survive and pursue their foreign policy interests in a hostile capitalist environment as also to build ‘socialism’ as they understood it, and where ideological considerations, born of a certain economistic or productivist bias in Marxism, decisively contributed to the making of the choice. It is in fact this ‘autonomy’ of politics as against ‘autonomy’ of economics of capitalism, ‘the politicisation of the surplus-utilisation process’ as it has been described, that permitted the Soviet society to introduce some rationality into economic management of society and to deal effectively (relative to capitalism) with some very basic problems affecting the lives of the masses—such as employment, education, health, social welfare and so on. Indeed whatever economic and social achievements the erstwhile Soviet Union had to its credit, they were the product of political decision-making and not the working out of any ‘laws of socialism’ or the structural logic of Soviet economy, certainly not of any Soviet form of ‘capitalism’.

[Excerpts from chapter 8 in the book, What was Built and What Failed in the Soviet Union, by the author, Aakar Books, 2011]

A distinguished teacher and former Professor of Political Theory, University of Delhi, the author has been associated with the communist movement since 1939 and has written several books on Marxism, socialism and Indian politics.