Twentieth Century Socialism: Anti-Emancipatory, Enslaving

by PARESH CHATTOPADHYAY

Today there is a curious convergence of views between the Right and the dominant Left on the meaning of socialism. Put more concretely, for both the Right and dominant Left socialism refers to the system which came into being as a sequel to the conquest of political power by the Bolsheviks in Russia, 1917, and this system signifies a society governed by a single political party where the means of production are owned predominantly by the state and not privately, and the economy is directed by central planning. Needless to add, the Right looks at this ‘socialism’ negatively while the (dominant) Left considers this ‘socialism’ positively. Both these tendencies, again, assert the origin of this socialism in the ideas of Karl Marx.

Now that this socialism has almost evaporated, two kinds of responsibility have been attributed to Marx involving two kinds of criticism of Marx in regard to this socialism.

First, it is held that since the inspiration for this system supposedly came from Marx, its disappearance only shows the failure of Marx’s ideas. Similarly, under the same assumption that this socialism was Marx’s brain-child, a contrary charge is directed against him. Here the point is stressed that the horrible reality of this system in practice—shown, above all, in its relation to human individuals—only demonstrates that (Marxian) socialism by nature is repressive, that is, it is an inhuman regime.

The second kind of responsibility attributed to Marx and, consequently, the second kind of criticism of Marx is very different. It involves Marx’s prognostication of the future after capitalism. The affirmation is made that what Marx had envisaged for the future, that capitalism undermined by its own inner contradictions would go out of existence yielding place to a new, infinitely more humane society—socialism—has been proved wrong. Capitalism continues to exist in spite of all its ups and downs, and socialism continues to elude humanity. Marx’s vision has simply proved to be unrealisable, It has turned out to be a utopia.

The present paper is concerned with demonstrating that the socialism in Marx is completely different from, if not opposed to, the socialism as we find in its common theoretical presentation as well as in the practice in its name in the twentieth century and that what Marx had envisaged as socialism has not yet even been tried.

Secondly, as regards the alleged failure of Marx’s prognostication of society after capital, the advent of socialism in Marx’s sense is conditional upon the presence of certain material and subjective conditions which require a prolonged historical period for their fruition within the existing society itself before the new society could appear, for which Marx did not set any calendar.

Marx’s emancipatory socialist project has lost none of its lustre and is still worth striving for. We are here concerned mostly with the notion of socialism, first in Marx, then its later trans-formation. In this text expressions within inverted commas are all Marx’s, unless stated otherwise.

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IN what follows first a synoptic overview of the Marxian notion of socialism is offered. Then we argue how the original notion was metamorphosed into its very opposite in the twentieth century and as such was carried out in reality. Both as regards the notion of socialism and its reality in the last century we consider socialism in Russia after October 1917 as the prototype of all later socialisms. Then very briefly we refer to China as the second great example of the metamorphosed socialism.

First, a word on the confusion about the term ‘socialism.’ The widespread idea that socialism and communism are two successive societies and that the first is a transition to the second is not found in any text of Marx and is of later vintage. For Marx, as alternative terms, they refer to the same society each passing through more than one stage.

The conditions for the rise of socialism are not given by nature. Socialism is a product of history. It is capital which creates the material conditions and the subjective agents for transforming the present society into socialism, called by Marx “a society of free and associated individuals”. The subjective or active agents—the most important element—are the labouring people, selling their working capacity (manual and mental) for wages and salaries. Even with all its contradictions capitalism will not disappear on its own. This task is achieved by the revolution of the labouring people where the seizure of political power by labouring people themselves—not by a group/party in their name—is really the “conquest of democracy”. This act is only the “first step in the revolution” which continues over a long period—the “period of revolutionary transformation”—the period required for creating the conditions for the abolition of all classes, including the labouring class—only at the end of which the revolution can be regarded as victorious ushering in socialism, a union of free indiviuals, where individuals are finally free in so far as they are no longer under personal subjection (slavery in its different forms including patriarchy), nor under material subjection (commodity production leading to capital) where the producers are dominated by their own products mediated by the latter’s owners.

Similarly, with the classes gone, the state also disappears. The individuals are now under their own self-created, self-governed Association bringing the ownership and control of the conditions of production directly under society itself. The new society casts away the elements of alienation and subjugation of the individual-private ownership of means of production, commodity production, wage labour, state. The human history does not end here, it only begins, leaving the inhuman conditions of “humanity’s pre-history” behind. Now let us see how this notion of socialism was metamorphosed into the twentieth century’s notion of socialism, its very opposite.

The enterprise starts with Lenin’s exposition in his brochure State and Revolution, wrongly supposed by many to be libertarian. Here he speaks of socialism basically in juridical terms, not in terms of the real relation between the capitalists and the workers in the production process. Arbitrarily, contrary to Marx, he differentiates between socialism and communism in which the first stands for the lower phase of communism. For him socialism is “social ownership” of the means of production which he further specifies as “ownership by the working class state”, sometimes substituting it by the expression “socialist state”. This is totally contrary to Marx’s emphasis on the society itself and not the state—which disappears in a classless society—being the (collective) owner of the means of production. Here Lenin has successfully stood Marx on his head.

Similarly, for the first phase of communism (Lenin’s socialism) Lenin envisages the economy as one “state syndicate” or one “single factory” where “all citizens” are transformed into “hired employees of the state”(emphasis added). What a contrast with Marx who in his “Inaugural Address” (1864) to the International had clearly distinguished between “hired labour”(of capitalism) and “associated labour”(of socialism)! For Marx what Lenin is talking about is simply the “state itself as capitalist,” “ in so far as it employs wage labour”. So, what Lenin presents as socialism is really state capitalism..

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IT was Stalin who, following Lenin’s lead on the concept of socialism, gave it the finished form on which the whole rationale of twentieth century socialism was founded. Needless to add, Stalin totally subscribes to the Leninist identity of socialism with Marx’s “first phase of communism” and the Leninist idea of socialism as the transition to communism. Stalin’s inversion of Marx’s materialist position. goes even further than Lenin’s. Stalin specifically makes “ownership of means of production the basis of production relations”, and state ownership of means of production is again, à la Lenin, identified with socialist ownership. Lenin’s idea of citizens as hired wage labourers of the state in socialism is also taken over by Stalin.

Stalin’s ‘improvement’ on Lenin’s position here lies in his statement that given the absence of private property in the means of production in socialism, labor power has ceased to be a commodity and that there are no hired wage labourers. However, the labourers receive their remuneration “in the form of wage” reflecting the material incentive according to the quantity and quality of labour. But this “wage under socialism is fundamentally different from wage under capitalism” because contrary to what happens in capitalism, labour power under socialism is not a commodity. In other words, wages exist and labour exists, but wage labour does not. It seems Lenin lacked this ‘subtle’ logic of his seminarist follower. Again, while justifying the existence of commodity production due to the existence of two forms of ownership—state, and collective farm—the commodity here is considered, nevertheless, as socialist and not capitalist given the absence of private ownership.

So we have socialist commodity and socialist wage as the specific products of socialism, claimed as completely different from their counterparts in capitalism. It should be stressed that the fundamental rationale for the existence of socialism in the new regime—underlined by Stalin following Lenin, from which all its other characteristics follow—is the alleged absence of private property in the means of production. Here private property signifies, following Lenin, “property of separate individuals”. Now, Marx had shown that the notion private property in this sense was taken over by bourgeois juris-prudence from the Roman law, but individual private property tends to disappear within capitalism itself through the dynamic of accumulation, ceding place to “collective property” beginning with share companies.

However, Marx has another, more profound, meaning of private property in means of production. In this sense private property in a society exists when the vast majority has no property except their labouring capacity to dispose of, as opposed to the minority mono-polising the means of production. This property is the “private property of a part of society”, “class private property” standing opposed to the wage and salary earners.

In the Communist Manifesto when Marx and Engels speak of the “abolition of private property” as the task of the workers’ revolution, they explicitly mean the “disappearance of class property”. Marx repeats this in his address on the 1871 Paris Commune. One could indeed advance the proposition: the existence of wage labour (the outcome of non property by the majority) is a necessary and sufficient condition of the existence of capital. Hence ownership of the means of production by the state with continuing wage labour (which implies commodity production) is effectively the “private property of a part of society”. This ends only when the new classless(necessarily stateless) society itself takes over the means of production.

Stalin’s notion of socialism, as summarised here, became the uncritically accepted notion of socialism in all the party-state regimes which followed the Russian. Mao, while critical of a number of things in Stalin, accepted substantially this ‘model’, though he understood the contradictions this notion contained. Towards the end of his life, he said: “ China is a socialist country… At present our country practices the commodity system, an eight grade wage system, and the wage system is unequal, and in all this scarcely different from the old society. The difference is that the ownership has changed.” Needless to add, by the same logic the Cuban régime also has been characterised as socialist.

As a matter of fact, in reality, in all the 20th century regimes characterising themselves as socialist, commodity production and wage labour, instead of being abolished, steadily increased over the decades under the protection of state ownership of the means of production which in its turn remained completely separated and alienated from the direct producers, The state machinery itself instead of tending towards its demise, increasingly fortified itself and became far more repressive of the individuals than many of the bourgeois regimes. Far from being emancipated, the labouring people, only possessing their own labour power, remained “wage slaves”. What a contrast with the “Association of free and equal individuals” that socialism was originally meant to be!

The author teaches at the University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada)