Author: skzb

The storming of the Winter Palace, October, 1917
There is so much confusion, vagueness, and even mysticism regarding the State that, in discussing it, I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps one of the most pernicious unfounded ideas is “there has always been a State.” In order to accept this, one must use such a broad definition of State that the term becomes meaningless. In particular, when we look at hunter-gatherer systems (according to the best information I’ve been able to find), we see a society without the fundamental element that, in my view, defines the State: compulsion. If there is no compulsion, and no threat of compulsion, and, above all, no organized force responsible for compulsion, then, whatever you’re going to call the social organization, it just isn’t a State.

The lack of compulsion was pretty clearly a product of egalitarianism—or, rather, egalitarianism meant there was no need for compulsion: no one had more than anyone else. In this write-up from Psychology Today, I was especially intrigued by the notion of “aggressive egalitarianism,” versus passive. The egalitarianism was, in turn, the result of scarcity. Lacking not only the means to produce a surplus, but (perhaps more important), the means to preserve what surplus nature might from time to time provide, meant no chance for an individual or a small group of individuals to accumulate wealth.

Before going further, a note on equality: I think the notion that “equality” refers to people being identical in every way is best left to reactionary science-fiction dystopias. But it is important to be precise about what is meant by the word, because it’s going to come up a great deal in this post. In brief, I mean equality in the sense that no one is entitled to a greater share of the products of human labor than anyone else, or a greater voice in how these products are distributed.

I’ve spoken before about the relationship between the State and class society, but this time let me look at it from the standpoint of its initial development: Once Man has invented the tools and technology (ie, agriculture) to regularly produce a sufficient surplus to permit the accumulation of wealth, and, thus, to support a leisure class, then the question at once comes up: how does this leisure class maintain its privileges, its luxuries, as against the rest of the population who, we might assume, would just as soon have some of the leisure and luxuries for themselves? If I am able to amass a certain amount of wealth from the labor of others—generally, at that stage of society, slaves of one form or another—then I can use some of it to pay for armed individuals to protect my privileges, and to enforce a monopoly on violence.

Once there is a group of armed individuals protecting the property and privileges of a leisure class, we have several things: First, we have a State, because that is exactly the definition I’m using. Second, we begin to have religious, philosophical, and moral injunctions to support the State. Third, we have, for the first time, the chance to hear someone say, “What do you mean leisure class? Do you know how hard I work?”

The question “when are two individuals part of different socio-economic classes, and when is one part a privileged layer of the same class as the other” is going to become very important, but I hope we can skip it for now. The point is, as long as there is socio-economic inequality, there must be a State. The State is a function of, and inevitably tied to, social inequality—in particular, inequality in the distribution of goods. As long as there is inequality, there must be a State; if there is a State, we know there must be inequality. The form of the State varies, but, in general, we can say that it always involves three aspects: a gendarmerie to maintain the property of the exploiting class, an army to deal with external threats, and a bureaucracy to handle the administrative details that inevitably come with the first two. These aspects may be larger, smaller, or combined in various ways, but they are always there. As society progresses, division and productivity of labor increases, relationships mediated by property become more diverse and powerful, and the State in general and the bureaucracy in particular becomes larger and more complex. Indeed, as capitalism advances through the industrial revolution, the bureaucracy becomes so large and complex that it begins to obscure the other functions, and make it appear as if the armed forces are secondary to it.

Another important function State begins to take on is that, except in unusual and extreme circumstances, it gives the appearance of standing apart from and above the contending classes, and mediating their conflict. Custom becomes codified into systems of laws that reflect the actual class relationships while giving the appearance of creating them—to identify the law as determining the relationship between classes is like saying thermometers cause changes in temperature, but it can sometimes look that way, if we ignore history and broader social context.

But with all of this complexity and fetishism, what always lies at the heart of it is the defense of inequality, of social privilege, and making certain those who create the material wealth of society are held in check and prevented from taking their share of it; in Trotsky’s words, “A special apparatus . . . for holding in subjugation the majority of the people.” And underneath the inequality is the inability of society to satisfy everyone’s wants.

So, then, two questions arise: 1) Once society is able to satisfy everyone’s wants, does that mean the elimination of inequality? And 2), Does the elimination of inequality necessarily mean the end of the State? In my opinion, the answer to both questions is yes. The first does not come without effort, without the overthrow of the State and placing it into the hands of the majority, and, even after that (as we’ll see in subsequent chapters) it is not an automatic result. The second is what I want to discuss here.

One argument for the Marxist view that the end of inequality will result in the withering away of the State was expressed by Hegel: “that which is rational is real, that which becomes irrational becomes unreal.” Or, in other words, once there is no reason for the State to exist, once it serves no purpose, why would it continue? Indeed, there are habits, customs, and expectations; but these by themselves aren’t powerful enough sustain a large bureaucratic institution of compulsion once there is no reason to compel. “The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand—as it does not now in any well-off family or ‘decent’ boardinghouse—any control except that of education, habit and social opinion. Speaking frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider such a really modest perspective ‘utopian.'”

The money spent by the ruling class on preserving its rule is like the rake in poker; it’s what you need to pay in order to have the game. It is not, by itself, the determining factor in how profitable the game is, but you certainly want it as low as possible. Hence, we can rely on the ruling class spending as little as it can get by with. Prisons, police, secret police, surveillance are not things that come cheap. Your likelihood of spending your money on a security system is a function of, primarily, how worried you are about being burglarized. And if you must install it, you spend as little as is required to provide a sense of safety. As we study generally “liberal” societies (the Weimar Republic, the Second Spanish Republic, Italy under Giolitti), we see the rise of fascism in response to the intensity of the class struggle; whereas such oppressive regimes as Franco’s in Spain and Greece under the Junta gradually became more liberal as the class struggle eased under the influence of the post-war boom. The same phenomenon is repeated, only faster, in several South American countries.

This observation is hardly profound: Society is as repressive as necessary to protect itself under given conditions. It can be complicated by custom, ideology, paranoia, and simple miscalculation on the part of the ruling elite; and it, too, has its dialectical element: sometimes a less oppressive state can reduce class tensions, and a more repressive State exacerbate them. But the general rule still retains its power. If anyone can suggest a counter-example—that is, an extremely repressive State in a peaceful society, or the reverse—I’d be glad to hear it. I believe we can simplify the matter into the following two laws:

1. There is always a correspondence between how repressive the State is at a given time and place, and the intensity of the class struggle.

2. The intensity of the class struggle is a reflection of the degree of inequality at that time and place.

I beg to submit that we Americans have seen this process up close for the last few years.

Knowing this, what, then, is the program of the vanguard party of the proletarian revolution after seizing State power? The workers councils, or similar organs, that made the revolution, become the sovereign power, and are guided by the principles of free election, and, moreover, immediate recall. Should there be full-time functionaries, they must be paid no more than the workers they represent, and “immediate transition to a regime in which all will fulfill the functions of control and supervision so that all may for a time become ‘bureaucrats’ and therefore nobody can become a bureaucrat.” This is Trotsky, quoting Lenin.

The analogy of a workers state to a trade union has often been made, with the further comparison of a deformed workers state to a corrupt trade union. As a thought experiment, consider how much better would be the condition of rank and file workers today if they were represented by unions in which the above policies were enforced.

So, that was the Bolshevik program for the State; why didn’t it work out that way? That will be for next time.

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The Left Opposition. Sitting: Serebryakov, Radek, Trotsky, Boguslavsky, Preobrazhensky. Standing: Rakovsky, Drobnis, Beloborodov, Sosnovsky

In 1626, Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus commissioned a ship. The Vasa began her maiden voyage on August 10, 1628. She was terribly designed, with serious balance problems, and horribly overloaded with decorations and brass cannon, and the first time she encountered a wind stronger than a mild breeze, she foundered and sank. The reasons for this disaster, which took the lives of 30 crew members, involved design errors combined with economic and political considerations. Scholars and engineers have learned a great deal about ship design since then, and studying the Vasa has been a useful part of that.

Taking the longest and most general view, human history can be seen as the gradual triumph of reason and planning over superstition and instinct. Where once we ducked into caves to protect us from a hostile environment, now we have the disciplines of engineering, architecture, and many related fields to build caves that are more suited to our needs, and climatology and other related fields to predict what those needs are liable to be at a given time and place. Where once we could only eat what nature provided, now we are able, thanks to agriculture, horticulture, genetics, and other fields to tailor food animals, fruits, and vegetables to provide more nutritious and digestible food in massively greater quantity and even with some consistency. And so on. This is not to argue that in any of the above-mentioned disciplines we are done learning—far from it. And all of them are to one degree or another limited by class society. But we have learned enough to make a difference in our lives, and in the last analysis, that is the point of the study of nature. It is also the point of the study of society, which, after all, is only a specialized division of the study of nature.

And this, in my opinion, is the importance of the study of history. Some say that we must study history to avoid repeating past mistakes, others that it is pointless because we never do seem to learn. Both are missing something important: this study, too, is a process. History itself—by which I mean, the collection of individual human decisions that determine general, long-term movements—is in theory as subject to conscious control as planting a row of corn. We know that planting corn crosswise on a hill will prevent erosion, but making that kind of conscious alteration in determining where we as species want to go, is still beyond us. Part of why we study history, or at least part of the effect of doing so, is to reach the point where we can subject our own destiny, our future, to planning and deliberate decision making.   And just as we do not solve the problem of excessive runoff and erosion from rows of corn on a hillside by ignoring the problem, so, too, we cannot hope to determine our own future without engaging with our past, without attempting to understand why things happened as they did, without making the effort to take control of what will happen next.

All of which is to ask a simple question: If we have understood the forces of nature well enough to intervene in them to make our lives better, and if it is possible to similarly intervene in deciding on the direction of our progress, why not do the same for the economy? I would assert that there is no reason why humanity is less capable of applying planning to the creation and distribution of human wants than to the questions of where to build a highway, how to build a windfarm, when to prepare for a hurricane. After all, in a limited, contradictory, anarchic way, any manufacturer engages in some form of this when beginning production of a new product.

One of the most important triumphs of the Russian Revolution was that it was the first sustained, large-scale effort at the creation of a planned economy. It was no more a finished product than the first time we built a bridge that required more planning than “drop a log over the stream” was the final culmination of the art of bridge building, but it was an important start that allows us to discover some of the difficulties we’ll be seeing in the future. As in all new techniques, the Bolsheviks began with an a priori scheme, then did their best to correct and adjust it. Even though (or perhaps because) it was attempted under difficult or impossible conditions, we can learn a great deal.

This is why, as we look at the chapter on the zigzags of the leadership, it worth also taking a look (call it extra credit) at The Platform of the Left Opposition. The Left Opposition was formed, informally at first, in 1923 and continued in spite of exile, imprisonment, torture, and murder, until the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. It was, from the beginning, engaged in all of the controversies of the day: the growth of bureaucracy, the suppression of democracy in the Communist Party and the Soviets, the program of the Third International (ie, the program for the world working class), and the economic choices that were so thoroughly intertwined with all of the others.

For this chapter, what I think it most important to establish, and the reason I bring in the program of the Left Opposition, is to show that there were alternatives to the major errors of the Stalin clique. No one would suggest that the economic proposals of the Left Opposition were “perfect,” and certainly no one would say they would have solved every problem confronting the workers state. But by looking at the bureaucracy’s decisions on the one hand, the Opposition’s proposals on the other, and especially the way the former had to hastily, spasmodically, and often brutally change direction and adopt the latter, it is possible to see that, even under the worst of conditions (or especially under the worst of conditions), one can see a way forward if one is looking.

What, then, were those decisions, those proposals? They involved every facet of economic life. The classic case regards the peasants. The Opposition saw the need for collectivization of peasant holdings, whereas the Stalin faction denied it, and instead turned itself toward the Kulak (the well-to-do peasant who employed farm labor), which was part of the middle class basis on which that faction rested. The result was that, instead of gradual collectivization driven by incentives, by an increase in quantity and quality of farm equipment, by education and by showing the actual advantages (and by making industrial decisions to help the peasant so there were actual advantages), the ruling group was suddenly, in panic, forced to collectivize by the most brutal, coercive means, turning massive sections of the peasantry against the workers state, and, at the same time, creating conditions where the collective farms, because they had been forced into existence ahead of the advanced machinery needed, were in fact less efficient in large numbers of cases, which increased the already dangerous dichotomy between city and village. “The blame for these sacrifices lies not upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling methods with which it was carried through.” This same sort of denial-followed-by panic-stricken-reversal runs like a thread of devastation through all of the decisions of the ruling group from 1924 to 1936. Consider, for a moment, with all that Soviet industry and agriculture managed, how much greater these accomplishments could have been with a better approach to planning the economy. But this brings up the question: why didn’t they? Is it just that the bureaucracy did not have planning technicians as skilled as those of the opposition?

Well, to be sure, making decisions about how to run something as complex as the economy of 150 million people requires skill and learning and trial-and-error, but I would argue that the difference between the Stalin camp and the Opposition camp was not about who was “smarter”; it was, like everything else, about social forces: Trotsky represented those forces that had made the proletarian revolution, Stalin the forces that were reacting against it, distrusting it. They were not individuals who had “better” or “worse” ideas, they were the representatives of particular social groupings, and carried out their tasks as best they could in the interest of those groupings. This leads us directly and immediately to the question: which forces did they represent, and how is it that those of the Stalin camp came out on top? That is the key question in all of these posts, and we’re getting there.

For now, when considering the planned economy, there is one thing I want to emphasize: When the Vasa sank, no one said, “Well, I guess we’d better not build any more ships, then.” We experiment, we learn, we study, we do it better, because there is no other way that progress happens.

 

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I spoke before of bourgeois revolution, taking for examples the most classic cases: the English Civil War and the Great French Revolution. At this point, I want to make a couple of observations about them, that are true in the case of every sort of revolution.

1. The economic pressure that results in the overturn of the State begins building considerably before the revolution: by the time the actual insurrection takes place, the new (in this case, capitalist) content has been built up to the point the old form is historically absurd.

2. Nevertheless, the fact that the new, progressive class (in our example, the bourgeoisie) now controls the State in its own interest, does not, in that instant, remove each and every vestige of the old (feudal-monarchical) system. For a greater or lesser time, these vestiges in law, in property relations, in custom and culture, in individual psychology, and in habits, remain in place until, over the course of a generation or two, they are finally left behind, and the new class can fully exercise its power and establish its imprint in all areas of life.

(In passing, it is because of this phenomenon that impressionists believe that the violence of revolution is “unnecessary,” because they see the evolution both before and after it, and consider it a pointless bump in a smooth flow of evolution. By this logic, of course, given the development of the fetus and the subsequent development of the infant, the violence of childbirth is “unnecessary.” But I digress.)

The same evolution-to revolution-to evolution must occur in the transition to socialism. The results of the October revolution were massive and sweeping: The banks and the major industries were expropriated, control concentrated in the State. The State itself became an organ of the Soviets, elected by the workers, the soldiers, the peasants. But it would be a mistake to think this instantly meant socialism had been accomplished, either in popular consciousness, or, more important, in all of the economic relationships—in particular, distribution. To be precise: production of goods was concentrated in the hands of the State, while distribution of goods still took place in the old way: the worker received wages, the peasant sold his product, and these were exchanged at the market for commodities.

This was inevitable—even under the best of conditions, it would take a certain amount of time to work out exactly how to distribute goods evenly and fairly, “to each according to his need.” I hope it is obvious that even distribution of goods requires, more than anything else, a society that can produce plenty for everyone; when the society cannot produce enough, some can have enough, others not. What then to do, particularly in the period of 1918-1921, when an impoverished nation, which had just made a broadly-based revolution in order, in large part, to get out of a war, was faced with yet another war? The answer was, quite simply, to hold out. The Bolsheviks themselves, during this period, were confident of two things: first, that given a period of peace, the potential for industrial growth was tremendous, and, second, that rescue by the world working class was bound to follow. “The theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact that all calculations at that time were based on the expectations of an early victory of the revolution in the West. It was considered self-evident that the victorious German proletariat would supply Soviet Russia, on credit against future food and raw materials, not only with machines and articles of manufacture, but also with tens of thousands of highly skilled workers, technicians and organizers.”

The first of these need not be justified as the facts and figures are there, as I mentioned in the previous post. As for the second—it did not fall out that way. This brings up what is, I think, a critical point in evaluating the economic and political decisions made by the Bolshevik Party: were they deceived in expecting this rescue? The prediction of a massive upsurge by the European working class was dead on. The prediction of revolutionary crises, in which the European worker had to confront the question of power, was also accurate. So where did it go wrong?  In Britain, France, Belgium, and especially in Germany where the working class had actually taken power, the infant Third International proved, in the event, too new and small to turn the tide of betrayal by the Social Democracy, which still held the trust of most of the working class in those countries. In 1919, the Social Democracy cooperated in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the fascist Freicorps, and gave power back to the capitalists. The Third (Communist) International was building as quickly as possible—parties sprang up in every major capitalist country, and most of the minor ones, and its influence within the working class grew. The Communist Party of Hungary took power (or, more precisely, was handed it by an utterly demoralized capitalist class), and workers in other countries rose. But there was simply not enough time. Building a mass party happens quickly when the objective circumstances are right and the program reflects the needs of the working class, but not instantly, and when the revolutionary crisis arose the working class was still too trusting in its Social Democratic leaders (no doubt helped a bit by the petty bourgeois dilettantes who insisted the Communist Party spent too much time criticizing other tendencies).

Still the belief held firm. The workers state must hold out, and must remain a beacon of hope to the international working class while it awaited rescue.

But, then, how to hold out? By the time of the failure of the first German Revolution, the Soviet Union had already been invaded, and everything was focused on survival: building an army, equipping it, feeding it, all under intolerable circumstances. This was the period of “War Communism,” in which the regulation of distribution of commodities was aimed, not at improving the life of the individual, but at survival in the face of foreign powers and Russian counterrevolutionaries determined to crush the Russian working class. It is a testament to the vitality of socialist property relations, and to the fighting spirit of the Russian worker and peasant, and to the leadership skills of the Bolshevik Party, that it held out at all. But the strain was incredible.

I spoke before about the relationship between peasant and worker—the worker’s need for the products of the peasant (food, and much of the raw material of production), and that, in turn, only through an improvement in farm machinery could the level of production of the peasant be increased. Co-existing with this relationship was one of prices. Price controls, of course, are nothing new: all of the major capitalist countries, certainly including the United States, have resorted during wartime and other crises to prices fixed by the State. But the tremendous pressure of poverty and civil war made this task especially difficult. Set the prices too low, and the peasant would refuse to sow, or hide his grain. Set the prices too high, and the worker would face starvation, or at best an inability to increase the productive forces.

And it is here that we arrive at one of the important features of a socialized economy: the novel role of the State in making decisions of prices and production. “…the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise.”

To the bourgeois economist or apologist for capitalism, of course, this is a weakness. Yet, we have seen from the growth of the productive forces how it is a strength, and is one of the things that permitted the Soviet Union to survive in nearly impossible circumstances. But this, too, has its reverse: to effectively direct the economy of an entire country requires studying and learning and a willingness to adapt to new circumstances; to experiment boldly and to analyze the results of the experiments honestly. For this to happen, Soviet democracy and freedom of discussion within the ruling party are among the most important features in order to ensure that the decision-making process is robust and flexible. For reasons that we’ll get to later, it was this democracy and freedom that was missing when, beginning around 1923—in other words, at the end of the Civil War—a bureaucratic clique gained more and more power. But before we study why this happened, we’re going to look at the results.

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