This is about the introductory section of this chapter, which ought to add another layer to our understanding of the character of the USSR under the bureaucracy that really rose to power in the USSR in the early 1920s.
This is a preparation for later sections of this chapter, which address some of the complex questions that caused major political problems for the Trotskyist movement as conflicts heated up between the degenerated USSR and imperialism in more recent times.
It is one thing to fight hard to defend a state which the movement considered to be led by good communists, internationalists and revolutionaries.
It is quite another to have the clear sightedness to understand the need to defend a state that clearly embodied gains for the working class, but at the same time was led by forces that were increasingly hostile to the revolutionary movement and even used mass repression to attempt to defeat it.
Clarifying what had to be defended, what had to be rejected, and how to defend and remedy those things, is of crucial importance.
Those are the questions this chapter addresses: the character of the USSR in some theoretical depth.
The introduction sets the scene with some observations about the economics of the degenerating USSR, and social and economic inequality.
First all it deals with the contradiction between the formally increasing statification of various aspects of the economy of the USSR, and the real material content of those changes in terms of progress, real or alleged, towards socialism.
This focuses on the contradictions we have explored when discussing earlier chapters, such as those between proletarian relations of production – formal economic planning etc, and bourgeois relations of distribution.
Thus, Trotsky examines the apparent statification of the USSR’s economy, and goes through some of the raw figures, quoting the official optimism about them:
“According to the census of 1934, 28.1 per cent of the population were workers and employees of state enterprises and institutions. Industrial and building-trades workers, not including their families, amounted in 1935 to 7.5 millions. The collective farms and co-operative crafts comprised, at the time of the census, 45.9 per cent of the population. Students, soldiers of the Red Army, pensioners, and other elements directly dependent upon the state, made up 3.4 per cent. Altogether, 74 per cent of the population belonged to the “socialist sector”, and 95.8 per cent of the basic capital of the country fell to the share of this 74 per cent. Individual peasants and craftsmen still comprised, in 1934, 22.5 per cent, but they had possession of only a little more than 4 per cent of the national capital!
“Since 1934 there has been no census; the next one will be in 1937. Undoubtedly, however, during the last two years the private enterprise sector has shrunk still more in favour of the ‘socialist.’ Individual peasants and craftsmen, according to the calculations of official economists, now constitute about 10 per cent of the population – that is, about 17 million people. Their economic importance has fallen very much lower than their numbers. The Secretary of the Central Committee, Andreyev, announced in April 1936: ‘The relative weight of socialist production in our country in 1936 ought to reach 98.5 per cent. That is to say, something like an insignificant 1.5 per cent still belongs to the non-socialist sector.’”
But then Trotsky sounds a huge note of caution:
“These optimistic figures seem at first glance an unanswerable proof of the ‘final and irrevocable’ victory of socialism. But woe to him who cannot see social reality behind arithmetic!”
And almost immediately he begins addressing what this means in practice, given the current levels of material development of the USSR:
“The enormous and wholly indubitable statistical superiority of the state and collective forms of economy, important though it is for the future, does not remove another and no less important question: that of the strength of bourgeois tendencies within the ‘socialist’ sector itself, and this not only in agriculture but in industry. The material level already attained is high enough to awaken increased demands in all, but wholly insufficient to satisfy them. Therefore, the very dynamic of economic progress involves an awakening of petty bourgeois appetites, not only among the peasants and representatives of “intellectual” labour, but also among the upper circles of the proletariat. A bare antithesis between individual proprietors and collective farmers, between private craftsmen and state industries, does not give the slightest idea of the explosive power of these appetites, which imbue the whole economy of the country, and express themselves, generally speaking, in the desire of each and every one to give as little as possible to society and receive as much as possible from it.”
It should be understood that this is not per se about the moral failings of individuals, or whole layers or even classes. It is about productive capacity, the presence or absence of the material base to achieve social and economic equality, and thus social and political stability around a would-be socialist project:
“No less energy and ingenuity is being spent in solving money-grubbers’ and consumers’ problems than upon socialist construction in the proper sense of the word. Hence derives, in part, the extremely low productivity of social labour. While the state finds itself in continual struggle with the molecular action of these centrifugal forces, the ruling group itself forms the chief reservoir of legal and illegal personal accumulations. Masked as they are with new juridical norms, the petty bourgeois tendencies cannot, of course, be easily determined statistically. But their actual predominance in economic life is proven primarily by the “socialist” bureaucracy itself, that flagrant [contradiction in terms], that monstrous and continually growing social distortion, which in turn becomes the source of malignant growths in society.”
And thus he dissected the Stalin constitution of 1936, with its assertion that “the state property” is “the property of the whole people”, by exploring the question of bourgeois norms of distribution, and how they impact on “the property of the whole people” … that is, state property in the means of production.
The real character of state property and its development into socialist property represents what Trotsky in this section calls the ‘dialectic of interaction”:
“State property becomes the property of “the whole people” only to the degree that social privilege and differentiation disappear, and therewith the necessity of the state. In other words: state property is converted into socialist property in proportion as it ceases to be state property. And the contrary is true: the higher the Soviet state rises above the people, and the more fiercely it opposes itself as the guardian of property to the people as its squanderer, the more obviously does it testify against the socialist character of this state property.”
Trotsky points out the official Soviet press was compelled to acknowledge some of this, that “We are still far from the complete abolition of classes,” referring to the still existing differentiation of city and country, intellectual and physical labour. They talked about ‘survivals’ of the old inequality.
But this concealed the income of the bureaucracy under the category of intellectual labour, and therefore:
“… these much put-upon “survivals” are completely inadequate to explain the Soviet reality. If the differences between city and country have been mitigated in certain respects, in others they have been considerably deepened, thanks to the extraordinarily swift growth of cities and city culture – that is, of comforts for an urban minority. The social distance between physical and intellectual labour, notwithstanding the filling out of the scientific cadres by newcomers from below, has increased, not decreased, during recent years. The thousand-year-old caste barriers defining the life of every man on all sides – the polished urbanite and the uncouth muzhik, the wizard of science and the day labourer – have not just been preserved from the past in a more or less softened form, but have to a considerable degree been born anew, and are assuming a more and more defiant character.”
He evokes the slogan that echoed from the top of the bureaucracy “the cadres decide everything” – the cult of the “cadres” being “a cult of bureaucracy, of officialdom, an aristocracy of technique.”
Thus formally, in terms of ownership of the means of production, there is equality “between a marshal and a servant girl, the head of a trust and a day labourer, the son of a people’s commissar and a homeless child”. But …
“Nevertheless, the former occupy lordly apartments, enjoy several summer homes in various parts of the country, have the best automobiles at their disposal, and have long ago forgotten how to shine their own shoes. The latter live in wooden barracks often without partitions, lead a half-hungry existence, and do not shine their own shoes only because they go barefoot. To the bureaucrat this difference does not seem worthy of attention. To the day labourer, however, it seems, not without reason, very essential.”
So, he concretises the dialectic referred to earlier:
“The destiny of the state-appropriated means of production will be decided in the long run according as these differences in personal existence evolve in one direction or the other. If a ship is declared collective property, but the passengers continue to be divided into first, second and third class, it is clear that, for the third-class passengers, differences in the conditions of life will have infinitely more importance than that juridical change in proprietorship. The first-class passengers, on the other hand, will propound, together with their coffee and cigars, the thought that collective ownership is everything and a comfortable cabin nothing at all. Antagonisms growing out of this may well explode the unstable collective.”
And he fleshes this out in terms of a similar set of formulas to those often used by Marx in Capital, this time to explain the influence of bourgeois norms of distribution, on the workers’ state. He sets the scene thus:
“If we translate socialist relations, for illustration, into the language of the market, we may represent the citizen as a stockholder in a company which owns the wealth of the country. If the property belonged to all the people, that would presume an equal distribution of ‘shares’, and consequently a right to the same dividend for all ‘shareholders.’ The citizens participate in the national enterprise, however, not only as ‘shareholders’, but also as producers.
Trotsky then works through the implications. He talks about how, with the lower stage of communism (we call this ‘socialism’), payments for labour are still made according to bourgeois norms – that is, in dependence upon skill, intensity, etc.
He divides the (theoretical) income of each citizen is thus composed of two parts, (a) (that is, the dividend from ownership), and (b) – wages.
So, the total income for a worker in a workers’ state on the road to socialism would be a + b. He points out that:
“The higher the technique and the more complete the organization of industry, the greater is the place occupied by a as against b, and the less is the influence of individual differences of labour upon standard of living.”
But here’s the rub:
“From the fact that wage differences in the Soviet Union are not less, but greater than in capitalist countries, it must be inferred that the shares of the Soviet citizen are not equally distributed, and that in his income the dividend as well as the wage payment is unequal. Whereas the unskilled labourer receives only b, the minimum payment which under similar conditions he would receive in a capitalist enterprise, the Stakhanovist or bureaucrat receives 2a + b, or 3a + b, etc., while b also in its turn may become 2b, 3b, etc. The differences in income are determined, in other words, not only by differences of individual productiveness, but also by a masked appropriation of the products of the labour of others. The privileged minority of shareholders is living at the expense of the deprived majority.”
He goes on …
“If you assume that the Soviet unskilled worker receives more than he would under a similar level of technique and culture in a capitalist enterprise – that is to say, that he is still a small shareholder – it is necessary to consider his wages as equal to a + b. The wages of the higher categories would be expressed with the formula: 3a + 2b, 10a + 15b, etc. This means that the unskilled worker has one share, the Stakhanovist three, the specialist ten. Moreover, their wages in the proper sense are related as 1:2:15.”
And thus, he concludes:
“Hymns to the sacred socialist property sound under these conditions a good deal more convincing to the manager or the Stakhanovist, than to the rank-and-file worker or collective peasant. The rank-and-file workers, however, are the overwhelming majority of society. It was they, and not the new aristocracy, that socialism had in mind.”
So, when Pravda wrote that …
“The worker in our country is not a wage slave and is not the seller of a commodity called labour power. He is a free workman.”
… it was impermissibly bragging. The workers state’s capacity to really liberate the worker from economic slavery depends on the development of a basic level of technique:
“In order to raise this level, the new state resorted to the old methods of pressure upon the muscles and nerves of the worker. There grew up a corps of slave drivers. The management of industry became superbureaucratic. The workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a ‘free workman.’ In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer. Free labour is incompatible with the existence of a bureaucratic state.”
Though this addresses mainly the situation in the towns, Trotsky notes that a similar contradiction between forms and social content occurs in the countryside:
“Pravda writes that the collective farms ‘are in essence already of the same type as the state enterprises and are consequently socialistic,’ but immediately adds that the guarantee of the socialist development of agriculture lies in the circumstance that ‘the Bolshevik Party administers the collective farms.’”
But this means:
“… in essence that socialist relations are not as yet embodied in the real relations among men, but dwell in the benevolent heart of the authorities. The workers will do very well if they keep a watchful eye on that heart. In reality the collective farms stand halfway between individual and state economy, and the petty bourgeois tendencies within them are admirably helped along by the swiftly growing private allotments or personal economies conducted by their members.”
In concluding this section:
“When the new constitution announces that in the Soviet Union ‘abolition of the exploitation of man by man’ has been attained, it is not telling the truth. The new social differentiation has created conditions for the revival of the exploitation of man in its most barbarous form – that of buying him into slavery for personal service. In the lists for the new census personal servants are not mentioned at all. They are, evidently, to be dissolved in the general group of “workers.” There are, however, plenty of questions about this: Does the socialist citizen have servants, and just how many (maid, cook, nurse, governess, chauffeur)? Does he have an automobile at his personal disposal? How many rooms does he occupy? etc. Not a word in these lists about the scale of earnings! If the rule were revived that exploitation of the labour of others deprives one of political rights, it would turn out, somewhat unexpectedly, that the cream of the ruling group are outside the bounds of the Soviet constitution. Fortunately, they have established a complete equality of rights … for servant and master! Two opposite tendencies are growing up out of the depth of the Soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norm must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system.”
