Translated by Sofía Pacheco
“(…) the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their history themselves, consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces on this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance. If, however, we apply this measure to human history, to that of even the most developed peoples of the present day, we find that there still exists here a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived at, that unforeseen effects predominate, and that the uncontrolled forces are far more powerful than those set into motion according to plan (…) Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for mankind in the specifically biological aspect”
Dialectics of Nature, 1983:38
What follows is a sort of preview of our work on Volume II of our book. It is a simple presentation, but it can serve as a kind of general “script” of what is forthcoming, showing that writing and re-writing work on the second volume has begun. [1]
In our first volume of Marxism and the Socialist Transition. State, power and bureaucracy, we announced an upcoming second volume, on the economy in the transition. And here we are, starting work on our second volume (the original text is from 2010, now being comprehensively rewritten, with new chapters being added as part of the second volume of this work), which had been originally titled Dialectics of the Transition because this is what the socialist transition is exactly about: a materialist dialectics where a series of determinations come into play which make for fluctuating dynamics as we have just pointed out; a social formation in the works. Logically, this second volume engages in controversy with previous standpoints (State capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, a degenerated workers’ state, etc.) [2] However, we do not wish to identify them at this point, because as we have remarked, our work is not meant to be a “labelling”, classificatory work, but rather it aims at pinpointing the dialectics in a process and passing down lessons to future post-capitalist / socialist experiences. But precisely for this reason, in the effort of avoiding any “bounded” definitions, we have adopted the logics of “social formation” in our work instead of the fixed “mode of production”, which is very appropriate for our subject: the economy in the socialist transition and its laws (regulators, rather; as we will later see).
1- A digression on the methodological approach of the Bolshevik government
Before moving forward, and through a long digression, we would like to underscore that something should be made clear on a subject that has been left out of our work (the reason being some of the first critiques we are receiving on volume I are precisely asking for that): a critical analysis of the Bolshevik government. Our approach is focused on Stalinism, the qualitative leap into degeneration that it meant, beyond any Bolshevik mistakes. However, we can affirm that our analysis of the Bolshevik government is distinctly different from the “reformist-Kautskyan-liberal” approach in the style of Canadian academic Lars T. Lih, as well as from the facile, autonomist-anarchist approach, both in vogue within academe. [3] Both find common ground in the idea that the “serpent’s egg” would lie within bolshevism itself, and not in the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration, which marked a break in quality, as Trotsky emphatically pointed out and which we share. Over and over again in the thirties, the great Russian revolutionary would challenge this type of interpretation, which the “newism” that permeates scholars’ logics is trying to question; the text Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937) provides keen insights on this.
On equating bolshevism with Stalinism, Trotsky stated the following in that classic work: «The error behind this reasoning begins with the tacit identification of Bolshevism, the Russian Revolution, and the USSR. The historical process, which consists of a struggle between hostile forces, is replaced by an abstract evolution of Bolshevism. However, Bolshevism is merely a political current (…) Bolshevism saw itself as one of the historical factors—its ‘conscious’ factor—an extremely important one, but not a decisive one. We have never been guilty of historical subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor—based on the foundation provided by productive forces—as the class struggle, not only on a national scale but also internationally (…) the conquest of power, however important it may be, does not turn the party into an all-powerful master of the historical process (…) To seek the origins of Stalinism in Bolshevism or in Marxism is, in a broader sense, exactly the same as trying to find the origins of the counterrevolution in the revolution.» (Bolshevism and Stalinism, 1975:14, 15, 21, and 22) [4]
In this pedagogical text Trotsky added “gems” that can be useful to provide a framework for these interpretations by “historiographical newism” (historiographical newism is a deviation where truth is exploited in order to advance your academic career; the need for constant “breakthroughs”) [5]: «In the USSR, the ruling stratum is forced to adapt to the revolutionary legacy, which has not yet been completely eradicated, while at the same time preparing a change in the social regime through an open civil war (‘bloody purges,’ mass extermination of the discontented)» (ídem, 1975:28 y 29). Clearly, from our viewpoint, in contrast to what Trotsky pointed out, that is exactly what transpired in the thirties with the Stalinist shift into forced collectivization, accelerated industrialization, Stakhanovism and the Gulag, the Great Purges. This, however, does not at all go against the argument we stand for: there ran -and there will always run- a river of blood between revolution and counterrevolution!
Out-of-context accounts of the so-called “war communism”, of Kronstadt, of the crisis that marked Bolshevik power in the years 1920/21 seem out-of-focus to us, even though some critical lessons may be drawn from a period characterized by additional constraints inherited from WWI and the civil war that immediately followed. Lih gives the floor to Trotsky during a period that seems to be of great interest to him: that of «war communism» (Lih clarifies that this term was coined later, during the NEP). His work What Was Bolshevism?, a collection of articles and essays published over 30 years in various journals, focuses on studying what he calls «the Bolshevik dreams of an immediate communism based on frugality» (our words)—a true «delusion,» according to him. In reality, it is unclear from which angle his analysis is coming (he asserts that everything would have been «simple» if the Bolsheviks had collected taxes from peasants instead of requisitioning grain) [6] but in any case, despite his criticism of Trotsky, he gives him a voice without distorting his perspective in several respects (both him and various other Bolshevik leaders), not only regarding the civil war period but beyond it: “Did Trotsky’s support of compulsion/coercion in 1920 really mean that he rejected material incentives? (…) First, Trotsky argues that material incentives always remain the underlying reality [that is, they could not be done away with during the transition]: ‘The effort and efficiency of labour is determined for the most part by personal material interest. For the toiler, what has decisive significance is not the juridical shell with which he obtains the fruits of his labour [statized property], but rather, what portion of them he receives.” (Lih, 2023:122) [7]
A sharp examination of the concept of «power» in the Bolshevik tradition—inherited from Social Democracy according to Lih, a debatable claim—is the Russian concept of vlast.[8] The Canadian author has stated that it is difficult for us today to fully grasp the rich layers of meaning in the word. He has pointed out that, due primarily to translation issues, referring to vlast simply as «power» can be misleading: «the Russian word signifies the sovereign authority in the political system and it is therefore closer to German ‘Macht’ or French ‘pouvoir’ than to English ‘power’” (Lih, 2024:107). However, given the reformist, social-democratic framework from which Lih is working, it is clear that by downplaying the word power and elevating the idea of «sovereignty within the political system,» one risks falling into Kautsky’s conception of «power»—that is, proletarian sovereignty within bourgeois democracy.
Lih is an ardent defender of the continuity between Kautsky and Lenin… It seems the Canadian scholar gave little to no importance, for example, to the profound philosophical break that Lenin underwent through his study of Hegel’s Science of Logic (see Marxism and the Socialist Transition: State, Power, and Bureaucracy, Vol. I, Part III, Section 8).[9]
Moreover, we cannot fail to mention a publication in the U.S. magazine Jacobin under the heading of “Strategy” (sic), featuring an excerpt from Massimo Salvadori’s Renegade Kautsky?: “For Lenin, in 1918, the dictatorship of the proletariat was ‘a power based directly on force and unrestricted by any law,’ ‘a government conquered and maintained through the proletariat’s use of violence against the bourgeoisie, a government that is not bound by any law.’ For Trotsky in 1920, ‘whoever renounces terrorism in principle—that is, measures of intimidation and repression against the armed counterrevolution—must also renounce the political domination of the working class, its dictatorship’ which, indeed, is precisely the case. However, Salvadori defends another perspective: ‘What did Kautsky understand by the dictatorship of the proletariat? The power obtained by the working class through the conquest of parliament (…)’” (Jacobinlat.com, 09/2024).
To put it plainly: the revolutionary perspective of proletarian dictatorship versus the reformist perspective of «power conquest» through the bourgeois parliament as conceived by Kautsky, as the author of this article rightly recalls, as nothing more than a mere tool of «governmental technique,» regardless of which class controls the state…
In any case, as soon as we are able, we will address this discussion in extenso (a general preview can be found in our text “The Rise and Fall of the Bolshevik Government,” Izquierda Web). For now, we will simply establish that our approach to Stalinist degeneration is based on a classical turning point: the defeat of the German Revolution (1918–1923). In our view, this event was the alpha and omega that ultimately determined the bureaucratization process (other events were «concurrent causes» but not the «final cause,» to use Aristotelian language).
2- Regulators of the Transition Economy
Returning to our argument, in this second volume we will make the transition from the sphere of the theory of revolution and the proletarian dictatorship (of the proletarian state or semi-proletarian state) to the field of the transition economy. We will rely primarily on the experience of the former USSR. However, as in the rest of this work, our interest lies in arriving at a set of general conclusions about the socialist transition process itself, based on the immensely rich but ultimately frustrated experience of the twentieth century. The «memories of the future,» these post-capitalist experiences—despite having been carried out under conditions of material hardship, which imposed specific parameters (limitations) that may not be the same in the future—are now being shaped by the brutal development of destructive forces in the twenty-first century (the ongoing ecocide before our very eyes will impose new material constraints on future non-capitalist experiments).
Rosa Luxemburg had insightfully pointed out in The Russian Revolution (a pamphlet written in prison in 1918 but only published in 1921 by Paul Levi, not by Luxemburg herself) [10] that it was impossible to demand «socialist perfection» from the Bolsheviks (while the wording here is ours, it remains faithful to her views), given the material conditions of their struggle, although it is only logical that these «imperfections» of the process initiated by the Russian Revolution and the revolutions of the second post-war period—more precisely, in Russia’s case, the Stalinist counterrevolution that followed—should be more than mere imperfections: what unfolded was a bureaucratic degenerative process that undermined the socialist content of the transition. The socialist transition became blocked, inhibited.
In the first volume of our work, we have sought to convey the lessons from this experience in the political sphere, the spheres of the State and the theory on the State, the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, against the backdrop of revolutionary Marxism (Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and Rakovsky), whilea at the same time, making an effort to retrieve Marx and Engels’ perspectives on these issues (the effort to build a correlation between revolutionary Marxism and classical Marxism in connection to the assessment of Stalinism is not commonplace among militant Marxism, nor among scholars of Bolshevism).[11]
In this second volume, we aim at addressing the underlying processes. Namely, the social relations of production that exist behind the form (fetishized under Stalinism) of statized property, which was bestowed false attributes by traditional revolutionary Marxism (Trotskyism) in the postwar period (they themselves were fetishists). The underlying social relations are, thus, planning, the market, and proletarian democracy—forms of social relations of production that can be analyzed from another angle as the regulators of the transition economy (within the context of international revolution).
Indeed, these are the material relations underlying the juridical-political relations, or to put it another way, what provides the material basis for the socialist progression (or the anti-socialist regression) of the processes at work: «The laws of the transitional period are fundamentally different from the laws of capitalism. But they are also distinct from the future laws of socialism, that is, of the harmonious economy (…) The potential for production under socialist centralization, concentration, and unified direction is immense [the ‘planned form’ that Engels spoke of in Dialectics of Nature]. But a false application, and especially by bureaucratic abuse, can turn these potentials into their opposite [Engels could not yet speak of this]. It can be said that this has already partially occurred, for the crisis is already present. Closing one’s eyes to this crisis would mean leaving the field open to the blind forces of economic anarchy [thus, economic anarchy also emerges from bureaucratic ‘planning’]. Attempting to force the economy forward through coercion would only multiply calamities» (Trotsky, 1973:75).
From this perspective—the economic regulators of the transition process—we believe that Trotsky had arrived at the most refined formulation of this issue in the pamphlet we just cited, “The Failure of the Five-Year Plan” (ironically, as far as we know, he did not return to this approach in any other work) [12]: «The struggle for vital interests, conceived as fundamental factors in planning, brings us into the sphere of politics, which is concentrated economics. The weapons of the social groups in Soviet society are (must be): the soviets, trade unions, cooperatives, and above all, the leading party. Only through coordination of these three elements—state planning, the market, and soviet democracy—can a fair direction of the economy be ensured in the transition period, and guarantee the mitigation, rather than elimination (which is utopian), of disparities within a few years, and consequently, simplify the foundations of the proletarian dictatorship» (pamphlet written in 1932).
Here we can see, in addition to the discovery through experience of the regulators of the socialist transition economy—overridden in one way or another by various bureaucratic experiments (purely bureaucratic, «command» economies, a reformist opening to the market, and in all cases, a mockery of socialist democracy)—[13] the «hybridization» of economic categories during the socialist transition. Trotsky himself stated that the fundamental factors of planning «bring us into the political sphere,» meaning that planning necessarily involves appraisals that cannot be purely «economic.» Not to mention that socialist democracy itself is a «weapon of the social groups in the transitional society.» Hybridization does not mean the loss of specificity: nothing in politics can override a material constraint (Pierre Naville); hence Trotsky’s clarification that the economy cannot be forced forward «by whip strokes.» A material constraint that could only have been overcome in the former USSR through the expansion of an international revolution, in the sense of broadening the material base of the transition economy itself (i.e., the opposite path to «socialism in one country,» or, as Radek mockingly put it before his capitulation, «socialism in a single urinal»).[14]
Whichever way one approaches this first five-year plan, it could only have emerged as a preliminary hypothesis, primarily developed for a fundamental reconstruction of the labor process. A defined system of harmonious economy cannot be created a priori. The plan’s hypothesis could not contain the old disproportions nor prevent the emergence of new ones. Centralized direction is not only a great guarantee but also brings about the danger of centralized flaws, that is, multiplied errors. Only a continuous monitoring of the plan during its implementation, along with its partial and total reconstruction based on accumulated experience, can ensure its effective economic character (Trotsky, 1973:16).
It can be affirmed that paradoxically, on the transitional economy, there was a certain “convergence” of concerns from positions as disparate as those of Trotsky and Bukharin on the matter. Bukharin never managed to transcend a peasant-oriented and somewhat liberal approach, but however, as his main historian in the West, Stephen Cohen, established decades ago, Bukharin eventually shifted toward a greater understanding of the need for planning (as seen in Volume I of this work, and which we will revisit in more depth below): “Stalin’s group had adopted an extreme version of what was called ‘teleological planning,’ a method that asserted the primacy of voluntaristic effort over objective forces (…). Bukharin’s views on planning, formulated in 1928-29, were naturally very different (…). First, economic planning means the rational use of resources to achieve desired goals; therefore, the plan must be based on scientific calculation and objective statistics, not on ‘doing as we please’ or an ‘acrobatic somersault’” (Bukharin as cited by Cohen in Marxism and the Socialist Transition, 2024:235). [15]
In any case, it is in Trotsky’s writings from the early 1930s that we can find the most conscious, consistent, comprehensive, and explicit “summary” of the social relations of production concerning the socialist transition, at least in countries outside the imperialist core. The idea that the “regulation” of the transitional economy involves planning, the market, and proletarian democracy appears as a distinct characteristic of Trotsky’s thought.[16] Bukharin only belatedly came to grasp—up to a certain extent—the need for planning and industrialization, while Evgeny Preobrazhensky, an eminent economist of the Left Opposition, undermined his own understanding and arguments by capitulating to Stalinism in 1929/30. Preobrazhensky’s thought “unilateralized” due to a methodological flaw already embedded in his fundamental work: an approach that was insufficiently dialectical and overly positivist. He conceived planning as an “objective law” of the transition and lost sight of its political determinations. This was not the case with Trotsky, who as early as 1926 distinguished himself from the Soviet economist (“Notes on Economic Questions,” 1926, in Dialectics of the Transition: Planning, Market, and Workers’ Democracy, 2010, Izquierda Web). While Preobrazhensky correctly acknowledged that the law of value was not, could not be the primary regulator of the socialist transition (since making it so would lead to the restoration of capitalism (as we will see in Volume II) he ascribed to planning an objectivity it does not possess: “(…) by disregarding the objective regularity in the expanded process of socialist reproduction, which develops despite and in conflict with the law of value, and with well-defined proportions (imposed externally, through the power of compulsion) of the Soviet state’s accumulation in each economic year, excluding this latter process from the operation of the law of causality undermines the foundations of determinism—which is the basis of science in general” (Preobrazhensky, 1965:4).
Clearly, by setting up planning with such “determinism,” nothing occurring around it, market problems and above all, [problems] of political power, could inhibit the “socialist command” over accumulation. As we will elaborate in our second volume, Preobrazhensky was aware that failing to address labor power as a commodity in the transition was a “wager on the future,” but in doing so, he evaded the problem of the potential reemergence of labor exploitation mechanisms, which he dismissed under the false assumption that “a class cannot exploit itself” (Naville).
In any case, the alleged “socialist automatism” of planning is the objectivist approach that intellectually led Preobrazhensky to capitulate to Stalinism (there is no doubt about this when one meticulously follows his main work, The New Economics): “(…) in order to conduct a scientific analysis of the Soviet economy, at a certain stage of research it becomes necessary to detach oneself from Soviet state policy and focus on analyzing developmental trends of the statized economy in their pure form on the one hand, and the private economy on the other” (Preobrazhensky, 1965:10).
The differences in approach between him and Trotsky could not be greater (besides the fact that the Soviet economist’s analysis largely disregarded the trends of the international revolution, the international market, and its influences—in total, the theory of permanent revolution!). This is why it is perplexing that Ernest Mandel, an economist and significant postwar Trotskyist theorist, so uncritically adopted Preobrazhensky’s framework of the transitional economy, losing sight, in his economism, of the hybrid nature of transitional categories—a key methodological issue that we have been addressing in our work.[17]
Paradoxically, despite his anti-planning, peasantist, and opportunistic positions in the 1920s, Bukharin understood the intertwining of the state and the economy, of politics and economics, in the transitional economy better than Preobrazhensky. To support the idea of a supposed “objective law of planning,” Preobrazhensky wrongly criticized Bukharin on this matter: “Statements asserting that when analyzing the capitalist economy we are dealing with a superstructure that is not ‘a component of the relations of production, the study of which is the object of economic theory’; under capitalism, the process unfolds spontaneously, whereas in the Soviet Union the base is merged with the superstructure in the state economy, and in the sphere of economic activity, the principle of planning gradually begins to overcome spontaneity” (ibid., 1965:16). Paradoxically, this Bukharinist assertion seems, strictly interpreted, appropriate to us.
This is the central issue that will lie across this second volume, along with other themes related to labor exploitation in the former USSR, such as a critical analysis of the Stakhanovite movement, the problem of forced labor camps (the Gulag system), and the socialist-ecological perspective that any contemporary elaboration on the transitional economy must adopt—in contrast with the rampant productivism of Stalinism. In this second part of our work, we will attempt to account for the material mechanisms behind the degeneration of the Soviet state and other states where capitalism was expropriated but where a socialist transition remained equally blocked. We will strive for a synthesis between the first and second volumes of our work to achieve an “organic whole,” a concrete totality that does not intend to craft any “general law” but rather to draw critical lessons from past experiences for the socialist revolutions yet to come.
References
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Dialéctica de la Naturaleza), Editorial Cartago, Mexico, 1983.
Lars T. Lih, What Was Bolshevism?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2024.
Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A survey of the critical theories and debates since 1917, Historical Materialism, 17, Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2007.
J.J. Marie, Kronstadt, Fayard, France, 2005.
Eugene Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965.
Roberto Sáenz, The Dialectics of the Socialist Transition: Planning, Market, and Workers’ Democracy (La dialéctica de la transición socialista. Plan, mercado y democracia obrera), Izquierda Web, 2010.
Massimo Salvadori, “‘Renegade’ Kautsky?” (“¿El ‘renegado’ Kautsky?”), adapted translation of the chapter “The Ideological crusade against Bolshevism” in Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, jacobinlat.com, September 2024.
Catherine Samary, “Plan, marché et démocratie. L’expérience des pays dit socialistes” (“Planning, market and democracy: the experience of the so-called socialist countries”), Cahiers d’etude et de recherche, double issue 7/8, Institut International de Recherche et de Formation, 1988.
Leon Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism (Bolchevismo y estalinismo), El Yunque Editora, Argentina, 1975.
—————— The Failure of the Five-Year Plan (El fracaso del plan quinquenal) Ese Editor, Argentina, 1973.
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[1] The concept of the dialectics of the transition is a tribute to Engels’ Dialectics of Nature. If anything can be truly dialectical, it is the very process of the socialist transition: it is inevitably a process in flux. “(…) The eternal ‘repeated’ succession [quotation marks are ours, R.S.] of worlds in infinite time is only the logical complement of the coexistence of innumerable worlds in infinite space, a principle for which need was even imposed on Draper’s anti-theoretical yankee brain: ‘The multiplicity of worlds in infinite space leads to conceiving a succession of worlds in infinite time.’ That in which matter moves is an eternal cycle (…) a cycle in which all finite modes of existence of matter (…) are equally transitory, and in which nothing is eternal except matter in eternal motion, in eternal change, and the laws according to which it moves and changes” (Engels, 1983:40). Throughout our work, unless otherwise indicated, italics are ours.
[2] For a classificatory approach, see Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: a survey of critical theories and debates since 1917, Marcel van der Linden, Historical Materialism, 17, Brill, 2007, a text we will cite in our second volume because it is particularly relevant in terms of classification (a terrain that has pedagogical value, though it does not replace the dialectical analysis of our object of study: societies in transition into socialism).
[3] An example of the autonomist anti-party logic can be found in Astarita’s critique of us in «Precision on the Kronstadt Program» (see his blog), where he formalistically argues that the insurgents did not put forward the slogan “soviets without parties,” despite all historical evidence to the contrary. J.J. Marie, in his valuable work Kronstadt, states exactly the opposite: “The resolution adopted would frequently be summarized by the slogan: ‘soviets without communists,’ which first appeared during a hunger riot in Murmansk in May 1918 and was taken up in numerous peasant uprisings. This slogan did not appear in the resolution, but its development would move in that direction” (Marie, 2005:141).
[4] That revolution and counterrevolution should be linked by a “thread of necessity” does not mean that one mechanically follows from the other: like action and reaction, one presupposes the other. This is due to very material reasons: any attempt at social transformation, revolution, or refoundation stands in opposition to resistance from material structures, to a social body marked not only by revolutionary tendencies but also by the conservatism of historical inertia. Trotsky reflected extensively on this in the 1930s, and it is only logical that he did so, given that those were reactionary years.
[5] However, Marxist elaboration does not operate according to the rules of newism but according to more materialist principles: a Marxist elaboration does not make a leap into the void in relation to previous elaborations, nor does it take a step backward like orthodoxy and doctrinarism. It attempts to take a critical step forward while standing on the shoulders of our predecessors; a critical thread of continuity and dialectical surpassing of previous elaborations (Hegel’s Aufhebung, the overcoming that preserves), always in correlation with reality: “One of the main traits of Bolshevism is its inflexible, even meticulous, stance on doctrinal issues. Lenin’s 27 volumes will always remain an example of the most scrupulous attitude towards theory” (Trotsky, 1975:26).
[6] The first work by Lih, which we were not familiar with and have not read, is precisely titled Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (1990).
[7] It is evident that from the outset of his reflections, Trotsky was highly aware of the limitations that the mere statization of property had, by itself, in the masses’ perceptions on the improvement of their material conditions: this could not be merely formal but had to be real (Trotsky would insist on this argument in The Revolution Betrayed, particularly in the crucial chapters IX and XI). In this regard, our friend Nicolás González Varela makes the mistake of attributing to Trotsky inaccurate positions, as demonstrated when contrasted with the very studies by Lih we just cited: “In 1925, the Left Opposition, which echoed the growing discontent of the proletariat, unlike its dismissive stance in 1923” (“Gramsci and the Unknown Marx”, VII, Izquierda Web). Nicolás forgets that in October of that very year, prominent leaders of the Bolshevik Central Committee allied with Trotsky presented the famous “Platform of the 46,” marking the beginning of the party leadership’s split and the systematic struggle against bureaucracy (in other words, the very birth of the Left Opposition, the strongest anti-Stalinist current not only in Russia but worldwide). Nicolás falls into the trap of embracing newism, without clarifying the conceptual framework from which he does so.
[8] Lih repeatedly insists on Lenin’s connection to Kautsky, yet in his writings, Marx and Engels seem absent (at least in those we have studied so far)… As far as we know, Lenin devoted in-depth works to Marx (“Karl Marx,” a pamphlet for the Russian Granat Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1914; The State and Revolution, an unfinished 1917 work meticulously based on Marx and Engels) and to Hegel (Conspectus on Hegel’s book Science of Logic, 1914, published posthumously), but none to Kautsky. Unless we consider “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” which was obviously not a scholarly study of the German reformist Marxist but a sharp polemic. Lenin certainly cited Kautsky extensively, but that is quite different from claiming that he dedicated specific studies to him, at least not on the same scale as those he wrote on Marx, Hegel, and Engels, which is our argument.
[9] There has been much debate within Marxism about the value of this Leninist notebook. Our steady position is that it entailed a categorical transcendence of Lenin’s previous philosophical framework (besides our own appraisal, we base this claim on Dunayevskaya, John Rees, Kevin Anderson, Stathis Kouvelakis, and others). This transcendence did not mean abandoning the materialist framework of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, but rather giving Lenin’s Marxism a more dialectical and transformative character. The active role of the subject in shaping reality, which was absent from his 1908 work, now appears in full force: “The idea not only reflects reality but also creates it,” Lenin asserts in the Philosophical Notebooks.
[10] As has often been noted, it is impossible to determine whether, after being released from prison in November 1918 and before being assassinated in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg still held the positions expressed in said pamphlet. This is beyond the general “method” she advocated in it, which we assume she would still have upheld: a general, critical approach on the Bolshevik experience, in the way Marxism would deal with any other experience (a critical yet defensive approach, it must be added).
[11] Our theoretical “operation” in this work is precisely to overcome the habitual dead-end mechanism where “the dog chases its tail” and to open up the post-capitalist experience and reflections of revolutionary Marxism’s masters in contrast with those of classical Marxism’s masters. An operation we conceive as a universalization of the discussion on post-capitalist societies. István Mészáros had attempted something similar in Beyond Capital, though primarily on the basis of a critical engagement with the thought of his philosophical mentor, Georg Lukács. Our ambition, which will have to be realized, is to conduct a sort of comprehensive review of 20th-century Marxism from the standpoint of assessing Stalinism, anchoring this reflection and experience in our classics, Marx and Engels, as we have been arguing.
[12] Our assertion would need to be verified in the vast collection of Trotsky’s writings, but at least to our knowledge, this approach is not explicitly addressed in any of the major works of the great revolutionary, such as The Revolution Betrayed, his main interpretative effort regarding the degeneration of the former USSR.
[13] As we will later see, Che Guevara, in his debate on Cuba’s economic management in the 60s, also failed to grasp this combination of regulatory mechanisms. Faced with the conservative-opportunistic-reformist pressure coming from the former USSR, towards reliance on market mechanisms as a solution to the problems of a bureaucratically controlled economy, Che mechanically counterposed planning per se. This position, losing sight of workers’ democracy, was uncritically supported by Ernest Mandel. Meanwhile, the Stalinist French economist Charles Bettelheim initially backed the conservative stance of Soviet economists, only to later shift toward a subjectivist Maoism. We will return to this issue later in this second volume.
[14] Radek is a particularly elusive figure within Bolshevism, and we believe he has been insufficiently studied. His capitulation to Stalinism took such unpalatable shape that it has been met with nothing but rejection. However, unlike other figures such as Preobrazhensky, the principled causes—i.e., the political logic from which he operated—remain unclear (perhaps it was mere “bohemianism,” in which Radek seems to have been an expert, receiving comrades in his own bed; or perhaps it was his opposition to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, as was evident in the case of China).
[15] The well-known reference work by Cohen is Bukharin and the Socialist Revolution (1976). The Sovietologist Lars T. Lih is a disciple of Cohen. We will return to Lih’s work later. Trotsky pointed out something similar, though with greater clarity and depth (something Cohen dismisses; his biography of Bukharin expresses a ludicrous disregard for Trotsky’s role in the anti-Stalinist struggle): «The plan will be verified and, to a great extent, implemented through the market. Regulation of the market must be based on the trends that manifest within it daily. The [planning] bodies (…) must demonstrate their economic understanding through commercial calculation. The system of the transitional economy cannot be tackled without control over the ruble. This requires, therefore, that the ruble correspond to its value. Without a stable monetary unit, commercial calculation serves only to deepen chaos» (Trotsky, 1973:62). And as a punchline, regarding socialist democracy, he adds: «At the same time, the ossification (…) of the trade unions, the soviets, and the party was moving forward (…) Thus, the fundamental mechanism of socialist construction—the flexible and dynamic system of Soviet democracy—was completely dismantled» (Trotsky, 1973:69).
[16] Catherine Samary, economista de la corriente mandelista y especialista en la ex Yugoeslavia, desarrolló esta problemática en polémica con el propio Mandel en un conocido folleto de finales de los años 80: “Plan, marche et democratie. L’ experience de pays dit socialistes”, 1988. Sin embargo, no tenemos conocimiento de que exista una obra más ambiciosa de la autora al respecto (quizás nuestra radicación en el Sur global sea la fuente de este desconocimiento).
[17] Y no sólo Mandel; mucho del marxismo revolucionario en este siglo XXI sigue asumiendo a-críticamente el legado económico de Preobrajensky respecto de la economía de la transición socialista.
[16] Catherine Samary, an economist from the Mandelist current and a specialist on former Yugoslavia, developed this issue in a polemic against Mandel himself in a well-known pamphlet from the late 1980s: Planning, Market, and Democracy: The Experience of the So-Called Socialist Countries (1988). However, we are not aware of a more ambitious work by the author on this subject (perhaps our location in the South accounts for this gap in our knowledge).
[17] And not just Mandel; much of revolutionary Marxism in the 21st century continues to uncritically accept Preobrazhensky’s economic legacy regarding the socialist transition.
