Presentation
«In Lenin’s unfinished little book, The State and Revolution, so important, so dense, I stumbled upon a phrase. He says, insisting, moreover, on an idea dear to Marx and Engels: ‘Up to now, there has not been a revolution which, in the end, has not led to a strengthening of the administrative dynamic’. I quote from memory and I would swear that these are not exactly their words, but I believe that I do not betray their thoughts at all. It is, moreover, the idea that is developed throughout the book. And he gets in this consideration stimuli to undermine more completely the complicated apparatus of the State. Because, he thinks, if the preceding revolutions have only led to a strengthening of what they wanted to destroy, it is that these revolutions have been imperfect, that they have not been carried to the end. This writing is from 1917. If it was not finished, it is because Lenin considered that acting was more important than writing. Now, they have made this revolution complete. To realise it, to carry it to the end, all sacrifices have been accepted. The revolution finally triumphs; it has triumphed. It was twenty years ago. And now, where is the Soviet Union? Never has the dreaded bureaucracy, the administrative mechanics, been stronger» (André Gide; 1964; 1126).
In the coming weeks, the first volume of a work that aims to be «comprehensive» on the experience of Stalinism and the strategic-revolutionary lessons it has left for the socialist revolutions to come will be published[1] .
The edition was postponed for a few months for a number of technical reasons but will soon be released in open pdf format to be shared internationally among revolutionary socialist militants and scholars interested in the tradition of Marx and Engels and that of revolutionary Marxism in its classical epoch (Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci and Rakovsky).
Ours will obviously be a critical approach which, in addition to our classics and contemporary Marxist authors who will not be named here, aims to rescue the contributions of «forgotten» anti-Stalinist Marxists such as Christian Rakovsky, Karl Korsch, Hal Draper, Karel Kosic, Pierre Naville, Raya Dunayevskaya, Moshe Lewin, Victor Serge, Tony Cliff, Ernest Mandel, Nahuel Moreno, Ernst Bloch, George Breitman, Daniel Guérin, Agnes Heller, Evald Ilienkov, Roland Lew, Karol Modezelewski, Maximilien Rubel, Leon Sedov, Lucio Colletti, Cornelius Castoriadis, Tamás Krausz, and even writers like Panait Istrati, André Gide, Vasili Grossman and others. Marxist and revolutionary intellectuals who usually do not figure in the academy; not even in Latin American Marxist publishing houses. Based on the work of one hundred and twenty authors, on the practical and historical experience of the post-war revolutions, and on the daily revolutionary militancy, both national and international, of the last forty years, mostly within the working class and the youth, we have produced this work[2] .
It is a two-volume work in which the first volume deals generically with the problems of the transition state and the second with the problems of the economy of the socialist transition[3] .
Our first volume will be released in the coming weeks in digital format and soon in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French editions.
Without further ado, we leave you with the introductory chapter to the first volume of our work.
1. Introduction
1.1 Marx and Stalinism
The theory of the state in Marx and Engels is fundamental in order to take stock of Stalinism. There are two ways of approaching this theory, which, as is well known, was not systematised by our classics.
The first has to do with the theoretical approach to the question, especially in Marx. It is a fact that, theoretically and historically, this approach became ever richer, revealing several angles: the problem of the separation between state and society, the question of the class character of the bourgeois state as a «committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie», the problem of the state apparatus and «cheap government» that the experience of the Paris Commune had raised, the parasitic character of the state, denounced by Marx under Louis Bonaparte as sucking the lifeblood of society[4], etc., all these complementary angles for their approach.
In short, the two dominant aspects in the classical elaboration of the state, complementary but not identical, are, on the one hand, the class character of every state, i.e. as an institution in the hands of the ruling class or stratum to keep the exploited and oppressed in check, as is the case with the capitalist state or the proletarian dictatorship, through which the working class exercises power to the exclusion of the bourgeoisie (the latter’s property rights are taken away, as well as their citizenship). And on the other hand, fundamental for the transition with regard to the working class itself, there is the problem of the separate character of the state in relation to the exploited and oppressed society, for example under capitalism, where the state appears as an abstraction supposedly representing the whole of society (the abstraction of the citizen in relation to the private person in civil society), or in the workers’ state, in the proletarian dictatorship, with the danger of a bureaucracy replacing the working class in the exercise of power.
This last problematic is central to the approach to socialist transition, because if in the traditional point of view the proletarian dictatorship is a class form of domination in relation to the former ruling classes, it is not sufficiently stressed that, in relation to the working class itself, separate forms of state are a symptom that something is wrong with the transition (Trotsky, chapter III of The Revolution Betrayed)[5] . The state is not reabsorbed into society but the opposite is true: exaggeratedly put, society is «statified» (it is not by chance that Trotsky pointed out that unlike Louis XIV, who claimed «I am the state», Stalin seemed to claim «I am society»). In our work we will develop in detail the problematic of the statisation of the categories of political economy and even the statisation of many other aspects of society in the bureaucratic state (which is not the same as moving into the category of totalitarianism, devoid of nuances).
Beyond the above, and the varied biases to be found in classical Marxism regarding the state, it could be said that the most developed theorisation of the state is to be found in the young Marx: in The Jewish Question (1844), in the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State (1843), and above all, brilliantly, in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State (1843), a major text that is often unjustly overlooked.
The critique of Hegel deals with various theoretical and methodological aspects of the state. Marx had in mind a «double critique» of the Prussian state as it presented itself at the beginning of the 19th century, as well as of Hegel’s conception of that state, a conception which, paradoxically, Marx regarded as an innovative approach (a non-conservative analysis; Hegel’s political views in relation to that state were another matter). This modern approach accounted for some general features of the emerging capitalist state, with its characteristic division between state and economy, its general peculiarity of «political abstraction», i.e. the separation between the individual in his economic capacity in civil society and the citizen at the level of the political sphere, the problematic of state bureaucracy, etc. (Artous and Colletti).
This characteristic separation of the state from the exploited and oppressed society under capitalism, moreover, leads to a reflection on the need to put an end to it: that the state ceases to be a separate form and thus tends towards its own dissolution, an illuminating aspect for the socialist transition.
Marx points to a methodological critique of Hegel in the sense of the latter’s inversion of subject and predicate. In Hegel, the state is the subject of social relations, and civil society and the family are the predicates, and not the other way around, as it is in reality: the state is a product of society which is hopelessly embroiled in social and class contradictions that make it necessary[6] .
Undoubtedly, at the same time, the state reacts on society, an important aspect for understanding the anti-capitalist experiences of the last century.
Bearing in mind the problem of the division between state and society, Marx makes sharp points, as when he states that «democracy is both form and content». What does he mean by this? That when society is present in the state, when what the state represents is society itself, when the two terms are equated, the state loses its necessity, its existence becomes superfluous: it ceases to be a separate form, liquidating itself as such a state.
Marx makes sharp points about the Prussian bureaucracy and bureaucracy in general when he says that it is a «tissue of practical illusions». This refers to the idea that bureaucracy has no alternative but to administer real people and the flesh-and-blood society outside it, in civil society. The problems of the bureaucracy would not be those of itself, but the material questions inscribed in social relations, which the bureaucracy subjects to its formalism, to its administration. In The New Course Trotsky takes up this idea by pointing out that bureaucracy is the administration of people and things.
The bureaucracy is thus the political and state expression of the civil society corporations. But, paradoxically, the bureaucracy, a by-product of the corporations, transforms itself into a corporation and begins to confront them: it begins to assert its own interests.
Marx introduces here the idea that the bureaucracy has the state as its private property, a concept taken up by Rakovsky to understand the process of bureaucratisation in the USSR: bureaucracy tends to give itself foundations in society. In his critique of Hegel, Marx toys with the dialectical idea that every consequence fights against its causes, reverts on them. For us, this idea is essential to realise that bureaucracy is not in all cases merely the personnel of some fundamental social class.
Marx concludes his critique of Hegel by addressing the subject of primogeniture, an absolute form of private property which overrides the laws of the market. An extreme form of private property, because this is characterised as an absolute form of ownership, although capitalist private property has no restrictions on buying and selling above the will of the owners. Not in this case: the primogeniture is established to prevent the subdivision of land, and in that sense does not follow from the free market. By institutionalised mandate, the ownership of land must go to the first-born male.
Marx’s reflection is that this form of property assumes a life of its own beyond the will of human beings: there is a total inversion of social relations where objects, the private ownership of land with its own logic against territorial subdivision, is imposed over the desires or will of people; another form of fetishism, of inversion of real relations. This is what entailed the entailment: the land was invariably given to the first male child. Be aware that the entailed estate is a form of pre-capitalist private property, because it introduces a criterion that inhibits the free operation of the market.
Marx’s theory of the state and the bureaucracy, its development behind society’s back and, in opposition, the radical-democratic-socialist commitment to society taking charge of its own affairs, tends towards the disappearance of the state as such after passing through the proletarian dictatorship; it leaves essential elements for a critical approach to the experience of the twentieth century.
Let us now turn to the more classical but no less important strand of the Marxist theory of the state: the class character of the state, the fact that the state is that of the ruling class, a «superstructure» deriving from the class structure of society. The class that is dominant in the relations of production is dominant in the state. Its general function is to ensure the reproduction of those relations of production and, in the case of capitalism, to ensure the general conditions of that reproduction: the repressive forces and laws that make it possible, as well as the forms of political domination and the investments in infrastructure too costly to be undertaken by individual capitalists. (Marx gives the example of the railways in the first volume of Capital, an enormous infrastructure work in his time; he introduces the concept of «general conditions of capitalist accumulation» to refer to this type of work).
The class character of the state has to do with another aspect of the proletarian state or semi-state in the transition, that of the proletarian dictatorship as a class dictatorship. The proletarian state, the proletarian dictatorship, here taken as synonyms – we shall see in our work that this assimilation entails its complexity – is the dictatorship of the working class once the capitalists have been expropriated. The working class is supposed to dominate at the level of the state and to dominate at the level of production.
All these developments became complex. And with the bureaucratisation of the revolution, the bureaucracy ceased to depend on the working class. The state was decharacterised and reverted to the social structure itself, liquidating, in our view, the working-class character of the state.
In any case, what interests us here is that both approaches to the state, the state as separate from society and the state as an expression of the economically and socially dominant class, complement each other in the Marxist approach to the state and are tools to be used in a subtle and non-mechanistic way – contrary to the mechanism with which they have been used in many cases – to evaluate the lessons of the non-capitalist experiences of the last century.
The Marxist theory of the state has other complementary facets or angles which we will develop in our work. But these are the two most classic theoretical aspects that must be put to work in order to understand the process of transition and the lessons of the last century.
As a second plane of approach, there are the concrete-historical elements of the state, and even anthropological ones. This angle has several milestones in Marxist work, such as The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Class Struggle in France, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany, The Civil War in France and the historical anthropological texts of Marx and Engels in relation to communal societies. This is the case of the valuable Engelsian text The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)[7] and Marx’s ethnological Notes (1881-83), which are extremely rich and to which Marx devoted enormous energies in the last years of his life, as well as the equally rich notes in the Grundrisse, the Forms Preceding Capitalist Production (1857-58) and even the anthropological notes made by Marx and Engels in the first chapter of The German Ideology (1846). These are texts of unequal inscription in which the problematic of the various relations of production and historical states is addressed: the different types of state and their diverse relation to the economy.
This is precisely what we wish to emphasise in this introductory note: that Marx and Engels’ approach to the state is a historical approach to an institution doomed to disappear, a historical institution that has undergone modifications concomitant with the different economic-social formations that have marked the human experience. A state which, approached in a concrete, i.e. historical, way, has various forms depending on the transformation of social relations and modes of production. A state that was not present in previous communal forms of human organisation[8] .
As a digression, let us point out that the concept of mode of production is, in any case, a stylised concept, a sort of Weberian «ideal type»[9] . This is why we prefer to use the concept of socio-economic formation for the analysis of the transitional or blocked transition societies of the last century[10] . The latter concept allows us to go to the concrete-historical object that the abstraction of the mode of production leaves out. This latter «model» remains, we repeat, an «ideal type»: there is no «mode of production» outside the characteristic features common to the various economic-social formations of the same type[11] .
This angle is important for a critical approach to the non-capitalist experiences of the last century, to understand that there is not only one type of state – the class states proper – but also properly «bureaucratic forms of state» such as the «Asian» state (in reality its scope was universal) and the non-capitalist bureaucratic states of the last century, just as, in the perspective of communism, societies without a state and without exploiting social classes can also exist – historically existed – (Rosa Luxemburg was the only revolutionary socialist of the era of classical Marxism to concern herself with this issue, in Introduction to Political Economy)[12] .
All in all, the historical approach to the state and social classes shows that there is nothing rigid or schematic in their development. Any approach must be historically concrete, far removed from any mechanism.
1.2 Bureaucratisation, an unexpected phenomenon
The aporias of the circumstances of the Russian Revolution surprised its actors. Lenin and Trotsky were fully aware that without the international extension of the revolution, in an isolated Russia, developments would be complex and it would be enormously difficult, if not impossible, to go in a socialist direction. The uneven and combined development of a revolution in relatively backward tsarist Russia, just as it had made the revolution possible, posed dramatic contradictions for the socialist transition[13] .
However, it is one thing to understand this intellectually and another thing to understand it in practical experience. The civil war declared by the imperialist powers in collusion with White Russia clearly showed the multiplied difficulties regarding the realisation of the revolution itself, of its emancipatory promise.
These difficulties revolved around the definition of what kind of state was being set up. At first, during the so-called «war communism», the Bolsheviks as a whole, including Lenin, believed that they were passing «directly» to socialism….
The money economy had virtually disappeared, and while no real economy had appeared in its place, what was actually taking place was the deaccumulation of all the nation’s resources in the service of the war front; no simple, let alone expanded, reproduction of existing capital. This was misinterpreted in the sense of a supposed, largely fanciful, direct passage to «socialism» on the basis of frugality in a situation where all economic and human resources were put at the service of the civil war.
Hence the difficulty over how to define revolutionary Russia, the state that was being put on its feet[14] . There was an opportunity when the debate on trade unions in the late 1920s. The civil war was ending and the discussion about how to rebuild the country was beginning. Trotsky raised early that year a return to commercial exchange, an idea which at the time did not seem convincing (Lenin would take it up almost verbatim a year later).
In a radical shift, concerned above all with what to do with the personnel who were to be demobilised from the Red Army, and taking into account his experience of how through the Red Army the railway system had been re-established, it occurred to Trotsky to propose the militarisation of labour in the service of economic reconstruction.
An expression of this idea is to be found in a polemical work against Kautsky, Communism and Terrorism[15] , one part of which correctly refuted Kautsky’s indoctrinated democratism, which opposed the formal mechanisms of bourgeois democracy to the implacable laws of civil war; but the other part of which wrongly posited the militarisation of labour.
These positions were combined with the specific debate on the role of trade unions in the socialist transition, particularly at that point in the development of Soviet Russia. And from this emerged a debate that is particularly instructive for the subject of the present work.
Lenin argued for the permanence of the trade unions in their basic function of defending the vindicatory interests of the working class, a function similar to that under capitalism, to which Trotsky and Bukharin opposed a function more as a «transmission belt» of the national economic command: the idea of the trade unions as «schools of labour».
When Lenin insisted on the idea that trade unions should be the workers’ tool to defend themselves against their own state, Bukharin asked him why trade unions would be needed in their traditional role if Soviet Russia was a «workers’ state».
The fact is that, in the heat of the debate, Lenin replied to Bukharin that in reality we were not dealing with a workers’ state as such, but with a «workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations» (R. Sáenz, «El Estado soviético según Lenin», 1993, mimeo)[16] .
Having said this, Lenin added that as such a workers’ state, i.e. a bureaucratically deformed one, trade unions were still necessary to defend the immediate rights of the workers, which meant, at the same time, that he considered not only a mistake but an aberration the proposed militarisation of the working class, the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship prevailing in the country. The militarisation of labour was opposed at the apex to the necessary workers’ democracy in the management of the proletarian dictatorship, a management which cannot be a head without a body or a body without a head: the proletarian dictatorship cannot be carried out on a lasting basis without the exercise, even at a minimum, of workers’ democracy. Form and content tend to overlap, which means that the proletarian state or semi-state must tend to overlap with the exploited and oppressed society. And it was impossible for this to happen if the working class was militarised in labour, subjected to military discipline, to orders and not to rank-and-file democracy.
In any case, the trade union debate formalised, so to speak, the idea that the proletarian dictatorship was accumulating deformations, and that these deformations – the product of the isolation of the revolution, the backward economic and cultural heritage of the tsarist empire, and the destructions of the world war and civil war combined – took the form of a bureaucratic deformation, of an «administrative management» from above of everything that the exploited and oppressed society could not take into its own hands, of an arbitration over a social body marked by inequalities.
The development of that discussion – which, moreover, was poorly resolved at the 10th Bolshevik Party Congress in March 1921, when the debate on the trade unions had expired and the party had to face the uprising of the Kronstadt garrison – marked, with the turn to the NEP, the official recognition that something was wrong. “Resistance of material», the added weight of conservative elements on the basis of backward objective conditions, was taking its toll on the character of the revolutionary state, deforming it[17] .
It is now clear that the unprecedented element that crept into the revolution was the process of bureaucratisation of the revolution. The phenomenon of the bureaucratisation of the workers’ movement had precedents, although it is true that it was a historical novelty because it was not until 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, that Lenin realised the degree of national-bureaucratic rot to which German Social Democracy had reached. Lenin acknowledged to Rosa Luxemburg that she had been an eagle in this respect. But another question was the bureaucratisation of the proletarian revolution, something perhaps inconceivable. Today we have naturalised it, but in real time it was a real headache: an unprecedented phenomenon with which it was difficult – and life-threatening – to measure oneself.
The phenomenon was new insofar as it was only a few years before that the analysis and understanding of what was happening – the rise of reformism – had begun to become widespread. Works by bourgeois «socialist» sociologists such as Robert Michels’ The Political Parties were anticipatory in this respect, although with the characteristic mechanicism of enunciating a sort of «iron law of oligarchy» regarding the bureaucratisation of political parties by their leadership, which is not real.
But if this phenomenon began to be appreciated from Millerandism onwards (after French president Millerand, of the SP, in the 1920s, who had already been a minister in a bourgeois cabinet at the end of the 19th century), the idea that the proletarian dictatorship could be bureaucratised had another historical density.
The debate about the character of Soviet Russia led to a much more dramatic one: the debate about the character of the bureaucracy. At the beginning, no one spoke of the bureaucracy as a specific social layer, but rather of the «bureaucratism» that was beginning to prevail in Soviet institutions. The concept alluded to the «red tape», the neglect and lethargy with which social affairs were regarded in the ranks of the state. But it was not yet seen as the emergence of a new social layer, an unprecedented phenomenon as we are pointing out; it is extremely difficult to measure oneself against original phenomena[18] .
1.3 Bureaucracy and state property
However, a whole series of causes led to a huge imbalance: the growth of the state administrative staff was explosive, and its multiplier was monumental (Broué, Marie and Lewin). Soviet power had begun with a small staff, but the state had to replace and take over tasks that the private economy was doing or that the masses themselves had only just begun to take over with the rapidly emptied Soviet agencies. This meant that «the practical people», a administrative staff drawn from the ranks of activism[19] and not just former tsarist officials, began to take over the administration.
In the conditions of post-revolutionary weariness, of the isolation of the revolution and with the idea that «nobody would follow Russia» after the 1923 defeat in Germany; also because of the natural human tendency to comfort (Trotsky), and in the context of the cultural backwardness and extreme economic shortages of the country after the revolution and the civil war, coupled with the «professional dangers of power», i.e. the difficulties for a class without traditions of command and rule to assume power, a bureaucracy was emerging. One that formed its features out of the small great advantages of administering power, even in a genuine workers’ state. And even more so in conditions of extreme general penury; advantages that Stalin encouraged with a criterion of negative selection – selection of the worst and not the best, as Bensaïd puts it-[20] .
The Stalinist bureaucracy emerges from this process as the decantation of a specific privileged social layer, which Trotsky described as something more than a mere bureaucracy and something less than an organic class, but which Rakovsky defined more conceptually, following Marx to some extent, as a «political class».[21]
In the discussions on the character of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Trotsky embarked on the idea that the bureaucracy would constitute a «caste» (political, we add, because that is what he meant), in the sense of a monopoly: the administration of power. The definition of caste comes from there: from the social privileges that come from a certain role in society[22] . With the definition of caste, Trotsky avoided the idea that the bureaucracy constituted a new organic, historical, social class. This was a fair concern, but by leaving the bureaucracy as a sort of «social epiphenomenon» he removed any «necessity» from the phenomenon, any real implication. With this analysis he avoided modifying his definition of the Soviet state as a workers’ state, even if he added «bureaucratised»[23] .
Rakovsky would take a qualitative step beyond Trotsky, going deeper into the degenerative bureaucratic phenomenon: he plunged the knife deeper into the original social reality that the Left Opposition had before it. He brilliantly described in «The Professional Dangers of Power» (1928) the emergence of a social stratum in which, as a product of a differentiation of functions, an unprecedented social differentiation was at work: it obtained privileges from the exercise of power, thus forming a new social category. This new social category was not a «workers’ bureaucracy» but something else: a social stratum that had become independent of the working class and obtained other social foundations, even though its members often came from the different strata of the class[24] .
Rakovsky defined this new social category as a political class, in the sense that it was not a social class like the traditional ones, i.e. with an economic-social basis, but neither did he consider it as a mere bureaucracy, a mere epiphenomenon or «excrescence» of a power which was basically still a workers’ power, but precisely as a «political class» (a definition which seems a contradiction in terms, but is not): the original phenomenon of a new privileged social category which is forged from its monopoly of power in a society where the means of production are statified.
This is linked to the problem of ownership in the transition. State property, unlike the purely economic private property typical of capitalism, is an economic-political or political-economic form: a mixed, hybrid social category.
Logically, private property is a juridical form, a superstructural category that enshrines on the level of law the monopoly over a certain good, the de facto possession. However, private property, the absolute form of property in capitalism, does not have an ounce of politics in it, it does not require the participation of any political form for its consecration.
The problem is that with state property, as its name already indicates, something different happens: since what was expropriated from the capitalists is state property, we are dealing with a political form of property, because it is the state that has ownership of it (the owner of state property would be the «entire people» through the state)[25] .
However, when we speak of a proletarian state or semi-state, the question arises to what extent the state itself is a representation of the working class. For that is what will define in whose hands the state property is really in, which class or social stratum it benefits: whether it benefits the working class or a parasitic bureaucracy.
The key to the whole question is to understand the difference between the forms of ownership. Private capitalist property, in the form of joint stock companies or whatever, poses no problem of sovereignty or political issue to mediate it: the owners of the good, the company or whatever, are the ones who own its shares wholly or partly. Period.
But when it comes to state property, the problem is that the collective owner of state property must have some political form of expressing its power. No worker has in his hands, individually, a title to state property (the latter is the cooperative form, which is not the same as state property)[26] , but the workers become owners as a collective, as a social class, not privately or individually. Being the collective owners of the state property expropriated from the bourgeoisie, there must be political bodies to represent their will for this purpose, the forms of socialist democracy that allow them to exercise their power.
The problem is that if the will of the working class is systematically violated; if the working class is exploited because it does not command – politically, not only in the workplace – the process of production, the means of production and economic planning; if it has no way of preventing dead labour expressed in the means of production from dominating living labour in the working day, such ownership will not belong to the whole people but will be the fig leaf of new forms of exploitation (legal forms, as derived forms, lend themselves to this kind of «inversion games» of real relations).
Since it is a fact that state property has no way of expressing itself as «workers’ property» per se because the workers have no way of controlling it without real instances of political sovereignty, and since, moreover, it is a political form of property par excellence, it is obvious that if the working class is not in power, this property loses its character of workers’ property, its capacity to determine the character of the state as a workers’ state. (Note that anti-capitalism and socialism – in form and content too – are not the same thing. We develop this theme extensively in our work).
Bureaucracy and state property correlate insofar as both categories are economic-political or political-economic. Trotsky had already warned that between the bureaucracy and the statified means of production, entirely new social relations tended to be created, since that same bureaucracy held the state in its hands. And all this brings us back to the problem that, ultimately, the test of the real character of the state in the transition is whether the working class is in power, or tends increasingly to be in power. The opposite is the tendency for power to be in the hands of a new social category which, in the end, gives rise to a bureaucratic state, eventually with remnants of the gains of the revolution, denying itself as a workers’ state.
1.4 A historically original revolution
The critical analysis of the frustrated socialist transition processes of the last century refers back to the theory of revolution itself. They are not watertight compartments: the theory of revolution and the theory of socialist transition are dialectically linked around the combination of three terms: the tasks posed by the revolution, the social and political subjects who bring it to completion and the way in which they do so.
As we have written many times, from a methodological point of view we have always referred for this debate to the founding discussions within the Left Opposition. It so happens that the discussions with Preobrajensky on the Stalinist turn in the late 1920s, as well as on the character of the Chinese Revolution, raised illuminating methodological aspects about the specificity of the socialist revolution and its connection with the transition process.
More generally, the question refers to a more processual genetic-historical approach linked to the more conscious nature of processes. Marx had stressed that people make history even if they do not know that they are doing so. In Capital he had pointed out, with regard to commodity fetishism and the inversion of subject and predicate that seems to occur in production, the famous apothegm «they don’t know it, but they do it»[27] .
However, in the development of history, and in addition to the objective conditions on which the revolution is based (which pose a series of potentialities but also constraints), the process has tended to move from humanity as a pure object of the objective course of history towards the acquisition of an increasing reassertion on reality[28] . Not only an «unconscious» but also a subjective, i.e. conscious, reacting.
Anthropologically, Marx had pointed out that the first human action was to give oneself conditions of existence (eating, clothing, etc., The German Ideology). But he also pointed out that, unlike animals, human beings are characterised by the ability to represent the work in their consciousness before performing it. The analogy was with bees: they make the most perfect honeycombs, but human beings have the capacity-potentiality to represent the work in their heads before they carry it out. The best honeycomb could not surpass the most mediocre human work.
And this should not be approached ahistorically or anthropologically, in the abstract. There are a number of potentialities in the human figure that may or may not develop and may even regress in barbaric conditions. The historical development of the productive forces, the human capacity to create tools (Marx quoted the idea of people as tool making animals) and to react on nature, have created the conditions for a higher, more conscious and planned human activity (which does not mean that it can never escape the ultimate material determinations that come from nature and the universe itself)[29] .
This is the theoretical and historical background against which the need is expressed in the socialist revolution for a more conscious approach to its tasks, i.e. the need for freedom. The 20th century has shown that there is no such thing as «objectively socialist revolution». Without the working class, the most that revolutions, under capitalist conditions, can achieve is anti-capitalism. Without the working class rising to power as a historical class, without the working class gaining control of the statified means of production and of the revolution and the transition as a whole, the transition in a properly socialist sense is blocked.
These general considerations also include a reflection on the way things are done: the relations of ends and means, which will be dealt with in our work in a sort of critique of the objectivist conception of revolution prevailing during the last post-war period in the ranks of the revolutionaries, with a simultaneous effort not to fall into any subjectivism, a trait that characterised another set of elaborations.
The socialist revolution is a historically original revolution. Its originality comes from the fact that its historical mission is not to consecrate a new form of domination and exploitation like previous revolutions, but to abolish all forms of domination and exploitation after passing through the proletarian dictatorship and the international revolution.
The material conditions for this, so that it is not a kind of «utopian dream», have to do with the fact that the development of the productive forces achieved by humanity means that it is no longer necessary to rely on the exploitation of one another to promote social development, as well as the international political character of our enterprise. Of course, we do not lose sight of the fact that the systematic transformation of productive forces into destructive ones in the 21st century makes things more complex. We will address this highly topical issue in the second volume[30] .
Of course, this is easier said than done. Not only because the uneven and combined development shows in each case very different conditions, but also because states and nations contain different «geological layers» in their social formation which accumulate both forms of exploitation and oppression: both types of relations are intertwined, constituting the concrete capitalist form of exploitation. In turn, with the degree of globalisation or globalisation of capital now relatively contested, each specific, particular society is but an exquisite «derivative» of the capitalist world society, the capitalist world market and the world system of states that corresponds to it.
Previous historical revolutions could count on a certain «automatism» in their developments. But by its very mechanics, because the political form, the proletarian dictatorship, precedes the economic form, the real socialisation of production, the socialist revolution is placed on a higher historical plane than the other revolutions: it has the conscious involvement, the most historically conscious involvement, of its protagonists. «With man [human being. RS] we enter history. Animals also have a history, the history of their descent and gradual evolution until they reach their present state. But this history is made for them, and to the extent that they participate in it, this happens without their knowing or wanting it. On the other hand, the more human beings distance themselves from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they themselves consciously make their history» (Engels: 1983: 37).
What we have, in short, is the concrete expression of Marx’s early intuitions in a double sense. One, that the working class is «a class of society which is not a class of society», which must be interpreted as meaning that it is a class which does not seek to establish a new historical domination but to abolish all domination, all classes and social differentiations, even if to achieve its aims it must rise to the political plane and establish its proletarian dictatorship – its «dictatorship of a new type» (Lenin) – beforehand[31] .
And the other, that the working class cannot fulfil its aims if it is replaced by another social stratum. In the proletarian revolution what happened in the bourgeois revolution, where at its height the radicalised Jacobin petty bourgeoisie carried out the tasks which the bourgeoisie was unwilling to, for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, cannot happen. In the proletarian revolution – the historical experience of the last century has shown this – if the working class is not at the head of power, of the conquered state, it degenerates into something else and ceases to be an instrument of its social emancipation, of its self-emancipation (Roland Lew).
Much of the Marxist elaboration of the last century lost sight of these elementary parameters. It is time to re-establish them.
The working class in power is what gives the working class character to the transitional state. The whole effort of this first volume is to re-establish this simple truth demonstrated by historical experience. For, as Marx acutely pointed out, profound truths are simple.
And it is this simplicity that was lost sight of in the second post-war period in the ranks of revolutionary Marxism, when there was a tendency to substitute the character of power, which class is really at the head of the proletarian dictatorship, for the statified character of property.
The reality is that the state property remains as «in dispute». And if it is not the working class with its organisations, parties, etc., that is really at the head of the proletarian dictatorship, there is no proletarian dictatorship.
From this devilish confusion and transfer of terms, in the second post-war period most of Trotskyism lost track. Logically, if the bourgeoisie is expropriated, the revolution cannot be regarded as anything other than anti-capitalist. But anti-capitalist and socialist have different connotations, referring not only to who – which class – is actually in command of power, but also to the dynamics of the process. If the dynamic is not the reabsorption of all forms of inequality, all forms of oppression, all forms of property and all forms of state, we are simply not facing a socialist transition.
1.5 The Jacobin element of the revolutionary party
The other side is the unavoidable problem that any new socialist revolution is going to be bloody – to a greater or lesser degree depending on countries and general conditions – and that the proletarian dictatorship is not only a democracy of a new type in relation to the masses but also an iron dictatorship of a new type (of the majority over the minority) in relation to the internal and external class enemies of the revolution.
All the strategic teachings of revolutionary Marxism, the passage from political action to physical action, civil war as a class war par excellence, etc., questions that we have dealt with in other texts but which are an indispensable dialectical complement to this work[32] .
The revolutionary party, the party that makes revolutions, is indispensable before and after the seizure of power. It contains the «Jacobin» element of being not only legal but also illegal, as Lenin taught, and is forged in the most extreme conditions of the national and international class struggle, confronting reaction and counter-revolution.
Thus, he tests himself in these circumstances in order to be tempered for the moment when – inexorably, beyond the times – the revolution comes; in order, in his maturity, to undergo the experience of revolution, insurrection and conspiracy in order to stake his claim to power (cf. «Trotsky, la Historia de la Revolución Rusa y la escuela de Lenin [Trotsky, the History of the Russian Revolution and the School of Lenin]»).
As is well known, the Jacobin, conspiratorial, element came to Lenin from his elder brother and from the experience of the narodniki (populists) in general. Logically, Lenin’s social base was the proletariat and not the peasantry, and he understood perfectly well that the revolution as a whole is a work of the great masses starting from their own forms of struggle.
However, when we speak of the «Jacobin element» of the revolutionary party we mean that the party is the least natural thing in the development of the working class. Here was verified a crucial innovation of Lenin’s in relation to Marx (and also Luxemburg and Trotsky) in the sense that the necessary selection of the best of activism for the building of the revolutionary party is indispensable. The party in Marx was still an amorphous idea where it seemed that the party arose «naturally» from the working class (in Marx there were various conceptions of revolutionary organisation but this was the dominant one)[33] .
Not for Lenin. The revolutionary political party does not arise naturally out of the experience of the working class, which, as he points out in What Is To Be Done? is usually (but not always) imposed by the consciousness of the bourgeoisie.
The party must be built as a specific task of the sectors of the workers’, students’ and intellectual vanguard. And if the militancy does not build it, nobody builds it. In this sense, the councilist, autonomist and spontaneist approaches have had a resounding refutation in the 20th century.
The point is that without a revolutionary socialist party (or bureaucratic anti-capitalist organisations) it is impossible to take power.
The revolutionary party is indispensable before, during and after the revolution. The long and very hard process of transition which opens up after the seizure of power requires that the bodies of the state, which are by nature highly administrative, should not be superimposed on the party bodies, which by nature, in a healthy organisation, are political bodies. The international class struggle is the horizon of the party and the revolutionary international; the workers’ state has – to a certain extent – no way of escaping the pressures of the other formerly exploited and oppressed classes in the country of the revolution, in addition to the tremendous pressures coming from inter-state relations.
Hence Lenin’s definition of the party as “a Jacobin within the proletariat», so criticised by Luxemburg, had a grain of truth in it. Lenin was not pointing here to some sort of «external element» of the working class but simply to the fact that within the working class there are elements of differentiation, that the complexity of the development of its subjectivity is enormous and that the conscious elements are called upon to play a fundamental role in intimate connection with our class as a whole.
This is what Trotsky said in his classic pamphlet «The Class, the Party and the Leadership» which we shall quote extensively: «Our author substitutes mechanistic determinism for the dialectic conditioning of the historical process. Hence the cheap jibes about the role of individuals, good and bad. History is a process of the class struggle. But classes do not bring their full weight to bear automatically and simultaneously. In the process of struggle the classes create various organs which play an important and independent role and are subject to deformations. This also provides the basis for the role of personalities in history. There are naturally great objective causes which created the autocratic rule of Hitler but only dull-witted pedants of “determinism” could deny today the enormous historic role of Hitler. The arrival of Lenin in Petrograd on April 3, 1917 turned the Bolshevik party in time and enabled the party to lead the revolution to victory. Our sages might say that had Lenin died (…), the October revolution would have taken place “just the same.” But that is not so. Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical process. He personified the experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat. His timely appearance on the arena of the revolution was necessary in order to mobilise the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is the role of the chief command during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process. Otherwise, why leaders? Why parties? Why programs? Why theoretical struggles?» (Trotsky, Bolshevism and Stalinism, El Yunque Editora: 45-46).
And Trotsky adds something else: «The vital spring of this process is the party, just as the vital spring of the party is its leadership. The role and responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch are enormous» (idem: 44).
Thus, the experience of the last century, far from weakening the idea of the party, has squared its necessity. Another thing is the sectarian logic that prevails in many organisations, which lose sight of the necessary dialectical relationship that is established between the vanguard party and the competing revolutionary currents, the vanguard and the masses. We have written in many places that the party without the masses is not much, and that, also, the working class without the conscious organisation of the revolutionary party, also fails to assert itself as a historical class.
We develop this approach at length at the end of this first volume. Let us now turn to our work.
Index
Presentation
1. Introduction
1.1 Bureaucratization, an unexpected phenomenon
1.2 Bureaucracy and state property
1.3 A historically original revolution
1.4 The Jacobin element of the revolutionary party
2. The theory of the State in classical Marxism
2.1 The State in Marx and Engels: class expresión and separate form
2.2 The historically changing relations between the State and society
-Criticism of the unilinear historical schema
2.3 State and political regime in capitalism and transition
-Proletarian dictatorship and workers’ state: two different approaches to the power of the working class
-The bureaucracy: from formal to substantial fabric of social relations
2.4 The proletarian dictatorship as a semi-state
-”Commune form», equality and bourgeois right
-The soviets as revolutionary form of representation
-The return of social stratification
3. Alienation, fetishism and socialist transition
3.1 Alienation
3.2 Fetishism
3.3 Althusser «corrects» Marx
3.4 An egalitarian freedom
3.5 Bread and freedom
4. The experience of the USSR: from revolution to bureaucratization
4.1 A «State with bureaucratic deformations».
4.2 A State that does not die out
-From self-exploitation to unilateral exploitation
-From power to social transformation
4.3 The «bureaucratic vermicelli».
4.4 From revolutionary politics to bureaucratic administration
4.5 Politics and administration; society and bureaucracy
5. Bureaucracy as a «political class».
5.1 Christian Rakovsky: a new definition for a new phenomenon
5.2 An original stratification process
5.3 A non-schematic Marxist evaluation of the bureaucracy
5.4 The statization of the categories of political economy
5.5 Stalinism: an anti-socialist bureaucratic regime
6. Property in the socialist transition
6.1 Property in general
6.2 Excursus on private property as absolute form
6.3 State property as a political-economic form
-A political form of ownership
6.4 Right, property and the law of value
6.5 From the dominion of people to the administration of things
7. Methodological notes on forced collectivization
7.1 An anti-socialist «collectivization».
7.2 Socialist modes of activity
7.3 An attack on the whole peasantry
7.4 The liquidation of the bourgeois-democratic conquests of the revolution
7.5 The bastard forms of state property
8. Criticism of the «objective socialist» revolutions
8.1 An unexpected phenomenon
-Lenin and Hegel
-Trotsky and the methodological teachings of the Russian Revolution
8.2 Tasks, subjects and methods in the socialist revolution
-Marxism is not a philosophy of history
8.3 The erroneous assimilation of anti-capitalism and socialism (before and especially after the post-war period)
9. The historical specificity of the socialist revolution
9.1 A universal class (general foundations)
9.2 Criticism and vindication of the French Revolution
9.3 The post-war anti-capitalist revolutions
9.4 The anti-bureaucratic revolutions in the European East
10. The working class in power
10.1 The elevation of the working class to a historical class
10.2 The revolution as the work of the great masses
10.3 Strategy and party
-The principle of self-emancipation
-From Marx to Lenin
-The separation of the party and state organisms
10.4 Dual power, party and «Jacobinism» -The soviets as direct democracy and representation.
-The party and «Jacobin» element of the revolution
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[1] In various parts of the world, for example in Brazil, Stalinism or Stalinist currents are again beginning to grow in the vanguard, in the face of the prevailing confusion about the socialist perspective and even the barbarism that capitalism means today. Fashionable authors such as the recently deceased Domenico Losurdo vindicate Stalin and Stalinism in his work.
In the meantime, Louis Althusser, philosopher of late Stalinism, is still in vogue in the academy, a philosopher of late Stalinism who is being vindicated by various currents that call themselves «revolutionary socialists» and who are precisely those who are asking «what is the use of the balance sheet of Stalinism»?
[2] The author of this work, who comes from the middle classes, worked for several years in a factory and lived in a working class neighbourhood of the Great Buenos Aires for almost twenty years. That was my university.
[3] A background for this second volume can be found in “Dialéctica de la transición. Plan, mercado y democracia obrera”, 2011, izquierdaweb, an essay that can be read as a «complement» to this first volume until the second volume appears next year.
[4] The reconstruction of Paris undertaken by Baron von Haussmann during the rule of Louis Bonaparte was not strictly parasitic, but it was controversial. The reconstruction had a clear class character and ended in a financial scandal, which does not detract from the fact that, in a way, it embellished and gave magnificence to the «City of Light».
[5] «Following Marx and Engels, Lenin sees the first distinctive feature of the revolution in that, by expropriating the expropriators, it abolishes the need for a bureaucratic apparatus to dominate society (…) In his time, this criticism was directed against the reformist socialists (…); today, it is directed against the Soviet idolaters and their cult of the bureaucratic state, which has no intention of dying out» (Trotsky: 2008: 55).
[6] Engels insists in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the state is not a «whim», but a necessary development at a certain stage of human society.
[7] See our anthropologist Engels, izquierdaweb.
[8] It is interesting to note how Marx’s work is given renewed relevance in its different «stretches» depending on historical and political circumstances. It has been pointed out that, not coincidentally, in the 1950s and 1960s this happened with the work of the young Marx in relation to the problems of the bureaucratisation of the anti-capitalist revolutions. Today, on the other hand, there are many researchers focusing on Marx’s late work, so to speak, given his greater focus on the study of societies outside the capitalist West, his ethnological notes, his ecological sensibility, etc.
[9] There are features that make up a particular mode of production. But, in reality, every concrete social formation has a certain combination of modes of production. Only in its pure, ideal form is there a homogeneous mode of production.
[10] Pierre Rousset makes a valuable comment when he points out that we must stop considering these societies as if they were «transitional to socialism» and only consider them as «transitional societies», an assessment to break with the mechanicism of the environment.
[11] When the Marxist economist Michel Husson spoke of «pure capitalism» to refer to the current characteristics of capitalism (questioned in the new stage we are passing through in this third decade of the 21st century, although still dominant), he was implying that neoliberal capitalism resembles the ideal type of capitalism. We use this example to make it clear that every concrete historical-social formation is «plastic»: it has features that are specific to it and which, by abstracting from them, looking for what is common in the diversity of the different capitalist formations, we arrive at the concept of a specifically capitalist mode of production of which Marx spoke in order to understand that it is already based on mechanisms that are specific to it: the economic exploitation of wage labour. That is, a strictly economic form of exploitation, not based on violence or appropriation by outright theft, which characterises primitive capitalist accumulation. The problematic of economic-social formations and their relation to the concept of mode of production will be developed in our work.
[12] Her beautiful approach closes thus: «The noble tradition of the distant past thus extended its hand to the revolutionary efforts of the future» (2015: 76). Luxemburg is referring here to the strategic importance of the study of primitive communities.
[13] The early chapters of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution are highly instructive in this respect and a brilliant use of the tools of historical materialism.
[14] When you talk about the character of the state, workers’ state or whatever, you can already see how in the transition what defines things is the character of the state and not the economy per se.
[15] The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky is Lenin’s work on the same subject. Without going into the question of the militarisation of labour, both Lenin and Trotsky criticise Kautsky’s criteria of «democracy in general», in reality not at all revolutionary-democratic and totally counter-revolutionary bourgeois. Kautsky’s critical analysis of the Russian Revolution is a work of colossal political disorientation. Hence the efforts to rehabilitate him by some Marxist historians such as Lars T. Lih and Paul Le Blanc seem to us to be misguided, even if they provide useful and erudite elements.
[16] As can be seen, this work is an elaboration that began thirty years ago. The opportunity for the beginning of this research – apart from the «epochal» events that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall – is the personal experience within the working class when the working class was asking itself, in the factory environment and among the workers’ militancy, what had happened to the so-called «workers'» states and what the perspectives for the future would be.
[17] «Plato’s Timaeus indicates that no ideal ‘model’ can be perfectly reproduced in matter, and this natural imperfection is not artificial, but specifically material. It is not the consequence of a perverse act of will, but is to be found in the order of things, to use Spinoza’s words» (Antonino Infranca, Introduction to Ontology of Social Being. Alienation, by György Lukács).
[18] Indeed, there is something novel about every turn of events that is difficult to absorb immediately. Stathis Kouvelakis acutely insists on this with regard to Lenin in his stupefaction at the capitulation of German social democracy in 1914, to which the radical novelty of the outbreak of the First World War can be added (cf. «Lenin as a Reader of Hegel. Hypotheses for a reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on The Science of Logic»). Hence Gramsci insisted on the endowments of the science and art of politics, of analysis and also the intuition to carry out quick generalisations (definitions). It is also true that certain circumstances have common elements and that, on the basis of study and experience, this allows us to take a position (and this is precisely the material basis of intuition). But something else happens when we are faced with completely original, unprecedented events: in that case the difficulty of response is much greater and the division in the revolutionary ranks much easier (the doubts, the dissensions).
[19] In our work we will return to the concept of the «practitioners», those people without formal training who, on the basis of needs, took care of affairs and acquired trade and experience in state management, something that was surely typical of any revolution in backward countries.
[20] The concept of negative selection is extremely valuable in order to understand what the break with healthy general criteria implies: instead of the most self-sacrificing, class-conscious personnel, the most committed to revolution and socialism, those who paid obeisance, obedience and submission in exchange for material and other advantages were selected.
[21] Rakovsky had in mind a more careful reading of Marx and Engels than Trotsky. Lenin was also extraordinarily systematic in his notes on our classics (Marx, Engels and Hegel). The anecdote in which Rakovsky suggested to Trotsky that he should not reduce himself to day-to-day quarrels and return to the study of the classics in order to have a more comprehensive view of what was going on is well known.
[22] The concept of caste refers to a type of social stratification in which rigid hierarchies are established that grant privileges to their members and make social mobility extremely difficult.
[23] Trotsky spoke of the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. The definition was correct. But the problem that arose subsequently is that the degree of this degeneration went from quantity to quality.
[24] Rakovsky would draw directly from Engels for this definition: «An interesting debate here is whether the function creates the organ or the organ creates the function. In society, a social function creates a respective organ. We recall here Christian Rakovsky’s reflection on the bureaucratisation of the USSR and the relationship between function and organ. A ‘division of political labour’ taken too far in the absence of working class protagonism, ends up leading to the creation of the ‘organ bureaucracy’ (…); a reflection of obvious Engelsian roots» (cf. Engels anthropologist, left web).
[25] We will see later that in the state property of the capitalist state, the idea that it would belong «to all» is a mere «transfer of terms», because the state remains bourgeois. On the other hand, in the post-capitalist states, property really belongs to all the people only to the extent that they are effectively proletarian dictatorships.
[26] The cooperative form of ownership is another form of private property. It abolishes traditional capitalism, transforming the collective of workers into owners, but not as a collective, but each of its members has a share of ownership: they are partners in the productive unit transformed into a cooperative (private property subsists in this form). It is clear, therefore, that the cooperative is a form of property distinct from state property, where the working class is the collective owner through the state of the means of production: it expresses a form of sovereignty and not only of property. And this puts the problem of self-management in the unit of production in its proper place. This is progressive to the extent that the workers have direct command of the productive unit. But for this to go in a socialist direction, two assumptions are necessary: a) that the self-managed unit is considered as part of the total social property at the level of the proletarian semi-state, i.e. that it does not abolish the instance of the proletarian dictatorship as the collective political representation of the class; and b) that, precisely because of this, a game of competition of one productive unit against the other is not set up, which would only re-establish market relations and transform the self-managed unit into a new form of private property, cooperative property.
[27] Dead labour dominates living labour in capitalism and in the bureaucratic state as well (Mészáros).
[28] Human history is a history of monumental historical self-elevation (Gordon Childe). There is no «objective historical law» that has made this possible beyond a very slow evolutionary process that gave rise to hominids and homo sapiens, who placed under certain objective parameters began to fight for survival against their environment.
[29] The priority of materialist analysis is fundamental if we are never to lose the material terrain of our action. It is only by grasping this material terrain that we can transform it. It is from this material grounding that we move to the active, activist side, which is fundamental in Marxism. This is true even if it is absolutely certain that a certain external reality will always be larger than us. Although this must be affirmed by pointing out that – for better or worse, it is always socialism or barbarism – humanity’s reassertion on nature is a historical fact that is factually verifiable in this 21st century, ecological crisis and the anthropocene era notwithstanding.
[30] It is an unavoidable issue today to consider the problems of socialist planning, which we did not have so much in mind ten years ago when we wrote our «Dialéctica de la transición. Plan, mercado y democracia obrera” [Dialectics of transition. Plan, market and workers’ democracy]» in 2011, a text that will be, updated, the core of the second volume of this work.
[31] Here we have to be very careful because the «dialectical tensions» vary when it comes to the present conditions of our struggle and even from the initial, bloody steps of the socialist transition to the emancipatory tension it must have in order to be such.
[32] We refer in this sense to the reading of our texts «La política revolucionaria como arte estratégico [Revolutionary Politics as a Strategic Art»] and «Sobre la Historia de la revolución rusa de Trotsky [On Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution]» (both on izquierdaweb).
[33] Bensaïd, «Why Marx is and is not the party», in Strategy and the Party (1988).
