a ER LE UW HAN OLLLON
by B.Biro
It can hardly be said that the theory of regimes obtaining in such countries as the Soviet Union, has advanced mcch since Trotsky wrote Revolution Betrayed over thirty years ago. Indeed a vulgarisation of Trotsky's views has even occured. This received doctrine, shared by all groups basing themselves on the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in 1938, revolves around the Trinity of concepts (a) Workers' State; (b) Political Revolution as opposed to (c) Social Revolution. The doctrine is that in the Workers' State a bureaucratic degeneration or deformation has occured which requires a political revolution to establish socialism proper, but that no social revolution is required because capitalist property relations have, broadly speaking, already been replaced. The objection that a Workers' State can hardly be said to exist when the workers have no rights and are tyrmnised over by bureaucratic gangsters is got round by poiny* that the political form of bourgeois dictatorships can vary from parliamentary to fascist without affecting the social base of society because that is determined primarily by the economic form. Even Bonapartes who are interested only in the State and couldn't give a damn for the susceptibilities of the so-called ruling class, and dip their fingers in the till as they please, have to have a till filled up somehow, and how this is done determines the nature of society.
It is this doctrine, and in-particular the idea that we can counterpose political and social revolution in our programme so slickly, that I propose to re-examine. TI hope that other people will participate in a collective refining of our analytical concept in this area - and I don't pretend to offer here anything finished,
1,
In the first place let us just note the unfortunate ambiguity in the term 'Workers' State’. By this, of course, is meant the basic character of society as a whole. The state in the narrower sense of the word (i.e, the institutions of coercion) is acknowledged by Trotskyists not to be in the hands of the proletariat but of the party bureaucracy, which has expropriated the proletariat politically. Even so, it is held that in sofar as the interests of the bureacracy itself are connected with nationalised property, it will in some way or other be likely to defend the latter against capitalist encroachment and thus be partially a defender of proletarian interests,
So far, so good. However the neat dichotomy political/social begins to disintegrnte when Trotsky argues that it is inexplicable how such a degeneration could occur solely on the political level and fill out his accounnt of the political expropriation of the proletariat by giving this a social basis.
"This whole stratum which does not engage directly in productive
labour, but administers, ordersS,commands, pardons and punishes -
- teachers and students we are leaving aside - must be numbered
at five or six million...In the whole mass of the bureaucracy,
the communists together with the Communist Youth constitute a
block of 14 to 2 million - at present, owing to continued pur-
gations, rather less than more. This is the backbone of the
state power. These same communist administrators are the back-
bone of the Party, and the Communist Youth. The former Bolshevik
Party is now no longerthe vanguerd of the proletariat, but the pol-
itical organisation of the bureaucracy.ece. Hypothetically, we may
assume that the labour and collectivised peasant aristocracy, the
Stakhanovists, the non-party 'active', trusted personages, their
relatives and relatives in law, approximate the same figure we
adopted for the bureaucracy, that is five to six million....
Twelve per cent, or perhaps 15 per cent of the population - that
is the authentic social basis of the autocratic ruling circles. "
(1)
Thus Trotskyists always argue that even the personal dictatorship of Stalin had social roots in a stratum of society - a stratum that Trotsky had little difficulty in showing had very considerable material privileges which sharply differentiated their interests from those of the masses.
A question that immediately arises is that if even allowing for relative autonomy of the political sphere, we find this political expropriation has a social basis in such a stratum, can we talk about a merely political revolution when such a revolution would clearly involve dispossessing this stratum not only of its political expression but also of its material privileges? Especially when Trotsky computes over 12 per cent of the population may be involved?
In Revolution Betrayed Trotsky bases his argument primarily on antagonisms in the sphere of distribution flowing from a low level of productivity. However far more important than its effects on distribution will be the effect of the so-called political revolution on production itself. Trotsky doesn't stress this, partially because of the ‘administrative' bent Lenin noted no doubt, partially again perhaps because of the low level of the masses in his day makes my point academic. This point is that the social character of production in the Scviet Union sets fetters on the most important productive force of all, namely the initiative gnd creativity of the worker himself. The completely hierarchical command structure of the Soviet economy makes the individual worker the same kind of labour-power machine and nothing else that he is in a capitalist factory. Who can doubt that a new upsurge of proletarian revolution, sweeping away bureaucratic privilege, would also restructure productionitself so as to provide avenues of expression for the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the workers. It is noteel alt @ question, as the bourgeois press and the C.P.S.U. rightwing duey, + personnel changes, i.e. replacing politically reliable but stupid cadres with technically competent ones; but of the entry of an educated working class into the arena.
Te
Such an access of strength to the productive forces again requires us to ask if it can be-comprehended by a merely political revolution.
Moreover (if with some trepidation) one is also forced to speak of cultural revolution here. A new upsurge of proletarian revolution in the Soviet Union could not possibly suoceed in changing organisational forms in abstraction from the forms of thought, values, and character of the population. It is perfectly clear that, in many respects, bourgeois values and ideology, superstition, religion, all kinds of vice, profoundly permeate Soviet society.
One small example from Wolfgang Leonhard's book Child of the Revolution illustrates this. He relates that in Berlin in October 1945 a communist from the West accosted him in the Central Committee building.
"T am a K.P.D. official invited here from the West. I have been
given some chits for meals, but I don't know where the dining room
is."
"That depends on what sort of ticket you have"
He looked at me in surprise and showed me his ticket. It was cat-
egory 111 - a ticket for less important members of staff. I showed
him the way.
"But tell me - are the meals different for different members of
staff in the Central Committee?"
"Yes, of course, There are four different kinds of ticket, accord-
ing to the class of work one is doing. The last two categories are
for technicians and clerks."
"Yes but...aren't they all members of the Party?"
"Yes, of course. They are all certified members, including the char-
women and chauffers and night-watchmen."
He looked at me in astonishment and said, "Different tickets - diff-
erent meals - and they are all members of the Party!"
He turned and went without another word. A moment later I heard
the creak of the front door. My comrade had left the Central Com-
mittee building. Thoughtfully, I crossed the courtyard to the dining
room. I went through the rooms in which Categories 111 and 1V -
the lower classes - were fed: and for the first time I had an uneasy
feeling as I opened the door into the dining room reserved for our
category. Here, at a table covered with a white cloth, the senior
members of staff enjoyed an excellent meal of several courges.
Curious, I thought, that this had never struck me before}" (2)
What is important in this example is not so much that such an hierarchy exists even in the Party - but that no-one thinks it particularly odd. Values have to change with structures - large-scale transformations of peoples understanding of themselves and their social relationships, if socialism is to come out of this. In connection with these questions it is = instructive to ponder the following remarks by Marx:
"Do not say that the social movement excludes the political move-
ment. There is never a political movement that is not at the same
time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no
more classes and class antagonisms thot social evolutions will cease
to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general
reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always
be: combat or death... (3)
It is true that Marx's main thrust here seems to be against those socialists who wish to duck the question of political confrontation. It is noteworthy however, that he does assert the contrary connection - "There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social." If one considers the violence of the confrontations that have taken place in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc., one is forced to conclude we have here no ‘evolution', no merely political transformation but real social antagonisms working themselves out.
ll.
There is a related vulgar Trotskyist belief that needs some attention before proceding. It is held that the case of the Soviet Union and its degeneration is an 'exception' easily explicable by certain special circumstances we have no reason to expect to obtain generally - backwardness, isolation, encirclement, and so on. However, though it is obvious enough that the circumstances cited clearly conditioned the development, the 'exception'® theory begins to seem over-simple when we take into account other experiences There are now some dozen or more 'workers' states' and, although there are enormous differences between them, none of them corresponds to the expected ‘model! of socialism. (This leads some undialectical thinkers of an eitheror type simply to reject them as therefore capitalist, with brutal logic (formal) and capacity for flying in the face of realities.)
All of these regimes, just like the U.S.S.R. are, in various ways, in 4 transitional state somewhere between capitalism (or colonialism) and socialism. Indeed only abstract moralisers with no Marxist understanding, could expect otherwise than that a more or less long period of transition towards socialism is unavoidable. Furthermore this period cannot be expected to be one of continuous smooth transition. It toomust have its dialectic, its periods of decline and renewal. It should be stressed that historical experience proves that any revolution inevitably enters a period of ebb, of degeneration, more or less severe according to the circumstances obtaining. There is a sense therefore in which the swift rise of bureaucratiaem in post-revolutionary Russia was conditioned not only by the ‘allegedly exceptional conditions of the time but must also be understood, as having, in addition, endemic roots in the revolutionary process itself.
When the Left Opposition was grappling with the frightening phenomena of degeneration Rakovsky was the one who saw this most clearly and Trotsky rightly quotes his document on the subject several times in Revolution Betrayed. Rekovsky stressed in his analysis of the 'professional dangers' of power that "I do not refer here to the objective difficulties due to the whole complex of historical conditions, to the capitalist encircle-
ment on the outside, and the pressure of the petty bourgeoisie inside the country. No I refer to the inherent difficulties of any new directing class, consequent on the taking, and on the exercise of power itself, on the ability or inability to make use of it." (4)
The main such inherent feature is that proletarians do not automatically become supermen on taking power. They are the same proletarians whose behaviour before the revolution fluctuated wildly as their confidence rose and sank, as they were limited by their political and cultural experience. -The revolutionary seizure of power by a previously oppressed class that has lived all its life under the hegemony of another class, represents by definition an extraordinarily high peak of activity, unity and consciousness on its part. Is it surprising that when all problems are not solved the day after taking power, the revolutionary tide begins to ebb?
Apathy, cynicism, fragmentation, selfishness, withdrawal, disperse the masses from the stage of history again, leaving behind the apparatus thrown up by them, but no longer representative of, or controlled by, the class in whose name it rules. Now the road is open for negative developments in the apparatus itself which reinforces the demoralisation of the class; bureaucratic arrogation of power and privilege, careerism, corruptior. and finally instead of expressing the dictatorship of the preletariat the apparatus exercises dictatorship over the proletariat. How far such tendencies actually go, of course, will be conditioned by the kind of circumstances usually cited in explaining the degencration that took place. Also it goes without saying that we have here not simply an objective process but one which is mediated by particular people and their subjectivity - Stalin etc. - so that there is a certain openness about the situation within which area subjective factors e.g. Stalin's jealousy and suspiciousness, help to determine the outcome. Nevertheless, as Marxists, we have to recognise that the objective forces do set limits to what even the greatest individual can achieve.
It is not a question of saying that if Trotsky had been leader he would have done the same as Stalin. That is terribly abstract. For Trotsky to have been at the head of affairs, either the objective circumstances would have had to have been other than they were, or, Trotsky would have had to have been ...Stalint
On any objective consideration in retrospect the Left Opposition was doomed to defeat. This is not to say that their struggle was worthless, that they should have helped Stalin or retired into private life. Apart from the psychological impossibility of such a course by a man like Trotsky, at the time they were not in a position to know all the relevant considerations, Tt was always possible that some new revolutionary breakthrough in the West might have come to the aid of the U.S.S.R., which would have changed the conditions of their struggle. Then again it could be argued that a stubborn rearguard action might ameliorate or slow-down a process of degeneration. Finally it is possible for a revolutionary tendency, even if defeated, to make a positive contribution from the long term
point of view. For when a new upsurge of the revolution comes it can go back and learn from the struggle and analyses of the heroic groups that kept alive the programme of the revolution instead of capitulating to 'realities'. That is why today Revolution Betrayed is still an important book, and why Trotskyism gains more adherents and influence yearly - because it represents not only the dying embers of one revolutionary upsurge but also a point of renewal for the future.
To return to the main point, we have enough experience of transitional regimes to see now that tendencies towards bureaucratic degeneration ere endemic to the transitional situation, are internal to it and would have to be guarded against even if imperialism no longer existed.
Another notion that is found in the traditional analysis is that of "Bonapartism". However this too is not unproblematical. A'"Bonapartist" regime is one that performs 2 balancing act between various social classes, holds only state power, and, although gaining considerable independence and privilege for itself, on collapse leaves existing class relations more or less intact.
However it is extremely implausible to argue that the Soviet bureaucracy is thus related to any social stalemate inside the U.S.S.R. so normally it is argued that it forms a "Bonapartist" mediation between imperialism and the Soviet proletariat.
This stretches an already ill-defined concept to dubious lengths. It is true that the Soviet bureaucracy accommodates itself to imperialism and demobilises world revolution by playing the 'peaceful co-existence' game. Nevertheless, although this illustrates something about the nature of the regime, I find it not plausible to use this to explain its basis. After all, any conservative national bureaucracy has to pay some attention to the international conjuncture in its policy.
All of these queries impel one to try to develop a more sophisticated methodology for analysing, transitional regimes,
ill.
It is necessary to grasp the fact that the historical dialectic is not one-dimensional; nor are its phases of single amplitude. Indeed it might be more accurate to speak of an infinitely large number of dialectics, of differing social levels (economic, ideological ete.); of differing historical specificity (contrary to Marcuse in Reason and Revolution there is no reason to suppose that with the abolition of classes dialectic becomes obsolete); and of differing generality with regard to space and time. (Thus from the point view of a very general historical dialectic proletarian revolution may represent a simple moment of transition, but judged internally it reveals enourmous complexities which require a more specific historical analysis to supplement the other.) Those who think all that dialectics has to say about the transition from capitalism to socialism is bourgecisis v. proletariat results in classless society, or relations of private property v. socialised productive forces results in a new
ll.
mode of production, or even both, inevitably fall into mechanistic or fatalistic views with regard to questions posed at more concrete levels; they tend to reduce the related but autonomous dialectics to a single simple contradiction; and they treat transitional phases with the criteria of formal abstract categories (often of highly ‘moral! content) instead of grasping their historicity, of seeing them as a moment of a development, and of analysing their specific contradictions.
2
What I am pointing to here, to put it crudely, is the 'chinese box' character of the historical dialectic - we have totalities within totalities, dialectics with dialectics. a
This involves-not only seeing that the transitional period has its own phases and stages,but also of seeing that an epoch like capitalism is not just a stage of history but has its own history, i.e. is made up of a series of transitions. It does not just grow smoothly up to its limit, it has its own internal dialectic in which various subordinate contradictions work themselves out and various fetters are overcome. The Common Market project, for example, is an outstanding case of an attempt by the more far-sighted European capitalists to overcome the fetters of tariffs and piddling markets, and to resolve the contradictions between national capitals, by creating Huropean firms in a European market.
Once one gets away from concentrating on the single, simple, global contradiction and begins to develop the idea of dialectics of different levels of generality it begins to seem less extraordinary that post-revolutionary societies may exhibit all kinds of contradictions, and may ossify into various forms of partial supercession-of previous conditions, which forms then become partial fetters on further development.
The disjunction political revolution/ social revolution obscures this reality because it locates the trouble (at any rate in its terminology) at only one level, thus introducing a radical discrepency between this level and others. In fact a more sophisticated analysis would surely show contradictions at other levels. The terminology is an attempt to express theoretically the progressive character of Soviet society over capitalism; but because of poverty-stricken methodological assumptions it can only visualise being able to do this by locating its 'good side' in the base and its 'bad side' in the superstructure.
There is a utopian apocalyotic strain in Marxism that views socialism as the final resolution of all contradictions. Personally I take such talk with a grain of salt, preferring to regard such a resolution as an asymptomatic limit never reached. In particular I reject Marcuse's claim that since dialectic was developed to analyse the history of class societies, socialism makes it obsolete and a new development must be understood as & 'purely rational' one. I see no warrant for reducing the manifold contradictions of social life to a. single class-based dialectic. If one considers this allegedly purely rational social development, would it not presuppose that social structures were perfectly transparent, that individuals. knew exactly what all other individuals were thinking and had
instant means of mediating their activity. (There is also the relation of society to Nature to consider). This looks suspiciously like the reinsertion of Hegel's absolute.
Surely we must recognise that although you can define socialism's development as proceding from the free decisions of the voluntarily associated producers, this is easier said than done. In any complex society there is always the possibility that the institutions that mediate the activity of people can grow away from them, become so independent and autonomous that eventually antagonisms begin to make themselves felt, requiring a new adjustment in order to restore harmony. (cf. Lenin on the Trade Union controversy).
The language of the last sentence has an obvious bearing on the question of alienation. Does alienation exist in the 'Workers' States' - and if so, what? Once again one has to guard against reductionism and formalism. On the one hand, at the Kafka Conference organised by the Czechs some years ago, the East German delegates stoutly maintained that there was no alienation existing in their country because alienation is obviously a charactersitic of capitalism. On the other hand, the ultra-left C.L.R.James agrees with them, but concludes that because alienation obviously exists in these societies they must be capitalist! +
These complementary views clearly rest on the crude assumption that with the expropriation of the capitalists all problems, including that of alienation are solved.
It is necessary to stress that the category of alienation is an extremely general one which permeates capitalist society in manifold ways, expressing itself in a number of different manifestations. Very generally one can define a process, or state, of alienation as one in which certain expressions of human power, or activity, become lost to their originatcr, assume an independent form, and become external, hostile determinants of his behaviour.
The concept has been used in the critique of religion (e.g. in Feurbach), of the state (in Marx's critique of Hegel), of Capital (1844 Mss. and Captial. of commodities (Capital again , especially section on Commodity Fetishism) and in the critique of capitalist consumption (e.g. Fromm). It is clear from the generality of the definition that, although alienation, reification, fetishism and the rest are especially acute in capitalist society, one can apply the category to situations of different historical specificity by discerning the particular ways, the specific structures, which can helpfully be described in these terms without assuming we are thereby dealing with identical cases.
The form of alienation that is historically specific to capitalism is that which expresses itself in the rule of private prq@erty, or more concretely, of capital and of commodities, which are, of course, products of alientated labour. The relations between men in production are mediated by one form of estrangement, namely capital. The relations between producers and consumers is mediated by a related form of estrangement, - the + see International Socialism No.16
13%
fetishism of commodities. These mediations constitute the profoundly antihuman content of capitalist society. That is, if one asks about two men going into a factory why/can boss the other about, the answer cannot be given in terms of any human characteristics such as superior intelligence, force of personality, or whatever, The answer has to be given in terms of their different relation to the non-human entity, capital. That is why Marx so often; talks, not about the rule of the capitalists, but of the ‘rule of dead matter’. Capital mediates and even seems to determine, the relations of one man to another. Of course in this relationship the capitalist finds confirmation of his power, while the worker is subjected. Even more ironic is that capital itself i othing but crystallised labour so that the worker is being subjected to/externalised product of his activity. The more he works, the more products he produces for the capitalist the more surplus value is realised by the sale of these products, the greater grows the store of capital possessed by the capitalist , the non-possession of which determines the workers! subordination. So we See that in his activity the worker continually reproduces the means of his own domination.
‘Dead matter' also rules in the sphere of commodity exchange. Relations between producers and consumers are mediated by and disguised as relations between things. The latter relations, the exchange values, Marx says are determined 'behind the backs' of the producers, and, in association with the general compulsion to accumulate capital, condition what is produced.
Now, what happens when all the important concentrations of capital, and external trade, are expropriated by the revolution and constituted as state property? Clearly this must have a drastic effect on the laws of motion of the economy, it must profoundly modify the character of the estrangements constitutive of previous times, and represents the first step in the supercession of specifically capitalist forms of estrangement. It can hardly be said that the accumulation of capital, and the movement of the commodity market determines production in the U.S.S.R. in the same crucial way that they do in capitalism, though clearly they still play a role of greater or lesser extent (in the case of Yugoslavia, to a greater extent.) For example the domination of man over man is now no longer mediated directly by property ownership - rather we have an administrative hierachy (such as you might have in the Army or Civil Service.
It is true of course that state property still plays a mediatory role and that this constitutes a form of estrangement. However (just qs private property itself as a matter of fact) this moment is an historical necessity. Trotsky says on this. question:
"In order to become social, private property must inevitably pass
through the state stage as the caterpillar in order to become a
butterfly must pass through the pupal stage. But the pupa is not
a butterfly «+e. State property becomes the property of 'the whole
people' only to the degree that social privilege and differentiat-
ion disappear and therewith the neceessity of the state...'(5)
14,
Clearly though, in the case of the U.S.5S.R. State property is more than a convenient juridical mediation, because of the role played by the bureaucracy which Trotsky did not hesitate to compare with the fascist bureaucracy. There has always been a somewhat intractable problem of locating the State bureaucracy in the class structure of society. Marx criticised very early on Hegel's idealisation of bureaucracy, and writes in a striking passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of "this executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its ingenious state machinary, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body which emeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores."
This is very reminiscent of Trotsky's description of the Soviet bureaucracy. Howgrer the problem is compounded here by two further features:
"In no other regime has a bureaucracy ever such a degree of inde-
pendence from the dominating class. In bourgeois society, the bur-
caucracy represents the interests of a possessing and educated class,
which has at its disposalinnumerable means of everyday control over
its administration of affairs. The Soviet bureaucracy has risen
above a class which is hardly emerging from destitution and dark-
ness, and has no tradition of dominion or command."
Secondly, "...the very fact of its appropriation of political power in a
country where the principal means of production are in the hands of.
the state, creates a new and hitherto unknown relation between the
bureaucracy and the riches of the nation. The means of production
belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, "belongs" to
the bureaucracy." (6)
We will have to come back to this "hitherto unknown relation" but here I want to argue from the point of view of the analysis of the degree of estrangement involved, one must still insist that the character of the subordination of the proletariat by the bureaucracy is distinct from their subordination to capital. One way of seeing this is to approach it via Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital. In commodity production "it is a definite social relation between men that assumes in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." He then goes on to contrast this with feudal production.
"...For the very reason that personal dependence here forms the
groundwork of society there is no necessity for labour and its pro-
duct to assume a fantastic form different from reality. They take
shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and pay-
ments in kind... every serf knows that what he expends in the ser-
vice of his lord is a definite quantity of his own personal labour
powereeeee The social relations between individuals in their per-=
formance of their labour appear at any rate as their own mutual per=
«sonal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social
relations hetween the products of labour."
Again Marx contrasts commodity relations with a community carrying on their work with the means of production held in common, in which labour power of
individuals is consciously applied as the combined power of the community. Here the total product is a social product. Labour time would be apportioned in accordance with a definite social plan tzilored to the real needs of the community.
"The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both
to their labour and its products, are in this case perfectly simple
and intelligible..."
It seems that one can plausibly argue that the structures and associated consciousness of Soviet society can to a great extent be contrasted with capitalist society in a similar way. Social relations would seem to appear as mutual. personal relations rather than taking the fantastic form of things. Every worker knows who it is that is pushing him about from the factory manager up to the Praesidium. It is partly because the bureuacracy cannot cloak its privileges with the mystifications of commodity fetishism that a huge apparatus of phyisical repression is needed. The irrationalities of the economy are not so hidden as those in capitalism. If a sudden shortage or surplus
of some product occurs everyone knows that 'the bureuacrats have essed it up again.' There is some individual identifiable in principle, who was
too busy lining his own pockets or ensuring his political survival, to perform his role in the planning system effeciently. In spite of the existence
of the mediation of state property the relationships of subordination seem defined primarily in terms of personal dependence - though of course, unike the identity of a person and social position in feudalism, the bureauerat in his person is only contingently related to his official position. It is an administrative hierarchy open to talent (of a sort!).
However although state property represents the negation of private property, thisantithesis is still posed within the sphere of property, i.e. of estrangement. As Marx says of what he calls "crude communism":
Again -
"The role of worker is not abolished, but is extended to all men.
The rejigtion of private property remains the relation of the com-
munity to the world of things." (7)
"The community is only a.community of work and of equality of wages
paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal cap-
italist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed
universality; labour as a condition in which everyone is placed,
and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the com-
munity." (8)
State property is therefore, par excellence, an intermediate form. From one point of view it is the first form of communism - from another the final term of
the property system, universalised private property - hence property in the process of being negated. It has to be added, of course, that though in the Soviet Union everyone is juridically equal in respect of state property - some are ‘more equal than others'. This means that Russia represents
the future but as yet underdeveloped, permeated by conflict and unsure of itself. It has its own false consciousness because instead of seeing the activity of each of its members as its own self-sustaining basis, it sees the state as the incarnation and guardian of the socialised economy.
This state, unlike the proletarian dictatorship exercised by the armed working class envisaged by Marx, is seen as an external constraint and the individual is subjugated to a hypostatised universality which nominally includes him but which is just the ideological covering of the exercise of the interest of the new ruling group. Marx had already criticised this idealism in advance when he wrote:
"What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of 'Society' as an abstraction vis -a- vis the individual. The individual is the social being". (9)
This ideology includes the usual tired equations, the workers = the party = the leadership. People believed this to some extent, especially in the early stages, but now it known to be ahypocritical figleaf and there exists in popular consciousness a definite them/us dichotomy (alienation) even though this may not be understood by a theory which transcends the given categories. =
So far we have concentrated on capital and commodity fetishism as forms of alienation. However these are only specific ways in which man may become alienated from his own activity. In a more general sense, any social system which fails to constitute itself as the free, creative expression of its members must to some degree be one of estrangement.
After noting the subordination of the worker to his product Marx goes on to deal with the alienation of the worker from labour iteslf.
"How could the labourer be opposed to the product of his activity
in an alien fashion if he were not estranged in the act of production
itself? The product is only a resume of activity, of production...
«ein the alienation of the object of labour is only crystallised
the alienation, the renunciation, in the activity of labour eee,
10
The most vital expression of the life of man is his activity as a creative many-sided producer. This is what distinguishes him from the stereotyped, instinctual, one-dimensionality of animal existence. Marx does not look to communism to provide people with a condition of contented somnolence, but to provide the gateway to enormous possibilities of self- development, and fulfillment of the universality of mens' powers, that are being brought to birth by the whole historical process.
The condition of alienated labour, however, is one in which labour is not free self-activity, the conscious exercise of all man's powers, but is merely a means to something outside itself, a means to phyisical (i.e. animal) existence. It is in the literal sense "forced labour". Work in capitalist society is an inhuman degradation. Labour power is treated as a commodity like any other. The worker is reduced to the level of a machine with the result that the machine faces him as a competitor. He is reduced even to a cog in a machine, executing plans he does not form, obeying orders the rationality of which doesn't concern him, and unable to gain any satisfaction in his work. His very adaptability and univer-
sality is taken advantage of in the division of labour to reduce everyone to a particular, one-sided, stunting form of labour.
Work in a capitalist factory today is an insult to the human spirit. This despotism at the point of production undoubtedly provided more steam for the events of the French May than did the question of consumption (i.e wages). One concedes that, though implicitly challenging instead of withdrawing from the structures, by occupying the factories, the movement did not articulate a correct programme of workers! control demands. Instead impossibly high money demands were made. In effect the workers were saying that the slavery we have put up with simply cannot be adequately recompensed.
But what of the Soviet Union? A rationalisation of the organisation of industry has taken place. This has been achieved by constituting at the level of the economy the rationality of the capitalist workshop. This is good. But it is not enough.
"The same bourgeois mind which praises the division of labour in the
workshop, life-long annexation of thelabourer to a partial operation,
and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of
labour that increases its productiveness- that same bourgeois mind
denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially con-
trol and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such
sacred things as the right to property, freedom and unrestricted
play for the bent of the individual capitalist. It is very charact-
eristic thet the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have
nothing more damning to urge against a general organisation of the
labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one
immense factory." (11)
Though the workshop organisation is more rational than the macro-economic anarehy *, it remains despotic, maintains a division of labour, especially crippling in the form of the division between mental and physical labour, and makes the labour of the producers a meaningless routine. It is clear that this estrangement from the activity of production, this ‘forced labour' is characteristic of the Soviet Union's industry as much as of capitalist industry.
In ideology this is denied. The Soviet worker has a quite different attitude to his work, finds meaning in it, because he is now working for himself instead of for the capitalist - this is the story. It follows he has no right to strike because that would be striking ‘against himself’.
This purcly ideological connection of the worker with the purposes of despotic hierarchy above him has no empirical meaning because there exists no mediating institutions which would enable the workers in reality (not in ideality) to controltheir collective organisation, to set its purpose, rules, etc. Even if it was true, which of course the workers know it isn't, that the purposes of management were to minister to the interests of the workers, these purposes would still not be the workers' purposes, i.e. not an expression of themselves. Paternalism is still despotism. In this case
.
the state would incarnate the alienated essence of socialist man. The sociality of man would be recognised but only in an externalised form. Instead of subsisting in the individual and his activities, it becomes displaced into the state and the administration generally.
The Stalinist ideology attempts to paint uv the estrangement by talking about 'the State of the whole people', in a recent programmatic declaration. This is an obvious mystification. The state is an instrument of coercion - as such it must incarnate the power of one class in society over another. Why 'the whole people' would wish to exercise coercive power over itself is a mystery known only to Hegel (who provided a similar metaphysical disguise for the Prussian autocracy +) and the Stalinist epigones.
In fact the aforementioned logical possibility of beneficent paternalismthough having some application perhaps to the Castro regime - is emprically very dubious. Generally speaking we can say that in the absence of concrete institutions of proletarian democracy - Soviets, rights of tendency, workers councils, etc., talk of'the state of the whole people’ is a mystification of sinister interests. Just as capitalism lurks behind commodity fetishism, the fetishism of the Soviet State conceals the interests of the bureaucratic stratum.
In On the Jewish Question Marx writes:
"Human emancipation willonly be complete when the real individual
man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an in-
dividual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relat-
ionships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognised
and organised his own powers as social powers so that he no longer
separates this social power from himself as political power." + It is interesting to look at Marx's early critique of Hegel on the bureaucracy. "Hegel proceeds from the separation of the 'state' and 'civil society', from 'particular interests’ and the ‘completely existent universal’. And bureaucracy is indeed based on this separation ..... For the individual bureaucrat the state's purpose becomes his private purpose of hunting for higher positions and making a career for himself.... In bureaucracy the identity of the state's interest and particular private purpose is established in such a way that the state's interest becomes a particular private purpose opposed to other private purposes. The transcendence of bureaucracy can mean only that the universal intcrest becomes the particular interest in actuality and not, as with Hegel, merely in thought and abstraction. This is possible only when the particular interest becomes universal. Hegel proceeds from an unreal antithesis and hence develops it only to an imaginary identity really antithetical to itself. Such an identity is the bureaucracy."
(Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State. 1843)
In appearaace the U.S.S.R. has overcome the separation of the individual life and estranged social power (the State) - but it has done it by taking the estrangement to its limit by making every aspect of the individual life a& political question. The unity is a unity of bondage. It is an imposed and degrading unity, which, (while it docs have progressive aspects by taking for granted the right to work, education and welfare provisions), conccals a terrifying atomisation, isolation, and insecurity at the heart of the individuals experience of this false and hypovcritical brotherhood. C.L.R. James, in the above-mentioned article of the forties, describes the situation as follows:
"The bureaucracy has no free-will. It consumes more than the pro-
letariat. But its social life within itself is a form of jungle
existence. No member of the bureaucracy, except perhaps Stalin,
knows whether tomorrow his whole life may not be cut short and he
himself and all his family, ...: friends, and assistants disgraced,
murdered, or sent into exile. The various strata of the bureaucracy
address each other in the same tone and manner as the bureaucracy
as a whole address the proletariat. If the proletariat is imprisoned
in the factories, the members of the ruling party are subjected to
a regimentation, and unceasing surveillance and inquisition that
make the coveted membership in the party a form of imprisonment.
The Stalinist official, from the highest to the lowest, excludes his
wife and family from any participation not only in his public or pol-
itical life but even in his thinking. It is a measure of protection
so that when the arm of the NKVD falls upon him, they will be able
to say with honesty that they knew nothing of his political ideas.
That is their slender hope of salvation. Friendship is a permanent
suspicion. The risk of betrayal by one false word is too great.
This catalogue of crime, fear, humiliation, degredation, the alien-
ation from human existence of a whole class (or caste), is the fate
of those who benefit by the alienation of labour."
Marx criticised bourgeois individualist ideology for making the rest of society and the state a means for the individual's egoism. Stalinist ideology makes the individual simply a means for the egoism of the state. Such a bizarre notion clearly forms the mystificatory complement to a material estrangement - the subjection of the Soviet people to the Frankensteinian monster they brought forth from their revolutionary agony.
[to be concluded_/
. . . * . ° . . . . . . e . . . . e . . . . * . . e . e . * * . ° . . ° . Are you a subscriber to the Bulletin? If not why don't you do it now. Rates: T/- for four issues post free; 14/- for eight issues post free. Remit to the Business Manager, BMS, 4, Norwood House, Peakes Road,
Etchinghill, Rugeley, Staffs. Cheques or Postal Orders should be made out to M,Tarbuck .