The Dream Café

I think that as many people will read this, they will be asking: “Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, how did that happen?” My problems with the question as it is formulated are, for the moment, beside the point. The approach Trotsky takes is to ask: “What exactly is the social, economic, and political nature of the Soviet Union, how did it get there, and where is it going?” I hope and believe the answer to the first question will be contained in the answer to the second.

In the previous post, I made mention of the law of combined development, and how, in many ways, Russia had leapfrogged the advanced capitalist countries. Here, I want to emphasize “in many ways.” At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was still mostly an agrarian country. Unlike the advanced Western countries, where farming produced enough to support a massive industrial proletariat, the number of people working in industry was tiny. That is one of the contradictions of Soviet society: a backward level of development, but extremely advanced levels within many industries. Over-all, the word is “uneven” is accurate, although not nearly strong enough.

As a Marxist, Trotsky takes as a starting point an objective assessment of the country as it was at the time of his writing (1936); unless we see what actually is as regards material conditions, aside from our wishes or prejudices, we have no basis for understanding. Marxists believe that the most basic function of society is to provide the necessities of life to the people of that society, and that, therefore, the most important determining factor is the productivity of labor—in other words, before we even ask how things are distributed, we must ask: to what degree is this society able to produce enough to meet the needs of the people? The question “what is enough” is actually significant at a certain point: those who observe that poverty today is generally better than poverty a thousand years ago are not wrong; “enough” is a question that is determined socially. But whatever definition we use, the ability of the society to produce is the issue, and, in the last analysis, that raises the question: how much can an individual make in a given time? Productivity of labor, in turn, is determined by several factors, including the level of infrastructure (roads, railroads, telephone lines, &c &c), the level of development of the productive forces (farm equipment, factories, tools), and technique—the skill with which workers are able to use all of the above.

Trotsky therefore begins with various metrics to measure what we might call the successes and failures of the Soviet economy, or, more precisely, where the economy currently (1936) stands. These metrics include things like miles of railroad, agricultural production per acre, production of steel, coal, &c &c. He is looking at this from two perspectives: one, compared to the pre-revolutionary condition of Russia, and two, compared to the major capitalist countries.

The first of these shows a resounding triumph; the second shows the reverse.

In order to understand the scope of what was accomplished, it is worth reviewing a few things. Russia entered World War I as the weakest of the major powers in terms of level of industrialization, and in both industrial and military technique. For anyone inclined to view the details, Trotsky presents them in chapters one and two of his History of the Russian Revolution.

Following the revolution came civil war, supported financially and militarily by the major imperialist powers. Between 1918 and 1923, armies from the following countries invaded the Soviet Union: Germany, Britain, Italy, Greece, the United States, Australia, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia*, Japan, and France. The loss of life—especially among the most dedicated, class-conscious workers—and the destruction of infrastructure and production capacity were staggering. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Russia emerged from this war utterly exhausted and with industry and infrastructure barely able to support itself. This map should give a general idea of the scope of the war.

There is dialectical relationship between industry and agriculture: improved agricultural technique requires support from industry, and at the same time produces sufficient surplus to support the industrial workers. In a capitalist country, this balance is anarchic, determined by the market, and in general results in massive debt for the farmer and his gradual conquest by agribusiness. But what happens when this relationship is confronted by the massive destruction of railroads and roads, as well as the factories that produce the machinery agriculture requires?

That is what Russia faced. On the other hand, it had two factors in its favor: socialized property relations (ie, State ownership of production), and the confidence of the working class and the poorest peasants. The advantage of State ownership was tremendous: it permitted decisions on production to be based on the over-all requirements of society, rather than personal profit, as well as directing the fruits of that production to where they were be most needed. The result of this was tremendous; it permitted advances on a level never before (or since) seen in history.

Let’s get specific and discuss what this produced by 1936. There are a lot of data in this chapter, but I’ll cut out what I can, because what’s important is to get the general idea, and because I’m addressing these posts mostly to those who are choosing to read along as we go. And the general idea is a deep, profound contradiction.

As I said above, the single most important metric in a society for the purpose of showing its potential to meet the wants of its citizens is the productivity of labor, and in this, the Soviet Union lagged far behind the western powers, both because of the undeveloped character of industry, and the lack of technique of the average Soviet worker. “In the best metal foundry, according to the acknowledgment of its director, the output of iron and steel per individual worker is a third as much as the average output of American foundries. A comparison of average figures in both countries would probably give a ratio of 1 to 5, or worse.”

That refers to basic, heavy industry–required by other industries. But the quality of goods produced gets worse from there. “A unique law of Soviet industry may be formulated thus: commodities are as a general rule worse the nearer they stand to the mass consumer.”

Quality is always an issue where poor technique meets underdeveloped infrastructure. He speaks of the abysmal quality of automobiles, as well as the poor condition of roads and railroads. The tractors—so vital in raising the level of agriculture—spend more time being repaired than they do working (literally). This is even more pronounced if we look at the results as they reach the worker or the poor peasant: there has been, up until this point, little or no improvement in his day-to-day condition, and this improvement is the foundation on which the promise of socialism rests.

And yet, there is the other side of the coin: Every capitalist country in the world saw either stagnation or decline of industrial capacity when comparing its state from the end of WWI to that in 1936. The exceptions were Germany and Japan, in which increased “industrial capacity” meant arming for war. Japan, which in addition to arming itself was busily plundering its neighbors, saw the biggest increase: 30%. During this time, the Soviet Union’s increase in industry was 250%! No country, before or since, has shown anywhere near that level of industrialization in that short a time. Those who believe it was simply making up for her impoverishment are invited to look at Turkey, India, China, and Greece, which were also impoverished, and remained that way until built up by investment of foreign capital—which, in essence, bought those countries.

“In 1920, when the first plan of electrification was drawn up, there were ten district power stations in the country with a total power production of 253,000 Kilowatts. In 1935, there were already ninety-five of these stations with a total power of 4,345,000 kilowatts. In 1925, the Soviet Union stood eleventh in the production of electroenergy; in 1935, it was second only to Germany and the United States.”

For now, I think the point is clear enough: “With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an economic arena embracing one-sixth of the earth’s surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of iron, cement, and electricity . . . thanks solely to a proletarian revolution, a backward country has achieved in less than twenty years successes unexampled in history.” I can only add that in the 80 years since the book was written, that remains the case.

I spoke above of a deep and profound contradiction. There were, in the Soviet Union, many, but this is the one I was speaking of above all: between the unprecedented advancement of industrial and agricultural development on the one hand, and the way the Soviet Union lagged behind the advanced capitalist countries on the other. As we study the development of the Soviet Union in order to understand how it arrived where it is, we must keep that contradiction firmly in mind.

*To be precise, Czechoslovakia didn’t invade—troops were already there at the time of the insurrection, and spent their time trying to leave. But they, in effect, took the side of the imperialists, so I include them on the list for that reason.

I’ve tried to figure out a way to avoid this, but I just can’t. So much of the argument in the book is based on the opening paragraph of chapter one, and it contains such a vital concept, that I’m going to have to devote a post to it. Here is how the book starts:

“Owing to the insignificance of the Russian bourgeoisie, the democratic tasks of backward Russia—such as liquidation of the monarchy and the semifeudal slavery of the peasants—could be achieved only through a dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat, however, having seized the power at the head of the peasant masses, could not stop at the achievement of these democratic tasks. The bourgeois revolution was directly bound up with the first stages of a socialist revolution.”

The term “historical tasks” occurs a great deal in Marxist literature, and I’m afraid that, without some explanation, it will seem as if history is being seen as having agency, in exactly the way that certain casual references in discussions of evolution are sometimes seen by theists as implying that evolution has agency.

Society, driven by the production and distribution of necessities, has discovered various forms for managing that production and distribution. These forms—primitive communism (aka hunter-gatherer), slave-holding, feudal-monarchical, capitalist—are the product of several factors, including the climate and makeup of the land, the resources to be found on it, the history of the development of that culture, and, first and foremost, the development of the productive forces and its corollary, the productivity of labor.

Form and content, of course, are deeply interrelated.  Permit me to give an example. I’ll pick agriculture as the simplest and most classic case.  An improvement in agricultural technique—better seeds, for example, or a new plow design, or a new breed of draft animal—produces a greater surplus, which in a feudal society is appropriated by the landlord.  This increase permits, in turn, greater holdings for that landlord, which require a larger State (more gendarmes to keep the peasants in check, a standing army to fight off neighbors who want to appropriate the surplus for themselves) which, over time, leads to the growth of administrative cities that are centers of consumption (e.g., London).  The surplus is also used to purchase luxury items, which gives inspiration to crafts, leading to guilds and eventually to the growth of cities that are centers of production (e.g., Manchester).  As the guilds and craftsmen improve their own technique, and thus the productivity of their labor, they move us in the direction of more modern (i.e., capitalist) forms of production and exchange, which then find themselves held back by the very feudal forms in which they were developed.  A society whose content is based on commodity exchange cannot function well if the form is based on feudal law and land-ownership arrangements.  The inefficiency of trade in a society where each count or baron determines his own laws, taxes, and tariffs is ruinous to capitalism. The desire of a king to pull in as much wealth as possible and to preserve his power against the lesser nobles is antithetical to the need of capital for reinvestment to increase production. And, above all, peasants who are tied to the land by the force of law (serfdom) or economic necessity are unavailable for free labor needed in the workshops and, later, the factories.

Thus, at a certain point, the content overcomes the form; the capitalist class overthrows the feudal regime and re-creates society in its own image. The level of violence in this process is primarily the result of the relative strength of the contending classes.  The English Civil War  (1642-1651) and the Great French Revolution (1789 – 1799) are the classic types of capitalist revolution.  This comes about when a system has, in Marxist terms, exhausted itself-–in other words, reached the point where the old form is confining the new content and preventing its full development, and, indeed, threatening the strangulation of society.

But here’s the rule: A system never leaves the stage of history before it has reached that point of exhaustion. When Marxists speak of historic tasks, the term means first of all that the productive forces have been built up as much as they can without overthrowing the old arrangements. And, second, the society in question has completed the developments that go along with that, such as, in the case of capitalism, representative democracy, settling the “land question,” a more equitable justice system, and so on.

That’s the rule. Alas, history doesn’t have as a priority making things simple and straightforward. Cultures and countries don’t exist in isolation from each other, and they don’t all develop at the same tempo.

The law of combined development as regards industry states that, since technology doesn’t have to be developed independently every time,  advances in technique in backward companies will in some places surpass advanced companies exactly because of their backwardness.   Within an industry, there are many times when a company using older techniques of manufacture has surpassed a company using more modern techniques just because it was in a position, with greater credit and more available capital, to immediately take advantage of the newest discoveries that another cannot because it’s capital is still tied up in the last generation of technology.  This is especially true when there is a major breakthrough in the technique of manufacturing.  I remember working at a computer company (DNA/Avnet) in the late 70’s that was going through exactly that process with automated wire-wrap technology; it was on the wrong side, and eventually folded (there were other reasons, but that was a contributor).  Between countries this phenomenon is also not uncommon.   My favorite example is the way Hungary at a certain point in the 1980s became a leader in cell phone technology exactly because, when cell phones were introduced, Hungary was still using the old, WW II-era land line system. Instead of upgrading to an already obsolete technology, it leapfrogged and established a cell phone system that was, for a time, the most advanced in Europe.  Another example, just because I love examples that use Hungary, is that Hungarian orthography is the most logical, scientific, and rational in the world, because Hungarian literacy was so low for so long that they came late to the game and were thus able to see and avoid the ambiguities and inconsistencies that plague the orthographies of the more advanced languages.

But the same law also applies to the comparative overall technological level of countries.  Russia, which hadn’t yet abolished serfdom in the middle of the 19th Century (compared to the 14th in France, the 15th in most of Germany, and the 16th in England) was significantly “behind the times” for the creation of modern industry.  For that reason, when it started, it caught up quickly in certain ways (though not in others, as we will see). In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky shows that the typical size of factories, for example, was considerably larger in Russia than in the advanced capitalist countries for exactly this reason—it didn’t need to start small and build, the techniques for large industry were already known, and their greater efficiency (and thus, profitability) were well established by the “American system of manufacture.”

Under these conditions, certain things that one would expect of a bourgeois nation—the settling of the land question, the creation of democratic forms, the establishment of certain sorts of equality before the law, the building of the modern nation-state—had not been addressed. Capitalism performs these “tasks” for its own self interest: Democracy and formal legal equality is better for the ruling class because it drastically reduces the cost in gendarmarie, secret police, prisons, and other expensive institutions of repression. The land question and the modern nation-state both serve to make trade more efficient, and to provide a pool of free labor for manufacturing.

By the early 20th Century, capitalism had so exhausted itself that it could only continue by massive destruction of capital and infrastructure to raise the rate of profit, and by using military (instead of economic) means to shift markets and resources among the major powers—this is exactly the significance of World War I.  But the exhaustion of capitalism in the major powers of Western Europe and the United States came at a time when Russia was still a feudal monarchy. Above, I gave the rule as, “A system never leaves the stage of history before it has exhausted itself.” But here’s the rub: capitalism is international. What happens when, on a world scale, it has exhausted itself before certain countries (Russia, India, China, a host of African and South American countries) have even started on the road? The answer, in every one of those countries, is that the bourgeoisie is unable to carry out the tasks of capitalism. This leaves those countries two choices: to fall victim to the colonial pretensions of one of the major imperialist powers and become in essence an enslaved nation, or turn the historical tasks of capitalism over to those who can carry it out: the proletariat.

From February to October of 1917, the Russian bourgeoisie held state power.   During this time they not only failed to give land to the peasant, but instituted measures of repression against peasants who demanded it. They not only failed to end the war, but launched a doomed offensive that even their own generals knew was pure adventurism.  They not only failed to provide bread, but pulled in a counter-revolutionary general to crush the working class for daring to ask. In other words, in 9 months, they proved conclusively—if not to the willfully blind bourgeois historian, at least to the worker, to the soldier, and to the peasant—that they were unable to carry out the tasks of capitalism.  In October, the proletariat seized power with those tasks still not accomplished.  And, holding power, rather than let itself be crushed by efforts to restore the monarchy, or permit Russia to become a colonial puppet of the imperialist powers, the working class chose, under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, to complete the tasks of capitalism in the only way it could: by moving forward in the direction of socialism.  This determined everything that followed

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The introduction to The Revolution Betrayed was written in August of 1936—as mentioned before, just two weeks before the start of the Moscow frame-up trials. The United States is still in the middle of the Great Depression. That year also sees the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes. Hitler rules in Germany, and in March of that year “pro-democratic militarist” Keisuke Okada is replaced as Japanese prime minister with radical militarist Koki Hirota, securing control of the government for that faction. Fascist Italy anexes Ethiopia. The Remington Rand strike begins in the US. The social democrats sell out the French General Strike, paving the way for military capitulation before Nazi Germany.  The Spanish Civil War begins. In short: it is the final preparation for what will soon become the second World War.

As will become clear in the first two chapters, the Soviet Union is at this time a mass of contradictions–poor technique, terrible productivity of labor, agricultural poverty, cultural backwardness co-exist with the most incredible rate of growth of productive forces ever seen. “The learned economists of capital still often try to maintain a deeply cogitative silence about the unpredecented tempo of Russia’s industrial development, or confine themselves to remarks about the extreme ‘exploitation of the peasantry.’ They are missing a wonderful opportunity to explain why the brutal exploitation of peasants in China, for instance, or Japan, or India, never produced an industrial tempo remotely approaching that of the Soviet Union.”

Why? Why both the explosive tempo, and why the contradictory elements: famine, inefficiency, terrible productivity of labor? Is one dependent on the other? Would it be possible to have the one without the other? We will, of course, be getting into that–after all, the book would be largely pointless if we didn’t.

But there are some contextual things that I should mention as we consider the reason the book was written.  For one, it is important to understand that the attitude of the working masses toward the Soviet Union was different in the 1930s than it was in the last half of the 20th Century. Stalinism had not discredited itself (using the name socialism), the murder and repression were only beginning and not generally known, and even more, the selling out of the Stalinist-controlled trade unions by signing no-strike pledges during WWII had not happened. Most of my readers are probably familiar with the virulent anti-communism of the McCarthy era; but fewer of you are, I would guess, aware that the seeds of McCarthyism fell on ground that had been prepared by the role of the Communist Party in the trade union movement during the war. This, in the United States in particular, left the working class already bitter toward the idea of communism.

My point is, none of this had happened yet, and millions of workers were looking toward the Soviet Union with hope, or at least with a friendly fascination. Playing on this, as opportunists inevitably will, there emerged various schools of pro-Soviet writing, marked by a refusal to be the least bit critical of the ruling clique.

Trotsky discusses the types of writing produced by “the friends of the Soviet Union.” He says, “What unites these three catagories, despite their differences, is a kowtowing before accomplished fact and a partiality for sedative generalizations . . . this kind of contemplative, optimistic and anything but destructive literature, which sees all unpleasantnesses in the past, has a very quieting effect on the nerves of the reader and therefore finds a cordial reception.”

In part, the book was in response to these nostrums that concealed more than they revealed. But that, in a sense, begs the question: why is it important to understand the Soviet Union in the first place? “The purpose of the present investigation is to estimate correctly what is, in order the better to understand what is coming to be.” It would, I hope, go without saying that an understanding, in 1936, of where the Soviet Union was headed would be of no small interest to socialists and to any class-conscious worker. And in the sense that I mentioned in my introduction to these posts, the prediction, and then the outcome, is of vital importance to us today.

“Whoever worships the accomplished fact is incapable of preparing for the future.”

This is a key element, and I would beg the reader to remember it, both as we proceed, and now, as we look at the “why” of the book’s being written. Ten thousand times in my life have I heard some form of, “Socialism failed in the Soviet Union. That is a fact, and you can’t deny it.” Indeed not. But…what is a fact? A fact is a first-order abstraction from reality. It is a fact that I have three computer monitors—this means that, in my mind, I have abstracted from my monitors everything about them except their quantity. I could have said, “My ACER monitor is six years old,” or, “My Samsung monitor has a power switch in the lower right-hand corner,” and so on. These are all facts. The monitors themselves are not facts, they are material objects, from which, in my mind, I may pull whatever abstractions are useful for my cognitive activity.

To “worship the accomplished fact” is to make a single abstraction, and fetishize it—remove it from its historical and sociological context, ignore all thought of how it came to be and where it is going, and invest it with weight that it cannot carry without its poor epistomological back breaking.

To worship the “fact” of the Soviet Union’s “failure to accomplish socialism” is as unscientific as to deny it. Without looking at context, processes, and the interrelation of this fact with others, there is no possibility of understanding.

Here is, in essence, what the book is going to be looking at: Was the USSR socialist? If it was not, does that tell us that socialism is impossible? Why or why not?

I think, in some measure at least, we can answer the first question right here in the introduction: “If you remember that the task of socialism is to create a classless society based upon solidarity and the harmonious satisfaction of all needs, there is not yet, in this fundamental sense, a hint of socialism in the Soviet Union. To be sure, the contradictions of Soviet society differ profoundly from the contradictions of capitalism. But they are nevertheless very tense. They find their expression in material and cultural inequalities, governmental repressions, political groups and the struggle of factions. Police repression stifles and distorts a political struggle, but does not eliminate it.”

Is that task Utopian?  Are the Bolshevik methods—popular uprising led by a vanguard party—responsible for the degeneration of the workers state?  And, above all, how do we make this determination?  Those who are convinced it doesn’t matter, or who are too invested in cynicism and despair to consider the matter scientifically, are invited to stop reading now.

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