[A-List] Sin-Soviet split .

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Comment

>From a ratther small  social class in the 1920s, the Soviet working class
expanded into a huge  conglomerate in the 1930s. In 1928 there were 11.6 million
hired workers in  Russia and by 1937 that number had expanded to 27 million or
almost tripled.  80%  of people in industry by 1940 had entered the workforce
in the 1930s.  This was a new industrial working class that was constituted
from the peasants  or displaced peasants. Only in the late 1930s did new
workers come in  significant numbers from urban families.

In 1929 half the workers in the  Soviet Union had entered the workforce
before the 1917 Revolution. 35 - 40% had  been born peasants, and 25% still had
some ties to the land, 2/3 of whom had  fought with the Red Army in the Civil War
and were very loyal to Soviet Power  and the reliable prop - support, of the
Soviet regime.

The  transformation of the 1930s was in fact described correctly as a
revolution from  the top to bottom of civic society rather than from "below." This
concept of  industrialization from "below" - whatever that means in the real
world, is a  fantasy conception of social change, given the Soviet reality. The
revolution  from the top means that the state power itself went about the
business of  organizing resources and human labor rather than individual
enterprises acting  on the basis of the support their products received in the market
and from this  relationship reinvested in reproducing their products. At the
head of this state  power was of course the Party.

The new class of managers and  administrators that emerged in the 1930s seems
to me to be a distinct Soviet  phenomenon in the sense that the state
authority headed by the party pushed some  half a million communist workers into
managerial and technical position and  another half million noncommunist workers
into such positions of authority. I  call these group of mangers and
administrators a "new class" in the sense of  what their actual task in production
consisted of in relationship to non-mangers  . . . and as a historical category,
they are new because they are not  characteristic of any social activity under
economic and political feudalism.  Hence "a new class."

And because this social grouping did not exists in  the 1920s as such and
most certainly not before 1917.

One can  nevertheless construct a vision of why a "revolution from below" was
not  possible. In the industrial sense and meaning of society there was not a
below  as such. Below was being constructed from the decomposition of the
peasantry and  the landed property relations. That is to say the infrastructure -
in this case  the industrial infrastructure, - that alone gives reality to
the subjective and  material factors that constitutes "below," had to be
constructed. This new  industrial working class would come to learn 50 years later,
that no social  grouping can overthrow itself or the system of production
relations of which  they constitute.

Remembering that what we face before us is a new  working class and new class
of managers, it goes without question that these  social grouping had very
little "class consciousness" as the culture of  industrial classes. By "class
consciousness," here is not meant Marxist  political consciousness - Marxist
ideology, or a general materialist conception  of history, but the lived
experience of industrial classes in the hereditary  meaning of the word "class" and
"consciousness."

Because peasants now  worked in the factories or on a building site did not
mean that they understood  the culture and discipline of industrial work. As a
new class this social  grouping was resistant to the new way of life, worked
slowly, broke tools and  got drunk on the level of the English industrial
worker during the rising curve  of the industrial revolution. This meant in real
life that all the organizations  of the industrial workers bore a petty
bourgeois tinge, with leaders being  elected and treated as elders from the villiage
in which the peasants, now  proletarians, had come. Here is the real life human
drama, real communist faced.

Don't get me wrong, because I drank hard for 17 years of my 30 year  tenure
at Chrysler. The difference is that I had assimilated a hereditary sense  and
the meaning of class culture while in the womb and was born into a household
that was organized and operated in correspondence to industrial logic,
industrial time, industrial reality or the industrial mode of life, as the  result of
my environment and my dad working for Ford Motor Company. The  elementary,
Middle School and High School I attended was organized on an  industrial basis
and operated on industrial time frames. By age 15 I was  conditioned for the
assembly line and had the class consciousness/culture of the  industrial classes
of our society. Political Marxists class consciousness would  come later.

In the first fifty years of Soviet power the urban  population of the USSR
rose from 15 percent of the total population to 60% or  the same growth that
took America well over 100 years. In 1926, about 26 million  or less than a fifth
of the population, lived in towns and cities. In 1939, - as  war was breaking
out in Europe, 56 million, almost a third of the total  population lived in
towns and cities. These 30 million new city dwellers came  from somewhere . . .
the peasantry, in a massive influx.

Here is a  small slice of reality often ignored by students of Soviet
history.

Yet  if one compared the life of the Soviet peasantry in its transition to
industrial  class during the 1930 with the actual life of the sharecroppers and
rural  proletarians and semi-rural proletarians of the 1930s America, neither
had a  comfortable life. In America during the 1930s, (a period many insist
that our  working class could have gone into political revolution and seized
political  power if not for bad communist leaders), our working class was still
formed  primarily from European immigrants with the Slavic workers - and to a
degree the  Irish, at the core of the unskilled. The mass migrations from our
rural areas  was still a solid decade away.

The dialectic of transition from  feudalism to capitalism to socialism has a
larger context that is proven by  Soviet history.

The actual transition is from agrarian relations as the  predominate force in
society to industrial relations, with competing forms of  property relations.
Just because the communists win the political contest does  not mean we can
ignore the general motion of history and magically created a  perfect
industrial society out of ideological concepts. There is nothing  ideological about a
machine or industrial infrastructure. The Soviet working  class and the world
workers are learning a bitter lesson and new meaning of  class antagonisms and
why one cannot simply overthrow a bureaucracy. One cannot  magically leap to
communism by "world revolution," carrying in your wake  peasants or a society
configuration that is exchange of products riveted to  agricultural relations.

Here are some of the facts of history, as I  understand them. Here is the
real dialectic of history and Soviet history in  particular. 1949 China and 1949
Soviet Union were really very different  societies. 1949 Soviet Union was
closer to American society than Chinese society  in 1949. The Soviets had their
own problems needing resolution. The Khruschchev  gang sought to resolve these
problems on the basis of collusion with bourgeois  imperialism and market
relations patterned after American capitalism.

The Soviets were going to have real contradictions with China for  history
reasons, culture and levels of development. These contradictions did not  have
to become violent and split the world communist movement. The reasons they  did
is because of the Khruschchev gang rather than the CPC.

Melvin P.


Henry C.K. Lui writes:

>The October Revolution was  an unexpected anomaly because geopolitical
circumstances caused it to take  place in a pre-industrial country the
majority population of which was  peasants rather than factory workers,
and the main socio-economic conflict  was between landlord and landless
peasant classes rather than capitalist and  worker classes. It is then a
revolutionary task to create a proletariat  class in Russia and other the
Socialist Republics within the USSR as quickly  as possible through rapid
industrialization, not merely to catch up with the  more industrialized
West, but to hasten revolutionary dialectics of  transition from
feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Thus the modernization  strategies
of the Soviet revolutionary government were fundamentally  different than
the imperialist strategies of Peter the Great. It was wrong  to see
Soviet industrialization as inter-imperialist rivalry as the Western
anti-communist left does. Social engineering had to be speeded up to fit
revolutionary dialectics. This new proletariat class, not having existed
before the revolution, had not had the experience of being oppressed by
capitalists. In fact there was a shortage of capitalists to realize the
triumphant class struggle that was supposed to be the victorious outcome
of the revolution. Yet it was problematic for the new proletariat class
to be a new antithesis against a nonexistence thesis of capitalism. The
revolution provided the solution by creating a class of state
bureaucrats, known as party cadres, which opponents immediately name the
New Class. Notwithstanding the ideological role of the party cadre is to
guide the revolution toward socialism, this new class acted essentially
as management against labor in the new industries to facilitate a
controlled class struggle toward socialism. The socialist proletariat,
in the absence of a capitalist class, mistook the bureaucratic
management class as the target of class struggle and played into the
hands of reactionaries. This eventually culminated in the Solidarity
Movement that began in Poland, a broad anti-communist social movement
that united the Catholic Church with the anti-communist left.  <><<