to vladimir bilenkin on state capitalism

[Walter Daum <WGDCC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Vladimir Bilenkin's long critique of state capitalism theory (10
Jun 1996 13:24:41 -0700 (PDT)) deserves a serious answer. Time is
unfortunately limited, so I can only reply by commenting on
selected portions of Vladimir's essay.

In my opinion, some (but not all) of the charges he makes against
Cliffism hit home. But the alternative theory he suggests has
done no better and in some cases possibly worse.

I write from the standpoint of a theory of state capitalism
different from Cliff's; I hope the essence of the difference will
be clear in these comments.

VB wrote:
There have been only three choices:
1. To accept Trotsky's position and to wage international
struggle both against the imperialist threat from the outside and
Stalinist bureaucracy from the inside.
2. To renege, as Burnham did.
3. To eliminate the problem "theoretically," as Cliff did.

And in reply to Jorn, VB added:
The difference between (1) and (3) was not about whether the
bureaucracy had or did not have anything to do with socialism. It
was about whether the international working class had something
very important for itself to defend in the SU. This something
important was the means of production free from the rule of
private property.

WD:
There is a difference between defending the workers' gains and
defending the Soviet state. The working class had every need to
defend statified property and the gains this property embodied.
But that should not be confused with defending the Stalinist
state, which was not a trustworthy protector of these gains (or
even of state property, as events showed). State capitalism as a
system is primarily capitalism, not some third system based
fundamentally on state property. In crisis it turned toward
intensifying capitalistic methods by reducing statification, not
towards a more democratic form of state.

VB:
Another point: I do not know what was Cliff's interpretation of
the Cold War, but one of the implications of his theory would
must have been the trivialization of it as just another product
of imperialist contradictions between two variations of "state
capitalism." In fact, the victory of "capitalist democracies"
over the SU would have been preferable from this standpoint for
in the former the workers have legal rights to organize.

WD:
The preference Vladimir suggests was in fact that of Shachtman,
Cliff's U.S. ally for a time; I don't know that Cliff ever went
that far. (Shachtman was not a "state capitalist" but a
bureaucratic collectivist," but in reality the two theories were
not that different.) Shachtman went so far as to support the U.S.
war against Vietnam on the grounds that South Vietnamese workers
had democratic trade unions and North Vietnamese workers didn't.

VB:
Let us imagine a Soviet worker who reads _State Capitalism in
Russia_ in, say, 1987. By that time our worker has been growing
anxious. ... Our worker looks for answers and he finds some very
soothing answers indeed in this book. It tells him that all his
life the worker has already lived under capitalism, and therefore
he has no socialism to defend. On the other hand, he should have
no fear of "private" or "individual" capitalism for it could be
restored only by "external forces."

WD:
This is a non sequitur. The worker has no genuine socialism or
workers' state to defend, but s/he has plenty of gains that are
socialist in form. These are crucial to defend, even under
"ordinary" capitalism.

I think, however, that the Cliff tendency did not recognize this.
Their line in post-1989 Eastern Europe was in effect that the
workers had nothing to defend. They wrote in 1990 that the
"transition" from state capitalism to multinational capitalism,
was "neither a step forward nor a step backward but a step
sidewards."

By the way, there were also "orthodox" Trotskyists (maintaining
the workers' state theory of the USSR) who refused to defend
nationalized property after the Stalinists lost power -- on the
grounds that the state was no longer a workers' state. That meant
that they too ended up not defending important working-class
gains.

VB:
The imperatives of Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet society were
not easy to follow by any measure. The communists who accepted it
had to battle on two fronts. Mostly important, they had do
everything possible to fight the bureaucracy inside SU and to
keep alive the tradition of revolutionary Marxism in the country.
Under the regime of the Stalinist terror, it was perhaps the
hardest imperative to accept in the entire history of the
communist movement. Cliff's analysis provided theoretical
justification to avoid this imperative for those who could not
follow it. One can object by saying that the adherents of the
Fourth International have dismally failed to carry over the
struggle inside SU. True, but they did so DESPITE the imperatives
of Trotsky's conclusions which they deemed correct.

WD:
The orthodox Fourth Internationalists also had "theoretical
justification" to avoid the imperative of keeping revolutionary
Marxism alive. Their theory (not Trotsky's) held that Stalinism
was a revolutionary current, since after all it had overthrown
capitalist governments (and therefore supposedly capitalism
itself) in many countries after World War 2.

Under these circumstances it was difficult, indeed logically
impossible, to stick with Trotsky's characterization of Stalinism
after the Spanish Civil War as "counterrevolutionary." The
pressure to see revolutionary possibilities in Stalinism, not to
speak of reformist ones, was immense.

If we turn back to Vladimir's Soviet worker in 1987, it is
important for such a worker to understand as well that the
"bosses" [Vladimir's term, and it is accurate] are not allies but
enemies, and that they will hinder the workers' struggle.
Trotsky's theory certainly makes this clear, but not that of
Trotsky's post-war followers.

VB:
Cliff makes a theoretical discovery that there can be a social
revolution from below without revolutionary consciousness. So far
we do not know of any instance of such revolution. On the
contrary, every revolution we know of was prepared by long years
of theoretical activity and revolutionary propaganda. For some
unknown to me reason Cliff predicted that a revolution in the SU
would be an exception to this rule.

WD:
Here Vladimir is entirely correct.

VB:
What sort of a "revolutionary marxist party" is it that comes
AFTER the "first chapter of the victorious proletarian
revolution?" The representatives of what classes would flock to
this sort of party? Lenin and Trotsky had a few things to say on
this issue.

WD:
Again, point well taken. But it is not only Cliff who is under
criticism here. The orthodox Fourth Internationalists held such a
view about the Stalinist takeovers in East Europe. The
revolutionary Marxist party would be needed to guide these
"deformed workers' states" to socialism -- although such a party
was apparently an optional extra for the socialist revolution
that created the "workers' states."

VB:
How do Cliff's predictions fare in the face of what has actually
happened in SU? Not very well, to put it mildly. There was no
"spontaneous outburst of millions," not to mention the "first
chapter of the victorious proletarian revolution." While the
Soviet workers remained politically passive even after 1956 ...
the bureaucracy had consolidated itself and achieved a new level
of stability and continuity.

WD:
The workers in other Soviet-bloc countries, however, did not
remain passive, but broke out in uprisings, mass strikes, etc.
>from 1953 through 1981. They thereby challenged the "stability
and continuity" of the bureaucracy. One could easily argue that
Gorbachev's reforms were inspired by the specter of communism --
that is, the Polish working class's movement, despite its
counterrevolutionary leadership and illusions in the West --
spreading across national borders.

VB:
When the time had come - and contrary to Cliff's fantasies - the
anti-communist leadership and the social groups behind it
attacked the fundamental socialist features of the Soviet society
>from the standpoint of the neoliberal ideology and from the
outset took the course at the restoration of "private
capitalism," i.e. the course the possibility of which Cliff so
categorically denied. In general outlines, they have achieved
this goal in an exceptionally short time.

WD:
Cliff's error is as serious as Vladimir says, since he sees state
capitalism not as a deformed version of capitalism but its
highest stage, superior to "private" capitalism. In his book he
wrote that the Stalinist bureaucracy is the "truest
personification of the historical mission of this [capitalist]
class." ("State Capitalism in Russia, 1988 version, p. 182.)

Cliff also predicted: "Before the experience of World War II, it
was an understandable if incorrect assumption that private
capitalism could be restored in Russia without its occupation by
an imperialist power. But the victory of the concentrated,
statified Russian economy over the German war machine silenced
all talk of such a possibility." (p. 326.) That is, privatization
of property from within was the opposite of the direction Cliff's
theory foresaw for the USSR.

But again Cliff was not alone. Mandel, the theoretical leader of
Trotskyist orthodoxy, held for a long time that there could be no
internal restoration of private property. He wrote in October
1989 (when the Polish CP was in a coalition government with
Solidarnosc): "Today, whatever impressionable journalists or
people who confuse their desires with reality may say, in Poland
and Hungary it is the bureaucratic nomenklatura and not the `pro-
bourgeois forces' that control the state apparatus."

Few assertions made with such assurance have been refuted so
quickly. And few observers, impressionable or otherwise, were so
blinded by theory as to miss the fact that the nomenklatura was
as pro-bourgeois as anybody else and were not defending state
property against privatization.

VB:
And even the actual mechanism of this transition from planned
economy to "private capitalism" has turned to be remarkably
similar to that envisioned by Trotsky in the Revolution Betrayed.

WD:
Trotsky's predictions were accurate except in one respect: he
foresaw the *rapid* end of Stalinist rule, at the hands either of
the revolutionary proletariat or Western imperialism. He did not
anticipate the bureaucracy's "stability and continuity." This
unexpected development has to be accounted for by anyone dealing
seriously with Trotsky's theory. I would attribute it to the
strengthening of the bureaucracy through its consolidation as a
ruling class on the basis of state capital -- which also led
ultimately to its downfall, since this form of capital also
embodied, in a deformed way, gains of the workers limiting the
rulers' ability to exploit them.

VB:
I wonder if after 1956 the followers of Cliff questioned his
fatalistic thesis on the impossibility of revolutionary work
inside the SU? And if they did not, why?

As I have mentioned, the trotskyists did not fare much better in
this respect. During the same period they spent tons of ink and
eloquence to defend Trotsky's theory of the Soviet society. But
why did not they act on it? Why did they fail to establish a
revolutionary underground in SU? Did they actually BELIEVE in the
theory they defended on paper? Did they actually BELIEVE in
Trotsky's either/or and the urgency to act that this alternative
called for?

WD:
I know little about the actual work of the Trotskyists in the
USSR or East Europe in the pre-perestroika years. But their
theory (of Stalinism's revolutionary capacity) could have
contributed to a belief that no revolutionary party was
necessary.

Moreover, it was not just a question of failing to carry out
Trotsky's program for building a revolutionary party; they worked
in the opposite direction. During the events of 1989 and after,
both the orthodox Trotskyists and Cliffites tailed the pro-
bourgeois "democratic" opposition leaderships and often the new
governments these leaders later formed. Poland's Solidarnosc was
a favorite of both -- the government ministers as distinct from
the union structures. For example, after Walesa had been in power
for a year the Mandelite Bulletin in Defense of Marxism reasoned
as follows:

"If capital is going to be attracted by the Walesa/Mazowiecki
team it will be necessary to allow capitalists to make
superprofits. Superprofits, however, require superexploitation of
the Polish workers and of Polish natural resources. But such a
process is completely incompatible with the development of the
economy in the interests of the Polish people, which Solidarity
is committed to. And besides, the government remains too close to
its social base amongst the workers to allow such a thing."

Whatever dreamworld these writers were in, it had to be notions
of working-class power under Stalinism that put them to sleep. In
reality, of course, the Solidarity ministers (then in coalition
with the Stalinists) were so committed to the workers' well-being
that they imposed a ferocious austerity policy demanded by
Western bankers, leading to massive declines in industrial
production and real wages, and over a million unemployed.

-----

Finally, I take to heart Vladimir's impassioned plea for
international solidarity with the ex-Soviet workers. One cannot
deny the danger of violent, anti-democratic, anti-worker measures
on the part of the regime.

But I cannot accept what Vladimir appears to link with this plea,
namely the suggestion that voting for Zyuganov is a necessary
defensive step for the Russian working class. Vladimir has
eloquently demonstrated that Zyuganov is the candidate of "some
of the most reactionary forces of Russian nationalist Right, big
industrial and financial capital, and the military-industrial
complex."

Vladimir's suggestion that workers should vote for the fascism of
the day-after-tomorrow in order to forestall the fascism of
tomorrow is reminiscent of the idea that German workers in 1932
should vote for Hindenburg to stop Hitler. It didn't work, and it
certainly was not Trotsky's strategy.


Walter Daum <wgdcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
League for the Revolutionary Party


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