[Marxism] Soviet history

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Haynes. Russia: Class and Power, 1917-2000. London and Sydney:
Bookmarks, 2002. v + 251 pp. Notes, index. $21.95 (paper), ISBN 1-898876-87-8.

Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff. Class Theory and History:
Capitalism and Communism in the U.S.S.R. New York and London: Routledge,
2002. xiv + 353 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $95.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-415-93317-X; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 0-415-93318-8.

Reviewed by: Henry Reichman, Department of History, California State
University, Hayward.
Published by: H-Russia (November, 2004)

Marxism and Soviet History

To many observers the collapse of the Soviet Union marked a collapse as
well of the Marxist vision of an ideal society. The disastrous outcome of
the events set in motion by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 seemed
to suggest that any attempt to build a society based on the destruction of
"bourgeois" property rights and the replacement of the free market by
social planning would be doomed from the start. At the least, the failure
of the "Soviet experiment" poses a major challenge to Marxists and to all
those whose vision of a better world was linked to the communist utopia of
proletarian revolution and classless society. Could this failure be
explained without abandoning the essential elements of the Marxist vision?
What lessons might Marxists learn from the Soviet experience? As Mike
Haynes pointedly puts it, "Standing stark in the middle of any discussion
of a possible better world is the history of the USSR" (p. 2).

The two works under consideration here offer explicitly Marxist analytic
surveys of Soviet history. Both conclude that the Soviet Union never
succeeded in building a genuinely communist or socialist society. The
system that collapsed in the Soviet Union in 1991, they argue, was "state
capitalist," and its failure cannot therefore be taken as indicative of the
failure of Marxist socialism and communism. The potential for a truly
communist society and a genuinely Marxist movement remains, they suggest,
but those who seek to build such a society and movement must learn the
harsh lessons of the Soviet experience.

If these books have this much in common, however, they employ quite
different methodological approaches and reach significantly different
historical conclusions. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, both economics
professors, approach Soviet history on a highly theoretical level,
analyzing the productive relations in Soviet society with sometimes
mathematical (or, perhaps, pseudomathematical) precision. Their strikingly
original argument, which they acknowledge is "not, in the main, a work of
empirical history" (p. xiii), "foregrounds the social organization of
surplus" (p. xii) and concludes that "the USSR represented, across its
entire history, chiefly a state form of capitalism" (p. x). Their book is
aimed toward a more specialized readership of political economists and
theoretically inclined historians. It is densely argued, sometimes
difficult to read, and, in Goethe's famous formulation, colored in the drab
gray of theory.

full: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=153541106927452

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