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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The crooks are the rich who defend themselves with murder

The anger and ethics of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Mike Eaude

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003) was one of the last of the engagé writers of Southern Europe, left wing intellectuals produced by the large Communist parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Prolific journalist, essayist and novelist, he was an outstanding interpreter of Spain in its transformation from the sad, frightened country of the Franco dictatorship to its limited, but vibrant, bourgeois democracy today.

Occupied city

Montalbán, born in the year of Franco's Spanish Civil War victory, grew up in the slums of Barcelona during the grimmest years of the dictatorship. Many men were absent—dead, exiled or in jail. Montalbán met his father for the first time when, aged five, he passed a strange man on the stairs. A few streets down from Montalbán's home on the Calle Botella, the biggest brothel district in Europe thrived. Working class women in these post-war years often had to choose between prostitution and their children's starvation. Mass prostitution, which the anarchists had sought to abolish during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 by closing brothels and encouraging women to take up arms against fascism, prospered under the rule of Franco and the church.

1940s Barcelona was treated by Franco and a vengeful Catalan bourgeoisie as an occupied city. For the regime, Catalans were guilty of three cardinal sins—Communism, atheism and separatism. Franco set out to extirpate all signs of Catalan and working class culture.

In the Raval, the part of Barcelona's Old City where Montalbán grew up, particularly punished by the bombs of the Italian air force based on Mallorca during the civil war and a traditional stronghold of anarchism, 99 percent of the population was anti-Franco. Montalbán remembered women with children begging for scraps at their door, even though his mother had no income apart from what she earned by sewing. He remembered their fear of 'fascist commandos with their heads shaved to the scalp who forced people to drink castor oil' just for speaking Catalan. In a memorable phrase in The Pianist, a character says, 'I know the neighbours, almost all of them have lost the war and they carry the post-war round on their backs like a dead body.' Just to survive, the defeated and impoverished population needed basic solidarity with each other. This background, both an open wound and an ethical touchstone, pervades all Montalbán's writing.

Montalbán was one of the few who escaped from the Raval to the university, another world only a 15-minute walk from his home. At university he became involved in opposition politics, was arrested in 1961, beaten up personally by the notorious torturer Inspector Vicente Creix and sent to Lleida jail. This was, Montalbán said, his second university. He joined the PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party, a commitment he maintained throughout his life.1 Despite his international renown as a prize-winning essayist and novelist, he remained loyal to the solidarity of his childhood right up to his fatal heart attack in October 2003.

Released from jail in 1963, in an amnesty occasioned by Pope John XXIII's death, Vázquez Montalbán embarked on a career as a journalist. His early fame came from his skilful political analysis and acid, sarcastic turn of phrase, especially in the PCE-sponsored Triunfo. A more lasting claim to fame and the motive for this article is that, between 1977 and 1990, he wrote half a dozen novels that stand among the best in modern Spanish literature. The Pianist (1985),2 discussed below, is his masterpiece. Galíndez (1990) runs it a close second: it is a fictionalised account of the 1956 kidnapping in New York of an exiled Basque Nationalist leader and his torture and murder in the Dominican Republic by the dictator Trujillo.

Montalbán became best known, though, for crime novels, featuring his detective,
Pepe Carvalho. Of these, The Angst-Ridden Executive (1977), Southern Seas (1979) and The Rose of Alexandria (1984) fall into the half-dozen mentioned above.3 In Montalbán's crime novels, the crooks are revealed as the rich who defend their privilege with murder. This was not new. Raymond Chandler, king of the modern 'hard-boiled' crime novel, explained in the 1950s:

'The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels…where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.'


Chandler carries on in this vein, and doubtless readers of this journal need little convincing. However, Chandler was not a man of the left. Rather, like many writers of his period, he hated the gangstercapitalists who he blamed for destroying the lives of middle class people like himself in the 1930s Depression.

Like Chandler in Los Angeles, Vázquez Montalbán tears the mask of democracy off a city—Barcelona, in his case—run by crooks, but the context is very different.
The Angst-Ridden Executive and Southern Seas were written at the time of Spain's 1970s transition from dictatorship to bourgeois democracy. The background is not the defeat of the left in 1940s Los Angeles, but the mass struggle against the Franco dictatorship. Montalbán was not (as Chandler was) a former oil company executive, but an activist in that struggle. In his 1970s and 1980s novels, Montalbán is explaining how the change in 1970s Spain was not a 'rupture' with the dictatorship, but a controlled 'transition' to parliamentary democracy. He shows how 'the same dogs with different collars' continued to exercise power in the new Spain. The political structures changed, but economic power remained in the hands of not just the same class, but the same individuals.

Sceptic or cynic?

Montalbán's experience as a campaigning journalist had taught him that, with an increasingly sophisticated mass media assimilating opposition, it was not enough for a left wing journalist just to denounce injustice. He was ambitious to reach out to an audience even wider than the big readership of his articles in Triunfo. With crime novels, Montalbán found a popular genre with down to earth language, in which he could include the songs, memories, smells and tastes common to his own and millions of others' youth.

Montalbán conceived the Carvalho novels as a chronicle of contemporary Spanish and Catalan society, explaining events to his readers very soon after they had occurred:

'In each book I look at different questions: in The Angst-Ridden Executive the illusions of the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, in Murder in the Central Committee the crisis in the Communist Party, in Offside sport and the fleeting nature of media fame, in An Olympic Death entrepreneurs whose athleticism consisted in lining their own pockets as quickly as possible.'


In The Angst-Ridden Executive, for instance, Carvalho investigates the murder of Antonio Jauma, found dead with a pair of women's knickers in his pocket. The police quickly conclude that Jauma was the victim of a sex intrigue. Unconvinced,
Carvalho finds that Jauma was killed not because he was a womaniser—though he was—but because he was honest. Jauma was silenced because he had discovered a financial hole in the multinational company he worked for. The multinational had helped finance the 1973 coup in Chile, and now money is being illegally siphoned off to fund fascist groups during Spain's transition. As one of the characters explains, '[Fascist groups] probably won't be necessary, but the ruling class likes to cover all contingencies.'

In his investigation Carvalho visits six of Jauma's friends from their time together in the underground struggle at university 15 years before. Montalbán uses the investigation to look back into history, to note how each character has evolved, to examine who has betrayed their youthful beliefs and who has not.

He gives his narrative historical depth in another way too, throughout the Carvalho novels. The detective's office is at the seedy end of the Ramblas and he often wanders through the Raval, where streets, bars, shops and people he meets all spark off memories. In this constant inventory of the past, Montalbán is writing an alternative working class history, a history of those excluded from official history. The detective has a sort of 'family'—his call-girl girlfriend Charo, his 'secretary' and ex car thief Biscuter, and the ex-fascist boot-black Bromide. All three have their own carefully documented histories. Bromide, for example, was a volunteer with the Spanish Blue Division fighting for Hitler in 1941 against the Soviet Union. Living at the bottom of society, Bromide is a reminder that Franco didn't even look after his own.
The detective, clearly not to be identified with the author but nevertheless sharing much of his past and his point of view, is vital to making the novels work. Carvalho loves good food, wine, sex and long rambling conversations. Quite consciously, Montalbán challenged a certain puritanism on the left by creating a hedonist detective. Given the world's a mess, Carvalho ruminates, he has to look after himself, because no one else is likely to. For this reason, he has often been called a cynic. As if to reinforce this, the detective growls, 'I believe only in my stomach,' early in The Angst-Ridden Executive. But at the climax of the novel, when the murderer offers Carvalho a Nuits St George, Carvalho does not act cynically. Magnificently, he pours the exquisite wine onto the priceless carpet. He is a sceptic, as you have to be when listening to the lies of the powerful, but no cynic. He will not drink with a killer. Like Chandler's detective Marlowe, Carvalho is the moral man on the mean streets.

The revolutionary Marxist Ernest Mandel had a related criticism in his social history of the crime novel, Delightful Murder:

'In general all Montalban's books are soaked in an atmosphere of spleen, scepticism and fin-de-siècle ennui, very significant as the background of a whole layer of intellectual Eurocommunists. It is a break with Stalinist dogmatism and hypocrisy, but hardly a step towards greater lucidity of what this society and this world are all about'.4


There is some truth in Mandel's comment, for Montalbán's tone is often one of rather bitter sarcasm. This is rooted in his appreciation of the defeat the working class suffered in the transition, and his and its subsequent disenchantment with the new 'democratic' Spain. Mandel, however, fails to pick up the contradictions in Montalbán. As a Communist Party member, Montalbán supported all the nefarious deals made by the PCE with the ruling class to hold back working class struggle. However, as a novelist, where he lets his imagination rip, he shows a reality which does not excuse this CP-led defeat of the working class. Similarly, in his 1990s fiction he was an outspoken critic of Barcelona's Olympic Games and the building speculation, corruption and destruction of historic memory they brought, yet the party to which he belonged supported the games.

Mandel's remarks also make one ask, what would a revolutionary detective novel be like? How would it be different from Southern Seas, in which the detective reveals the lies of the powerful, gives voice to the working class, expresses and practises solidarity with the poor, explains the history of the people and places he describes, shows the ruling class as imbeciles or cynics, deliberately avoids handing over criminals who are criminals because of their social oppression to the police who are portrayed as the enemy, and recognises explicitly that a detective—one person— cannot change the world, however much he wants to?

No escape

Southern Seas' title announces its theme—the yearning to run away. Carlos Pedrell, a capitalist with artistic leanings who is terrified of ageing, wants to follow in the steps of Gauguin. But a year after leaving, supposedly for a South Pacific island, he is found dead. His exotic destination was much closer to home—the cheap estate whose construction he himself had financed in the suburbs of Barcelona. Montalbán, good materialist that he is, always explains where people's money (or lack of it) comes from. In the 1950s Pedrell had made his fortune building blocks of flats, 'vertical shanty-towns', for workers who migrated from southern Spain. These were thrown up without basic services or transport on the outskirts of industrial cities like Barcelona.

The central character of Southern Seas is Ana Briongos, a Communist and car factory worker who lives on the estate built by Pedrell. Unlike the other characters, she knows there is no escape to a fantasy world, which is why she fights in union and party for a better world here and now. It is Ana who explains to Carvalho the Moncloa accords of late 1977, the pact that rounded off the transition. The Communist Party, which had already accepted the monarchy in return for its legalisation, now signed with government and bosses an agreement to restrict wage rises to a maximum 22 percent when inflation was running at 29 percent. Ana, the rank and file fighter, explains:

'No one swallowed the Moncloa pacts, but we had to defend them with all the good faith we could muster…that in the long run they would favour the working class. In short, we spouted what they'd told us to say. Soon everyone saw it was a sell-out, like all the rest.'


With the character of Ana, Montalbán breaks with traditional 'hard-boiled' novels by introducing the organised working class. He also breaks with their characteristic sexism—Ana speaks with her own voice.

The defeated within the defeated

The Pianist is a non-Carvalho novel that takes the two high points in Spain's 20th century class struggle, the revolution of pares them. The choral novel is divided into three parts. In the first, a group of anti-Franco ex-university friends, on a night out in 1983, go to a fashionable club in the Raval, with transvestite singers and an elderly pianist. Javier Solana, the new Socialist minister of culture, is holding court at one of the tables. Not even Montalbán, so politically prescient, could have realised how suitable a representative of Spain's new rulers Solana was. This affable, smiling cultural mandarin would become NATO general secretary, and be responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 on behalf of the main imperialist powers.

Half the group of friends, now building their professional or business careers, look back on the transition as 'a confused period', and the other half are disoriented by how little was gained in the transition. At the end of the night Montalbán leaves the group of friends and follows the old pianist, who walks home to his dingy flat where a bedridden old woman awaits him. Lovingly, the old man talks to the invalid and washes her.

The middle part of The Pianist moves back to 1946 in the same Raval. This intense heart of the novel draws on Montalbán's childhood memories and is one of the most deeply felt and beautiful passages in his 80-odd books. A group of young people are on the flat rooftops, the only place where they can talk freely and escape the ubiquitous spies and cops of the dictatorship. They are fascinated with stories of history, unlike the group in the first section who want to escape from their recent history. A new tenant arrives, just released from prison. It transpires that he is the old pianist of 1983. Again unlike the group in the first section, this 1946 group show solidarity with Albert, as he is called, and help him find Teresa, the invalid of the first and the third section will tell us just who he is.

This third part takes place in Paris in mid-July 1936. The pianist Albert has newly arrived on a music scholarship and goes to see a well known Catalan musician, Doria, and his girlfriend, Teresa. His career loosely based on the painter Salvador Dalí's, Doria had appeared in the first section as a grand old glory of Spanish music, revered by Solana; in the second as someone praised by the dictatorship's press; and in the third as an iconoclastic revolutionary. To Doria's shock, when Franco's uprising comes on 18 July, just four days after the massive Popular Front demonstration in Paris on Bastille Day, Teresa sees through his revolutionary posing. 'Bla, bla, bla,' is her reply to Doria's empty aesthetic verbiage. She leaves him and accompanies Albert, who has decided to give up his music career and return to Barcelona to defend the revolution by fighting with the POUM.

When asked in an interview why he, a PSUC militant, made Albert a POUM member, Montlbán replied: 'Because those of the POUM were the defeated within the defeated.' The reply reflects the novelist's post-transition pessimism, but also his understanding that the POUM, crushed by Stalinism, represented the defeat of the revolutionaries within the general defeat of the Republic. This recognition led Montalbán in the 1980s, alongside other PSUC militants, to insist that the PSUC should correct the murderous calumny of 1937 that Andreu Nin and the POUM were fascists. It did.

When The Pianist came out in Spain in 1985, it was widely acclaimed. It was later voted book of the 1980s in an El País readers' poll. Almost everywhere, it was reviewed as an elegiac novel looking back to the glorious, irrecoverable time of the civil war and lamenting the sad fate of Teresa and Albert, the defeated of the defeated. Times had changed, and revolution was no longer desirable or possible.

Despite their praise, though, the critics misread the novel. In fact, they reflected the point of view of the group of friends in the first section. They overlooked the critique of the friends' 'aesthetic' or 'individualist' abandonment of class struggle, which is implicit in the novel's backward-moving structure, in which the 1983 present can only be understood through the 1936 and 1946 pasts. Doria and Solana represent, in their different ways, the continuity of opportunism.
Nothing can be expected of them. But the 1983 friends' lack of interest in history and in Albert, the POUMist, underlines the failure of the anti-Franco left in the transition. Albert is left alone, with nothing but his love for Teresa and his unbroken integrity. If the lessons of solidarity and history are forgotten, Montalbán is telling us, then the tragedy of losing the civil war is repeated in the tragedy of losing the transition.

The Pianist is a stunning political novel. It is written with the sarcastic anger or 'spleen' of Vázquez Montalbán at his best. And it contains, too, the melancholy undercurrent of understanding that, in both civil war and transition, capitalism won out. It is true that Montalbán the Eurocommunist fails to make a balance sheet of Stalinism and thus offers no political perspective that will help us win next time. Political analysis, though, is not the function of fiction. In the novels mentioned, he creates imaginative worlds with historical depth, and insists that no change is possible without understanding of our history.

NOTES
1: The PSUC, though autonomous to some degree, was part of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. The PSUC disintegrated in the 1980s and Montalbán ended up supporting one of its descendants, Iniciativa per Catalunya, a rather right wing 'eco-socialist' ex Communist Party.
2: Published in translation by Quartet in 1989, but now out of print.
3: Six of Montalbán's 20 Carvalho novels are available in English, published by Serpent's Tail, including The Angst-Ridden Executive and Southern Seas.
4: Out of print now, Delightful Murder was published by Pluto in 1984.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Obama Selects Bush As Running Mate


via Dissident Voice
http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/01/obama-selects-bush-as-running-mate/


Obama Selects Bush As Running Mate

Return of “The Decider” Stuns Washington; GOP Presidential Debates Thrown Into Chaos

by Michael K. Smith / January 30th, 2012

Related Headlines

Bush Pick Hailed as “Pragmatic Master Stroke”

Outraged Biden Joins Tea Party, Threatens To Sue

Obama Lauds Bush Vow To “Follow the Cheney Tradition” as VP

Washington, January 27 — Barack Obama today named George W. Bush of Crawford, Texas as his running mate, the first ex-president selected to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. The president announced his historic step before an ebullient crowd of Blackwater mercenaries on the White House lawn. ”There’s an electricity in the air, an excitement, a sense of new possibilities and of pride,” Obama told a section of cheering snipers moments after disclosing the stunning development.

Calling for an end to partisan bitterness, Obama introduced Bush as “an exciting choice” and “clearly the best” for healing a divided nation. Bush thanked the president for continuing the family dynasty, and offered to formally adopt him into the Bush clan if he thought it would “help carry the South.”

Obama said the decision to choose the former president was a ”difficult” one, but explained: ”GW has excelled in being bailed out, and this country certainly needs more of that!” He added that GW’s political return was ”really the fulfillment of a classic American tradition: to fail continually at everything and emerge triumphant anyway.”

Harvard Lawyer Obama Cites Constitution

”History speaks to us today,” Obama told the Blackwater throng. ”Our founders said in the Constitution, ‘We the people’ – not just the identity politics focus groups, but all of us.”

”Our message,” the president went on, ”is that America is a country of diversity where the spirit of conciliation overcomes all philosophical differences. As President Bush has said many times: ‘ politics stops at the water’s edge.’”

Bush, who was anointed president in 2000, has received the endorsements for the Vice Presidency of numerous Democratic Party organizations, including, On Our Knees, Inertia Unlimited, and Strength Through Servility.

Increase in Pragmatic Energy Seen

”He loves Israel, he’s charismatic, he believes in God,” enthused one adviser to Obama. ”We have broken the barrier. He will energize, not just southerners, but a lot of Republicans, which will make the Democratic Party more inclusive.”

Another adviser to Obama said that although Bush had engendered “unfortunate” bad publicity around foreign policy issues, he nevertheless would bring “new chemistry, new passion, and new understanding” to the ticket, especially of an often overlooked minority group: the rich. “People never seem to realize that as wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy become a smaller and smaller minority group,” said Obama campaign manager Marshall Cash.

In the last three weeks Obama interviewed seven prospective candidates and made it plain that he was seriously considering a break in precedent and selecting a candidate who “reflects our values,” rather than just another identity politics token.

Ranking aides to Obama indicated last week that Bush had outdistanced Biden in his personal interview with Obama, as well as in his press comments afterward. Some aides said Biden had proved somewhat disappointing, a comment that angered the outgoing vice-president, who is threatening to sue.

Factors in Choice Listed

What apparently swayed Obama, Democratic officials said, was Bush’s experience in ramming through deeply unpopular policies, his considerable support among Blue Dog Democrats, and perhaps most important, his appeal to blue-collar superpatriots, coupled with his traditional “tough love” views, which seem to coincide with the president’s.

Bush had emerged in recent weeks as the strong favorite among pragmatic liberals, typified by the vastly influential NAACR, the National Association for the Advancement of Crackpot Realism. But Democratic advisers to Obama said the decision in favor of Bush was based heavily on the notion that his political strength would enhance Obama’s support among the super-rich and religious fanatics. “They vote,” explained Obama at the announcement ceremony.

At the conclusion of the day’s historic event, Obama and Bush clasped hands high overhead in the classic victory stance and called for world peace through the obliteration of Iran

Marxist thinking on the state

After spending the week making notes on the article The 1980 Elections: Reaffirming the Marxist Theory of the State which I posted earlier this week, I thought the Miliband article below would be a useful compliment:

State Power and Class Interests

Ralph Miliband

Work done in the last fifteen years or so by people writing within a broad Marxist perspective on the subject of the state in capitalist society now fills a great many bookshelves; and however critical one may be of one or other article, book or trend, it is undoubtedly very useful that this work should be available. There is, however, a very large gap in the literature, in so far as very little of it is specifically concerned with the question of the autonomy of the state. [1] How great a degree of autonomy does the state have in capitalist society? What purpose is its autonomy intended to serve? And what purposes does it actually serve? These and many other such questions are clearly of the greatest theoretical and practical importance, given the scope and actual or potential impact of state action upon the society over which the state presides, and often beyond. Yet, the issue has remained poorly explored and ‘theorized’ in the Marxist perspective. [2] The present article is intended as a modest contribution to the work that needs to be done on it. [3]

In the first volume of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Hal Draper very usefully sets out what Marx and Engels said on the subject of the autonomy of the state, and shows how large a place it occupied in their political thinking and writings. [4] It was also this that I was trying to suggest in an article on ‘Marx and the State’ published in 1965, where I noted, in a formulation which I do not find very satisfactory, that there was a ‘secondary’ view of the state in Marx (the first one being of the state as the ‘instrument’ of a ruling class so designated by virtue of its ownership or control—or both—of the main means of economic activity). This ‘secondary’ view was of the state ‘as independent from and superior to all social classes, as being the dominant force in society rather than the instrument of a dominant class’, with Bonapartism as ‘the extreme manifestation of the state’s independent role’ in Marx’s own lifetime. [5] On the other hand, I also noted then that, for Marx, the Bonapartist state, ‘however independent it may have been politically from any given class, remains, and cannot in a class society but remain, the protector of an economically and socially dominant class’. [6] Some years later, in the course of a review of Political Power and Social Classes by the late and greatly-missed Nicos Poulantzas, I reformulated the point by suggesting that a distinction had to be made between the state autonomously acting on behalf of the ruling class, and its acting at the behest of that class, the latter notion being, I said, ‘a vulgar deformation of the thought of Marx and Engels’. [7] What I was rejecting there was the crude view of the state as a mere ‘instrument’ of the ruling class obediently acting at its dictation.

The Debate over State ‘Autonomy’

However, it is undoubtedly to Poulantzas that belongs the credit for the most thorough exploration of the concept of the autonomy of the state; and it was he who coined the formulation which has remained the basis for most subsequent discussion of the subject, namely the ‘relative autonomy of the state’. In essence, the view that this formulation encapsulated was that the state might indeed have a substantial degree of autonomy, but that, nevertheless, it remained for all practical purposes the state of the ruling class.

There has been considerable discussion among Marxists and others about the nature of the constraints and pressures which cause the state to serve the needs of capital—notably whether these constraints and pressures were ‘structural’ and impersonal, or produced by a ruling class armed with an arsenal of formidable weapons and resources. But beyond the differences that were expressed in these discussions, there was also a fundamental measure of agreement that the state was decisively constrained by forces external to it, and that the constraints originated in the national and international capitalist context in which it operated. The state might be constrained by the imperative requirement of capital for its reproduction and accumulation; or by the pressure from lobbies and organizations and agencies at the service of capital or one or other of its ‘fractions’; or by the combined impact of these and international forces such as other capitalist states or the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. But these at any rate were the kind of factors which had to be taken into account to explain the actions of the state. As has occasionally been noted in this connection, this Marxist view of the state as impelled by forces external to it shares its ‘problematic’ with the liberal or ‘democratic pluralist’ view of the state, notwithstanding the other profound differences between them: whereas the Marxist view attributes the main constraints upon the state to capital or capitalists or both, the ‘democractic pluralist’ one attributes them to the various pressures exercised upon a basically democratic state by a plurality of competing groups, interests and parties in society. In both perspectives, the state does not originate action but responds to external forces: it may appear to be the ‘historical subject’, but is in fact the object of processes and forces at work in society.

It is this whole perspective which has come under challenge in recent years, not only from the right, which has long insisted on the primacy of the state, but from people strongly influenced by Marxism. Two notable examples of this challenge are Ellen Kay Trimberger’s Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt and Peru, [8] and more explicitly Theda Skocpol’s much-acclaimed States and Social Revolution, [9] which is, however, not concerned with the contemporary state but with the state in relation to the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions. [10]

In the Marxist tradition, Skocpol writes, ‘whatever the variations of its historical forms, the state as such is seen as a feature of all class-divided modes of production; and, invariably, the one necessary and inescapable function of the state—by definition—is to contain class conflict and to undertake other policies in support of the dominance of the surplus-appropriating and property-owning class.’ This, she argues, fails to treat the state ‘as an autonomous structure—a structure with a logic and interests of its own not necessarily equivalent to, or fused with, the interests of the dominant class in society or the full set of member groups in the polity.’ [11]

This seems to me to be a valid criticism: the Marxist tradition does tend to under-emphasize or simply to ignore the fact that the state does have interests of its own or, to put it rather more appropriately, that the people who run it believe it has and do themselves have interests of their own. The failure to make due allowance for this naturally inhibits or prevents the exploration of the ways in which class interests and state interests are related and reconciled.

For her part, Skocpol goes much further than merely stating that the state has interests of its own or that those who run it do have such interests. For she goes on to argue that the Marxist perspective makes it ‘virtually impossible even to raise the possibility that fundamental conflicts of interest might arise between the existing dominant class or set of groups, on the one hand, and the state rulers on the other’. [12] But contrary to what she appears to believe, this second argument does not follow from the first, and in fact raises an entirely different question, of great interest, but which should not be confused with the first one. That first proposition refers to the interests which the state may have of its own, and leaves open the question of how these may be reconciled with other interests in society. The second proposition, on the other hand, assumes that the state may have interests ‘fundamentally’ opposed to those of all forces and interests in society. This is a much stronger version of the autonomy of the state, and needs to be discussed separately from the other, and much weaker, one.

The Scope of State Action

Perhaps the first thing to note in this discussion is how very large is the sphere of action which the state in capitalist societies does have in all areas of life. It is deeply and pervasively involved in every aspect of economic life. It is a permanent and active presence in class conflict and in every other kind of conflict. It plays a great and growing role in the manipulation of opinion and in the ‘engineering of consent’. It has, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’. It is alone responsible for international affairs and for deciding what the level and character of the country’s armaments should be.

To speak of ‘the state’ in this manner is of course to use a shorthand which can be misleading. The reference is to certain people who are in charge of the executive power of the state—presidents, prime ministers, their cabinets and their top civilian and military advisers. But this assumes a unity of views and interests which may not exist: great divisions between the people concerned are in fact very common, with ministers at odds with their colleagues, and civilian and military advisers at odds with their political superiors. If these divisions are so deep as to make a workable compromise impossible and as to paralyse the executive power, some kind of reconstruction of the decision-making apparatus has to occur. In the end, decisions do have to be made; and it is the executive power which makes them, ‘on its own’.

No doubt, there are many powerful influences and constraints, from outside the state, international as well as indigenous, which affect the nature of the decisions taken; and these may well be very strong and compelling. But it is ultimately a very small group of people in the state—often a single person—who decide what is to be done or not done; and it is only in very exceptional cases that those who make the decisions are left with no range of choice at all. Much more often, there is some degree of choice: even where governments are subjected to the imperative will of other governments, they are usually left with some freedom of decision in relation to matters which directly and greatly affect the lives of those whom they govern. Perhaps the best way to highlight the meaning of the autonomy of the state is to note that if nuclear war should occur, either between the ‘superpowers’ or between lesser powers armed with the capacity to wage such a war, it will occur because governments will have so decided, without reference to anybody else. There is no democractic procedure for starting a nuclear war.

The degree of autonomy which the state enjoys for most purposes in relation to social forces in capitalist society depends above all on the extent to which class struggle and pressure from below challenge the hegemony of the class which is dominant in such a society. Where a dominant class is truly hegemonic in economic, social, political and cultural terms, and therefore free from any major and effective challenge from below, the chances are that the state itself will also be subject to its hegemony, and that it will be greatly constrained by the various forms of class power which the dominant class has at its disposal. Where, on the other hand, the hegemony of a dominant class is persistently and strongly challenged, the autonomy of the state is likely to be substantial, to the point where, in conditions of intense class struggle and political instability, it may assume ‘Bonapartist’ and authoritarian forms, and emancipate itself from constraining constitutional checks and controls.

It is worth noting that the capitalist class has very seldom enjoyed anything like full hegemony in economic, social, political and cultural terms. One major capitalist country where it has come nearest to such hegemony is the United States—the prime example in the capitalist world of a society where business has not had to share power with an entrenched aristocracy, and where it has also been able to avoid the emergence of a serious political challenge by organized labour. Everywhere else, business has had to reach an accomodation with previously established social forces, and meet the challenge of labour. Moreover, it has also had to deal with state structures of ancient provenance and encrusted power that were strongly resistant to change. Capitalist hegemony has therefore been much more contested and partial in the rest of the ‘late’ capitalist world than in the United States; and even in the United States, economic and social contradictions and pressure from below, particularly since the Great Depression, have strengthened the state and given it greater autonomy than it enjoyed between, say, the Civil War and the Great Depression.

The idea that class struggle is of decisive importance in determining the nature and form of the state is a familiar part of classical Marxism; [13] and so too is the view that the purpose of the state’s autonomy is the better to protect and serve the existing social order and the dominant class which is the main beneficiary of that social order. As I noted earlier, it is this latter proposition which is under challenge; and rightly so. For the question: ‘What is the state’s autonomy for?’ cannot simply be answered in these familiar terms: the point is not that these terms are wrong; but rather that they are inadequate to explain the dynamic of state action and cannot provide a satisfactory ‘model’ of the state in relation to society in a capitalist context. The dynamic of state action is explained by Marxism in terms of the imperative requirements of capital or the inexorable pressure of capitalists; and these are indeed of very great importance. But to focus exclusively on them is to leave out of account other very powerful impulses to state action generated from within the state by the people who are in charge of the decision-making power. These impulses undoubtedly exist; and they cannot be taken to be synonymous with the purposes of dominant classes.

The Impulses of Executive Power

The two main impulses which are generated by the executive power of the state are self-interest on the one hand, and a conception of the ‘national interest’ on the other.

People in power wish for the most part to retain it. It is a spurious kind of worldy wisdom which affirms that all ‘politicians’ and people in power are moved by nothing but self-interest and are only concerned to serve themselves by acquiring and clinging to office. But it is naive to think that, whatever else moves such people, they are not also moved by self-interest, meaning above all the wish to obtain and retain power. Of one man of power, the late Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, it has been said that he exhibited from early days ‘the desire to dominate, the need to dominate, to bend others to his will . . . the overbearingness with subordinates that was as striking as the obsequiousness with superiors . . . the viciousness and cruelty, the joy in breaking backs and keeping them broken, the urge not just to defeat but to destroy . . . above all, the ambition, the all-encompassing personal ambition that made issues impediments and scruples superfluous. And present also was the fear—the loneliness, the terrors, the insecurities—that underlay, and made savage, the aggressiveness, the energy and the ambition.’ [14]

No doubt, Lyndon Johnson was a very repulsive politician. But the sentiments and motives ascribed to him are hardly unique; and the different terms that may be used to describe the drives of other men and women in power do not affect the point: this is that there are many people for whom the exercise of great power is an exceedingly satisfying experience, for whose sake acts of extraordinary cruelty have been committed throughout history. The point would hardly be worth making if it was not so imperfectly integrated into the Marxist view of the state.

The reason for this, or at least one reason for it, has already been touched on, and lies in Marxism’s emphasis on economic and social processes as determinants of political action. The emphasis is perfectly legitimate but is easily deformed into an under-estimation of the weight which political processes themselves do have. The tendency to one form or another of ‘economic reductionism’ has had a marked influence on the Marxist discussion of politics and the state, even when the deformation has been acknowledged and pledges made to correct it.

The state is not the only institution which makes the exercise of great power possible; but it is by far the most important one. Nor does it only make possible the exercise of power as such, crucial though that is: it is also the source of high salaries, status, privilege and access to well-paid and otherwise desirable positions outside the state. [15] Nor is this only relevant for those people who are at the very center of the decision-making process. Thousands of people in the upper reaches of the state are involved, whom the state provides with high salaries and all that goes with state service at this level, not only in government departments, but also in innumerable boards, commissions, councils and other public bodies. Such people constitute a ‘state bourgeoisie’, linked to but separate from those who are in charge of corporate capitalist enterprise. Their first concern is naturally with their jobs and careers. Capitalist interests are in no danger of being overlooked; but they are not the sole or primary concern of these office holders.

Those who seek state power find it easy to persuade themselves that their achievement of it, and their continued hold on it, are synonymous with the ‘national interest’, whose service, they proclaim, is their paramount and overriding consideration. Here too, it would be short-sighted to treat these proclamations as mere sham, and as elicited purely by the wish to obtain and retain state power. It is much more reasonable to think that people in power are moved by what they conceive to be the ‘national interest’, in addition to being deeply concerned with their own jobs. This is all the more likely to be the case in that the ‘national interest’ is woven into a larger and very powerful sentiment, namely nationalism. There was in classical Marxism the hope and belief that a different sentiment, namely proletarian or revolutionary internationalism, would move not only the working class but its leaders, in opposition but also in power. The collapse of internationalism in 1914 dealt a shattering blow to this hope; and so, in different ways, did the fact that the Soviet regime alone survived the revolutionary convulsions which followed the First World War. Even if manifestations of revolutionary internationalism may occasionally be read into the actions of people in power (Cuba in Africa?), it is nationalism and what is taken to be the ‘national interest’ which everywhere form the main and even the exclusive frame of reference for state action today; and this is easily compatible with the pursuit of the self-interest of those who control state power.

If it is agreed that self-interest and a conception of the ‘national interest’ have been and are powerful influences in shaping the policies and actions of the people in control of state power, the question which immediately arises is how this relates to the interests of the dominant class—in other words, what is the relationship of state power to class interests?

The answer is that, throughout the history of capitalism, that relationship has on the whole been very good. The people in charge of the state have generally been strongly imbued with the belief that the ‘national interest’ was bound up with the well-being of capitalist enterprise, or at least that no conceivable alternative arrangement, least of all socialism, could possibly be more advantageous to the ‘national interest’; and they have therefore been particularly attentive to the interests of capitalist enterprise, whatever view they might take of capitalists. However, being attentive to these interests might well mean refusing to pay heed to capitalist wishes: very often, it was precisely because they wanted to ensure the best conditions for capitalism that they did things which ran counter to the wishes of capitalists.

A certain tension between state power and class interests is in fact inevitable, however good their relationship may fundamentally be. The dynamic of capitalism is the reproduction and accumulation of capital, and the maximization of long-term profit for each individual firm. This is the paramount aim, the all but exclusive concern of those who are in charge of the private sector of economic life: all else passes through this and must be subordinate to it. But this cannot be the dynamic of state power. For those who control that power, the ‘national interest’ in essence requires the defence of the existing social order against any internal challenge to it, and also the best defence they believe they can mount against commercial, military and ideological competition from other states. Of course, this may also include, and often has included, offensive action abroad. These twin concerns encompass, or at least seek to encompass, capitalist class interests: but this is not at all the same as saying that state action and these class interests precisely coincide. In fact, there is always likely to be some unhingement between what the state does, however much those who control it may be devoted to capitalist interests, and these interests. The state, for instance, needs revenue; and it cannot obtain all the revenue it needs from the subordinate classes. It must levy taxes upon capital and capitalists, and thereby drain off some of the surplus which accrues to them: hence the constant lamentations of businessmen, large and small, about the state’s taxation policies, and their complaints that the state, in its blind bureaucratic and greedy bungling, is forever undermining private enterprise. Similarly with reform and regulation: the containment of pressure from below, and indeed the maintenance of a viable and efficient labour force, demand that the state should undertake some measures of reform and regulation, which capital finds disagreeable and constraining, and which it certainly would not undertake on its own.

State and Class: a Partnership?

In short, an accurate and realistic ‘model’ of the relationship between the dominant class in advanced capitalist societies and the state is one of partnership between two different, separate forces, linked to each other by many threads, yet each having its own separate sphere of concerns. The terms of that partnership are not fixed but constantly shifting, and affected by many different circumstances, and notably by the state of class struggle. It is not at any rate a partnership in which the state may be taken necessarily to be the junior partner. On the contrary, the contradictions and shortcomings of capitalism, and the class pressures and social tensions this produces, require the state to assume an ever more pronounced role in the defence of the social order. The end of that process is one form or another of ‘Bonapartism’. Meanwhile, it makes for a steady inflation of state power within the framework of a capitalist-democratic order whose democratic features are under permanent threat from the partnership of state and capital.

This ‘model’ of partnership seeks to give due importance to the independent and ‘self-regarding’ role of the state, and to make full allowance for what might be called the Machiavellian dimension of state action, which Marxism’s ‘class-reductionist’ tendencies have obscured. [16] This is not a question of the ‘primacy of politics’: that formulation goes rather too far the other way, and suffers from a ‘state-reductionist’ bias.

By speaking of partnership between the state and the dominant class, I seek to avoid both forms of ‘reductionism’: the notion makes allowance for all the space which political and state action obviously has in practice; but it also acknowledges a capitalist context which profoundly affects everything the state does, particularly in economic matters where capitalist interests are directly involved. The idea of the ‘primacy of politics’ tends to abstract from the hard reality of this capitalist context: but no government can be indifferent to it. So long as a government works within it, so long does the partnership hold. If it seeks to pose a fundamental threat to capitalist interests, or a threat which capitalist interests judge to be fundamental, the partnership is dissolved and replaced by the determination of these interests to see the government destroyed. Nor in such a case is that determination likely to be confined to capitalist interests: it would be shared to the full by many other forces in society, and by people located in the state itself—military people, top civil servants, and many others.

The notion of partnership is scarcely contradicted by the experience of the governments of the left which have come to power (or to office) in capitalist countries in this century. For all practical purposes, the partnership has endured between such governments and capital, perhaps with more tensions and disagreements than when governments of the right have been in office, but not so as to bring about a complete break in relations. Great antagonism to the government might be expressed by members of the dominant class, business interests and their many agencies; but there was always a clear understanding on the part of these class forces that, even though the government might be doing some reprehensible things, it was also seeking to maintain the existing social order, to help business, to discipline and subdue labour, and to defend, in international and defence matters (and in colonial ones in an earlier day), what dominant class interests and the government both agreed to be the ‘national interest’. In any case, capital also knew that it was only a small part of the state that was now in alien hands: the top reaches of the civil service, the police, the military, the judiciary remained more or less intact, and vigilantly concerned to limit the damage which the government might do. Moreover, the hegemony exercised by the dominant class in civil society was never much affected by the arrival in office of a government of the left. All the ‘earthworks’ which that dominant class occupied remained under its control. On the other hand, governments of the left have always sought to contain the activism of their own supporters and to bid them wait patiently and obediently for socialist ministers to get on with their tasks. The one case where the partnership between a government of the left and dominant class interests was broken was that of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. Given that break, the government’s only hope of obviating the dangers which it faced was to forge a new partnership between itself and the subordinate classes. It was unable to achieve this, or did not sufficiently strive to achieve it. Its autonomy was also its death warrant.

This proposed model of partnership stands in opposition to Theda Skocpol’s model of the ‘state for itself’ referred to earlier. According to that model, it will be recalled, ‘fundamental conflicts of interest might arise between the existing dominant class or set of groups, on the one hand, and the state rulers on the other’. In this view, the state would be no one’s partner or ally: it would be ‘for itself’ and against all classes and groups in society. In relation to countries with a solid class structure and a well-entrenched dominant class, such a model does not seem appropriate. For it is surely very difficult to see, in such countries, what the interests of ‘state rulers’ would be which would also place these rulers in fundamental conflict with all classes or groups in society. I have already noted that there are things which the state wants and does, and which are very irksome to the dominant class: but this is a very different matter from there being a fundamental conflict between them. Moreover, if such a conflict between them did occur, the state would in all likelihood be acting in ways that would favour some other class or classes. In other words, a new partnership would have been created; or the state would be acting, for whatever reason, in favour of a class or classes without any such partnership having been established. In neither case would the state be ‘neutral’, or acting solely ‘for itself’.

Of course, state rulers, in pursuing what they conceive to be their interest, and the ‘national interest’, may use the autonomy they have to adopt policies and take actions which turn out to be disadvantageous or disastrous for everybody (quite possibly including those who took the decisions). History is full of such failures of statecraft; and recent examples abound. Thus, it may be argued that the American decision to wage war in Vietnam was very disadvantageous to all classes in the United States, not to speak of the disaster it represented for the people of Vietnam. But it can hardly be claimed that the decision to wage war in Vietnam was taken in the interests of state rulers in fundamental opposition to the interests of the capitalist class in the United States. On the contrary, there was a perfectly good ‘fit’ between the two, as witness the support which most capitalist interests there gave to the war until its very end. Another instance is that of Hitler’s expansionist ventures, including his decision to take Germany into war. This turned out badly for everybody concerned: but there was no fundamental opposition between business interests in Germany and the Nazi leaders; and here again, there was ample support from business for Nazi policies. In this case, however, it is possible to argue that the Nazi regime provides an example of the interests of those in charge of the state being fundamentally opposed to the interests of everybody else: the war was clearly lost by 1943, and the only people whose interest it was not to bring it to an end were the Nazi leaders. Other instances of this sort could no doubt be adduced. But they do not provide a firm basis for a ‘model’ of the state as being ‘for itself’ and against everybody else.

State Power under Socialism

It seems to me that the ‘model’ of partnership advanced here can be useful in defining the relationship of the state to the working class in a socialist society. In the classical Marxist perspective, this relationship is defined in terms of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As may be deduced from Marx’s Civil War in France, and as it is presented in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, this means in effect the virtual dissolution of state power into class power. The state is not abolished but its functions and powers become largely residual and subordinate. Göran Therborn is well within this tradition in saying that ‘a strategy for socialism or for a transitional stage of “advanced democracy” must dismantle the government, administration, judicial and repressive apparatus of the existing bourgeois state’, and in urging ‘a political programme of changes in the organization of the state that will bring about a popular democracy’. [17]

For their part, both social democratic and Communist parties have adopted perspectives and strategies of a very different kind, according to which class power is strictly subordinated to state power. For social democracy, class power has always tended to mean the deployment of electoral strength by the working class and the election of a social democratic or labour government. Once this is achieved, the task of the ‘voters’ is done, save for the routine activities of the party or parties which support the government. Indeed, any manifestation of class power (for instance strike action) is frowned upon, disowned and opposed.

Communist parties place a greater emphasis in their pronouncements and programmes on grassroots activism, but the focus tends to be on the achievement of legislative and ministerial power in what is in effect the old state with a partially renewed personnel. Whatever might happen to the hegemony of the dominant class, it is not on this basis likely to be inherited by the hitherto subordinate classes. Partnership between state power and class power in a socialist context means something rather different. It requires the achievement of real power by organs of popular representation in all spheres of life, from the workplace to local government; and it also involves the thorough democratization of the state system and the strengthening of democratic control upon every aspect of it. But it nevertheless also means that state power endures and that the state does not, in any strong sense, ‘wither away’. It must, in fact, long continue to remain in being and carry out many functions which it alone can fulfil. Indeed, it requires some degree of autonomy to carry them out. For the working class is not a homogeneous bloc, with one clear interest and one voice; and the state alone is capable of acting as a mediator between the ‘fractions’ which constitute the newly hegemonic majority. Furthermore, it is also upon the state that falls a large part of the responsibility for safeguarding the personal, civic and political freedoms which are intrinsic to the notion of socialist citizenship. In this sense, and with proper controls, state power in a post-capitalist society is not in conflict with class power, but its essential complement.




[1] For an interesting survey of the bulk of this literature, see Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, London 1982. The autonomy of the state, however, is not accorded any particular attention in this book and does not appear in the index.

[2] For a recent discussion of the subject by a ‘mainstream’ political scientist, which shows well how limited is an approach that takes no serious account of the state’s capitalist context, see E. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State, New York 1981. Actual case studies are discussed in S. D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and US Foreign Policy, New York 1978.

[3] This article is exclusively concerned with ‘late’ capitalist societies. The question presents itself rather differently in countries in the capitalist world which are poorly developed, and very differently indeed in Soviet-type regimes. Here again serious theoretical work has only commenced.

[4] Volume One: State and Bureaucracy, New York 1977, Chs 14–23.

[5] See my ‘Marx and the State’, in The Socialist Register 1965, London 1965, p. 283.

[6] Ibid, p. 285.

[7] See my ‘Poulantzas and the Capitalist State’, in NLR 82 (November–December 1973), p. 85, footnote 4.

[8] New York 1977.

[9] Cambridge 1979.

[10] See also Fred Block, ‘The Ruling Class Does Not Rule’, Socialist Revolution 33, (May–June 1977); and ‘Beyond Relative Autonomy’, in The Socialist Register 1980, London 1980, where he speaks of the ‘relative autonomy thesis’ as a ‘cosmetic modification of Marxism’s tendency to reduce state power to class power’. (p. 229).

[11] Skocpol, p. 27.

[12] Ibid.

[13] See Marx’s famous description of the Second Empire as ‘the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation’ (The Civil War in France, in Selected Works (1950), I, p. 470). Also Engels’s equally well-known remark: ‘By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both’ (The Origin of the Family, Property and the State, ibid., II, p. 290). For many other such examples, see Draper, op. cit.

[14] The quotation appears in Murray Kempton, ‘The Great Lobbyist’, in New York Review of Books, 17 February 1983; and is drawn from R. A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, New York 1982.

[15] A recent example is provided by Sir David McNee, who retired in 1982 as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and who was appointed non-executive chairman of the Scottish Express Newspapers: ‘Sir David, who left last September on an index-linked pension of £22,000, will be paid between £5,000 and £10,000 for the job. He recently sold his memoirs to the Sunday Mirror for £120,000, joined Clydesdale Bank for £5,000 a year as non-executive director, and in November the British Airways Board for £10,000 a year. In December he was nominated president of the National Bible Society of Scotland’ (The Guardian, 27 January 1983).

[16] Thus, Göran Therborn dissolves state power into class power when he asserts that ‘state power is a relation between social class forces expressed in the content of state policies’ (What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?, nlb. London 1978, p. 34). Note also Jessop’s characterization of Poulantzas’s view of the state: ‘The state reflects and condenses all the contradictions in a class-divided social formation . . . political practices are always class practices . . . state power is always the power of a definite class to whose interests the state corresponds’ (op. cit., p. 159).

[17] Therborn, p. 25.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Theoretical tragi-comedy of capitalist "restoration" in the USSR



Capitalism in the USSR? An Opportunist Theory in Disarray

Bruce Occeña and Irwin Silber


I. Introduction

Every major line struggle in the communist movement has been bound up with the struggle over some fundamental theoretical proposition. Bourgeois ideologists, among whom we include those within the communist movement who take a pragmatic view of line struggle, have great difficulty comprehending the significance of such struggles which, at times, seem to be over fairly abstract points of doctrine.

Thus some have reduced the repudiation of Trotskyism to a power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, in the course of which the protagonists seem to hurl theoretical arguments at each other simply to gain some tactical advantage. Of course, there is an element of truth to this perception since line struggle does not proceed as a clash of disembodied ideas but appears and is fought out between historically definite individuals and groupings. More to the point, however, in bourgeois society, where social life is organized on the basis of private property and individual gain, ideological struggles between bourgeois political figures are very much tied to the advance of their personal positions. Such bourgeois careerism has often infiltrated the ranks of the workers’ movement and expresses itself in the manipulation of ideas for narrow personal or organizational gain.

But the element of truth in the pragmatic world view should not reinforce cynicism about the central importance of theoretical debate within the communist movement. It should serve as a warning that the struggle for correct theory must proceed with the most rigorous use of the principles and methodology of dialectical and historical materialism.

Today, when we are faced with the fact that Marxism-Leninism must settle accounts with a particularly stubborn “left” deviation, it may be useful to review briefly the significance of the theoretical struggle against an earlier “left” deviation, Trotskyism.

The clash between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism focused on a fundamental theoretical proposition: should and could socialism be built in one country? The international proletariat, having secured a socialist beachhead in one part of the capitalist world, had to decide on the basis of a concrete examination of historical conditions whether it should make the securing of that beachhead and the construction of socialism in Russia its principal task for the next period. Stalin and the Comintern argued that such a course had been imposed on the working class by the actual historical conditions under which the first proletarian revolution had wrenched a major portion of the world out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky and his followers held that the political course for the international working class should be based on the primacy of extending the Bolshevik Revolution in fairly rapid fashion to the other major capitalist centers, and that building socialism in one country represented a major departure from Marxism.

The theoretical question of socialism in one country became the nub of a major struggle which wracked the international movement, the reverberations of which continue to be felt today.

A theoretical controversy of similar proportions has been on the agenda of Marxist-Leninists for the past two decades. It revolves around the proposition that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union and, by implication, in those socialist countries most closely associated with it through economic and/or political ties.

By extension, this “modest proposal” has also called into question the Marxist understanding of the laws of historical development, postulating the possibility that socialism can revert to the inferior capitalist mode of production with relative ease and under somewhat mysterious circumstances. The question has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the nature of the present epoch, whether we are witnessing the transition from capitalism to socialism or instead the emergence of a new, more insidious form of capitalism with a socialist guise. The controversy around this question has brought substantial disorder and confusion to the ranks of the international communist movement.

For the past several years it has become increasingly clear that all attempts to rebuild a Marxist-Leninist trend internationally are inextricably bound up with the repudiation of this capitalist restoration thesis. This is especially clear politically since the thesis that the Soviet Union is a capitalist country provides the theoretical foundation for the general line of collaboration with U.S. imperialism held and practiced by the Communist Party of China (CPC), the leading center for the restoration theory.

The thesis itself grew out of the struggle against modern revisionism.[1] This helps to account both for its initial acceptance in the anti-revisionist movement and for its staying power. But it is hardly the first time that a major deviation from Marxism-Leninism has appeared in the context of a generally correct struggle against another deviation. In a striking historical parallel, Lenin noted that “Anarchism was not infrequently a sort of punishment for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement.” He added, again with telling relevance to more recent struggles, “The two montrosities were mutually complementary.” (“Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder)

In the midst of the struggle against modern revisionism, coming especially at a moment when the struggle against imperialism was reaching a critical watershed in Southeast Asia, the CPC’s deviation went by relatively unnoticed in the ranks of the anti-revisionists. As a result, the position that the USSR had been transformed into a capitalist “social imperialist” country was viewed merely as the logical extension of the anti-revisionist critique and was not submitted to rigorous theoretical scrutiny. Consequently, it became a cardinal principle among the bulk of anti-revisionist forces in the international communist movement.

In retrospect we can see that the capitalist restoration thesis was one of the first conspicuous signals that the general line of the CPC was collapsing all-sidedly into opportunism.

In view of its serious political and theoretical implications, the ready acceptance of the restoration thesis by many Marxist-Leninists is quite astounding. Not a single reputable bourgeois scholar has seriously entertained the notion that the USSR has reverted to capitalism in any meaningful sense of the term. How could this line be taken so seriously, for so long, by a whole section of the international communist movement? The answer is inescapable and sobering. The phenomenon says much more about the relative political immaturity and theoretical underdevelopment of the revolutionary forces gathered around the CPC in the wake of the revisionist bombshell dropped at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956 than it does about the theoretical strength or factual substance of the capitalist restoration line itself.

From the beginning, the capitalist restoration thesis had negative political consequences, the most graphic being the policy of “no united action with revisionists” which was employed by the CPC to prevent a coordination of political strategy and military assistance to Vietnam during the height of the war against U.S. imperialism. Still, a number of years elapsed before the CPC line matured into full-blown class collaboration with imperialism.

The theory’s fuller programmatic expression actually began to appear in 1972, particularly with Nixon’s visit to China, which laid the basis politically and ideologically for the present tacit anti-Soviet alliance between Washington and Beijing. This event coincided with a significant shift in the CPC’s evaluation of U.S.-Soviet relations. Before 1972 the principal charge directed by the CPC against the Soviet Union was that it was colluding with U.S. imperialism in an attempt to divide the world into two respective spheres of influence. But starting in 1972, the CPC began putting forward the line that the relationship between the U.S. and the USSR was characterized by both collusion and contention, and that contention was principal and permanent whereas collusion was secondary and temporary.

This line change coincided with China’s attempt to forge a closer working relationship with the U.S., indicating that the leadership of the CPC believed that underscoring the specter of the “Soviet menace” would provide the objective basis for that relationship. It is significant that this line change took place at the time the U.S. had begun to surrender its hopes of military victory in Indochina and was completing its military withdrawal so that the military threat once posed to China by the presence of half a million U.S. troops near its southern border was fading.

By 1974, the capitalist restoration thesis had reached its political pinnacle with the elaboration of the Theory of the Three Worlds and its explicit call for the peoples of the world–worker and bourgeois, colonized and colonial, oppressed and oppressor–to direct the main blow at the USSR. With the elaboration of the Theory of the Three Worlds, the international class struggle had been stood on its head. Friends and enemies were thoroughly confused. Socialism became equated with fascism and the headquarters of world imperialism was designated a legitimate ally in the struggle against “hegemonism.” The wolf and the lamb were to make common cause against the “social imperialist” tiger. The political implications of this theory were revealed in the starkest form in Angola, where China sided not only with U.S. imperialism but with the puppets of Portuguese colonialism and the racist regime of South Africa against a popularly based revolutionary force because it enjoyed the support of the Soviet Union. As a result, the anti-revisionist trend whose unity had always been extremely shaky (itself an indication that it included both Marxist-Leninists and several strains of opportunism) began to split apart.

With Angola and the increasingly apparent opportunism of the Theory of the Three Worlds, a Marxist-Leninist trend has begun to emerge from the anti-revisionist camp which, from the beginning, had been largely under the domination of a “left” opportunist line headquartered in Beijing. But the maturation of this trend is closely bound up with the thorough refutation and settling of accounts with the theoretical underpinning of the “left” opportunist line–the thesis that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union.

There are further reasons for our trend to conduct a rigorous critique of the capitalist restoration thesis.

First, we must note that Marxist-Leninists are not the first to oppose the capitalist restoration thesis. From the beginning, this thesis has been challenged by both revisionist and Trotskyist circles. Many elements of these earlier critiques are both cogent and useful. But since these critiques have been advanced in the service of generally opportunist lines, Marxist-Leninists have been understandably wary of making use of them. But our trend must appropriate the best of all the critical work done thus far in relation to this thesis so that this important theoretical work can be used in forging a revolutionary general line for the communist movement, the basis for re-establishing a genuine communist party in the U.S.

Second, despite the profound shattering of the fragile unity of the “left” opportunists–signified by the split between China and Albania as well as the defeat of the “Gang of Four” by the Deng Xiaoping group in China–the capitalist restoration thesis has not at all been abandoned. For those appalled by the class collaborationist line of the Theory of the Three Worlds, the Albanian Party of Labor (and groups such as the Revolutionary Communist Party [RCP] in the U.S.) offer the comfortable niche of being able to reject the Theory of the Three Worlds while maintaining the capitalist restoration thesis. On the other hand, for those appalled by the anarchist tendencies of the Cultural Revolution, there is the much more business-like pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping and the current CPC leadership, who seem to have rejected all of the voluntarism associated with Mao Zedong Thought except for the capitalist restoration thesis.

Most importantly, the still fragile Marxist-Leninist trend has no basis for complacency around this question. We must guard against the legacy of pragmatism which expresses itself in a tendency to merely break with the incorrect political line without thoroughly settling accounts with the theoretical assumptions involved. Such pragmatism would leave our trend poorly equipped to deal with theoretical questions in general or with re-emerging manifestations of some of the underpinnings of the capitalist restoration thesis. The struggle for a correct summation of the “Maoist” deviation will revolve, in large measure, around the theoretical and political basis on which the capitalist restoration thesis is rejected. This struggle speaks directly to the future direction and general orientation of the Marxist-Leninist trend.

Some forces in our trend reject the capitalist restoration thesis but have not broken with the legacy of anti-Sovietism which significantly predates the adoption of a revisionist general line by the CPSU. So we are witnessing a minor revival of “Bukharinism” as well as emergence of neo-Trotskyism, both of which use the prejudices associated with the capitalist restoration thesis while standing on the “high” ground of anti-Stalinism. The fairly conspicuous ultra-democratic and anti-Leninist prejudices within this trend are reinforced by (and liberally borrow from) the anarchist legacy of the capitalist restoration thesis.

It is particularly significant that in recent years the critique of the capitalist restoration thesis has been taken up and qualitatively advanced by anti-revisionist forces formerly of a “Maoist” orientation. In the U.S. this has included the work of Jonathan Aurthur (Socialism in the Soviet Union, Proletarian Publishers) and Albert Szymanski (Is The Red Flag Firing? Zed Press). The most recent and important contribution, in our opinion, is The Myth of Capitalism Reborn by Michael Goldfield and Melvin Rothenberg (Line of March Publications) which tackles some of the complex theoretical questions involved in the controversy from a firm foundation of Marxist political economy and methodology. Its particular strength is that it is written in a polemical style, successfully engaging the principal theoretical lines and constructs of the restorationists and appropriately highlighting the political significance of the debate for communists.

In addition to these individual efforts, the National Soviet Union Study Project, located within our trend, has brought together approximately two dozen people of relatively advanced theoretical capacity who have been examining the question of capitalist restoration and several related questions for almost two years. In the past year, the project has sponsored a series of public forums in which its conclusions concerning the critique of the capitalist restoration thesis have been presented to large numbers of revolutionary activists. It is now preparing to publish a series of Occasional Papers by members of the project concerning various questions flowing from its studies.

The present article, then, is an attempt to summarize the most advanced theoretical work on this question emanating from the anti-revisionist, anti-“left” opportunist trend. In addition, the concluding section of this article will put forward a beginning critique of a theory the authors deem to be an unsatisfactory alternative to the capitalist restoration thesis, a theory most forcefully advanced by Goldfield and Rothenberg, that what has popularly been called “socialism” ever since The Bolshevik Revolution is more properly described as a “transition period” between capitalism and socialism. In the course of this critique, the authors also advance some initial thoughts concerning a theory of socialism.

II. The Theory of Capitalist Restoration

The critical examination of any theory requires, first of all, a clear-cut statement of what that theory says. This is so obvious that it comes as something of a shock to realize that in the case of the capitalist restoration thesis this is easier said than done. Although the CPC has advanced the line of capitalist restoration in the USSR for more than 15 years, it has never produced a single serious and systematic elaboration of this theory nor has it taken on any kind of theoretical defense of it.

A. Restorationist Literature

Both as a theoretical proposition and as a statement of historical fact, the thesis of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union is of such overriding significance that we would expect it to be presented and documented in a thorough and readily accessible fashion. How far this is from being the case can be demonstrated through a brief survey of the available literature.

The closest that the CPC has come to an actual theoretical statement of the thesis is the Ninth Comment previously mentioned. A number of scholars have concluded that this document was the only one of the polemics with the CPSU which Mao himself played an active role in drafting. Unfortunately it does not enhance Mao’s reputation either as a Marxist theoretician or as an accurate documentor of social reality. As a polemic against the political line of Khrushchev, the Comment clearly scores some effective points; but as a theoretical exposition of capitalist restoration it fails. Nowhere in it does Mao attempt to use any of the fundamental categories of Marxist political economy which characterize capitalism. As for documentation, the Comment does not use any objective criteria other than the revisionist line of the CPSU to demonstrate that the capitalist mode of production has now come to characterize the Soviet economy.

The self-serving quality of this theoretical work is demonstrated further by the fact that it points to Yugoslavia as the prime example of capitalist restoration. Since this judgment has been dramatically reversed by the CPC in recent years without the slightest indication of any change in the Yugoslav economic system, the tactical and narrow political objectives of the thesis have become more transparent than ever before.

The only other literary effort by the CPC to document the capitalist restoration thesis is a pamphlet published by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing in 1968 called How The Soviet Revisionists Carry Out All-Round Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR. At first glance, this would appear to be the Rosetta Stone of restorationist theory, the place where we could expect all the mysteries of the thesis to be disclosed. Unfortunately the term “theoretical work” could be applied to this pamphlet only with a thoroughly unwarranted excess of generosity. In fact, it is nothing but a collection of brief articles from the Chinese press supposedly documenting instances of corruption and ideological distortions in Soviet life–most of which are drawn from accounts in the Soviet press itself where they were reported in the context of the struggle against anti-socialist behavior. Insofar as this pamphlet makes certain assertions of “fact,” these have been thoroughly refuted by a host of scholars, both bourgeois and Marxist.

To get a feel for the quality of this pamphlet, consider one typical item. In a section “documenting” that “the dregs of society–ghosts and monsters–have been drawn into the (Soviet) party,” the pamphlet reports as follows: “The director of a state farm in Kazakhstan, Avbaklov, was a drunkard and humbug who led a dissipated life. The Party organization of the farm nevertheless dragged him into the Party. But before it had time to issue him a membership card he was guilty of further misconduct.”

The above constitutes the full extent of the documented report on this incident which, we are supposed to conclude, demonstrates a pattern of degeneration of the CPSU’s ranks. In terms of evidence for the capitalist restoration thesis–or for almost anything else–this Comment raises more questions about the CPC than it does about the CPSU. For one thing, the report, such as it is, is obviously abstracted from a criticism by the Soviet party itself of bad practices in recruitment. The point is that the pamphlet is filled with exactly this type of political gossip in its effort to demonstrate capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union; and this dubious scholarship is one of the most thorough attempts made by the CPC to document its thesis.

Further evidence of the quality of the theoretical work is provided by an article in the journal Modern China (Vol. 5, No. 1) by a pro-Mao U.S. scholar, Joseph W. Esherick. The article is entitled On The “Restoration of Capitalism”: Mao and Marxist Theory. One turns to this article with expectations of at last being able to discover that hitherto elusive body of theoretical work in which the capitalist restoration thesis will be advanced in all its glory. Instead we are told that Marx never explicitly said that capitalist restoration was impossible, that Lenin held that it was possible, that the position of “the Trotskyite Left Opposition .... (was) remarkably similar to the analysis of Mao” and that “the most striking parallels to Mao are found in Bukharin’s warnings of the dangers of a new ruling class emerging in Soviet society.”

Beyond that, Esherick admits that the Ninth Comment “is unquestionably the fullest statement of the Chinese position on the restoration of capitalism” and that at best the rest of the theory can only be pieced together by a close examination of Mao’s writings during the period.

The bulk of the remaining CPC work on capitalist restoration in the USSR is contained in the following: the polemical commentary, Is Yugoslavia A Socialist Country? which is the Third Comment on the Open Letter of the CPSU; a modest pamphlet called Leninism or Social-Imperialism published in 1970 on the centenary of Lenin’s birth; and scattered articles in Beijing Review, many of which have been anthologized in two compendiums published by a “Maoist” bookstore in the U.S., Social Imperialism and Social Imperialism: The Soviet Union Today (Yenan Books).

The Albanian Party of Labor (PLA) does only slightly better. Its theoretical work is contained largely in a number of articles which appear in the magazine Albania Today. The most useful summary, in the opinion of Goldfield and Rothenberg, is to be found in Issue No. 4 of Albania Today published in 1975.

Oddly enough, the most elaborate expositions of the theory have been produced in the west. (Perhaps this is not so odd. There has always been a ready market in the U.S. and Western Europe for any form of anti-Sovietism, especially with a “left” cover). It will probably surprise many to learn that the shoddy work by Martin Nicolaus, The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR (Liberator Books, 1975, since withdrawn from circulation) and Red Papers 7 published by the RCP constitute two of the most thorough presentations of the theory in print. Even the leading French “Maoist” theoretician, Charles Bettelheim, has not produced a unified exposition, of the thesis. His theory has had to be reconstructed from the various bits and pieces to be found in a wide array of writings.[2]

B. Two Distinct Theories

The theoretical work supporting the capitalist restoration thesis can at best be described as sparse. For all its leanness, however, the thesis is extremely ecclectic and internally contradictory. It quickly becomes evident in attempts to reconstruct the thesis that there are actually two logically distinct theories of capitalist restoration in the USSR, and proponents of the thesis skip back and forth between them. This confusion, ironically, helps explain the stubborn persistence of the thesis since its gross departures from Marxism-Leninism are obscured by its elusive nature. One of the major contributions made by Goldfield and Rothenberg to the debate is the logical reconstruction of the two distinct theories and the unraveling of the common foundations.

What is common to both theories is the following. First, that the basis for the class struggle exists throughout the entire period of socialism; and that bourgeois elements will gravitate toward and exist within the communist party. And second, that former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev engineered a revisionist coup d’etat in the Soviet Union, the most visible expression of which was the twentieth congress of the C PSU in 1956, and that this was followed by a thorough-going purge of all the Marxist-Leninist cadre from the party.

On the surface these assumptions might not seem to be in contradiction to a Marxist-Leninist orientation even though they are somewhat imprecise. For example, the idea of class struggle under socialism is far from unreasonable since socialism is a transitional society (between capitalism and communism) which will inevitably be characterized by class contradictions and struggles, both in a material and an ideological sense. Additionally, the rise of Khrushchev certainly marked the conspicuous and qualitative consolidation of a revisionist line within the CPSU. However, the subsequent gross deviations from Marxism by the restorationists and the glaring idealist and anarchist distortions which marked the Cultural Revolution in China require us to scrutinize these assumptions in a much more critical way.

C. Class Struggle Under Socialism

To begin with, the assertion that class struggle continues under socialism must be carefully qualified. In the early substages, right after the seizure of power, the continuing class contradictions can have a substantial material basis in the actual property relations that exist. Since the proletariat must wrest bourgeois property away from the capitalists “by degrees,” and there is really no other way in which this can be done, then for a period of time exploitive class relations may continue to exist in different branches of the economy. At the same time, widespread small-scale production, especially in rural areas, will persist. Under these conditions, the class struggle will of course go on.

But at this stage of the class struggle, the edge has shifted to the proletariat which, holding state power, can use that power to complete, step by step, the expropriation of the capitalists, institute land reform and gradual collectivization of agriculture, and increase the socialization and rationalization of various spheres of production through the institution of economic planning and the elimination of the market, etc. Meanwhile, the proletarian legal system prevents the transfer of capital through inheritance and robs accumulated wealth of its capacity to act as capital.

In this sense, Stalin’s statement in the 1930s that exploitive classes in the USSR had been qualitatively broken up (and more recently a similar statement by the Deng/Hua leadership concerning China) cannot be dismissed out of hand as having absolutely no basis materially and theoretically as the “Maoists” have tended to assert. On the other hand, class struggle has certainly not disappeared altogether, although it will take new forms. So long as imperialism exists as a contending world system anu scarcity and inequality still characterize socialist societies, there is a basis for the emergence of bourgeois lines, practices and ideology. However, increasingly the class struggle expresses itself as contention in this realm. Locating more precisely the forms of class struggle under socialism in this fashion in no way minimizes its significance in terms of serving either to accelerate or fetter the socialist revolution world-wide and in the particular country. However, the existence of such class struggle does not necessarily imply or necessitate the material existence of exploitive class relations within that particular socialist society.

But this is not the way in which the capitalist restoration thesis deals with this question. With typical idealist methodology, restorationists argue that if class struggle exists under socialism then there must be an exploiting class actually operating within the socialist system. From here it is but a short step to the classical anarchist view that the “holders of power” actually constitute this exploiting class–a view which is then “verified” by pointing to instances in which these holders of power are able to obtain for their personal use a higher proportion of the social product than do most workers. (Whether or not such practices are correct or justifiable under socialism is irrelevant for the moment– although by no means do we concede to anarchist prejudice and take it for granted that the existence of such seeming inequities is automatically and always contrary to the interests of the working class as a whole. The point is that even if true and unjustifiable, such practices can hardly be said to constitute in Marxist terms the principal basis for proving the existence of an exploiting class, let alone defining the economic system as one based on capitalist property relations.)

D. The “Revisionist Coup d’Etat”

The other common assumption of the restorationists – that Khrushchev engineered a coup d’etat which seized power on behalf of the bourgeoisie – is equally problematic. While the revisionist deterioration of the political and ideological line of the CPSU becomes qualitative and conspicuous with the rise of Khrushchev, all assertions of a massive purge of party ranks or deproletarianized class composition of the party are totally without foundation. There is no evidence whatsoever of any full-scale purge of party ranks in the CPSU from 1956 up to the present. The party shows signs of comparative stability and steady growth throughout this period. Nor is there any evidence of a massive change in the class composition of the party away from the proletariat; a larger proportion of workers are party members today than in 1956.

Of course, none of this proves that the line of the CPSU is necessarily a proletarian line. The point, however, is that a fundamental argument of the restorationists can in no way be substantiated. In fact, it is precisely this type of argumentation which has served to obscure the real contradictions in socialist society and the international communist movement which the emergence of revisionism represents. In this sense, the restorationists fulfill Lenin’s prescription for dogmatists – they are theoretically lazy – since by declaring the USSR capitalist they avoid the much more difficult task of analyzing the real contradictions which flow from the ideological deterioration of the communist party or the task of constructing socialism. For if a revisionist line equals capitalism, there is no need for a whole new body of theoretical work that begins to do for the socialist epoch what Marx, Engels and Lenin have done for the analysis of the capitalist epoch.

Starting with these two basic assumptions, the restoration thesis then goes galloping off in two different directions.

E. Theory No. One – The “Political Economy” Thesis

The “political economy” thesis appears to follow orthodox Marxist lines. It holds that capitalist relations of production have been restored in all major sectors of the economy, beginning in agriculture. The critical turning point was in 1965 with the Kosygin reforms marking full-scale restoration. As a result, economic planning has been abolished and capitalist profit has become the principal driving force in production. Various endemic capitalist contradictions have emerged such as cyclical crises and massive unemployment, with increasing social stratification and worsening conditions for the working class. In short, the USSR is depicted as functioning essentially like the U.S.

F. Theory No. Two – The “Superstructure” Thesis

The second argument is an a priori formulation, based on Mao’s statement: “The rise to power of revisionism means the rise to power of the bourgeoisie” (Leninism or Social Imperialism, p. 14). Consequently it holds 1956 as the decisive year with the emergence of the revisionist line in the CPSU and its further consolidation by the Twenty-First Congress. This theory stresses the key importance of the attitudes of the leadership toward remnants of capitalism. Consequently, degeneration into capitalism is synonymous with the degeneration of the party line into revisionism. Once the line alters, capitalism is restored rapidly. In short, this argument takes the liberty of redefining capitalism, conveniently incorporating into this “capitalism of a new type” socialist planning and all the numerous political and material advantages enjoyed by the working class in the USSR. Ideologically this argument is more insidious because it plays into the prevalent anticommunist legacy in the West. As in 1984, the USSR is depicted as a materially advanced society hiding a fascist-like totalitarian system.

G. Merging of the Theories Politically

These two distinct lines of argument represent the logical separation of the capitalist restoration thesis. However, in the world of politics, the restorationists nimbly skip from one theory to the other, advancing a “fact” here or a thesis there in order to buttress their argument on behalf of capitalist restoration in the USSR. Chinese propaganda has, for years, argued both theses – often in the same article – until Deng Xiaoping’s latest return to power finally brought even the semblance of theoretical work on this question to an end. A good example of the merging of the two theories is to be found in Red Papers Seven by the RCP. The single most ambitious attempt to argue the “political economy” thesis is the Nicolaus book. The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR, while the ongoing work of Charles Bettelheim represents the most sophisticated and ambitious version of the “superstructure” thesis.

In recent years, the “political economy” thesis has increasingly lost favor among restorationists as it keeps bumping up against the stubborn material reality of the Soviet economy and society, which simply refuses to behave in accordance with the prescription these theorists have laid out for it. Consequently, the “superstructure” thesis has become the fallback argument for the most recalcitrant restorationists since it allows for the incorporation of socialist relations of production into “capitalism of a new type,” now appearing for the first time in the world by edict of these theoreticians.

In the following pages we will examine these two theories in greater detail. Concerning the “political economy” thesis, we will take up both the empirical evidence offered in its behalf and the theoretical categories it employs. Drawing upon the body of work already available, we will demonstrate that the theory does not stand up either empirically or theoretically. Concerning the “superstructure” thesis, we will examine its underlying theoretical assumptions and, drawing from the work done by a wide array of forces, demonstrate that its categories represent a substantial departure from Marxist political economy and that it represents not the materialist world outlook of Marxism-Leninism but the idealist world outlook of petit bourgeois revolutionism.

III. The “Political Economy” Thesis

If the capitalist restoration thesis can be attributed to any one figure, the most likely candidate is Mao Zedong. Evidence is increasing that Mao developed the thesis not only in the midst of the deteriorating relations between China and the Soviet Union; perhaps more significantly, the thesis appears to have been tactically developed as part of the ideological preparation for the Cultural Revolution in China. (By the same token, there is considerable evidence to indicate that Liu Shaoqi, who was the principal political target of the Cultural Revolution, never supported the capitalist restoration thesis although he seems to have been the principal author of most of the famous CPC critiques of Soviet revisionism up through 1963.)

The significance of this point is that it is doubtful if Mao himself ever had much to do with what we have designated the “political economy” thesis. Mao himself was not well-versed in Marxist political economy and his generally idealist views and voluntarist approach to economic questions is strongly suggestive of this weakness (i.e., both the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were Mao’s economics in practice). Where, then, did the “political economy” thesis come from?

The most logical explanation – one that is confirmed by some direct experiences in the U.S. communist movement – is that it represents an effort by a number of more orthodox Marxists in the “left” opportunist camp to try to find a way to prove Mao’s poorly thought-out formulations on capitalist restoration in a manner that would appear to be consistent with classical categories of Marxist political economy.

The difficulty which this thesis immediately encounters, however, is that the most conspicuous features of capitalism which Marx identified and which are readily observable – private ownership of the means of production, cyclical crises, structural unemployment, anarchy of production – do not appear to be present in the Soviet economy. Accordingly, the proponents of the “political economy” thesis have been forced to argue that in fact all of these features of capitalism are indeed present in the Soviet economy, but they appear in a disguised form. The socialist “appearance,” they hold, is used to mask the capitalist “content.”

Their argument runs somewhat along the following lines. Private ownership of the means of production characterizes the Soviet economy even though it cannot be demonstrated that there is legal ownership; the “ownership” consists in effective control over the means of production and is demonstrated by greater access to the social product. A definite capitalist class, defined by its effective control over the means of production, exists in the Soviet Union. Despite the apparent existence of a central plan for the Soviet economy, anarchy of production actually reigns; the plan, they hold, is nothing but the concoction of the enterprise managers who simply register what they have already determined will be their economic course over the next period of time. What this means is that the pursuit of private profit rather than social need is the principal motive force organizing the Soviet economy. Because of the anarchy of production, the classical boom-and-bust business cycle of capitalism characterizes the Soviet economy. The cause is the same as in the U.S., periodic crises of overproduction resulting in a decline in the gross national product and massive unemployment among Soviet workers. They assert that a permanent industrial reserve of the unemployed now exists in the Soviet Union. Soviet capitalism has led to the absolute emiseration of the Soviet working class with a measurable decline in living standards and a widening income gap between workers and “capitalists.” The bourgeoisie’s penetration of the socialist system in the Soviet Union took place first with the restoration of capitalist production relations in agriculture and was principally signalled by the abolition of the motorized tractor stations and the growth of the private plots. Capitalist restoration was completed in an all-sided way with the adoption of the 1965 Kosygin reforms. As a result, the Soviet Union has become a “social-imperialist” superpower where the absolute law of the export of capital is the underpinning of Soviet foreign policy and Soviet contention with the U.S.

Such, in brief, is the “political economy” thesis of capitalist restoration. What will be immediately apparent to anyone with a reasonable acquaintance with Soviet reality is the sheer absurdity of it all. On the phenomenal level, only the most die-hard anticommunists would have so little respect for the facts as to assert these propositions seriously. Most bourgeois Sovietologists would quickly dismiss this theory as having so little correspondence to Soviet reality on the empirical level as to call into question the honesty of any who advanced it.

In this connection, a recent appraisal of the Soviet economy by a fairly well-known and widely respected bourgeois scholar, Alex Nove, is in order. According to Nove (The Soviet Economy: Problems and Prospects, in New Left Review No. 119, Jan.-Feb. 1980), the Soviet economy is based on centralized planning, market forces are absent or severely restricted, profitability plays a subordinate role in decisionmaking, and there is a labor shortage, as opposed to unemployment and a reserve army of labor.

As Nove points out, there are problems in the Soviet economy: a declining growth rate in labor productivity, inefficiencies in the use of labor and investment resources, distribution bottlenecks, especially in consumer goods, and inadequate output and productivity in agriculture. However, to quote Nove: “The Soviet leadership has shown every sign of being determined to reject the ’market’ solution” to the economic problems of the Soviet Union. In other words, the Soviet Union is characterized by an absence of market forces, contrary to the claims of the restorationists. Nove concludes that despite the economic problems in the Soviet Union, “people have not become worse off,” there is no threat of economic collapse, the system is not in chaos, and the quality of planning and production are not declining. Thus according to Nove, the emphasis that critics of the Soviet Union place on chaos, waste and the production of poor quality goods is misleading–especially when compared to previous periods when the economy was far more wasteful and inefficient and less productive.

Given the stark contrast between the “political economy” thesis and the summation by even bourgeois scholars such as Nove, the question that presents itself is how such gross distortions about the USSR could have become a material force among a whole section of the international communist movement. What the “political economy” thesis reveals is not some new understanding of the Soviet Union but the abysmal ignorance of the bulk of those forces who made up the anti-revisionist trend which congealed around the CPC after the CPSU’s collapse into revisionism. It is clear that this trend is marked by a profound break in historical continuity. For the most part the “Maoist” parties, which splintered off from the older parties whose roots went back to the Third International, attracted mainly young revolutionary elements, leaving the majority of older cadres in the revisionist ranks. In some respects this was a strength. But it was also a profound weakness which was compounded by the inability of the “Maoist” parties to recognize that the break in continuity was hardly a cause for celebration.

One result of this break in continuity has been a conspicuous drop in the level of knowledge about the history and functioning of the USSR in which the Third International was schooled. Nowhere was the ignorance factor more stark than in the ranks of the “new communist movement” in the U.S. This problem was confounded tenfold by the relatively low theoretical level of the anti-revisionist trend which was weaned almost exclusively on the writings of Mao. Mao’s writings, especially in the area of political economy, are best summed up as a form of theoretical pablum when contrasted to the rigorous scientific tradition of Marxism. In addition, this trend was deeply infected by the anti-communist prejudices of U.S. society in general and the New Left in particular, so that there existed in the anti-revisionist movement a ready audience for the wildest slanders which could be concocted about the Soviet Union.

Taken together, these elements shape a whole generation of communists who are relatively gullible and susceptible to distorted facts and analysis about the USSR. Any serious work in our movement concerning the Soviet Union, therefore, cannot proceed on the basis of assumptions that could once have been made concerning the communist movement’s acquaintance with Soviet reality. Incorrect assertions about Soviet life and society which, in the past, communists might reasonably have been expected to dismiss as obvious nonsense, must now be more carefully and painstakingly refuted. In short, the capitalist restoration thesis must not only be theoretically critiqued, but also empirically refuted. In the process, the working knowledge of Marxist-Leninists concerning the main features and functioning of Soviet society must be raised substantially.

In the main, the critical work done on the capitalist restoration thesis by Aurthur, Szymanski, Goldfield and Rothenberg, and the Soviet Union Study Project provides an overwhelming empirical refutation of the thesis. In the pages that follow, we can only touch on a few of the main points and will cite these and other appropriate sources for fuller documentation.

The central proposition of the “political economy” thesis is that members of a new Soviet bourgeoisie privately own the means of production and organize the Soviet economy on the basis of the pursuit of private profit. Demonstrating this proposition is indispensable to any serious theory of capitalist restoration in the USSR. If capitalism has been restored there must be a capitalist class; the restorationists have invested considerable time and energy in search of it. In general, two candidates are proposed for this role.

The first candidate proposed is the group of managers and enterprise directors who supposedly maintain essentially private control over their enterprises in spite of disguised socialist legality (Nicolaus). They supposedly operate “their” plants on the basis of market considerations and derive personal profits from the success of these enterprises. But this proposition quickly falls apart once reality is examined. In fact, the actual authority of Soviet plant managers is comparable to that of plant foremen in the U. S. (Myth). They manage their enterprises under major restrictions from central planning agencies. They have no fundamental control over either the wage scale of the workers or the prices of the finished products. They can be readily removed from their positions by the political leadership of the party and government. To argue, as Nicolaus does, that these directors and managers constitute the new Soviet “ruling class” is nothing but a measure of the fertility of the human imagination.

The second proposed candidate for the Soviet bourgeoisie is the top level of party and state functionaries, a choice which is politically somewhat more plausible than the enterprise managers since they control the key positions in the party and state apparatus. But there are major problems with this choice as well. The biggest problem is that it implies a form of capitalism without competition, a question which we will take up later on when we deal with the concept of “state capitalism” as the restorationists use it. On a more immediate level, however, there is an immense difficulty in identifying as capitalists individuals who have no property rights over the means of production nor legal private claim over the social surplus. To the extent that they can acquire individual wealth it is the result of a combination of material incentives, pilfering and corruption. There is little they can do with that wealth except enjoy consumer luxuries not readily available to others; they cannot use it to invest or control the economy in any way. They cannot use their “insider” knowledge of the economic plan to buy stocks in certain corporations, nor can they transfer their wealth to their offspring in the form of inheritance. A closer counterpart to the Soviet elite in capitalist society would be the professional petit bourgeoisie rather than the bourgeoisie.

Ironically, the very privileges which this stratum of Soviet society enjoys – and the privileges are real – suggests that they are not likely to attempt to undermine the socialist system as it presently exists which gives them these privileges in favor of a much chancier capitalist system.

Do the privileges, both relative and absolute, enjoyed by high-level state, party and technical functionaries in the Soviet Union indicate a problem of socialist development? Of course they do. Objectively, this reflects the persistence of the contradiction between mental and manual labor, administration and execution, specialized and general functions, etc., which will characterize socialist societies at a still relatively low level of development of the forces of production. From this, there is a danger that this fragmentation of human society imposed by the social division of labor will be reified and frozen. This is a substantial and complex contradiction facing socialist construction in general and the USSR in particular.

On the level of line and policy, such privilege indicates the ideological deterioration of the Soviet party, not simply as exemplified in the tolerance of a measure of personal corruption, but in the pervasiveness of a mechanical materialist world outlook which has lost confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the masses and which is imbued with pragmatism and complacency. But capitalism is not principally a set of ideas or a philosophy. It is a mode of production. And no matter how much one may deplore the prevailing ideology in the leadership of the CPSU, it will have to be demonstrated that this stratum owes its position to its role in a capitalist mode of production before we can begin to consider them a new bourgeois class.

A second set of arguments on behalf of capitalist restoration holds that the Soviet economy is marked by cyclical crisis similar to the recession-prosperity cycle of the U.S., reflecting the anarchy of unplanned capitalist production and resultant unemployment; it posits a permanent industrial reserve who serve the function of depressing the wage-scale of the Soviet working class.

The restorationists must attempt to assert this as a description of the Soviet economy. These are such characteristic features of capitalism that we cannot imagine a capitalist system without them. In fact, they flow out of the very heart of the capitalist mode of production – generalized commodity production (the market determines all) and the drive for surplus value. But any attempt to demonstrate that these conditions actually characterize the Soviet economy quickly comes to grief on the hard rocks of fact.

The only phenomenon which remotely gives any credence to this charge is the gradual decline in the Soviet Union’s rate of industrial growth since 1950, a decline from the immediate post-World War II period of extensive reconstruction to a much more modest rate of approximately 3 to 4 percent annually (Nove, 1980). This slower growth rate does pose serious problems for the Soviet economy and, in our opinion, speaks in large part to the weakening consciousness of the Soviet working class in a period in which the party leadership has largely abandoned the task of raising the ideological and political level of the masses, which is a key factor in developing the forces of production under socialism. But even a slowed rate of Soviet growth is a far cry from the negative growth rates which continue to characterize capitalist recessions. During these recessions, plants shut down, companies go bankrupt, unemployment shoots up as the general crisis brought on by overproduction must work its way out of the classical capitalist bind.

In the USSR, however, industrial employment has increased substantially each year (Myth). As for the claim by the restorationists that during the past 20 years chronic unemployment and a reserve army of labor have appeared in the Soviet Union, all of the evidence points in the other direction. (The claim is important since, if true, it would indicate that a market in labor power had developed in the Soviet Union, thus bringing into being one of the indispensable features of capitalism.) But even among bourgeois experts on the Soviet economy – experts who would be more than happy to cite evidence of unemployment in the USSR if there were any – there is overwhelming agreement that the Soviet economy is characterized by a labor shortage which in fact has existed for many years (Nove, 1980).

What the restorationists take the liberty of terming unemployment is more precisely the recent phenomenon of relatively high mobility of labor in the Soviet Union. But as Goldfield and Rothenberg point out, the relatively high job turnover of the early 1960s was at least as extensive as that which occurred in the 1930s and was largely due to the fact that during and right after World War II (1940-56) there were legal restrictions on workers changing jobs without explicit permission. Thus, with the relaxation of these restrictions, there was a significant rise in the number of workers who voluntarily left their jobs, undoubtedly because the prospects for obtaining better ones were quite evident to them (Myth). Meanwhile, Soviet labor laws continue to subject all worker dismissals to a review by the trade union and stipulate that workers cannot be laid off unless provision has been made for other employment.

These laws remain strictly in force and would indicate that neither legally nor in practice have unemployment and a reserve army of labor returned as features of the Soviet economy. In fact, the estimated average time lapse between jobs for Soviet workers is approximately two weeks.

A third argument of the restorationists is that with the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, there has been a decline in the standard of living of the Soviet masses, and that the phenomenon described by Marx of the absolute emiseration of the working class is now a feature of Soviet life. Indeed restorationist literature abounds with horror stories of the groaning Soviet working class increasingly feeling the burden of capitalist exploitation. These are usually accompanied by reports of a rising tide of class struggle of the Soviet working class which we are assured is bound to spell doom for “the new tsars.” Strangely enough the Soviet officials have apparently managed to keep this mounting class struggle secret from the international press – a trick their Polish counterparts have obviously not yet mastered! The lack of visibility of this class struggle in the USSR strongly suggests that the assertions are nothing but the workings of fancy when otherwise sober-minded individuals set out to “prove” a proposition which has originated solely in their imaginations.

What are the facts? Per capita food consumption in the Soviet Union has doubled during the past 25 years. Per capita consumption of consumer goods has increased four-fold. Services have tripled from 195 1 to 1975 in areas like housing, utilities and recreation. Government outlays for education and health services have tripled in the past 25 years. At the same time, the work week has been reduced and the minimum wage raised substantially (Myth). While there are problems in the availability and distribution of consumer goods (Nove, 1980), it is absurd to characterize the material welfare of the Soviet masses as one of increasing misery when, in fact, their standard of living has been increasing dramatically and steadily.

By itself, the fact that the standard of living of the Soviet masses has gone up does not, of course, disprove the capitalist restoration thesis. During certain periods and in the short run, capitalism has displayed its capacity to improve the living conditions of the masses. But here we are highlighting the Soviet reality in order to illustrate the extent to which the restorationists are prepared to play fast and loose with the facts in an effort to support their thesis. It also helps demonstrate their poor grasp of Marxist political economy since they should have understood that such fabrication is not necessarily required for the proof of their thesis.

Closely connected to this question is another one. that is, the relative degree of economic inequality in Soviet life and whether it is rising or declining. Overall consumption may rise but it could be so inequitably distributed that the masses of the people would still not be better off. This question speaks to the general trend of Soviet society, whether it is becoming in fact more or less egalitarian. Of course, inequities are difficult to measure simply in monetary terms. There are advantages, for instance access to higher education, which will not show up immediately in statistics on income. And there is evidence to indicate that the children of intellectuals do have greater access to higher education than do children from manual workers’ families (Szymanski), although it should be noted that there has been an absolute expansion of higher education for all sectors. It is also true that there is significant unreported income in the Soviet Union, especially among the upper strata of the population, where a number of individuals utilize their positions for illegal economic activity.

Bearing all these qualifications in mind, however, it can still be demonstrated that the overall tendency in the Soviet Union is toward a greater degree of equality in income (Szymanski, Goldfield and Rothenberg). The gap between the income of the lowest 10 percent of the Soviet working class and the income of the technicians, managers and senior-level party and government officials who might be said to constitute the upper 10 percent is closing steadily and rapidly (Myth). According to Nove (1980), engineers, doctors, teachers, and office employees have lost ground insofar as wages are concerned and many now earn less than skilled workers. The most striking exceptions to this pattern, in fact, are not to be found among the enterprise managers or high government and party officials, but among the top-name artists and entertainers, some of whom command truly extraordinary incomes – extraordinary, at least, by Soviet standards. This reflects a political problem (guarding against the temptations from the West) and an ideological problem (weaknesses in cultivating a proletarian consciousness among cultural workers), but clearly it does not reflect a fundamental reversal in the overall egalitarian trends in Soviet society.

The restorationists have given much attention to Soviet agriculture. According to them, the socialist economy of the Soviet Union was undermined first in the sphere of agriculture. This argument maintains that Khrushchev and his successors, through a program of decentralization, turned the collective farms over to managers and restored capitalism in the countryside. To support their allegations, the restorationists point to the failures of Soviet agriculture during the last 20 years. They claim that agricultural productivity and output have declined and that the social, political and economic life of the peasantry has deteriorated sharply. Accordingly, with the destruction of socialist forms of agriculture, a new capitalist class has developed in the rural areas, and private ownership and the peasant private plot have become the dominant forms of agriculture.

Now what is actually happening in Soviet agriculture? First of all, Soviet agriculture has been and remains the weak sector of the Soviet economy; it is relatively backward, inefficient, and still has a sizeable private sector – the peasant private plots. However as a result of huge investments, agricultural output and productivity are rising slowly, even though agriculture is still a net burden on the Soviet economy (Nove. 1980). None of these problems, however, began with the rise to power of Khrushchev and his successors but have in fact plagued Soviet agriculture since the 1930s (Myth). Many of the problems of Soviet agriculture are due to objective factors (e.g., a short growing season and a relatively narrow arable land belt) as well as the real ideological and political problems encountered in the construction of socialism in the rural areas. These factors and their intersection with the revisionist policies of the present Soviet leadership are very complex. It is only this type of thorough analysis which could begin to grasp the real situation and problems facing Soviet agriculture.

Contrary to the unfounded claims of the restorationists, in the post-Stalin period (beginning in 1953), there has been a dramatic tendency to extend the base of socialist agriculture and to improve both the absolute and relative quality of life for the peasantry. Many collective farms have been converted into state farms (the highest form of socialist agriculture) and smaller collective farms have been amalgamated into larger collective farms (Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1976). The guaranteed minimum wage and pension, previously available in rural areas only to the state farm workers, have been extended to the collective farm peasants. Rural wages and peasant income have risen steadily, while agricultural production has doubled between 1953 and 1973 (Myth). Education and health care has improved significantly for the collective farm peasants since 1953 (Nove, 1976).

The private plots of the collective farm peasants, guaranteed by the 1936 Soviet Constitution, do continue to play an importnt economic role in the Soviet Union, accounting for one-quarter of total agricultural production (Myth). However, during the last twenty years the percentage of total production from the private plots has declined. This is also the case for the percentage of total peasant income derived from the private plots, since the steady increase in rural wages and other changes noted above have made “private” farming less necessary. And while it is true that much of the potatoes, vegetables and eggs are still produced on private plots, they must be worked by the farmers themselves. Hired labor cannot be utilized; neither can the assigned private plots be sold or rented.

These features and developments in Soviet agriculture are hardly compatible with the claim that capitalism has been restored in the countryside and that the private sector is being extended and encouraged by the present Soviet leadership.

The political centerpiece of the “political economy” thesis is that the program of economic reforms introduced in 1965 by Soviet Premier Alexander Kosygin, the “Kosygin Reforms,” signified the full restoration of capitalism in the USSR, that in effect they represented the legal alteration of the Soviet economy from socialism to capitalism. According to Nicolaus and others, these reforms abolished the central plan, allowed the enterprise manages to invest increasingly according to market considerations, established full private ownership in the means of production and opened up the free competition of capitalism. Most of these assertions are readily refuted simply by examining the Soviet economy as we have already done.

But a comment on the Kosygin reforms in general is nevertheless appropriate since the reforms themselves demonstrate to what lengths the restorationists have gone in distorting Soviet reality and history. On the other hand, the reforms also help to reveal some of the major problems which continue to plague the Soviet leadership in their efforts to manage the socialist economy while tied to an economic determinist and mechanical materialist world outlook.

The chief impetus for the Kosygin reforms was the declining growth rate of the economy, which the Soviet leadership correctly attributed to the relatively low rate of labor productivity. Leadership summed up the problem principally as one of inefficiency in the productive process, which tended to be aggravated by some of the outlandish policies of Khrushchev which created bureaucratic chaos within the economic planning and party apparatus.

The reforms called for a big push for more mechanization and improved technique, as well as a campaign to stress increasing the profits of Soviet enterprises. The latter was to be accomplished by attempts to streamline and simplify production and distribution guidelines from the central planning agencies, and to induce higher production and more efficiency through a system of material incentives to managers and workers alike.

Now there is little doubt that maximum utilization of the available productive forces is a real problem that probably reflects one of the central contradictions of the socialist period. Under capitalism, similar problems are solved by the ruthlessness of the marketplace. When companies are too inefficient technically, they fail. A minimum labor productivity is guaranteed through the ever present fear that the capitalist will exercise his right to fire, lay off, move the shop in search of a cheaper, more pliable labor force, etc. For socialism, the problem is how to increase production taking into account a whole host of variables without sabotaging the overall economic plan or reducing the workers to wage slaves to be hired and fired, at will, and for whom no responsibility has to be taken.

The Kosygin reforms were an attempt to solve this problem principally by an administrative approach which did confer upon plant managers a greater measure of authority than they previously had enjoyed, both over the production plan for the enterprise and the work process. Enterprise targets from central planning agencies were reduced from 20 or 30 to about 8 (Szymanski). But in no way did this qualitatively dismantle socialist planning. The quality and quantity of goods, size of wage fund, amount of state allocation and percent of return to state budget, material and technical supplies, etc. were all still stipulated centrally. The significant thing is that the implementation of these modest Kosygin reforms proved impossible because the measures ran counter to the centralized planning apparatus at the heart of the Soviet system. As a result, the reforms for the most part were scrapped in the mid-seventies (Aurthur), a fact which our restorationists conveniently neglect to mention. In addition, while enterprise directors did acquire a greater measure of flexibility that would permit them to discharge excess workers, this was offset by other measures which required trade union approval of any such discharges and the guarantee of an equivalent job elsewhere for the discharged workers {Myth).

The problem of Soviet economic growth, of course, remains quite serious. The economic determinist approach of the Soviet leadership runs long on improving technique, mechanization and computers (all of which are important), but runs short on the ideological remolding and political orientation of the Soviet masses. This holds back the revolutionary potential of the Soviet proletariat to solve the economic problems of socialist construction in the USSR.

Lastly, of all the arguments the restorationists have advanced to prove that the Soviet Union is capitalist, none has had a more serious negative political impact than the claim that the Soviet Union has become a “social-imperialist” superpower. On the basis of this notion, a whole section of the international communist movement has abandoned materialism and concluded that the essence of Soviet foreign policy is indistinguishable from the foreign policy of the U.S. The restorationist argument is straightforward: With the re-emergence of capitalist relations, the Soviet Union has become an imperialist power with a socialist cover. The countries of Eastern Europe, Vietnam, and Cuba are mere colonial appendages of the USSR, exploited and oppressed at the whim of the Soviet tsars. The developing, nonsocialist countries are, in turn, a playground for the rapacious Soviet capitalists. Most important, the huge Soviet military is a clear expression that the “social-imperialists” are determined to conquer the world through a war with their major imperialist rival, the U.S.

Aside from the fact that the restorationists have far from proven that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union, this scenario suffers not only from a lack of supportive evidence but from a simplicity that is both mendacious and demagogic. Its objective effect is to obscure the danger of U.S. imperialism to the people of the world.

First of all let us register that the very term social-imperialism as used by the restorationists represents in itself a distortion of an important Marxist-Leninist concept, a point that will be developed in the next section. For the moment, however, we will confine our comments to certain phenomena which have apparently captured the imagination of our restorationists.

Their favorite theme is the Myth that the Soviet Union maintains economic relations of exploitation with other socialist countries as well as with the non-socialist, oppressed countries. As anyone who has studied Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds is aware, the evidence mustered to support this claim borders on the ludicrous. Careful analyses of the existing data on the Soviet Union’s economic relations with other countries indicate that this theme is a gross and intentional distortion of the facts (Aurthur, Szymanski). In general Soviet foreign relations may be characterized as follows. The Soviet Union does not export capital to other countries nor does it own means of production beyond its borders. Soviet trade agreements tend to be equitable and the traditional imperialist pattern of importing raw materials and exporting finished goods is absent. The USSR often imports finished goods and in return exports raw materials. In contrast to “economic assistance” from capitalist countries, the terms of Soviet economic assistance and loans are usually favorable to the recipient country and usually include repayment at relatively low interest rates (Aurthur, Szymanski).

To cite one well known example of Soviet economic aid frequently distorted by the restorationists – Cuba. The Soviet Union has for many years subsidized the two major exports of Cuba – sugar and nickel – through purchases at prices above the world market price (Aurthur). Given the grave political and economic situation in Cuba created by the U.S.-coordinated embargo against Cuban goods, the very existence of Cuba as a socialist country would have been extremely tenuous without Soviet economic assistance.

It is true, however, that the Soviet Union has used both its economic and political power in attempts to maneuver other socialist countries into line with its own domestic and foreign policies. This is a reflection of the nationalist deviation which dominates the worldview of the revisionist Soviet leadership. But to confuse nationalism and revisionism with imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is inexcusable from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism.

Finally, with respect to the question of Soviet “militarism,” it is necessary to consider first the basic difference between imperialism and socialism, a point carefully obscured by the CPC and other restorationists. Imperialism requires the militarization of society and the development of a war-making capacity in order to pursue its political and economic objectives. Socialism, by contrast, inherently requires neither since it is a social system dedicated to the elimination of the sources of war, exploitation and oppression. However, the existence of imperialism means that socialist countries must develop a military capacity both as a defensive measure and as a means of rendering assistance to other revolutionary movements in their struggles against imperialism.

Since Lenin’s time, Soviet military policy has emphasized the need to maintain a powerful defense with the capacity to go over to the offensive in the event of an attack on the Soviet Union (Aurthur). The strategic military policy of U.S. imperialism since the end of World War II has been to contain socialism through the threat of nuclear annihilation, in particular directed at the Soviet Union. Given the exceedingly dangerous orientation of U. S. imperialism, it has been necessary and correct for the Soviet Union to strive for military parity with the U.S., especially in relation to nuclear weaponry. To have done otherwise would have been politically naive and would have constituted out and out capitulation to imperialism.

In terms of the distortions of the restorationists, the point here is that the Soviet military build-up is not endemic to the Soviet Union’s economy. Unlike the situation in the U.S. where a military-industrial complex has a material interest in the development of weaponry (and the banks have a material interest in the military as the instrument for defending the international expansion of capital), the necessity for military development in the USSR acts as an impediment on the full socialist development of the economy. And yet the Soviet leaders have little choice in the matter. Far from being the cause of the international arms race, as the U.S. imperialists and their ”left” opportunist cohorts argue, the Soviet military build-up is principally a defensive policy to maintain parity with the U.S. Furthermore it is an eminently necessary and useful development which serves not only to defend the USSR but to provide a significant measure of assistance and security to other socialist countries and to anti-imperialist forces in general.

(Part 2 of this article will appear in the next issue of Line of March)

Endnotes

[1] The earliest full expression would appear to have been the CPC’s Ninth Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU, titled On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World (See The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing 1965.)

[2] Bettleheim’s actual thesis on capitalist restoration is not laid out comprehensively in any single work. His most explicit formulations appear in his debate with Sweezy, On the Transition to Socialism. His general theoretical framework can be found in the more esoteric work, Economic Calculations and Forms of Property. Lastly, his most well known work, Class Struggle in the USSR, appears to be his historical proof, but even here his actual thesis remains largely implied and sparsely scattered throughout the book.