According to Marx, the inner laws of development of a society manifest themselves in its inner contradictions. And it was precisely these contradictions within the society that the Soviet economists ignored in their writings about their country. One cannot say they were unaware of them, when even the chauffeurs and clerks could point them out.
The ruling party, one imagines, laid down this rule of denial of contradictions because its own power was one of the principal ones. It straddled the chasm. When it became impossible to continue to do so, to hold the two aspects together anymore, the party, within which the new ruling class had matured, revealed its class character. And the Soviet Union fell with the society whose inner laws of development could not be contained within the existing social framework anymore.
The bourgeois economists are not of much help either in revealing the causes of the failure of the Soviet experiment. Professor John Roemer, who has a philosophical approach to economics, says that “the failures of Communism are due to its non-competitive politics and its abjuring of markets....” (Egalitarian Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p290). In other words, communism failed because it was not capitalism.
Well, apparently, it was not socialism either. When the civil war ended, the system was a capitalism in ruins. The New Economic Policy restored both the worker-peasant alliance and a combination of nationalized industry and private agriculture. Under this system, agriculture yielded to the industry the equivalent of the industrial goods supplied to it. This contributed to internal peace and above all, to internal unity, but resulted in a low rate of accumulation. The Soviet Union needed a lot of food grain to buy foreign machinery with. The grains yielded by the farmers as tax and in exchange for industrial goods did not suffice, after the internal demand was met, to pay for all the imports. The economist, Preobrazhensky, formulated his theory of “primitive socialist accumulation,” which simply called for robbing the peasants to pay for a high rate of accumulation. Stalin proceeded to do that with his collectivization, while the author of the theory ended up in a labour camp.
However, it now transpires that this regime of primitive accumulation had more features of 19th century slavery than of socialism. Of course, the workers of the Soviet Union were not slaves. Neither was its emerging ruling class slave-owning. But the specific manner in which the working class was related to the means of production lent the productive relations some of the features of modern slavery, as for example, the one prevalent in the southern states of the United States until 1863.
The Soviet Union was too backward, economically and culturally, to permit the mastery of the process of production by the workers, the distribution according to the need or the elimination of money, that are considered the governing features of socialism. Consequently, the workers still stood in a relationship of wage-labour to the capital. And since the capital was represented by the state, it was not fragmented. This, in turn, meant that though the worker was “free” of the ownership of the means of production, he was not free to bargain with the competing capitals about his wages or about redistribution.
The state, as the sole employer in the industry, was free to determine the wage-level, subject, of course, to ensuring the cost of reproduction of the labour power. But this cost could be pushed down considerably in view of Russia’s backwardness. The Soviet government, whose primary objective was to extract the maximum surplus from the workers for the purposes of a high rate of accumulation, kept the wages low. This had the additional advantage of forcing the husband and wife both to work and yield double the surplus, that would have been yielded if only one of them had worked. The system thus combined a wage-labour relationship with a factually unfree labour. Rebellious souls, who may otherwise have been labour leaders or stood up for the rights of the workers, were put in the forced-labour camps, whose population exceeded the five million figure under Stalin.
This working class may not have had the opportunity to either bargain for its wages, choose its employer or its conditions of work. But it still had one weapon to strike back with, indifferent labour, like the 19th century slaves. As a result, its productivity was low.
There are two characteristics of indifferent labour: (a) the labour force has to work in mass, as the individual tends to work below his capability (b) labour’s application or intensity can be increased only with close supervision, which increases the number of supervisors so much that what Marx calls “les faux frais de production” negate the surplus.
Thus, Soviet industrial production was marked by mass work and low productivity.
The mass nature of work manifested itself within the work-place by the system of evaluating labour not individually but by the team’s output. As a result, the planning commission went on, year by year, planning quantitatively with increase of value per unit being marginal. The industry was unable to assimilate the scientific advances made by the Soviet scientists, as reorganization would interrupt production while the new machine is produced and installed. So the patents were often sold abroad. But a deeper reason for emphasis on quantity was the individual worker’s refusal to apply himself to more sophisticated work.
Perpetuation of low productivity had a more pernicious effect. The worker was paid by the average labour time. But the content of his labour was lower, that effectively lowered the content of his wages due to the poor quality of goods. This, in turn, made his labour more indifferent. It also resulted in inflation. Excess rubles were then used to buy foreign currency at a high rate of payment, which devalued the Soviet labour power further.
Only the military equipment was of standard quality due to a high degree of supervision. However, the hardware exported was sold at what would have been “normal” cost, i.e. with lower “faux frais”. This meant a Soviet subsidy to the foreign buyers of its arms.
The state farms were given priority in the supply of machinery. Even so, their productivity was no higher than that on the good collective farms whose taxes were fixed on the basis of notional production. Therefore, the farms often ended up paying all their surplus, the farmers’ own standard being supported by intensified labour on the private plots whose product was sold on the free market. The latter were allowed by the state, as otherwise all collective farms would be bankrupt and the country would starve.
The other aspect of society was the bureaucracy that had seized power under Stalin in the 1930s, by wiping out almost the entire Bolshevik Party cadres who had made the revolution. This ruling class exercised unmediated power, managing both the political and industrial spheres directly. The class contradiction between it and the workers and peasants was, of course, about the extraction and disposal of the surplus.
In actual practice, the ruling class was unable to increase productivity in an economy of wage-labour, without the logical next step of unemployment. But that was not possible when it was the sole employer in the country. So the mass method of production with its low productivity, characteristic of New World slavery, had to be perpetuated. Lastly, the slave-owners of the American South had to take care of all the slaves on the plantation, no matter how badly they worked, because they embodied both the slave-owners’ capital and their own labour power. The Soviet ruling class had to provide social security to all Soviet workers, because they included among their ranks, with the active workers, the industrial reserve army, too.
Ideologically, the bureaucracy lived in permanent illegitimacy. The schools taught the children socialism, while the ruling stratum, fast turning into a class, lived in opulence, hidden behind walled-off dachas, special shops, special schools, rampant corruption, etc. Its children were truly ‘la generation oree’. The compromise between the rulers and the ruled, that seems to have been arrived at under Brezhnev, was that the workers would not face unemployment and would be allowed to work indifferently without any demand being made upon them to intensify their labour. The state would try to generate surplus by employing more and more persons, each new worker producing less and less.
The workers, on their part, would let the ruling class live on whatever surplus it could extract by the methods of absolute exploitation. In fact, the ruling class was already throwing up a rentier stratum.
The Soviet Union’s exports consisted of raw materials to buy sophisticated goods with, and of arms to purchase influence abroad.
The crisis, that intensified in the Soviet Union in the early 80s, could theoretically be resolved either to the Right or to the Left. However, in reality, there was no opening to the Left, as the workers had no means of independent political action, the Communist Party having itself become a part of the bureaucratic ruling class. Moreover, the word “socialism” denoted to them the regime of harsh exploitation, hypocrisy and privilege that they saw around them.
Therefore, the only exit was to the Right, i.e. the ruling class going from the regime of primitive accumulation to modern capitalism, which it did in 1991.
