CUBA has decided to restore the law of value. It is a major development, signalling the end of the era of revolutionary socialism, which began with the Paris Commune and which many had hoped would be the era of a general transition from capitalism to socialism.
Henceforth, the means of production may be state-owned or private property, the worker’s worth will be determined by his cost of reproduction.
This is not a problem of socialism — a rational system which must replace the anarchy and wastage of capitalism, if the mankind is not to descend into barbarism — but of how to get there. It is a question of stagism — the problematique of revolutionary strategy. The theorists of socialism had all conceived of socialism as following capitalism.
Marx, the most scientific and influential among them, did not offer any detailed programme of what socialism would be like, except for tit-bits in discussions of other subjects e.g. every ruling class re-organises the society to suit its class interests. The working class would do the same. He was, however, emphatic that no mode of production ceded place to another before all its possibilities had been exhausted. It would thus seem that socialist transformation or revolution would take place in the most developed capitalist societies, which would then show the way to others.
The problem with history is that, though the man may discover its laws, it does not always conform to those “laws”. Two attempts at revolution by the workers in the advanced European countries — France in 1870, Germany in 1918 — both failed. Instead the Bolsheviks succeeded in seizing and retaining power in the most backward European country, the barely industrialised, autocratic Russia, whose large chunks were still in the pre-capitalist stage.
Lenin and Trotsky thought that the October Revolution would carry out the tasks of a bourgeois revolution — land reforms, bourgeois democracy etc. They could not conceive of embarking upon socialism in what Lenin termed semi-barbaric Russia. For that, they would have to wait for a socialist revolution in an advanced European country, which could help Russia in moving towards socialism, more precisely building its material and cultural pre-requisites. They expected such a revolution in Germany, but in vain.
Stalin claimed that Russia, being a continent, could build socialism entirely by its own efforts. This essentially meant rapid industrialisation and spread of education. Stalin achieved these but by closing the doors to the possibility of attaining socialism. The funds for investments in industrialisation were obtained by collectivisation of agriculture and squeezing almost its entire surplus. In addition, the wages of the workers were pushed down though, here, the hardship was mitigated by a system of social security.
As if this barbarous rate of exploitation was not enough, the workers never transited from the capitalist to socialist relations in the process of production. Far from controlling, what to say of managing, production, as Lenin had exhorted them to do, they were reduced in fact to wage-relations, but with one difference. The workers under capitalism were free to change jobs and place of residence. Now they had lost both these rights in a state which claimed to be socialist. In view of all these factors, the workers were alienated from the process of production.
Actually the pre-revolutionary Russian working class, with its great traditions of economic and political struggles, may have resisted these reactionary measures of the Soviet leadership, had it survived the civil war. But it had been almost completely wiped out in that conflict. What the factories held now was a mass of peasants torn away from the farms and shoved into workshops. The discipline imposed upon them was entirely coercive, without any common ground with the management. Thus Lazar Kaganovich, the minister for industry, said “The earth should shake when the manager arrives in a Soviet factory”, hardly the ground in which socialist consciousness and culture could grow.
The alienation of the workers from the conditions of production, engendered thus, in both the factories and the farms, did not cease to grow as industrialisation gathered pace. Of course there is alienation in the capitalist society too. In fact the alienation there has been internalised by the workers. But, there, it is in the context of the lash of unemployment and threat of destitution. So the workers cannot hold back their labour. They have to work with the intensity demanded.
In the countries building the pre-requisites of socialism — social security, combined with a policy of full employment, lifted the threat of starvation from the workers. Given their state of alienation, there was no other incentive to hard work on their part. So they practically ceased to work, meeting only the quantitative requirements of the Plan and turning out sub-standard products. This devalued their wages too. They could buy only the products available locally, the goods turned out by themselves.
This meant that a good nominally containing eight hours of labour actually contained only four hours of socially necessary labour in it, i.e. the goods on offer were of extremely poor quality. But the workers, who did not put in intensive enough labour in making them, demanded high-quality goods in the shop. Their absence alienated them further and made them work even less intensively.
It was this contradiction between the essentially capitalist relations within the process of production and social security-cum-full employment outside that was resolved by one socialist country after another by going over integrally to capitalism. Cuba is the latest. It was the refusal of the workers to work hard that made Castro say to a journalist that the socialist system “doesn’t even work for us any more.” (Dawn,22.9.10)The question whether the workers would continue to work hard without the threat of hunger, was raised by Marx himself. Since it was not an immediate issue, he only commented that two generations of the working class had been trained by capitalism to work hard. They would therefore, presumably, continue doing so under socialism.
The Soviet workers took the lead in transforming the society after the Revolution. For example they were given an eight-hour day and a five-day week but they decided to work, in addition, on Saturdays without payment. However, practically, the whole of the militant working class was wiped out in the ensuing civil war. This enabled Stalin to carry through rapid industrialisation with primitive methods, including penal control of the work force. Stalin was so intent upon quick industrialisation that he ignored completely that revolution was primarily about the workers gaining mastery over the process of production, about new relations of production.
This policy left behind an alienated working class and an increasingly powerful state-bourgeoisie, with an antagonism between them which can only be described as class conflict.
The Chinese workers still faced unemployment in the beginning and their “iron bowl” was never as effective as the Soviet social security system. Moreover, perhaps their longer civilisation had instilled a habit of hard work deep in them. Lastly, the Party itself told them to work without straining themselves. So the quality of their products did not suffer. However, the general lack of education and the feudal background of the society made for the rapid rise of an ever stronger managerial stratum, which showed all the signs of becoming a new exploiting class on the basis of nationalised means of production. Mao’s attempt through the Cultural Revolution in the sixties to bring it under proletarian control and to give primacy to political education failed.
Yugoslavs tried workers’ self-management, wherein the workers exercised complete control, though not management, of production. But that was found to work only in a market, which determined the prices of goods.
Che Guevara tried a somewhat similar system in Cuba, in which the workers’ control of production aimed at the fulfilment of the state plan. However, it was abandoned early under Soviet influence when the latter became Cuba’s chief source of economic assistance.
The result is that these backward aspirants to socialism found that they had never broken out of the logic of capitalism. Their tremendous sacrifices to develop the material bases of socialism had been nothing more than extremely painful primitive accumulation, leading to capitalism.
There is also a socio-historical reason for the development of the social strata into antagonistic classes after the revolution and the revival of capitalism during the construction of the material pre-requisites of a new society. Workers usually form the majority of the revolutionary parties. But their representation in the leaderships is far weaker. They are composed mainly of the intelligentsia, drawn from the middle and upper classes.
This division continues after the seizure of power too. Intelligent and qualified workers do rise to leadership but have never composed a majority there. Moreover, the leaders of worker-origin, once they join the leadership, tend to acquire the outlook of that stratum. They too have no interest in inviting the workers to take over the management of production. Thus the distinction between the managerial stratum (or class) and the working class tends to solidify.Perhaps historical stages cannot be skipped in social evolution and there is no road from pre-capitalism to socialism. Maybe Lenin was wrong and the poor, forgotten Plekhanov right after all. But as someone put it aptly: “If the workers do not emancipate themselves, no one else will do it for them.”
