

1975 Introduction

1991 Introduction

The present publication contains translations into English of some of the many texts that have appeared in our party press dedicated to "The Russian Question". They were first published together in 1975, as they appear here, in the Italian language under the title "Why Russia isn’t Socialist". We have changed only the title and added one more short artide "Communism is Dead - Long Live Communism!" which was written in the light of the final, and complete, confession of capitalism by the Russian ruling classes (who now talk of selling Lenin’s corpse!). Apart from that, nothing has been changed apart from slight alterations to ‘The Party’s Work of Economic Research into the Historical Cycle of Capitalism" which has been updated in order to include statistical information up to 1987.

Our main intention in presenting this work is to accelerate the dismantling of the widespread myth of Russian socialism. The collapse of this myth has often been indicated by the party as one of the necessary conditions for the re-affirmation of the Communist revolutionary program, and thus, a retrenchment of the proletarian International on positions of revolutionary class struggle. Today the myth is being dismantled by the Russian government itself, but this does not prevent the bourgeoisie from launching a huge counter-revolutionary propaganda campaign: basing its conjectures on Stalinist and post-Stalinist falsifications, it gloats about the historical failure of Communism, when in reality the failure of Stalinism means neither the failure of Marxism as a scientific doctrine, nor the failure of the keystone of Marxism - the domination of the State by the proletarian class. The fact of the matter is that within Russia and its satellites the only thing that has really failed is the falsified versions of the Marxist doctrine, and the lie that would have us believe that proletarian State domination is impossible: it is only the myth of the possibility of a centralized, rational and socialized regulation of the capitalist mode of production that has really been exploded.

The real crisis exists for that poisonous dogma, whether it appears in the guise of social-democracy, fascism and Stalinism, which would have us believe that State capitalism, or State control of capitalism, is something fundamentally economically different from... capitalism: that rotten, catastrophic and ubiquitous economic system that underlies all those forms of administering it.

This is the economic structure in Russia as it stands:

Large-Scale industry: – State-owned, with production ordained, along with price regulation and an absence of free competition but not exchange-values; salaries are related to either production or hours; profits are kept.

Small-Scale Industry: – Whether co-operatively or individually owned, both are de facto privately owned; buying and selling takes pIace freely in the marketpIace; wages are paid; profits are kept.

Agrlculture and the Kolhozian Hybrld: – within this sector we find the real nucleus of the reproduction of mercantile relations and the accumulation of capitals.

Commerce: – Partly conducted by State businesses using wage-Iabor, but for the most part by privately owned co-operative societies.

The Russian type of economy is distinguishable from that found in the West in terms of quantity, but not by economic category or social relations. For instance, the practice of administering prices and production quotas for large-scale industry, i.e. steel and grain, occurs throughout the western world. Monopoly in the West exists under the two aspects of concentration of finance and as attempted central planning. Planned capitalism isn’t socialism though and socialism isn’t State organization of mercantilism and sale of labor power; and nor is socialism to do with co-ordinating different businesses, all with their own profit and loss accounts, and acting as a go-between between them and the State.

So why then all the fuss about changing this system? The fact is that capitalism requires and aspires to a maxirnum concentration and centralization of different capitals, whilst, meanwhile, it rebels against the required unitary discipline. Capitalism requires not only competition, but also the most unbridled struggle to select not its best, and/or most technically efficient parts, but rather the worst. Therefore Russia suffers, if that’s the right word, from a capitalism which is so close to the ideal capitalist structure that it can’t function: in order to exploit the proletariat with sufficient ruthlessness, Russian capital requires unemployment and the suppression of businesses which don’t treat their employees like slaves etc, etc.



Perestroika effectively means more freedom for capital, and therefore for individual capitalists, to bring the State into total subjection to their needs, just as happens in the West.

Whilst on the one hand Stalinism has been able to assume the modern form of bourgeois government, that is open dictatorship, on the other, post-Stalinism - post-fascism in the west, - certainly doesn’t mark a return to pre-fascist democracy or to February 1917. It presents us rather with incontrovertible proof of the irreversible triumph of fascism; a fascism moreover which subordinates to itself the same old familiar democratic forms (like the center parties) and the same old parties and unions of the working class - all under the banner of one and the same nationalist and capitalist program. Finally, we find parliamentary cretinism with liberal doses of self-seeking individualism dressed up as politics.

Over the last few months, the evolution of the Russian economy confirms our diagnosis of it having ’come of age’ as another decrepit modern capital with all its attendant crises, e.g., with production increasing at a rate that runs in inverse proportion to the increasing misery of the proletariat - a canonical capitalist law - we find already a million unemployed Uzbeks.

The difficulties that are being encountered by the various economic reforms of businesses, property, and land management, find their explanation in Russia society itself, within the latent opposition and open struggle of the Russian proletariat. The fact that grocery shops managed by the State are empty, whilst the market stalls of the kolkhozians groan under the weight of produce, set at prices, moreover that are out of reach for families or workers, represents a flashpoint of class struggle which the State is loath to confront openly. The groundswell of class struggle is confirmed both by references in the press to continual strikes, which resulted in 7.5 million working days lost in the first eleven months of 1989, and also by the existence of ‘The United Workers Front" about which we only know that it has declared itself for a long time ’an enemy of Perostroika’.

What is lacking in fact in the Russian bourgeoisie’s power structure are secular structures for the parties and opportunist unions; all the better for them to be able to declare themselves formally opposed to the State whilst in reality they are dedicated to democracy and the defense of the regime. Unlike the outcome for the Polish bourgeoisie, helped as they were by intellectuals and priests, we are not sure how much the Russian proletariat instinctively mistrusts the democracy of the reformers and middle classes. The central problem posed for the Russian government remains, i.e., to subdue the proletariat, and as yet it hasn’t succeeded.

All that remains of the debate on economy is the inevitability of the arrival in Russia, as in the rest of the world, of a plurality of property forms; with the State and big banks rigging prices; with the treasury, credit and investment neither projecting or planning for the future. All that remains, in other words, is the permanent crisis within a system that is no longer any use to the human race as a whole. A system which will have to be destroyed in Russia just as everywhere else.

October 1991