Dear Editor

Nothing can be clearer today than the failure of the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist sects of every hue and description adequately either to foresee or to understand the tempestuous course of capitalist development in the post-Second World War years, still less the continuing collapse of ‘actually existing Socialism’ first in the buffer zone of Eastern and Central Europe, and more latterly in the heartland of the Soviet Union itself. Al Richardson’s review of Walter Daum’s The Life and Death of Stalinism (Revolutionary History, Volume 3, no 4) is quite right to direct our attention to this matter. I wonder, nonetheless, whether he goes far enough.

As I understand Richardson’s case, the very notion of a ‘workers’ state’ is a kind of dialectical absurdity. If the state truly appertained to ‘the workers’, then it could not properly be a state. If a state, it could in no meaningful sense ‘belong’ to the workers. To the best of my knowledge, the notion of a ‘workers’ state’ cannot be found in Marx. Over three-quarters of a century this notion has introduced unparalleled confusion into the international workers’ movement. Like a rabid dog, it ought to be put down. We should hear no more of it, ever again.

State capitalism is a dialectical absurdity of a similar order. If a command economy state truly owns and plans everything, then there can be no commodities, and in the absence of commodities, no capitalism. Conversely, if capitalism exists, state ownership of everything, and production according to a single global plan, is impossible. State capitalism, seeking to explain everything, ends up, as Richardson rightly points out, by explaining nothing at all.

In his perceptive Conway Hall lecture, ‘After the Death of Stalinism, Is There a Future for Trotskyism?’, published in New Interventions, Volume 2, no 4, Richardson takes the argument still further. If ‘Marxism is a science’, then it must ‘have some power of prediction’. Yet in regard to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Trotskyism has manifested ‘no power of prediction whatever’. The Eastern European system is in collapse. Yet these revolutions have nowhere been led by Marxist parties, still less by sections of the Fourth International. There have been no soviets established. Contrary to all expectations, the working class has played no ‘leading role’. The most heartfelt desire of the masses would seem to be not democratic Socialism and a classless society, but a mad rush to capitalism of the most crude and vulgar kind. To add to the confusion, nationalism is rampant everywhere. Yet nowhere can be found a national bourgeoisie.

Furthermore, the perspective outlined in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme of 1938, that the Second World War would be followed by a massive slump, ‘an epoch of wars and revolutions’ which would ‘pose the question of power’ has proved entirely misplaced. The theory of Permanent Revolution postulated that colonial independence could only be attained under the leadership of the working class, and that industrialisation could not develop in the underdeveloped world under capitalism, but only by the coming to power of the working class. The former colonies are now all independent. Capitalism thrives, not least in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere. The Permanent Revolution, the very spine of all Trotsky’s revolutionary theory, would seem to be broken beyond all hope of repair. So what went wrong?

Richardson makes one highly illuminating suggestion, upon which I would like to elaborate. Further, I would like to add one suggestion of my own. Tsarist Russia, Richardson quite rightly points out, was more of an Asiatic Despotism than a capitalist imperialism. State ownership was the predominant mode both before and after the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. But is state ownership necessarily workers’ ownership? Surely not. I have set out the Marxian argument for this view at some length in my State Ownership, Workers’ Control and Socialism (Leeds and Nottingham, 1973, reprinted in New Interventions, Volume 3, no 1). Richardson, who is very interested in ancient society, and speaks with some authority on the subject, carries the argument one stage further. In much of ancient society, most evidently in Pharaonic Egypt, but also in Ancient Sumeria and perhaps elsewhere, for quite sound and materialistic reasons, state property preceded private property, and proved the social basis for a paratheocratic despotism, which put a brake on social progress for several thousand years. Social emancipation required the breaking up of state property into private and/or communal property as a precondition for social progress. Is this not precisely what we see under way in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe at the present time?

Very many Socialists and Syndicalists before 1917 considered state ownership as a recipe for bureaucratic disaster. ‘The revolutionary Socialist denies that state ownership can end in anything other than bureaucratic despotism’, wrote William Paul (later a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain) in 1917. Workers’ ownership, industrial union ownership, cooperative ownership, workers’ control, Guild Socialism, a hundred varieties of social ownership in these years contended with one another for pride of place. ‘It is true that Engels... regarded the first act of the Socialist revolution as the takeover of the economy by the state’, Richardson states. He proceeds to argue, however, that ‘there is nothing in Marx and Engels which suggests that the state has to keep the property’. Opinions may differ on this point. Yet there can be no doubt that in Volume 3 of Capital no less a person than Marx himself clearly envisages a post-capitalist society as one characterised by worker-owned enterprises coordinated one with another by means of a market.

The point I wish to add to the argument myself is the following. Classical Marxism has little or nothing useful to say about the practical organisation of post-capitalist society. Almost the only piece of literature on the subject is Karl Kautsky’s On the Morrow of the Social Revolution, published by the Social Democratic Federation in 1909. This ought to be compulsory reading for every Socialist, even today. Kautsky specifically warned against some of the dangers that ‘planned’ society might bring. Now it needs to be recognised that it is precisely the ‘planned’ command economy which has brought the Soviet economy to its present bankruptcy and ruin. After 70 years, it stands revealed as inferior in terms of the ability to organise production, on almost every count, to advanced industrial capitalism. The Soviet planned economy was far more militarised than that of the capitalist USA, far more so than even that of Hitler’s Germany between the wars. Misplaced uneconomic investment on a titanic scale has reduced the nation to something like beggary. And why is that investment misplaced? Because in the totally state owned command economy, there is no basis for rational calculation of costs. Nobody, least of all the planners, knows the proper price of anything. If we do not know what raw materials, components, finished products, transport and distribution cost, either overall or in relation to one another, then there is no way we can rationally organise economic resources. The external form is that of the plan. The internal content is that of chaos.

Already in 1909 Kautsky foresaw that planning threatened ‘to reduce [the needs of mankind].., to a minimum, and to apportion to each his share, barrack fashion, in other words, to reduce modern civilised life to a much deeper level’. Something analogous to this we have seen emerge in Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in our own time. The command economy, marketless society in short, has ended in dystopia. Rational use of economic resources, and, yes, even ‘planning’ requires a market, the buying and selling not only of consumer goods, but also of raw materials, semi-finished and finished products, and means of production as well. Without this there can be no true prices, and no accurate knowledge of economic cost. Plan and market, properly understood, are complementary and not contradictory at all.

The ‘workers’ state’ is a nonsense. State property is in no sense social property. Rational use of economic resources requires a knowledge of real costs and thus of necessity a market. Al Richardson has rendered a great service by showing what went wrong. These three conclusions ineluctably follow, if ever things are to go right in the future. Have readers of Revolutionary History anything to say on these matters? Or are they wilfully blind to the cataclysmic events taking place all around us at the present time? Walter Kendall

Cannon Balls