Революции в России. Теория и практика социальных преобразований

Left unexplained was that the matter does not simply rest on state power, for in war communism the state as a military force of authority, as a “deterrent to class enemies through dictatorial” power, acted as the mainspring of the economy. This had no roots in any form of Marxist theoretical tradition from Marx’s own time, and even contradicted his period’s idea of socialism. Lenin was not so naive as to identify war communism with “complete socialism,” for he continued to believe that “as long as workers and peasants remain, socialism has not been achieved”.12 Moreover, he never deduced the concept of equality theoretically from the reality of war communism, using it only to refer to eliminating social class in economic terms, a final and indispensable requirement of the liberation from capital and achieving freedom. Lenin’s real theoretical mistake in 1919–1920 was that he overestimated the possibilities of socialization, of social supervision within the framework of nationalization, and underestimated the inveteracy of the market and money in a regulating role, a fact he later recognized. The “atmosphere” of the epoch, the romantic attitude of the civil war, was also expressed in war communism’s compulsory egalitarianism. The roots of this “primitive” egalitarianism ran deep in Red Army units and partisan brigades engaged in life-and-death combat with the Whites – a phenomenon picked up by innumerable literary works and films. War communism also influenced theory, which interpreted the “system” as socialism, despite that being suggestive of an anachronism – especially in light of the famous thesis of the “semi-state” in State and Revolution (which can be traced back to Marx). There, Lenin was already engaged in a polemical attack on what was a conceptual muddle. He used Engels’ critique of the draft program of Erfurt, which he had handed over to Kautsky in 1891, who published it a decade later in Neue Zeit. This is interesting because the “opportunist wing” of the social democrats had already suggested that the state, in itself, might be able to consolidate socialism. This line of thought incorporated the increased role of the state in modern capitalism. Lenin mentions the concept of “state socialism,” opposed to the revolution and revolutionary socialism, inasmuch as the role of socialism is defined in opposition to the state.

War communism’s focus was on the consolidation of the new military-power hierarchy under civil war conditions, even though it simultaneously exacerbated the economic situation. Meanwhile, Lenin held that socialism, as a system that had reached completion, would only be composed of voluntary associations of economic-productive communities organized from below. It was still a state, though, for “there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie” in order to defend the “equality of labor” and public property.13 Lenin differentiated between state and social property even at its inception; before the introduction of war communism, he believed that the productive classes would themselves have to create socialist conditions. War communism was, however, a consistent system of compulsory state-military measures; according to some writers it carried certain traits of the state economic policy of “German war socialism.” Lenin kept the formative theory in sight even while making his most propagandistic political speeches, indicating that until his last day he continued to view the history of the revolution through the lens of Marxist theory (as reconstructed by him).14 Until March 1919, Lenin did not even use the term war communism, and did so afterward mostly in quotation marks. This means that, not just had Lenin not planned “war communism” in either theory or practical political terms, but also that the war communist measures only “coalesced” into a system much later, by the summer of 1919. The “naturalization” of production and distribution, along with the introduction of the ration system and the persecution of private trade, were not a priori economic measures, but sprang from immediate political and social needs.

NEP vs. war communism – irreconcilable contradictions