The Thinking Reed

Some democratic and socialist institutions do exist in the USSR, but only formally: they do not work! One can point to this unquestionable fact, if to nothing else: that in the entire history of the USSR there has never been a single referendum or testing of the views of the nation as a whole concerning political problems. Consequently, talk by official ideologists about ‘full democracy’, and still more about ‘developed’, ‘mature’ and ‘victorious’ socialism in the USSR appears rather comical.12

The new order established by the Stalinist bureaucracy is often called — not without reason — an ‘industrialized Asiatic mode of production’, or a ‘statocracy’. Here once more, as in ancient Asia, the state appears as the organizer of production and supreme property-owner, but it is now faced with new tasks. The attitude of the ideologists of the Stalinist bureaucracy to the concept of the Asiatic mode of production obliquely confirms the correctness of this analogy. In 1930-31 this theory of Marx’s was subjected to systematic criticism, although Marx’s name was not mentioned, and eventually it was condemned and ‘cancelled’. ‘The simplest explanation for this’, writes the Italian scholar Gianni Sofri,

would refer to the climate of dogmatism which existed in the Soviet Union in those years, but that answer is inadequate, for all that it explains is how the ground for such an event was prepared — no more than that. In reality, the Asiatic mode of production was once more the subject of a sharp and serious political discussion…

In the first place one must not underestimate the fact that the ‘Asiatic’ interpretation of Russian history could be very well applied to the forms that Soviet power had gradually begun to assume after Lenin’s death. The idea of a new Leviathan-state and a new caste of bureaucrats was, as has already been mentioned, a central feature of the criticism which various oppositional groups, and especially the Trotskyists, directed against Stalin and the Party apparatus. This criticism was, naturally, engendered by reflection upon the everyday development of the Party and the Soviet state, but it was highly reminiscent of what Marx and Engels had written about Asia. That the opposition might make use of those ideas was more than obvious.13

In The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky came to the conclusion that in the twentieth century there could be no capitalist road to overcoming a country’s backwardness.14 One should probably qualify this statement to read that it is impossible for a capitalist country to overcome its backwardness if its relies on its own internal forces alone. Otherwise, perhaps, by importing capital, rapid growth can be ensured, but as a result the country concerned will fall into a state of extreme economic dependence (as we see from the cases of South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan and other countries of the ‘Third World’). Concentration of the means of production in the hands of a despotic state makes it possible to achieve relatively rapid industrial and scientific technological growth (at least in the period which might be called that of primary growth, until the centralized bureaucratic organization comes into contradiction with the new productive forces which it has created). Statocratic society has some of the outward signs of socialism and also of State capitalism, but in reality it is a quite distinct system of relations. Society is here divided into two basic groups — the ‘collective producer’ (the proletariat: workers, engineers, scientists and scholars, and all the exploited working people) and the ‘collective exploiter’, the statocracy. In addition there are intermediate middle strata whose position is extremely contradictory.