The Thinking Reed

For many Marxists the awkward problem is that of property. As Cohen writes, ‘the narrow association of class dominance with legal ownership of property would later hamper the critiques of anti-Stalinist Communists for decades.’23 Djilas and the Leningrad Marxists V. Ronkin and S. Khakhaev arrived at about the same time at the conclusion which had already been drawn in Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: that the bureaucracy is the collective owner of the instruments and means of production. Similarly, Voslensky says that ‘socialist property is the collective property of the nomenklatura.’ The nomenklatura (Voslensky uses here the name by which the top section of the statocracy call themselves) ‘holds all the means of production of the society at its proprietorial discretion. Under real socialism the nomenklatura is the collective employer.’24 This statement is highly abstract and imprecise, because it is a judgement formed by analogy. Here, once more, capitalism remains the only pattern of an exploitative social formation. Paradoxically enough, however, under statocracy property appears in the form of state power (and vice versa), losing independent existence. It was Trotsky, perhaps, who offered the most interesting formulation: ‘The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, “belongs” to the bureaucracy.’25 This situation does not seem so very peculiar if we remember the role played by the state and its property-ownership in the countries of Asia and in pre-revolutionary — especially pre-Petrine — Russia. The property-owner is the state, but the state is inseparable from the ruling class. If Louis XIV could say ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’, in the USSR the ruling statocracy can say, with equal justification, ‘The state is us’.

Marx never gave a definition of class, and Lenin by no means always reduced his concept of class to the question of property-ownership. Classes, he wrote, are distinguished ‘by their position in the social structure of production’, and are distinguished in such a way ‘that one group can appropriate the labour of another.’26 So broad a definition makes it possible to raise the question whether the statocracy is a ‘new class’ in the USSR. But we need to bear in mind that, as a whole, the classical Marxist concept of class, elaborated on the basis of material from nineteenth-century Britain and France,27 is in need of serious reexamination if we want to apply it to present-day society, whether Soviet or Western. Property-ownership is a key category only under capitalist conditions (under neocapitalism its role is markedly reduced, even though not to the extent supposed by supporters of Galbraith or right-wing Social Democrats); in other formations it loses its significance, becoming a formal or even fictitious concept. The concept of property-ownership can be applied to early feudal Europe, to the India of the Great Mogul or to present-day Afghanistan only conditionally, by analogy with capitalism. In the USSR property-ownership cannot be treated as a class category and attempts to define the ‘new class’ through property-ownership are fruitless. The categories of ‘classical Marxism’ cannot be applied mechanically to the USSR, as Voslensky has done. From this it is not to be concluded that such categories as class, property-ownership, and so on are false ‘in general’, but they have to be made more precise in relation to concrete reality. Many Western Marxists speak of the statocracy as ‘a class of a new type’, and even ‘a political class of a new type’.28 Many Soviet sociologists consider it problematic whether the concept of property-ownership can be applied at all to Soviet society. A similar idea was expressed by Rakovski when he pointed out the ‘ownership functions are distributed between the various parts of the administrative apparatus and are, at the same time, impossibly intertwined with their non-ownership functions: for example, the tasks of ensuring political stability and macroeconomic balances.’29

A more general Marxist category is that of ‘the surplus product’. Production of a surplus product and its appropriation by the employer, whether capitalist or state, is a necessary condition for exploitation. At the same time, production of surplus-value is in itself a necessary feature of any profitable economic process. Under socialism the surplus product must actually be put at the disposal and under the control of society as a whole — the collective producer. Thereby surplus-value would become, essentially, an alienated portion of necessary value.30 Since surplus-value is extracted in the USSR — as all economists have acknowledged since Stalin’s death — but there is no social control over its utilization, the statocracy is able to appropriate the labour of others, using this to satisfy its own collective and individual requirements.