Earlier still he had said that a revolutionary class which is obliged to take power prematurely, when the economic conditions are not yet ripe, does not liberate itself but merely creates the conditions for rule by some other class, even though the leaders of the revolutionary class sincerely believe the contrary.6 Later, Plekhanov reiterated that ‘the Russian socialist party merely provides a fresh historical example to confirm the idea expressed by Engels.. ’,7 and that its victory would result in a ‘political monstrosity similar to the ancient Chinese or Peruvian empire, that is, to a renewal of Tsarist despotism in communist dress.’8
The revolutionary dictatorship was replaced by a new system which was qualitatively different. This could hardly be called socialism, despite its pretensions, for it did not grant elementary rights to the working people.
When Stalin announced in 1936 that socialism had been built in the USSR, he referred to the fact that in our country there were no longer any bourgeois, landlords or kuląks. The groundlessness of such an argument is obvious. As Wolfgang Leonhard later pointed out, the fact that the old exploiting classes have been destroyed testifies to the appearance of a post-capitalist or non-capitalist society, but certainly not necessarily to the victory of socialism.9 In a subsequent period the nature of the official argument changed somewhat, and today the ruling ideologists speak of the building in the USSR of ‘developed socialism’, referring mainly to the predominance of state property in the country’s economy.
For state property to be really ‘property of the whole people’ it is not enough to write fine words in a constitution. What is needed is democratic social control over the means of production and the public administration, with wide participation by the masses in the discussion and implementing of decisions. This, in turn, is not possible without definite democratic institutions of people’s power, both indirect (Parliament, a multiparty system, a free press, free elections) and direct (a system of participation by trade unions in the application of economic-administrative decisions, local and economic self-government, and so on). Marxists always distinguished between socialization (real collectivization) of the means of production and their formal nationalization. ‘The basic criterion of socialization of the means of production, therefore, in our understanding,’ writes the eminent Marxist economist Wlodzimierz Brus, ‘is the criterion of democratism.’10 This is why ‘there can be no victorious socialism that does not practise full democracy.’11 How ‘full’ present-day ‘Soviet democracy’ is can best be judged by the fighters for civil rights who are now behind bars. It is a pity that we cannot ascertain the opinion of the twenty million Soviet people who were tortured by Stalin…
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.
The statocracy was studied by Trotsky, Deutscher, Djilas and, in his own way, by Orwell, as well as by many others.15 Berdyaev was one of the first to write that ‘the new Soviet bureaucracy is more powerful than that of the Tsarist regime. It is a new privileged class which can exploit the masses pitilessly.’16 The difficulty in the position of Marxist critics of ‘the new class’ lies, however, in the fact that this qualitatively new phenomenon cannot be adequately described by using the categories of the capitalist mode of production. For example, the problem arises as to whether, in this case, political power results from economic power or vice versa. Djilas inclined towards the latter view, thereby casting doubt on the validity of Marx’s main idea that politics is the concentrated expression of economics. The Eurocommunists — Johnstone, Elleinstein, and others — are in general disposed to treat economics and politics quite separately.17 In fact, as more recent studies have shown, the question has been posed quite wrongly, through analogy with capitalism. In statocratic society economic and political power are simply identical. The one cannot give rise to the other, for the one already is the other. Power exists here only as complete political and economic power, and can exist in no other form.