Forget Those Bolsheviks...

 “Unlearning Marx – Why the Soviet Failure Was a Triumph for Marx” by Steve Paxton, 2021

Paxton is a supporter of G.A. Cohen of the British “September Group,” working under him as a doctoral candidate. This book is a general look at the USSR’s ‘socialism’ and why it failed.  He rejects the state capitalist analysis, while relegating Lenin and Trotsky to purely political thinkers. (!) Instead he posits that, in his reading of Marx, ‘socialism’ in the primitive, agricultural USSR was impossible.  He contends that Russia was not capitalist in 1917 and that the later Soviet regime actually preformed the same functions as capital in Europe – industrialization, dispossessing the peasants of land and creating a proletariat.  So to their mind the USSR accomplished the tasks of a state-led bourgeois revolution in Russia.  They attempt to base themselves exclusively on Marx’s view of the role of the economic productive forces.  This September group explicitly puts technology in the driver’s seat as far as history is concerned.  They could be called technological determinists.

This brings up far more questions than it answers.  Such as “What level of technical development or productivity is required for socialism?” “Was the USSR able to move to socialism by the 1950s-1960s at least? After all, the USSR lasted 74 years.” “Why did Marx support the 1870 Paris Commune?  Or the 1848 revolutions?” “Logically, the Chinese Revolution was premature too.  Is China now ‘ripe’ for socialism?” “What is the role of a political revolution within a workers’ state when production is higher?” “Wouldn’t a move towards socialism also accomplish these tasks?”  "If it wasn't capitalist, what was it?" And “Isn’t this the same argument pushed by Kautsky, the Mensheviks and the “old” Bolsheviks for a time, then refuted by Lenin in the April Theses?”

Paxton gives the Bolsheviks an ‘out’ by quoting Marx in 1882 as to the possibility that Russia could become socialist if the peasant ‘Mir’ communes remained, with the absolutely essential aid of added social revolutions in Europe. Evidently this shows that 1882’s European capitalism was sufficient to begin to build socialism.  The Soviet Communists understood this international perspective by creating the Comintern after the revolution.   Attempts at proletarian revolution were made in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Italy and more after 1917, but all failed. 

Civil war and foreign invasions, continuing isolation, material backwardness, military threats and increasing bureaucratism led to the ‘theory of socialism in one country’ and the Comintern’s dissolution later.  Paxton sees this as ultimately leading to the Soviet's 1991 collapse due to heavy military costs and the failure of consumer production in the USSR.  Essentially, they had lost the support of the majority of people, including the working class. Paxton does not mention the added issues of bureaucracy as a production hindrance in its own right, the lack of workers’ democracy or inadequate planning.   

His argument could be used in a reactionary way in many ‘poor’ countries eviscerated by imperialist looting, telling them to ‘wait’ for more development.  Paxton does understand that capital is now in a descending phase, over-ripe in its world-wide destructiveness, productivity and technological decline – even with the development of high-tech digital and now ‘green’ capitalist production. 

What Paxton mentions only once is the existence of a preparatory phase to socialism – the post-revolutionary, transitional workers’ state – formally called the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Marx mentions this a number of times, especially in "The Critique of the Gotha Programme."  This is what Marx and Engels called the Paris Commune – a political revolution that put the proletariat in charge.  This is the solution to the quandary as to what the USSR was, though bureaucratically degenerated.  Yes, it never reached actual socialism, let alone communism.  Outside of the state-cap schools (Maoist, Schactmanite and anarchist) and the bunker Stalinists, most independent Marxists recognize this. Marx said in Capital, Vol. 1, that the proletariat might seize power politically, but the material foundations of socialism would be lacking, and lead to failure.  This seems to be the path Paxton is following. 

DISCUSSIONS

Paxton claims only 10% of the Russian workers and peasants were under capital in 1917.  At one time he says the Mir constituted the majority of landholdings; later that subsistence and ‘petty production’ dominated.  These forms seem to be intertwined.  This makes him unable to explain why the revolution unleashed a mass struggle against landlords who controlled estates across Russia, or even the SR/Bolshevik slogan of “Land to the Tiller.”  This would not have happened if this were true.  He considers the majority of landlords not to be capitalists charging land rents, but transitional pre-capitalist formations of personal servility, dues collection, labor and grain requirements.  This even though serfdom had been abolished in Russia in 1861.  The U.S. saw a somewhat similar situation in the U.S. when slavery was outlawed, to be replaced by share-cropping.

Paxton goes on to define the various characteristics of class – in-itself and for-itself, while discussing subsidiary characteristics like dominance/submission; education and wealth; skill sets.  He understands that the very useful, highly trained ‘technocrats’ as he calls them – doctors, engineers, architects, dentists, software developers, scientists etc. – have higher skill sets than most workers.  He relegates them to a separate strata from the true petit-bourgeoisie, as they collect salaries from their labor.  He does not note that some professionals like this run businesses, or accumulate wealth in other ways due to their higher salaries – becoming landlords or through investing.

Paxton hosts a debate over the primacy of the productive forces or the ‘relations of production’ and their interaction.  Paxton notes that stagnation and back-sliding occur in production throughout the history of different economic structures, as is happening now. This is how the ‘relations of production’ can stymy progress, as they are doing now. He does not mention colonial mercantilism, looting, slavery or primitive accumulation in his understanding of how capital developed – assuming it was just the bland and automatic ‘development of the productive forces.’ 

Paxton makes a case for survival as the key function of an economic system and its forces of production.  He contends that capital can whither away in an “adaptive metamorphosis” – not always through a violent or confrontational political or social revolution.  He does not address how ‘productive growth’ itself can be a contra indicator to survival.  He goes into a description of the differences between feudalism and capital as related to their goals, methods of extraction and productivity. 

Russian peasants selling in Moscow, 1900

RUSSIAN PEASANTRY & PROLETARIAT

To follow his analysis of Russian non-capitalism, Paxton looks at the real conditions of the Russian peasantry.  In detail, he tracks the number of MIR communes, subsistence and petty production peasants, kulaks, nobility landlords and a handful of capitalist landlords after Emancipation.  He notes that many workers in the cities also went back to villages to farm – similar to the situation in China.  Then he adds up the numbers of city proletarians, servants, members of the armed forces, farm workers and landless – and comes up with the optimistic Soviet number of 8.9% of the population as proletarian, while conservative estimates put it far lower. 

Paxton shows how, prior to 1917, the Czarist state attempted to build an industrial sector due to the weakness of the real bourgeoisie – owning most of the railroads and part of other firms, giving guaranteed prices to firms, becoming their customer, making loans, instituting tariff protections.  On the flip side was the large investment of foreign capital in the Russian banking, metallurgy and mining sectors – another sign of the weakness of the domestic bourgeoisie.  It was unable to build capitalism on its own.   

It is clear that ‘socialism’ was not on the agenda during War Communism or the NEP, which ended in 1929. Paxton’s tracking of MIR village communes is inconsistent, but you’d think their existence would lead to more cooperative organization.  And indeed by 1927 13 million of the 25 million peasant households were in voluntary cooperatives, while only 1.1% were in state collectives.  He considers the kulak threat far over-drawn. This period is prior to forced collectivization and industrialization.

The USSR caught up with aspects of early capitalism by 1939 according to Paxton, quite quickly.  Yet he’s still cheering for ‘the development of the productive forces’ under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and celebrates the 1991 counter-revolution thusly:  “At last, the political system would give way to the march of progress.”  The implication is that until the Soviet Union or Central and Eastern Europe became the same as the Western commodity economy, it was ‘lagging in the development of the productive forces.’  You can see there is another logic here other than Marxism and his theory of history.  In the end he does not advocate political revolution but changing to socialism ...“slowly…by utilizing technological developments within the existing system.” 

You might call this ‘vulgar economism’ and idiotic reformism for not recognizing the role of politics and class struggle in material history.  Nevertheless he makes some relevant points.  An interesting, short book that leaves many questions unanswered and problems hanging. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “Reinventing Collapse,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” “Slavs and Tatars – Red/Black Thread,” “Secondhand Time,” “Lenin’s Last Struggle,” “Soviet Women,” “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Workers’ Councils” “Building the Commune,” “Beyond Leviathan,” “From Commune to Capitalism” “Understanding Class” or “Marx,” “historical materialism.”      

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 23, 2022