By Kamran Nayeri, October 16, 2024
Editor's Note: This essay is the last of eight-essay series on the Cuban revolution publish in Critique of Political Economy (نقد اقتصاد سیاسی), a socialist website edited and published in Iran by Parviz Sedaghat. The free translation into English is mine. Many thanks to Parviz Sedaghat for permission to translate and publish some of them in English.
In the previous seven essays, I used the main ideas in the revolutionary history and thought in Cuba in conjunction with my ten research visits to Cuba between 1994 and 2006, as well as recent research on Cuba's economy and society to provide an analysis of the systemic crisis in Cuba. Today's crisis-ridden Cuba has no resemblance to a society in transition to socialism; rather, Cuba seems more like a peripheral country under economic sanctions and threats from imperialism. Of course, working people must oppose these imperialist actions and threats. However, the one-party system dominated by Stalinist ideology has made it impossible for any form of socialist democracy to develop and for a much-needed democratic public discussion in Cuba on how to get out of the crisis. Instead, the Communist Party (PCC) leadership has for six decades tried to avert the systemic crisis rooted in the lack of socialist motivation of the working people by using administrative measures and market incentives. In the first three decades after the 1959 revolution, subsidies from the Soviet Union helped avert the systemic crisis. When the Soviet Union and the COMECON collapsed, Cuba sank into a depression that lasted until after Chave's election to the presidency in Venezuela in 1998, which granted Cuba preferential trade policies. However, in recent years, Venezuela has been in crisis, and subsidies to Cuba have dried up, and in combination with delayed infrastructural upgrading, have created an unprecedented crisis.
My critique of the Cuban revolution's leadership and its policies is based on Marx's theory of socialist revolution, which I have briefly discussed in my essay on Che Guevara's economic and political thought (Nayeri May 1, 2024). The PCC has claimed to follow "Marxism-Leninism" and socialism as its goal, thus requiring Marx's theory to assess its policies. However, in the Cuban revolution, as well as in other revolutions of the twentieth century that has been described as "socialist", as in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and the former Yugoslavia, the working class, central to Marx's theory, has not played the leading or even an independent role and has never held state power, which has been held by political parties calling themselves "Marxist-Leninist." Stalinist parties led these revolutions, supported mainly by the peasantry. Although the July 26 Movement the led the 1959 revolution was influenced by the revolutionary tradition of Cuba and Latin America, Fidel Castro, who in his university years accepted the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party as representing "Marxism-Leninism" in Cuba, subordinated the leadership of the revolution to Stalinist politics and world outlook (Savoli, 1961; Nayeri April 19, 2024). In 1965, on the initiative of Fidel Castro, the July 26 Movement merged with the Revolutionary Directorate, a guerrilla student movement, and the Popular Socialist Party to form the new Communist Party built on the Stalinist model. From its formation, Leninist party democracy, in particular the formation of political tendencies, has been lacking.
Moreover, with the formation of the PCC, a one-party state was established in Cuba, which prohibited all other political groups and parties. The institutions of the Cuban state were rebuilt or built under the direction of advisors from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1975, the first congress of the PCC adopted the development model of the Soviet Union for its first five-year plan. Thus, the Cuban Revolution was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union.
This essay has three parts. Because I have used Marx's theory of history, the proletariat and socialist revolution as my analytical lens to examine the Cuban revolution, in Part 1 I will critically examine these theories. I will show that these theories have limitations and include critical flaws that are usually admitted and discussed. Given these problems, I will then ask how to evaluate "socialist" revolutions of the 20th century, including the Cuban revolution. In Part 2, I will examine critical theories of the Soviet Union to show how they are indifferent to problems in Marx's theories and indicate their limitations and flaws. In Part 3, I will present a new assessment of these revolutions, including the Cuban revolution, as revolutions against colonialism and imperialism in which the leadership fell on Stalinist parties that used "socialism" as a motivational ideological force in the struggle for independence, economic development and modernizing by one-party states.
Part 1: Marx and the Twentieth-Century Revolutions
In "Socialism in the 21st Century" (Nayeri 2022), I have already outlined my critique of Marx's theory of socialism and what was later claimed as Marxism in the 20th century. I invite the interested reader to read it as the final part of the present series of essays. Here, I will expand on some aspects of that essay.
We know that Marx hoped that soon, there would be a socialist revolution in Western Europe. He also emphasized that the society resulting from the victorious proletarian revolution will bear "in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually… the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges (Marx, 1875)."
Contrary to Marx's expectation, the socialist revolution took place in tsarist Russia, which, in his view, was the epicenter of reaction in Europe and was carried out by a newly formed and very small working class in a vast peasant country. According to a 1904 survey, of course, a rough estimate, workers, artisans, soldiers, and sailors together comprised only 4% of Russia's population, and 82% were peasants. The courtiers, nobility, landowners, capitalists, and the bureaucracy that served them constituted the other 14%.
The debate between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks must be placed in this context. The Mensheviks argued that the coming revolution in Russia would be bourgeois democratic in order to pave the way for capitalist development and modernization. As a result, they viewed the bourgeoisie as the leader of this revolution and their role as protecting the interests of the workers within this framework. As I have already outlined, Lenin and Trotsky argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was unwilling and unable to lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution because it was entangled with precapitalist relations. They suggested that the Russian workers, in alliance with the peasant masses, could and should lead this revolution and seize power. However, when the workers are in control, they can and must move in the direction of socialism, and in this way, it is possible to start a socialist revolution in Russia. Yet this revolution could only survive and deepen if the working classes in the industrial countries of Europe also made a socialist revolution and came to the aid of the workers and toilers of Russia.
As Lenin and Trotsky had anticipated, the soviets of workers', peasants', and soldiers' deputies were formed in the February 1917 revolution. Within months, this bourgeois government, which the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries supported, was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, supported by the soviets, who took the state power in October 1917.
Thus, the October Revolution marked the beginning of the socialist revolution in Russia and inspired a revolutionary wave worldwide, especially in Europe. In 1918, at Lenin's initiative, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Communist Party. In 1919, the Bolsheviks founded the (Third) Communist International to facilitate cooperation among revolutionary forces to extend the socialist revolution.
However, the revolutionary wave in Europe failed. The young Soviet state was isolated, and the economic crisis caused by the imperialist war and civil war and Russia's economic and cultural backwardness opened the way for the expansion of bureaucracy in society and state and impacted the ruling Communist Party. The socialist revolution was destroyed within a few years by the Stalinist counter-revolution, reflecting the interests of the bureaucratic caste. Stalin purged the Communist International of revolutionary currents, making them subservient to the Kremlin's policy to seek "socialism in one country" through collaboration with bourgeois parties and governments. That is why Trotsky considered Stalinism, the ideology of the Soviet Union's bureaucracy, as counter-revolutionary (Anderson 1983).
Thus, the working classes were burdened not only by the reformism of the Social Democratic parties of the Second International but also by the class collaborationist Stalinist parties of the Third International.
As the prospects of a socialist revolution dimmed in the industrial capitalist countries, the world revolution took a detour in the periphery of the world capitalist economy, where the revolution against colonial and semi-colonial rule was underway. In some cases, the parties that came to power presented themselves and these revolutions as socialists.
However, nowhere were the working people and their independent organizations at the head of the revolution, and the state emerged when this revolution overthrew the old order. Instead, in every case when the Stalinist parties came to power, one-party states were established that claimed socialism as their goal.
Of course, none of these developments aligned with Marx's theories. A fundamental theoretical and political issue was determining the class nature of these revolutions and states.
Before I proceed, let's ask whether Marx's theory of the proletariat and socialism have been supported by history, and if not, why.
Historical Materialism
The fundamental contribution of Marx and Engels is their theory of society and history, historical materialism. In a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852), Marx offered his prediction for the socialist revolution as follows:
"[A]s to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
Of course, Marx did not prove any of the three statements. Rather, basing himself on the first hypothesis, historical materialism, he made predictions (2) and (3) above.
More than 170 years later, history has not yet confirmed these predications.
Why have Marx's predictions failed? I would argue that they have failed because of the limitations and flaws in constructing Marx's theory of history, the theory of the proletariat socialist revolution. I will first deal with Marx's theory of the proletariat as the social force that will carry out the socialist revolution.
The Theory of the Proletariat
The proletariat as a revolutionary social class appears first in Marx's discussion of the prospects of revolution in Germany in the "Preface" to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (December 1843 and January 1844). Marx was still writing philosophically. Although Marx puts the future of Germany in the hands of the proletariat, he acknowledges that the proletariat in Germany was still in the process of formation. It was at least hasty for Marx to assign such a historical role to a social class that has not yet been fully formed, let alone tested in the course of history. Of course, the emerging industrial working class waged economics in England, which had just gone through the Industrial Revolution (1780-1830). Chartists even waged a political struggle. But even in England, there was no evidence that the proletariat was fighting for a socialist revolution. Why, then, did Marx consider the proletariat to be a revolutionary class poised to lead a socialist revolution? As Hal Draper (1971) points out before Marx, Utopian Socialists such as Robert Owen and Saint-Simon considered the proletariat a revolutionary force. Marx was reflecting the radical mood of his time.
With the formulation of historical materialism in The German Ideology (1845), the role of the proletariat in socialism took on a "scientific" form in their authors' view, as Engels (1880) stated later.
However, later in life, Marx and, especially Engels, who lived 14 years after Marx's death, expressed concern about the growth of the workers' aristocracy and bureaucracy in England. This, of course, calls into question the revolutionary potential of the working class. However, neither Marx nor Engels had the time to revise their theory of proletariat and socialism.
It fell upon the Bolsheviks to analyze the political impact of the rise of the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy on the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to explain why the mass Social Democratic parties in Western Europe, particularly in Germany, supported "their bourgeoisie" in the imperialist World War I. In The Social Roots of Opportunism (1916), Zinoviev used the official statistics of the German SPD to show that the material interests of the leaders and members of the party led them to support German imperialism.
Of course, the Bolshevik Party's acceptance of this analysis meant that in the event of a socialist revolution in Russia, there would be less possibility of a victorious socialist in Western Europe. This inference would have weakened the basis of Lenin's and Trotsky's theories of the socialist revolution in Russia, which required its expansion into Western Europe.
To summarize, the history of twentieth-century revolutions does not confirm Marx's theory of the proletariat and socialism. The working class, with its own independent organization, has not attempted to overthrow the bourgeoisie in any revolution except the Russian revolutions of 1917, and nowhere has the working class come to power as the ruling class except for a very short time in the young Soviet Republic.
This fact has caused "Marxists" to revise the theory of the proletariat and, therefore, Marx's theory of socialism without openly admitting their fundamental revision. The main reason is Marx's cult of personality, which is essential to the mythology that there is such a thing as "Marxism" as a scientific doctrine.
Replacing the Proletariat with the Vanguard Party
In What is to be done? Lenin (1902), relying on Engels's1874 "Preface" to Peasant War in Germany (1850) proposed the democratic centralist by emphasizing that without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary workers' movement. He argued:
"We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. In the period under discussion, the middle nineties [1890s], this doctrine not only represented the completely formulated program of the Emancipation of Labor group but had already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia (Lenin 1902)."
There are three key takeaways from Lenin's theory of the vanguard party. The first is its clear break with Marx's theory of the proletariat, as discussed earlier. Lenin put the vanguard party ahead of the working class.
Second, the Bolshevik Party played a crucial role in the Russian revolutions of 1917, especially the October Socialist Revolution. However, as China Miehville (2017) brilliantly recounts the key events of the Russian revolutions from February to October, focusing on the role played by the soviets, it was the mutually reinforcing interactions of the self-organized and self-mobilizing workers' movement with the Bolshevik Party that created the first workers' state in history. The central role of the self-organized, self-mobilizing soviets was recognized by Lenin in the April Theses (April 1917), which led the Bolsheviks to adopt the slogan "All power to the Soviets" (Liah 2017). In The State and Revolution (August-September 1917), Lenin argued that the soviets formed the backbone of the workers' state. However, the tension in Lenin's mind is revealed in the full title of the pamphlet, which is The State and the Revolution and the Task of the Proletariat in Revolution. For Lenin, it was the party that determined the task for the class, even though he insisted, relaying on the teachings of Marx and Engels, that the soviets would be the backbone of the future state! This tension remained in Lenin's writings and actions until he died. However, the "Leninists" that followed resolved the tension in favor of the party by taking an instrumentalist view of the proletariat.
Third, the Bolshevik Party did not last more than 20 years and turned into its opposite, a Stalinist party, soon after Lenin's death in January 1924. The rise of Stalinism in the Bolshevik Party was due to the decline of the self-organizing and self-mobilizing working people. As I have already discussed (Nayeri May 1, 2024), in the eighth congress of the Communists (Bolshevik) Party in February 1920, Lenin had proposed and passed resolutions to temporarily ban factions and essentially give all powers in the party to the Central Committee as the main policy maker in the young Soviet Republic. As Trotsky (1936, Nayeri May 1, 2024) later admitted, this turn of events helped pave the way for the bureaucratic counterrevolution in the Soviet Union.
Ever since, there has never been a party like Lenin's, which was a proletarian democratic centrist party rooted in the class.
Theories of Non-Proletarian Vanguard Party
With the detour of the world revolution to the periphery of the world capitalist economy, non-proletarian theories of the vanguard party to make socialist revolution emerged. Take the case of Paul Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review, who argued in support of the view that Mao and Fidel Castro represented leaders of socialist revolutions as follows:
"The history of the last few decades suggests that the most likely way for such a 'substitute proletariat' to arise is through prolonged revolutionary warfare involving masses of people. Here, men and women of various classes and strata are brought together under conditions contrasting sharply with their normal ways of life. They learn the value, indeed, the necessity for survival, of discipline, organization, solidarity, cooperation, and struggle. Culturally, politically, and even technologically, they are raised to a new and higher level. They are, in a word, molded into a revolutionary force which has enormous significance not only for the overthrow of the old system but also for the building of the new (Sweezy in Sweezy and Bettelheim 1971)."
Of course, such radical revisions of Marx's theory under the banner of "Marxism" are not rare or unique. All kinds of "Marxist" guerrilla movements developed in the 1960s and 1970s, each with their "theory" of socialist revolution; the most famous of these is Che Guevara's foci theory of guerrilla warfare (Guevara 1963). However, Sweezy, who enjoyed much support in the peripheral countries, revised Marx's theories in the most fundamental aspects in the name of "Marxism." Together with Baran, Sweezy claimed in Monopoly Capital (1966, pp. 5-6) that Marx's labor theory of value has only been operative since the latter part of the 19th century. Instead, he and Baran proposed the theory of monopoly derived from the bourgeois neoclassical theory. Soon after its publication, a number of young economists who had studied Capital closely showed how generations of "Marxists" beginning with Hilferding and ending with Baran and Sweezy, had misunderstood Marx's theory of competition as being the same as the neoclassical theory of Perfect Competition. Thus, Lenin's (1916) highly influential pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was primarily based on Hilferding's Finance Capital (1910) embraced by generations of socialists as "Marxism" was similarly defective (for my critique of monopoly capital theories see Nayeri 1991/2023B chapter 1).
Sweezy also followed Baran's non-Marxist dependency theory of late capitalist development (Baran 1957; for my critique, see Nayeri 1991/2023 chapter 4). Although Sweezy was a socialist, he was not a Marxist in any meaningful sense of the word. The same is true of the Monthly Review, which emerged from the Stalinist popular front in the U.S. and soon fell under the spell of non-Marxist currents of anti-imperialism, Maoism, and Third Worldism.
Historical materialism
As Marx acknowledged, the ideas of class struggle as a historical force and progressive stages in historical development were present in Europe long ago. The idea of class struggle dates back at least to Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744), a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. The idea of progressive stages of development in history dates to at least the eighteenth century. In Social Sciences and the Noble Savage (1976/2010, p. 5), Ronald Meek quotes Efimovich Desnistky, a student of Adam Smith, who described four stages of historical evolution in a lecture at Moscow University in 1781: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce. Meek attributes the earliest written discussions of the four-stage theory of history to Montesquieu (1689–1755), Smith (1723–1790), and Turgo (1727–1777).
Thus, the basic elements for historical materialism already existed. Marx's and Engels' innovation was to relate these to the modes of production, providing a theory of history anchored in economic development superior to theories of progress in history credited to great men or great ideas. Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection in a similar manner.
What "Marxists" have forgotten about historical materialism is its limited scope, the most important of which Marx and Engels point it out in The German Ideology:
"Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic, and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men (emphases added)."
To analyze the dynamics of class struggle, Marx and Engels abstracted from the "physical nature of man" and how social development and natural history are intertwined, a field of study now called social ecology. Thus, historical materialism remains an incomplete and anthropocentric theory of history. I suggest this limitation was due to the lack of the necessary knowledge that has accumulated since the middle of the twentieth century in fields such as biology, archeology, and anthropology (see Nayeri 1991/2023B, "Introduction"). I set aside other shortcomings of historical materialism here (see Nayeri 1991/2023B chapter 1 for a discussion).
Marx's critique of political economy—the labor theory of value—is the application of historical materialism to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, the labor theory of the value also has limitations and is anthropocentric. As Marx (1875) points out in his Critique of the Gotha Program, nature, including human labor, is the source of all wealth. The commodification of nature, human or extra-human, is a basis for capital accumulation. However, in Marx's theory of exploitation, nature is assumed passive and objectified, and nonhuman contribution to surplus value social production is ignored. In Marx's analysis, the "value" of nonhuman input to capitalist production is determined by the capitalist market and remains constant throughout the analysis. Thus, labor power is described as the only source of surplus value. However, let's also consider the contribution of nonhuman nature. It becomes apparent that surplus value is not just the result of the exploitation of the wage worker but is partly, and possibly mainly, the contribution of nonhuman nature (Nayeri 2022).
Take, for example, the world meat industry, which in 2023 provided an income of $930 billion. There can be no doubt that the billions of livestock who are born, fattened, and slaughtered in horrific conditions, aptly described as meat factories by Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation (1975), provided the commodity sold in the marketplace by this hellish industry hence it is its main source of income. Isn't it apparent that capitalist profit in this industry is utterly dependent on the enslavement, mistreatment, and murder of billions of sentient animals? Is it possible to deny that these animals are not oppressed and exploited and are not mainly the primary source of the surplus value?
Not only do the capitalists in the meat industry benefit from this exploitation, but the mechanization of the meat industry reduced the value of the meat products and has contributed to the decline of the value of labor power throughout the economy, as food constitutes a major part of the workers' subsistence basket. Thus, it increases the social surplus value and capitalist profitability. Moreover, the industry provides employment and income for workers who, in the U.S. in 2021, made up 42.7% of the food industry employment. Meanwhile, the capitalist meat industry has materially "enhanced" working people's consumption as more working people have more access to cheaper meat:
"World meat consumption has quadrupled since 1961 in absolute and per capita terms, although COVID-19 may reduce global availability. The growing human population has encouraged expansion of livestock, with 80 billion animals slaughtered annually to produce 340 million tons of meat for human consumption (Whitton et.al. 2021)."
Thus, the working class, along with the bourgeoisie, materially benefits from exploiting nonhuman nature to improve their lives.
If Marx and Engels were aware of the growth of the workers' aristocracy in the industrial capitalist countries of the late nineteenth century, in part due to colonialism and imperialism, as a source of reformism, and as the Bolsheviks showed, it caused reformism of major parties of the Second International, is it not appropriate for us to consider how participation of workers in the plundering of nature have been as major cause of the of reformism in the workers' movement? By participating in the plunder of nonhuman nature in capitalist societies, working people tend to support the system that exploits them and destroys the nature we depend on as human beings.
Thus, just as the working people should fight against colonialism and imperialism, they should also fight for the liberation of nonhumans to emancipate themselves from wage slavery.
To sum up, the structure of Marx's theory of history, the critique of political economy (capitalist mode of production), and the theory of the proletariat and socialism all have limitations and defects that deprive them of the possibility of predicting the historical process. As we have seen, the history of the last 170 years has yet to confirm Marx's predictions. Isn't it the duty of the followers of Marx to replace these with superior theories?
Instead, "Marxists" have revised Marx's theories piecemeal to support and explain the capitalist history and the revolutions of the twentieth century while presenting their revisions as "Marxism." As a result, there has been an increase in theoretical confusion and fragmentation among the "Marxists." Thus, little systematic work has been done to construct new and superior theories.
Part Two: The Class Nature of the Soviet Union
Stalin claimed to be a faithful follower of Lenin and the Soviet Union of the 1930s to be socialist, an early stage of communism in Marx's theory. Stalinist parties, both pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing, repeated these claims. Before discussing the class nature of the states claiming to pursue socialism in the twentieth century, it is helpful to review major critical theories of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky: Degenerated Workers' State
In The Betrayed Revolution: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? Trotsky (1936) characterized the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state. He argued that in the 1920s, there was a triumphant bureaucratic counterrevolution in the Soviet Republic that drove the working class out of politics and seized the state power. Still, Trotsky argued the Stalinist counterrevolution preserved the economic achievements of the October Revolution, which were nationalized industries and banks, a monopoly of foreign trade, and central planning. These, he argued, were the hallmarks of a workers' state. As a result, Trotsky believed a political revolution by the working class would revive revolutionary socialism in the Soviet Union. He also argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a caste and not a class and that sooner or later, the Soviet Union would either move in the direction of socialism by a proletarian political revolution or return to capitalism with a bourgeois counterrevolution. Trotsky believed that working people of the Soviet Union would resist such a counterrevolution and, therefore, it would require imperialist military intervention.
Trotskyists maintained this characterization of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. However, in retrospect, it is clear that Trotsky's assessment, even if correct, in the 1930s, just two decades after the October 1917 revolution, when the generation of workers and toilers who made that revolution was still alive. It was not meant to be valid five decades later. The collapse of the Soviet Union and other "socialist" states of Eastern Europe not only did not require imperialist military intervention but, in some cases, was actively welcomed by the workers and toilers, as in East Germany, Poland, and Romania. Nowhere did the working people oppose the collapse of the Stalinist regimes.
Regardless, the fundamental problem with Trotsky's theory is his criteria for characterizing the workers' state, which was essential, formal, and economical. How could a follower of Marx, who identified socialist revolution with a self-organizing and self-mobilizing working class and a close associate of Lenin, who in The State and Revolution outlined Marx's theory of the workers' state as inseparable from the existence and expansion of socialist democracy while the state gradually dissolves could characterize the state in the Soviet Union of the 1930s as a workers' state?
However, the Fourth International went even further, using Trotsky's criteria to identify China, the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam, North Korea, and Eastern European countries as deformed workers' states (states born with deformations). The Fourth International's characterization of Cuba as a healthy workers' state was similarly mistaken, even though differences about the characterizations of the Castro leadership existed.
Collectivist Bureaucracy
In his Bureaucratization of the World, Bruno Rizzi (1939) claimed that the Soviet Union represented a new historical mode of production represented by the expansion of the rule of bureaucracy, which he believed was also happening in the capitalist world, e.g., Hitler's Germany. Rizzi believed the Russian proletariat had failed in the struggle with the bourgeoisie. In fact, he denied the working class's revolutionary potential (ibid. p. 47 and p. 52). Instead, he argued the Russian bureaucracy expanded its hold through collective ownership of means of production and created a new and higher level of economic organization. Exploitation in this system had been elevated from the individual and micro-level to the collective and macro-level (ibid., p. 54).
Howard and King (1992, pp. 58-61) believe the rapid pace of industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s influenced Rizzi. Contrary to Rizzi, Trotsky (1936), who saw the bureaucracy as a caste, not a class, emphasized that the Stalinist bureaucracy would hinder the development of the Soviet Union in the long run. Adam Westoby (1985), who translated into English the first and main part of Rizzi's book and wrote a very good introduction to the book, argued that the importance of Rizzi's book is prominently in capturing and conveying the feelings and perceptions of his time: The book is "based more on experience and common sense than on scholarly immersion in theoretical literature, it has no fear of speculative leaps (Westoby, 1985:11)." Trotsky, who got a hold of a copy of the book in September 1939 and took up its central argument in his polemic regarding the class character of the Soviet Union (Trotsky 1939), accorded the book a wider audience.
Historical experience has shown that the Stalinist rule did not represent a new mode of production based on bureaucracy, but a transitory caste, as Trotsky had argued.
State capitalism: Resnick and Wolff
Following on scattered hints in Marx and Engels, some theoreticians of the Second International believed that what they had called finance capital or monopoly capitalism had turned in the Soviet Union as state monopoly capitalism. Martov, the prominent Menshevik theoretician, was the first to use this label for the newly established Soviet regime. However, the theoretical development of the state capitalist characterization of the Soviet Union had to wait until the 1940s. Two close associates of Trotsky—Raya Dunayveskaya (1992) and C.L.R. James (1986)--who criticized his notion of a "degenerated workers state" developed theories of state capitalism (for a review of the state capitalist literature, see Jerome and Buick 1967; Bettelheim 1976:464-476; Bellis 1979; Buick and Crump 1986:102-125). Tony Cliff (1955) of the British Socialist Workers Party was most successful in building a political movement committed to this characterization of the Soviet Union.
Resnick and Wolff's (2002) theory of state capitalism differs significantly from these earlier views because it adopts a different epistemological position and employs a distinct methodology, which requires its own definitions of state capitalism and communism.
Key to Resnick and Wolff's argument is their definition of class as "a process in the society where individuals perform labor above and beyond that which society deems necessary for their reproduction as laborers...A class analysis, in this sense, classifies individuals in a society in terms of their relationship to this surplus (ibid. 8)."
From this, follows their definition of the "communist fundamental class process" as one in which the same individuals who perform the surplus labor also receive it collectively. A "communist subsumed class process" is one in which collective receivers of the surplus labor also distribute it collectively: "They do so to pay for the performance of non-class processes (political, cultural, and so on) deemed necessary for the existence of the communist fundamental class process (ibid. 14)." Examples include payments to lawyers, teachers, entertainers, and security personnel.
Several conclusions follow. Such "communist class structures" seem feasible in any production location regardless of the mode of production (factory production, petty commodity production), and they don't need to be connected to the workers' self-conscious struggle for communism. In fact, in chapter 9, the authors argue that Stalin's forced collectivization in agriculture formed a communist class structure in the Soviet Union. The authors hold that communism can take centralized, decentralized, or any other form in between, and it can coincide with private property and markets and with democratic or dictatorial regimes. In fact, communism for them can coexist with just about any economic, social, political or cultural forms. This is because Resnick and Wolff's analysis focuses on micro-processes even as they hold a state capitalist position (presumably entails the highest possible degree of centralization and concentration of capital and socialization of capital and capital, given the capitalist mode of production).
From this definition of the class follows their conception of state capitalism:
"What defines the state as opposed to private forms of capitalism is the social location of surplus appropriating enterprises and the connection of appropriating individuals to the state...In state capitalism, individuals with a necessary connection to the state—employed and selected by the state—exploit labor in enterprises that occupy locations within the state apparatus (ibid. 87, emphases in the original)."
However, as Trotsky (1937A:245-52) noted, these features certainly affect the condition of exploitation and, therefore, the character of the state.
Resnick and Wolff do not confront these problems; instead, they argue that given the exploitation of direct producers, the Soviet Union should be characterized as capitalist by default because its mode of production was neither slavery nor feudalism. State capitalism was established in the Soviet Union because Russian workers never arrived at Resnick and Wolff's definition of communist class consciousness: "Their class consciousness did not grasp the difference between capitalist and communist structures of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution and their actions reflected that lack (ibid. 97)." Similarly, they assert that the Bolsheviks (or any other major political tendencies in the workers' movement at the time) were not communists. The Bolsheviks appear more like benevolent bourgeois reformers (see, for example, ibid. 156-57).
Furthermore, Resnick and Wolff maintain that Stalinism was the continuation of Bolshevism. In fact, they hold that the same continuity runs through the Soviet/Russian leadership to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, who are "like the Bolsheviks from whom they descended and absorbed class-blind theory (ibid. 323)."
Finally, they argue that just as the 1917 revolution resulted in a state capitalist transformation of the crisis-ridden private capitalism, the events since the end of the 1980s represent a reversal from the crisis-ridden state capitalism to private capitalism.
"Beginning in the 1970s, postwar non-class changes altered the balance among contradictory Soviet class structures: mutual support gave way to mutual weakening. Dissatisfaction, resentment, corruption, and conflict deepened (ibid. 285)." As Soviet reforms failed, "there arose...a society-wide sense of a need for some more fundamental, sweeping reorganization of the entire system. This set the stage for the collapse of the late 1980s (ibid. 285)."
Let us consider three reservations regarding Resnick and Wolff's overall argument. The first is epistemological and methodological. They write:
"We hold that all theoreticians of communism so far have lacked two key qualities. First, no systematically non-determinist (i.e., anti-essentialist) perspective has been applied to define and elaborate a concept of communism. Secondly, no class perspective has been applied where class refers to the social organization of surplus: how it is produced, appropriate, and distributed in a distinctly communist way (ibid. 3)."
The key here is their notion of "overdetermination" to stress that social reality is highly complex, interdependent, and in a perpetual state of change, but not in the commonly understood dialectical sense:
"No process in society can be understood as the effect of merely one or a subset of other social processes. No one process in society, nor any subset, can be understood as the cause of one or more other social processes. In other words, no process can be the essence of another; no subset of social processes can determine another subset (Resnick and Wolff 1987:25, emphasis in the original)."
This extreme anti-essentialist and anti-reductionist position leads to epistemological and methodological indeterminism. For instance, the authors claim that the Soviet Union has never been analyzed properly in class terms and that "the history of the USSR exemplifies the disastrous consequences of such exclusions [of Resnick and Wolff's class analysis] for the project of moving beyond capitalism" (Resnick and Wolff 2002:8).
This assertion is the main reason for writing their book. But on the next page, they write, "our analysis...is distinguished by not asserting that class is what determined the rise and fall of the USSR (p. 9, emphasis in the original)!"
Thus, it remains unclear how the authors' strong conclusions regarding the nature of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik party, and the Soviet Union and its history could be justified. In fact, true to their epistemological standpoint, the authors distance themselves from many of their conclusions, including some of those noted above.
Second, while it is clear from the outset that the authors take a different epistemological and methodological position than Marx and Engels, it is unclear why they present their theoretical development as Marxist. In fact, using a different epistemology and methodology, Resnick and Wolff's theorizing differs substantially from that of Marx, including on such key concepts such as classes (in particular the proletariat), exploitation and alienation, state, and socialist revolution all crucial to their concern with the Soviet experience (for elaboration, see, Nayeri 2005).
Finally, Resnick and Wolff's argument leads to a highly insufficient and contentious interpretation of the history of the Soviet Union. While attention to the labor process is crucial for any theory of proletarian socialist revolution and the Bolsheviks' theory, program, and strategy (together with all other prominent tendencies in the Second and Third Internationals), Resnick and Wolff's treatment often displays an amazing indifference to the actual development of the Russian and Soviet working class movements. There is no discussion of the development of workers' organizations such as unions, strike committees, factory committees, workers' control and management movements, and soviets.
Because Resnick and Wolff are singularly focused on their definition of communist class structure as an outcome measure, they fail to capture the rich dynamics of the working-class movement. They privilege continuity rather than change without focusing on the dynamics of the Russian revolution. As a result, their historical judgments are at odds with those of the most prominent historians of the Russian revolution. In their hands, the Russian revolution of 1917 became a bourgeois reform, but Stalin's forced collectivization was coined as revolutionary. Like the Stalinist and some bourgeois historians, Resnick and Wolff view Stalin's anti-labor and anti-communist policies not as a counter-revolutionary break with the Bolshevik program and strategy but in continuation with Lenin. They provide no explanations for the unceasing world capitalist hostility to the Russian revolution, the Soviet state, working-class gains preserved despite the Stalinist counter-revolution, and the imperialist drive to destroy the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold War.
5. The Test of History
Only Trotsky's theory of the Soviet Union as a transitional society ruled by a petty-bourgeois bureaucratic caste, "a regime of permanent crisis," would seem to explain in broad outlines the course of development of the Soviet Union: In the concluding section of his The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky warned: "The longer the Soviet Union remains in a capitalist environment, the deeper runs the degeneration of the social fabric. A prolonged isolation would inevitably end not in national communism, but in restoring capitalism (Trotsky 1937A:301)." He predicted that the Soviet Union would stagnate after an initial period of rapid growth and extensive development. The potential for the progressive initial phase was the ability to copy Western technologies based on nationalized property and central planning. The diagnosis of its demise came from an assessment of how the bureaucracy undermined incentives and innovations necessary for the intensive development of the Soviet Union. The problem with Trotsky's characterization was his designation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state, which is inconsistent with Marx's theory or Lenin's summary of the Marxist theory of state in his The State and Revolution. Thus, Trotsky's argument that the working class would oppose capitalist restoration and it would require an imperialist military has been refuted by historical events.
Rizzi's bureaucratic collectivism theory, which accorded the Soviet regime a progressive status compared to capitalist economies, was proven to be false. His view of the progressive potential of the bureaucracy, which coincides with Weber's belief in the rationality and efficiency of the bureaucracy, was a misconception.
The theory of state capitalism faced a similar problem. Was it a new mode of production or just a transitional phase of capitalism in Russia after the degeneration of the socialist revolution?
Resnick and Wolff's study was written after the collapse and, in part, to explain it. However, their methodology was averse to making a prognosis. While we cannot pass judgment on any specific state capitalist theory not examined here, it would be helpful to consider an underlying issue regarding those based on the Marxian basis. Marx's conception of capital allows from its historical development: money capital, merchant capital and industrial capital. As Paresh Chattopadhyay (1994: 21-28) shows, Marx's conception of capital allows for the development of share capital (where ownership and control functions are separated) and "state capital," where the concentration of Capital and socialization of Capital and labor attain their highest level. In a footnote, Chattopadhyay (ibid. p. 31), a learned disciple of Bettelheim, admits that "though Marx specifically speaks of 'state capital'...he does not ...go into any length on the question." He proceeds: "However, once given the concept itself, the essential elements for constructing the basis of the relevant analysis could easily be gathered from his discussion of the first form [e.g., share capital]."
Three considerations follow. Marx probably did not favor developing the "state capital" form into a "state capitalism." Typically, Marx refers to "state capital" in passing and in the sense of ownership and control of productive assets of industries that require a large amount of fixed Capital and long turnover time. For example, in Capital, volume 2, he refers to "state capital as far as governments employ productive wage-labor in mines, railways, etc., and function as industrial capitalists (Marx 1885:177)." This notion of "state capital" differs entirely from state capitalist theories. In this case, Marx refers to what Trotsky (1937A: 245-48) calls "statism." It requires a stretch of the imagination to suggest that Marx or Engels were precursors of state capitalist theories.
Second, as Trotsky pointed out, the character of property relations is not impartial to the historical process: property held by the state is not "state capitalism" if it is under workers' control or management, that is if it is indeed a workers' state. Thus, state capitalist theories are attractive because they include the historical context of how state property was introduced and evolved in the Soviet Union.
If we grant the claim of the more orthodox and internally consistent state capitalist theories, it follows that the Soviet economy had achieved the highest possible concentration and centralization of capital, and socialization of capital and labor. Therefore, the Soviet mode of production must have been superior to the mode of production in existing Western capitalist countries. However, the demise of the Soviet Union and similar economies in Eastern Europe, and the current process of transition to a private capitalist economy, disprove the anticipated superiority of the state capitalist model. This suggests that either the Soviet Union was not state capitalist or that major revisions to state capitalist theory are called for.
Both bureaucratic collectivist and state capitalist arguments still need to explain in what sense the Stalinist ruling group was a class. This is an essential question for those who argue these positions from a Marxian standpoint. As Trotsky argued, "The historical justification for every ruling class consisted in this—that the system of exploitation it headed raised the development of the productive forces to a new level (Trotsky 1939:6)." While the Soviet economy did experience a period of rapid economic growth, there is no dispute today that "bureaucratism, as a system, became the worse brake on the technical and cultural development of the country (ibid.)." It seems like Trotsky was right when he insisted that "the bureaucracy is not the bearer of a new system of economy peculiar to itself and impossible without itself, but a parasitic growth on a workers' state (ibid. 7)."
Part Three: Ecocentric Socialism
In the" Preface" to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx (1859) wrote that "Mankind always assigns to itself tasks which it is capable of performing because a closer examination shows that the problem itself appears when the material conditions for solving it is already ready, or at least about to be ready."
Although several generations of socialists, including my generation, have believed that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had taken the correct position against the Mensheviks, in practice, the socialist revolution in underdeveloped Russia was met with and destroyed by a counter-revolution from within the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves.
Lenin's and Trotsky's theories of the socialist revolution in Russia were based on the belief that the working class in Western Europe would support the Russian proletariat and make a socialist revolution. This belief was in line with the assessment of Marx and Engels, who considered the socialist revolution would begin in France, spread to Germany, and triumph over England. However, Western imperialism has bought off a significant section of the industrial working class, which has developed into aristocracy and bureaucracy of labor. Marx and Engels noted the early signs of this in the English labor movement, and the Bolsheviks argued based on Zinoviev's study of how the German Social Democratic Party was entangled with the German bourgeoisie. Thus, major parties of the Second International supported "their own" bourgeoisie in the imperialist World War I. The isolation of the Russian socialist revolution in the conditions of economic, social, and cultural backwardness and destruction caused by the First World War and domestic and imperialist counter-revolution led to the growth of bureaucracy in society, the state, in which the Bolshevik Party was rooted. The Stalinist counter-revolution, whose initial manifestations were witnessed and opposed by the ailing Lenin, decimated the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International (Third) parties' revolutionary program, strategy, and tradition and turned them into agencies of the Kremlin's conservative and counter-revolutionary policies.
The socialist revolution in the West that Marx and Engels had predicted never happened. In the most powerful imperialist country, the United States, the last mass labor radicalization took place in the 1930s, which led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. However, with its merger with the American Federation of Labor, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) was created, and it became subservient to the bourgeois-imperialist Democratic Party. As a result, workers in the United States have not experienced radicalized mass struggle in the last ninety years. Social Democrats and Stalinists have usually supported the Democratic Party. If a radical movement occurred in the West by other sections of society, such as the May-June 1968 protests in France, the leadership of the Socialist Party and Communist Party undermined it.
In this way, the world revolution in the 20th century took a detour to the peripheral countries of the capitalist world economy. All these revolutions aimed to resolve national democratic historical tasks while fighting colonial and imperialist domination. All these revolutions relied mostly on the peasantry, as the industrial working class formed a small part of the population and was never in a leadership position. In a word, all these revolutions were anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions, not socialist revolutions.
In those countries where Stalinist parties came to power, they did so against Stalin's theory of two-stage "theory," which required collaboration and subordination to the "national bourgeoisie" to develop better relations with the Kremlin. However, everywhere, the "national" bourgeoisie attacked the labor and Communist parties. As a result, the Stalinist leadership was sometimes forced to take an independent role and gain political power. For instance, the Communist Party of China, founded in 1921, in 1926 followed Stalin's policy to join the army of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party to fight the feudal lords. This led to Chiang Kai-shek's White Terror in Shanghai, where Communists were massacred. In 1931, Japanese imperialists invaded China. The leaders of the Communist Party were forced to form an independent armed struggle as Chiang Kai-shek still waged an anti-Communist campaign. With the defeat of Japan, there was a power struggle between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, which led to the defeat of the nationalists. Chiang Kai-shek retreated to the island of Taiwan. In this way, on October 1, 1949, the Communist Party established the People's Republic of China as a one-party state and copied the Soviet Union's economic structure and development model.
In his speech on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping (2021), the current leader of the Communist Party of China, stressed: "Through relentless struggle, the Party and the people of China have shown the world that they are not only capable of overthrowing the old system but also of building a new one, which can only be created by socialism with Chinese characteristics."
Of course, nowadays, few people or political currents still believe that China is socialist or is pursuing socialism. But why does Xi still talk about socialism? Aside from the fact that his reference to socialism with Chinese characteristics justifies the Communist Party's dominance over the lives of a billion and a half Chinese, he uses "socialism" as a mobilizing ideology. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the same as Chinese nationalism under the banner of the Communist Party.
In Cuba, Fidel Castro combined Martí's revolutionary nationalist thought with the "Marxism-Leninism" of the Popular Socialist Party to establish the Communist Party in 1965 as the final arbitrator of the Cuban state, economy, and society. The motto of the Cuban revolution was Patria o Muerte, Venceremos (Motherland or Death, we shall Win). In Cuba, "socialism" means both the undisputed rule of the Communist Party and the ideological force for mass mobilization to defend and develop Cuba's independence.
Of course, Stalin was the originator of this combination of "socialism" and nationalism, with his "theory" of socialism in one country. This combination was effectively used both in the forced industrialization of the Soviet Union and its defense against Hitler's army's aggression.
In these cases, the Communist Party and its state, which has provided social services to the population to various degrees, have had access to nationalized industry, a monopoly of foreign trade, and centralized planning.
Of course, a part of the left recognized this situation as socialism and even still recognizes it as such. However, there can be no denying the fact that these one-party states, even while claiming socialism as their ideology and goal and providing social service to the working people, has nothing to do with Marx's theory of socialism and the theory of transition to socialism while will require working people's self-organization and self-mobilization and a workers' state as Lenin outlined in The State and Revolution.
The fact these ruling parties call themselves socialist should be no surprise if we recall Marx's and Engels' critical assessment of the "socialisms" of their time in the German Ideology (1845) and the Communist Manifesto (1848, Chapter 3) as reactionary, feudal, petty-bourgeois, and bourgeois.
What separates Marx's socialism from all these types of "socialisms" is his theory of the proletariat as the historical agency for socialism, as the self-acting, self-mobilizing, and self-governing social class, not in need of saviors in all manners of vanguardist agencies whether party, guerrilla groups, or liberation armies. Let us also recall that socialism in Marx is not just for improving social services but for eliminating social alienation and alienation from nature.
In socialist literature, there are hints for a better understanding of the phenomena of "socialist revolutions" in the twentieth century. Trotsky (1922) wrote about how tsarism was compelled to undertake industrialization in the face of the state organization built after the Western model. In this, Trotsky applied his theory of uneven development and combined development, which also is the foundation for his theory of Permanent Revolution. Like the tsar, Stalin relied on the state to industrialize the Soviet Union at a heavy human and environmental cost. While approving Stalin's industrialization, Trotsky (1936) pointed out its high human cost but ignored its ecological cost.
Alexander Gershenkron (1966; also see Nayeri 1991/2023B, Chapter 7), a Harvard University economic historian who studies the industrialization of European countries, especially Germany and Russia, argued for his relative backwardness thesis. If the economic backwardness is not too great, backward countries not only can industrialize and modernize but surpass the countries that have already traveled this path. This uneven and combined development and late industrialization will rely on the mobilization of financial capital by the banks (Germany) or the governmental mobilization of resources (Russia). Thus, Gershenkron confirms Trotsky's argument for industrialization by the tsar and by Stalin. Some ideological props, such as nationalism or socialism, have accompanied state-led industrialization.
The revolutions of the colonies and semi-colonies were for independence, modernization, and industrialization. The vast literature on post-World War II economic development was a response to these problems. I have critically examined the most important of these theories in detail (Nayeri 1991/2023B). The socialisms of the 20th century were mainly attempts by the Stalinist parties for a "socialist" response to late development.
In conclusion, neither theories of socialism is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were adequate to the task nor the revolutions of the twentieth century were socialist in the way Marx theorized it. Anthropocentric materialism, historical materialism must be replaced with Animistic materialism and ecocentric historical materialism, and socialism with Ecocentric Socialism (Nayeri 2021; 2023A; August 23, 2023). These I hope would be the start of a conversation about these issues. The future of humanity and life on the planet depends on it.
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