PROBLEMS OF THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

Jehan van den Hoven

Published in the magazine Bilan no 28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38
Part I
The title of this study should not lead anyone to the conclusion that we're going to start
peering into the mists of the future or sketching out a solution to the many and complex tasks
which will confront the proletariat when it has become the ruling class. Such a project would
not be in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan. We will leave it to the
"technicians" and the recipe-mongers or to the self-proclaimed "orthodox" marxists to indulge
in such anticipations, to stroll down the byways of utopia, or to offer the workers formulae
which have been emptied of any class content.
For us it can never be a question of inventing panaceas which are valid once and for all and
which can be adapted to any historic situation. Marxism is an experimental method and not a
game of guesses and forecasts. It has its roots in a historic reality, which is a moving,
contradictory, process; it is nourished by past experience, tempered and corrected by the
present, so that it can be enriched by further experience to come.
By synthesising the events of history, marxism has shown the true meaning of the state, laid
bare of all idealist prejudices; it has developed the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and affirmed the necessity of the transitional proletarian state. But although it is possible to
define the class content of such a state, we are as yet still limited to a mere outline of its social
forms. It has still not been possible to situate the principles for running a proletarian state on a
solid basis, or to clearly draw the lines of demarcation between party and state. This
immaturity inevitably weighed heavily on the character and evolution of the Soviet State.
But it is precisely the task of those marxists who have survived the shipwreck of the workers'
movement to forge the theoretical weapons which will make the future proletarian state an
instrument of the world revolution and not a cog in the wheels of world capitalism.
This contribution to that theoretical task will examine:
a) the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises;
b) the necessity of the proletarian state;
c) the social and economic categories which will inevitably survive in the transitional period;
d) finally, certain requirements for a proletarian management of the transitional state.
The historical context of the proletarian revolution
It became axiomatic to say that capitalist society, overflowing with a productive capacity
which it can longer make full use of, drowning in a flood of commodities which it can't sell,
has become a historic anachronism. From this it is but a short step to conclude that the
disappearance of capitalism must open up the reign of abundance.

In reality, capitalist accumulation has reached the extreme limits of its progressive evolution
and the capitalist mode of production is nothing but a fetter on historical progress. This
doesn't mean that capitalism is like a ripe fruit which the proletariat simply has to pluck in
order to find true happiness; it simply means that the material conditions exist for constructing
the base (and only the base) of socialism, for preparing the ground for a communist society.
Marx said that: "The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the
antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour
and actual labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed
up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of
class antagonism".2 In his Anti-Duhring Engels asserted that the existence of a society
divided into classes: "was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted
development of production in former times" and from this he deduced that "if, upon this
showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given
period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production.
It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces". 3
It is clear that the final stage of capitalist development does not correspond to "the complete
development of modern productive forces" in the sense that all human needs can now be
satisfied. But what we do have today is a situation in which the persistence of class
antagonism not only stands in the way of any social development, but actually leads to the
regression of society.
This is what Engels was getting at when he said that the: "abolition of
classes...presupposes...the development of production carried out to a degree at which
appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of
culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only
superfluous, but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development".4 And,
when he added that capitalist society had reached this state and that we now had: "the
possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an
existence not only sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence
guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties"
there can be no doubt that he was envisaging the possibility of moving towards the full
satisfaction of needs and not saying that we already had the material means for immediately
achieving this.
As Engels said, the liberation of the productive forces: "is the one precondition for an
unbroken, constantly accelerating development of the productive forces, and therewith for a
practically unlimited increase of production itself".5 Consequently the period of transition
(which can only unfold on a world scale and not within one state) is a political and economic
phase which will inevitably be characterised by the inability of production to satisfy all
individual needs, even when we take into account the prodigious levels which the productivity
of labour has already achieved. The suppression of capitalist relations of production and of
their antagonistic expression makes it possible to immediately begin providing for essential
human needs (if we leave out the necessities of the class struggle which could temporarily
reduce the level of production).

To go beyond this requires an incessant development of the productive forces. The realisation
of the formula "to each according to their needs" will come at the end of a long process,
which will go forwards not in a straight line but through a winding course of contradictions
and conflicts, and in conjunction with the world-wide development of the class struggle.
The historic mission of the proletariat is, as Engels said, to lead humanity "from the kingdom
of necessity to the kingdom of freedom"; but the proletariat can only carry out this mission if it
analyses the nature and limits of the historic conditions in which this act of liberation takes
place, and applies this analysis to the whole of its political and economic activity. The
proletariat cannot abstractly pose socialism against capitalism, as though they were two
entirely independent epochs, as though socialism was not the historic prolongation of
capitalism and fatally scarred by it, but something clean and new which springs form the
virgin womb of the proletarian revolution.
It wasn't because of indifference or negligence that the founders of marxism didn't go into the
details of the period of transition. But Marx and Engels were the antithesis, the living
negation, of the utopians. They didn't try to construct abstract schema, to imagine things
which could only be resolved scientifically.
And in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg, who made an immense theoretical contribution to marxism,
still felt it necessary to point out that: "For from being a sum of ready made prescriptions
which only have to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social
and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the
future...(socialism) has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force against property,
etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot".6
In his preface to Capital Marx had already indicated that: "When a society has discovered the
natural laws which regulate it own movement (and the final purpose of my book is to reveal
the economic laws of motion of modern society), it can neither overleap the natural phases of
evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees. But this much, at least, it can do; it
can shorten and lesson the birth pangs."
A policy of proletarian management, therefore, can only envisage the general tendencies and
orientation of economic development, while historic experience (of which the Russian
revolution is a gigantic though incomplete example) can provide the proletariat with an
understanding of the social forms suitable for the implementation of its economic programme.
This programme will only have a socialist content if it follows a way which is diametrically
opposed to capitalism - if it aims at a constant and progressive elevation of the living
conditions of the masses, and not at holding them down or lowering them.
***
If we want to understand the revolution not as an isolated phenomenon but as a product of an
historical development, we must relate it to the fundamental laws of history - to the dialectical
movement generated by the class struggle, which is the living substance of historical events.
Marxism teaches us that the causes of revolutions are not to be found in philosophy, but in the economy of a given society. The gradual changes that occur in the mode of
production and exchange, spurred on by the class struggle, inevitably culminate in a

revolutionary "catastrophe" which tears through the envelope of the existing social and
productive relations.
In this respect the 20th century is for capitalist society what the 18th and 19th centuries were
for feudal society - an epoch of violent revolutionary convulsions engulfing the whole of
society.
In the epoch of bourgeois decadence, then, proletarian revolutions are the product of the
historical maturity of society as a whole, links in a chain of events which, as history since
1914 has shown, can easily alternate with defeats of the proletariat and wars.
The victory of one proletariat, although the immediate result of particular circumstances, is
definitely part of a whole: the world revolution. For this reason there can be no question of
assigning an autonomous development to this revolution because of any social or
geographical peculiarities.
Here we come up against the problem underlying the theoretical controversy which led
Russian centrism (and subsequently the Communist International) to put forward the theory of
"socialism in one country". We are referring to the interpretation of the unequal development
which has been a constant factor in historical evolution.
Marx observed that economic life was in some ways analogous to biological processes. Once
life has transcended a given period of development and gone from one stage to the next, it
begins to obey other laws, even though it is still dependent on the fundamental laws which
regulate all manifestations of life.
It's the same for each historical period, which has its own laws, even though history as a
whole is regulated by the laws of dialectical evolution. For example, Marx denied that the law
of population was the same in all times and all places. Each stage of development has its own
particular law of population and Marx pointed this out when refuting the theory of Malthus.
In Capital, in which he dissected the mechanisms of the capitalist system, Marx didn't dwell
on the many uneven aspects of its expansion, because for him: "What we are concerned with
primarily is, not the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms which
arise out of the natural laws of capitalist production, but these laws in themselves, the
tendencies which work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal. A country in
which industrial development is more advanced than in other simply presents those others
with a picture of their own future".7 From this passage we can see clearly that what has to be
considered as the fundamental element is not the uneven development of the different
countries which make up the capitalist system - as though there was some kind of law
ensuring the historical necessity of uneven development - but rather the specific laws of
capitalist production, which regulate the whole of society and which are themselves
subordinated to the general laws of dialectical evolution.
The geographical milieu explains why the historical evolution and the specific laws of a
society manifest themselves in varied and uneven forms of development, but it cannot explain
the historical process itself. In other words, the geographical milieu is not the active factor in
history.

Marx pointed out that while capitalist production is favoured by a moderate climate, this is
merely a potential factor which can only be made use of in historical conditions which are
independent of geographical conditions. "It by no means follows that the most fruitful soil is
the most fitted for the growth of the capitalist mode of production. This mode is based on the
dominion of man over Nature...It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the
temperate zone, that is the mother country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil but
the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons,
which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the
natural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capacities, his
means and modes of labour".8
The geographical milieu is thus not the primordial element which determines the way
different countries will develop. If we locate this development in the sphere of geographical
conditions, and not in the context of the general historical laws of a whole epoch, then we
would have to come to the conclusion that each country has developed in an autonomous
manner, independent of any historical context.
But history has only unfolded because of the intervention of men acting (with the exception of
primitive communism) within a framework of antagonistic social relations, which have varied
according to the historical epoch and which have imposed a particular form on the class
struggle: slave against master, serf against landlord, bourgeois against feudal lord, proletariat
against bourgeois.
Obviously this doesn't mean that various pre-capitalist social formations - Asiatic, slave,
feudal - always succeed each other in a mechanical way and that their specific laws have a
universal validity. Such a pattern of evolution was ruled out by the fact that these social
formations were all based on modes of production which by nature were very progressive.
Each of these societies was unable to expand beyond a certain geographical radius (e.g. the
Mediterranean basin in classical antiquity), while outside this radius other modes of
production could exist, in a more or less evolved manner, and under the influence of various
factors, of which the geographical factor was not the most essential.
But, with the arrival of capitalism, the whole course of history broadens out. Although
capitalism inherited a historic situation characterised by considerable differences in
development, it did not take it long to overcome these differences.
Dominated by the need to accumulate surplus value, capitalism appeared on the historical
arena as the most powerful and progressive mode of production ever seen, the most expansive
of all economic systems. But although it was characterised by a tendency to universalise its
mode of production and although it partially succeeded in creating a world in its own image, it
never completely destroyed all previous social formations. Rather it annexed them, sucked
them dry, or pushed them aside.
We have already expressed our opinion (see "Crises and cycles") on the perspective of the
advent of a pure and balanced capitalist society, which Marx is supposed to have put forward;
we don't want to go back over this here, since the facts of history have eloquently refuted not
Marx's pseudo-predictions, but the hypotheses of those who have used it to reinforce
bourgeois ideology. We know that capitalism entered into its epoch of decomposition before
being able to complete its historic mission because its internal contradictions developed faster

than the system could expand. But capitalism was still the first system of production to give
rise to a world economy, which is characterised not by homogeneity and balance, which
would in any case be contrary to its nature, but by a strict interdependence of all its parts. It is
this which, in the final analysis, subjugates the whole world to the laws of capital and to the
yoke of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The development of capitalist society, spurred on by competition, has produced this complex
and remarkable worldwide division of labour which can and must be perfected and purified
(this is the task of the proletariat) but which cannot be destroyed. It is not called into question
at all by the phenomenon of economic nationalism, which, with the general crisis of
capitalism, appears as a reactionary manifestation of the exacerbated contradiction between
the universal character of the capitalist economy and this division into antagonist national
states. In fact, this is further confirmed by the stifling atmosphere created by the existence of
what might be called obsidian economies. Under the cover of an almost hermetically sealed
protectionism, we are seeing a prolific growth of industries built up on the basis of enormous
waste expenditure, the development of war economies which exact a heavy tribute from the
living conditions of the masses. These are economically unviable, parasitic growths which
will be eliminated in a socialist society.
A socialist society is obviously inconceivable without this global division of labour.
The interdependence and reciprocal subordination of the various spheres of production (which
is today confined within the framework of bourgeois nations) is a historic necessity, and
capitalism has taken this to the highest possible level, both from the economic and political
point of view. The fact that, once this social structure appears on a world scale, it is shaken by
a thousand contradictory forces, does not mean that it doesn't exist on this scale. It is based on
a distribution of the productive forces and of natural resources which is the product of the
whole historical development. It is not at all dependent on the desire of imperialist capitalism
to counter-act the strict interdependence of all the regions of the world by retreating behind
national frontiers. If capitalism is attempting this mad project today, it is because it is being
driven by its own contradictions, but it can only do this by destroying the riches which
concretise the surplus value produced by generations of workers, by precipitating a gigantic
destruction of the productive forces into the holocaust of imperialist war.
The international proletariat cannot afford to ignore the laws of historical evolution. Once a
section of the proletariat has made its revolution, the price of the theory of "socialism in one
country" is the abandonment of the worldwide class struggle, and thus the defeat of that
revolution.
***
The idea that uneven development is a historical law giving rise to the necessity of
autonomous national development is a denial of the concept of society as a worldwide
phenomenon.
As we have shown, uneven economic and political development, far from being an "absolute
law of capitalism",9 is simply a sum of phenomena determined by the specific laws of the
bourgeois system of production.

In its period of expansion, capitalism, through a tortuous and contradictory process, tended to
even out inequalities of development, whereas now, in its regressive phase, the necessities of
its evolution have led to a deepening of these inequalities: the advanced capitalisms suck the
backward countries dry and destroy any possibility of their development.
The Communist International sees this retrograde and parasitical development, and concludes
that "uneven development is augmented and accentuated even further in the imperialist
epoch"; it thus puts forward its theory of "national socialism", by pointing out the
impossibility of a world proletarian revolution as a simultaneous act, and confusing national
socialism and a revolution which breaks out in a national framework.
In order to back up these arguments, it elaborates on certain of Lenin's writings, notably his
article of 1915 "On the Slogan for the United States of Europe" (Against the Stream) where he
said that "Uneven economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism.
Hence it follows that the triumph of socialism is to begin with possible in a few, or even a
single capitalist country."10
Trotsky has dealt quite adequately with these falsifications in The Third International After
Lenin and we don't need to refute them again here.
But all the same, Trotsky, seeking to follow Marx and Lenin, thinks that it is possible to use
the "law" of uneven development - which he also makes into an absolute law of capitalism to explain both the inevitability of the revolution assuming a national form and also why it
should first break out in the backward countries: "The uneven, sporadic development of
capitalism gives the socialist revolution an uneven and sporadic character, but the advanced
degree of mutual interdependence between all countries means that it is both politically and
economically impossible to build socialism in one country"11 and again that: "the prediction
that Russia, a historically backward country, could undergo a proletarian revolution before
an advanced country like England, was based entirely on the law of uneven development."
First of all, although Marx recognised the necessity of national revolutions, he never invoked
a law of uneven development, and he always made it clear that the necessity for national
revolutions derived from the fact that society was divided into capitalist nations, which was
simply the corollary of the fact that it was divided into classes.
The Communist Manifesto says that: "Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it
is, so far, national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word."12 In the Critique of the
Gotha Programme Marx goes on say: "It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at
all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the
immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not in substance, but as
the Communist Manifesto says in form'."13
When the national struggle breaks out into a proletarian revolution, it shows that it is the
product of the historical maturation of the social and economic contradictions of capitalist
society as a whole. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a point of departure, not the final
goal. It is an expression of the worldwide class struggle, and can only live by remaining part
of that struggle. Only in the sense of this continuous revolutionary process can we talk about a
"permanent" revolution.

Although Trotsky absolutely rejects the theory of "socialism in one country" and considers it
to be reactionary, the fact that he bases his argument on the "law" of uneven development
leads him to distort the significance of proletarian revolutions. This "law" is incorporated into
his theory of permanent revolution which, according to him, consists of two basic theses: one
based on a "correct" conception of the law of uneven development, the other on a precise
understanding of the world economy.
If, during the imperialist epoch the various expressions of uneven development are the result
not of the specific laws of capitalism (whose effects are intensified by the general crisis of
decomposition) but of a historical law of uneven development which has the character of
necessity, it is impossible to understand why the effects of this law should limit themselves to
national revolutions which begin in the backward countries. Why shouldn't they also permit
the development of autonomous economies, i.e. of "national socialism"?
By ascribing a preponderant importance to the geographical milieu (because this is what
happens when you make uneven development into a law) rather than to the real historical
factor - the class struggle - you are opening the door to a justification of a "socialism" based
on the physical possibilities of independent development. As far as Russia is concerned, this
means opening the door to centrism.
In vain Trotsky accuses Stalin of "making a fetish of the law of uneven development and
declaring it as a sufficient condition for the build up of national socialism" because,
beginning from the same theoretical premise, he must logically come to the same conclusions,
unless he arbitrarily stops half way. Trotsky said of the Russian Revolution that: "it was the
greatest of all expressions of the unevenness of historical development; the theory of the
permanent revolution, which predicted the October cataclysm, was itself based on this law."
The backwardness of Russia can to a certain extent be used to explain why the revolution had
to jump over the bourgeois phase, although the essential reason for this was that it took place
in a period when the national bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. But
the real significance of this backwardness was expressed on the political level, because the
historic impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie was accompanied by an organic weakness
which was aggravated by the pressures of imperialist conflict. In the chaos of the imperialist
war, Russia was revealed as the weak link in the imperialist chain. The world revolution
began in the place where conditions were favourable for the proletariat and the building of its
class party.
***
To conclude the first part of this study, we would like to look at the theory of countries being
"ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, a theory which is especially favoured by the "evolutionary
socialists" but which has found some echo in the thought of the communists of the opposition
when it comes to defining the character of the Russian Revolution or seeking the origins of its
degeneration.
In his preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx summed up his position on what it
meant to say that a phase of social revolution had arrived at a level of maturity: "No social
formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been
developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the
material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer
examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions
for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."14 This means that
the condition of maturity will always have its repercussions on the whole society regulated by
the dominant mode of production. Moreover, the notion of maturity can only have a relative,
not an absolute, meaning. A society is "ripe" to the extent that its social structure and juridical
framework have become too narrow in relation to the material forces of production which it
has developed.
At the beginning of this study we underlined the fact that although capitalism has powerfully
developed the productive capacity of society, it has not succeeded in developing the
conditions for an immediate passage to socialism. As Marx indicated, only the material
conditions for resolving this problem exist "or are at least in the process of formation".
These restrictions apply even more strongly to each national unit in the world economy. All of
them are historically ripe for socialism, but none of them are ripe in the sense of possessing all
the material conditions needed for the building of an integral socialism. This is true whatever
level of development they may have reached.
No nation on its own contains all the elements for a socialist society. The idea of national
socialism is in diametrical opposition to the international nature of the imperialist economy, to
the universal division of labour, and the global antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat.
It is a pure abstraction to see socialist society as a sum of complete socialist economies. The
world-wide distribution of the productive forces (which is not an artificial product) makes it
impossible both for the "advanced" countries and for the "backward" countries to complete
the transition to socialism within their own borders. . The specific weight of each of the
countries in the world economy is measured by the degree to which they are reciprocally
dependent, not by how independent they might be. England, which is one of the most
advanced sectors of capitalism, a country in which capitalism exists in an almost pure form,
could not operate in isolation. Facts today show that, even when only partially cut off from
the
world market, the productive forces begin to break down. This is the case with the cotton and
coal industries in England. In the U.S.A, the automobile industry can only go into decline if it
is limited to the home market, no matter how vast the latter is. An isolated proletarian
Germany would soon see its industrial apparatus breaking down, even if it initiated a huge
expansion of consumption.
It is thus an abstraction to pose the question of countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for
socialism, because on these terms you would have to say that neither the advanced countries
nor the backward countries were mature enough.
The problem has to be posed in the light of the historical maturation of social antagonisms,
which in turn results from the sharpening conflicts between the productive forces and the
relations of production. To limit the question to the material factors at hand would be to take
up the position of the theoreticians of the Second International, of Kautsky and the German
Socialists, who considered that because Russia was a backward economy dominated by a
technically weak agrarian sector, it was not ripe for a proletarian revolution, but only for a

bourgeois revolution. In this their conception was the same as that of the Russian Mensheviks.
Otto Bauer declared that the proletarian state inevitably had to degenerate because of Russia's
backwardness.
In the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg remarked that, according to the conception of the
social democrats, the Russian revolution ought to have stopped after the fall of the Tsarism.
"According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the
dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian
labour movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its
further course, and all disorders it has suffered, are pictured as purely a result of this fateful
error."
The question as to whether Russia was or was not ripe for the proletarian revolution can't be
answered by looking at the material conditions of its economy, but at the balance of class
forces, which had been dramatically transformed by the international situation. The essential
condition was the existence of a concentrated proletariat - despite the fact that it was a tiny
minority in relation to the huge mass of peasant producers - whose consciousness expressed
itself through a class party powerfully armed with revolutionary ideology and experience. We
agree with Rosa Luxemburg that: "The Russian proletariat has to be seen as the vanguard of
the world proletariat, a vanguard whose movement is the expression of the development of
social antagonisms on a world scale. What is happening in St Petersburg is the result of
developments in Germany, England, and France. It is these developments which will decide
the outcome of the Russian revolution, which can only achieve its goal if it is the prologue to
the revolution of the European proletariat." Certain comrades of the communist opposition
have however, based their appreciation of the Russian revolution on the criterion of economic
"immaturity".
In his study "Classes in Soviet Russia", comrade Hennaut takes up this position. In his
interpretation of those statements of Engels which we looked at earlier, Hennaut sees them as
having a particular significance which can be applied to a given country, rather than as
referring to a whole social order that has reached the historic limitations of its development. If
this were the case, Engels would obviously be contradicting what Marx said in his preface to
the Critique of Political Economy. But as we shall see, this is not the case. According to
Hennaut, it is the economic factor and not the political factor which is most important when
we are trying to establish whether or not a proletarian revolution is possible. He says: "if we
apply them to the present period of human history, these considerations (of Engels) can only
mean that the seizure of power by the proletariat, the maintenance and use of this power for
socialist ends, is only conceivable where capitalism has already cleared the path for
socialism, i.e. where it has given rise to a numerically strong proletariat which comprises, if
not the majority, then a powerful minority of the population, and where it has created a
developed industry which is able to stamp its seal on the further development of the whole
economy." Further on, he stresses that: "In the final analysis it was the cultural and economic
capacities of the country which determined the final outcome of the Russian revolution when
it became clear that the proletariat outside Russia wasn't ready to make the revolution. The
backward state of Russian society had to make all its negative sides felt." But perhaps
comrade Hennaut might have added that, whether we like it or not, any proletarian revolution
that tries to draw its "legitimacy" from the material conditions in one country will be drawn
irresistibly into the trap of "national socialism".

We repeat that the fundamental condition for the life of the proletarian revolution is its ability
to link up on a world scale, and this consideration must determine the internal and external
policies of the proletarian state. This is because, although the revolution has to begin on a
national scale, it cannot remain indefinitely at that level, however large and wealthy that
nation might be. Unless it links up with other national revolutions and becomes a world
revolution it will be asphyxiated and will degenerate. This is why we consider it an error to
base one's arguments on the national conditions of one country.
On the basis of these political considerations we can arrive at an understanding of the "leap"
the Russian revolution made over the various intermediary phases. The October revolution
showed that in the epoch of imperialist decadence the proletariat cannot stop at the bourgeois
phase of development, but must go beyond it by taking the place of a bourgeoisie incapable of
carrying out its historic tasks. In order to attain this objective, the Bolsheviks did not spend
their time drawing up an inventory of the productive forces at their disposal, but based their
activity on an evaluation of the balance of class forces.
Again, this leap was not conditioned by economic factors, but by political ones, since the only
way the Russian revolution could give rise to a material development of the economy was by
linking up with the world revolution. The "immaturity" of the backward countries - which
makes such "leaps" necessary - as well as the "maturity" of the advanced countries, must all
be incorporated into the same process of the world-wide class struggle.
Lenin gave a clear answer to those who reproached the Bolsheviks for having taken power. "It
would an irreparable error to say that, because there is an obvious imbalance between our
economic strength and out political strength, we shouldn't have taken power! To argue in
such a way you have to be blind, you have to forget that such a balance will never exist and
can't exist in any process of social revolution, and that it is only through a whole number of
experiences, each one of which will be incomplete and marred by a certain imbalance, that
the triumph of socialism can be realised by the revolutionary co-operation of the workers of
all countries."
No matter how "poor" a proletariat might be it does not have to wait for the "richer"
proletariats to make its own revolution. The fact that such a revolution might encounter many
more difficulties than would confront a stronger proletariat is undeniable, but history doesn't
offer other alternatives.
The historic epoch of bourgeois revolutions led by the bourgeoisie is over. The survival of
capitalism has become an obstacle to progress, and thus also to the development of the
bourgeois revolution, since we are now faced with a saturated world market. Moreover, the
bourgeoisie can no longer win the support of the working masses like it did in 1789; even as
early as 1848, 1871, and 1905 in Russia, it was unable to do this.
The October revolution was a striking example of one of these apparent historical paradoxes;
it showed a proletariat completing a short-lived bourgeois revolution but then compelled to
realise its own objectives in order to avoid being strangled by imperialism.
The Russian bourgeoisie had been weakened from birth by western capital's domination of the
economy. The price of keeping Tsarism going was that a considerable portion of the national
revenue was soaked off by foreign capital, and this was an obstacle to the economic
development of the Russian bourgeoisie.

1905 was an attempted bourgeois revolution marked by the absence of the bourgeoisie. A
highly concentrated proletariat already appeared on the scene as an independent revolutionary
force; this forced the politically impotent liberal bourgeoisie into the arms of the feudal
autocracy. But the bourgeois revolution of 1905 couldn't end in a victory for the proletariat,
because although it was a product of the convulsions caused by the Russo-Japanese war, it
wasn't accompanied by a maturation of social antagonisms on an international scale. Thus
Tsarism was able to receive financial and material aid from the whole European bourgeoisie.
As Rosa Luxemburg said, "The Revolution of 1905-1907 roused only a faint echo in Europe.
Therefore, it had to remain a mere opening chapter. Continuation and conclusion were tied
up with the further development of Europe".15 The revolution of 1917 arose in a more
developed historical situation. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Lenin traced its successive phases: "First, with the whole' of the peasantry against the
monarchy, against the landlords, against medievalism (and to that extent, the revolution
remains bourgeois, bourgeois democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semiproletarians, with all the exploited against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the
profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an
artificial Chinese Wall between the first and the second, to separate them by anything else
than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor
peasants, means monstrously to distort Marxism, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its
place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist
proletariat by means
of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie as compared
with medievalism."16
The dictatorship of the proletariat was the instrument which made it possible first to complete
the bourgeois revolution, then go beyond it. This is the explanation behind the Bolshevik
slogan "land to the peasants", which - mistakenly, in our opinion - was opposed by Rosa
Luxemburg.
With Lenin, we say that: "...the Bolsheviks...strictly differentiated between the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, and the socialist revolution: by carrying the former to its end, they
opened the door for the transition to this latter. This was the only policy that was
revolutionary and Marxian".17
(Bilan no. 28, March-April 1936)
1 Collected Works, Vol.21.
2 The Poverty of Philosophy. Collected Works, Vol. 6.
3 Collected Works, Vol.25.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 The Russian Revolution

7 Preface to the first German edition of Capital.

8 Capital vol. 1, Part V, Chapter XVI "Absolute and relative surplus value".
9 Programme of the 6th Congress of the CI.
10 Collected Works, Vol. 21.
11 The Third International after Lenin.
12 Collected Works, Vol. 6.
13 Collected Works, Vol. 24.
14 Collected Works, Vol.29.
15 The Russian Revolution.
16 Collected Works, Vol. 28.
17 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Part II
In our introductory study, we tried to show that there is not and cannot be a direct
simultaneity between the historic maturity of the proletarian revolution and its material and
cultural maturity. We are living in the epoch of proletarian revolution because social progress
can now only take place after the disappearance of the very class antagonisms which, in what
we might call the prehistory of the human race, have been the motor-force of all progress until
now.
But the collective appropriation of the wealth developed by bourgeois society simply does
away with the contradiction between the social form of the productive forces and their private
appropriation. It is simply the sine qua non for the further development of society. In itself
it doesnt lead automatically to a higher stage of development. In itself it doesnt contain all
the constructive solutions of socialism, nor does it immediately wipe out all forms of social
inequality.
The collectivisation of the means of production and exchange is not socialism - it is a point of
departure, a fundamental precondition for socialism. It is still only a juridical solution to
social contradictions and doesnt eliminate all the material and spiritual deficiencies that the
proletariat will inherit from capitalism. In a sense history will surprise the proletariat and
force it to carry out its mission in an unprepared state which no amount of revolutionary
idealism and dynamism can immediately transform into an ability to resolve all the
formidable and complex problems the revolution will pose. Both before and after the conquest
of power, the proletariat will have to make up for the historical immaturity of its
consciousness by relying on its party, which will remain its guide and educator in the period
of transition from capitalism to communism. At the same time the proletariat will only be able
to overcome the temporary insufficiency of the productive forces bequeathed to it by
capitalism by having recourse to a state, to an:

evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose
worse sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off
at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social
conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.[1]
The necessity to tolerate a state during the transition period between capitalism and
communism derives from the specific character of this period, which Marx defined in his
Critique of the Gotha Programme:
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own
foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in
every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of
the old society from whose womb it emerges (our emphasis).[2]
Later on we will examine these birth marks when we analyse the economic and social
categories which the proletariat will inherit from capitalism and which are going to have to
wither away alongside the proletarian state.
It would obviously be a mistake to cover up the mortal danger which the survival of this
instrument of servitude, this state, will pose to the proletarian revolution, even though its a
workers state. But to conclude that the revolution is bound to degenerate simply because this
state will exist would be to ignore the dialectic of history and to abandon the revolution itself.
Similarly, to delay the unleashing of the revolution until the masses have fully acquired the
capacity to wield power would be to run away from the reality of the historical problem, to
negate the necessity of the transitional state and of the party. This idea is the logical
accompaniment to the notion of basing the revolution on the maturity of material
conditions, which we examined in the first part of this study.
Later on we will consider the problem of the ability of the proletarian masses to run the state
and the economy.
The state: instrument of the ruling class
While the victorious proletariat will be forced by historical conditions to tolerate a state
during a more or less prolonged period, it is important that it understands what kind of state
this will be.
The marxist method allows us on the one hand to uncover the meaning of the state in class
society, to define its nature; and, on the other hand, by analysing the revolutionary
experiences of the proletariat last century, to determine what attitude the proletariat must have
with regard to the bourgeois state.
Marx and above all Engels succeeded in ridding the idea of the state of all idealist
excrescences. Laying bare the real nature of the state, they showed that it was nothing but an
instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class of a given society; that its only
function was to safeguard the economic and political privileges of this class: through coercion
and violence, its role was to impose the juridical rules which corresponded to the forms of
property and mode of production upon which these privileges were based. They also showed
that the state was the expression of the domination of the majority of the population by a

minority. The backbone of the state, the concrete expression of the fact that society was
divided into classes, was its armed force and coercive organs, which were placed above and
against the mass of the people, and which prevented the oppressed class from maintaining its
own spontaneous forms of armed defence. The ruling class could never tolerate the
existence of an armed force of the people alongside its own instruments of repression.
To take just one example from the history of bourgeois society: in France the revolution of
February 1848 armed the workers who were now a power in the state (Engels). The
bourgeoisie had but one concern: to disarm the workers. So it provoked them by liquidating
the national workshops and crushed them during the June uprising. Again in France, after
September 1870, a national guard mainly composed of workers was formed to defend the
country.
almost at once the antagonism between the almost completely bourgeois government and
the armed proletariat broke into open conflictTo arm Paris was to arm the revolution.
Thierswas compelled to realise that the supremacy of the propertied classes was in constant
danger so long as the workers of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was to
attempt to disarm them.[3]
Thus came March 18th and the Commune.
But once it had penetrated the secret of the bourgeois state (whether monarchical or
republican, authoritarian or democratic) the proletariat still had to clarify its own policy
towards this state. The experimental method of marxism gave it the means to do this.
At the time of the Communist Manifesto Marx clearly recognised the necessity for the
proletariat to conquer political power, to organise itself as the ruling class, but he was less
clear about the fact that the proletariat had to create its own state. He had already foreseen that
all forms of state would disappear when classes had been abolished, but this remained a
general and somewhat abstract formulation. The French experience of 1848-51 provided
Marx with the historical evidence which allowed him more firmly to grasp the idea of the
destruction of the bourgeois state, but it did not enable him to trace the contours of the
proletarian state which would arise in its place. The proletariat had appeared on the scene as
the first revolutionary class in history destined to annihilate the increasingly centralised police
and bureaucratic machine, which all exploiting classes had used to crush the exploited masses.
In his 18th Brumaire Marx stressed that up till now all revolutions perfected this machine
instead of smashing it.[4] The centralised power goes back to the absolute monarchy; the
rising bourgeoisie used it to struggle against feudalism; the French revolution simply rid it of
its feudal vestiges, and the First Empire completed the formation of the modern state. A
developed bourgeois society transformed the central power into a machine for oppressing the
proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx explained why all previous revolutionary
classes had conquered the state instead of destroying it: the means of production and of
exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built up, were generated in feudal society.[5]
Having gradually conquered economic power, the bourgeoisie had no need to destroy a
political organ in which it had already installed itself. It didnt have to do away with the
bureaucracy, the police, or the armed forces, but simply to subordinate these instruments of
oppression to its own interests, because its political revolution was only a juridical
replacement of one form of exploitation by another.

Proletarian state and bourgeois state

In contrast to this the proletariat is a class which expresses the interests of humanity rather
than any particular interest; it cannot therefore embed itself in a state based on exploitation.
The proletarianshave nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to
destroy all previous securities for, and insurance of, individual property.[6]
Despite its limitations, the Paris Commune was the first historical response to the question of
the difference between the proletarian state and the bourgeois state. The rule of the majority
over a minority deprived of its privileges eliminated the need for a specialised bureaucratic
and military machine in the service of particular interests. The proletariat replaced this
machine with its own armament - to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie - and a political
form which allowed it to progressively assume the task of managing society In this sense the
Communewas no longer a state in the proper sense of the word (Engels). Lenin stressed
the fact that the Commune had the gigantic achievement of replacing certain institutions by
institutions in principle essentially different.
Nevertheless, the proletarian state still has the essential character of all states. It is still an
organ of coercion and, although it ensures the rule of the majority over a minority, it can still
only express the temporary impossibility of doing away with bourgeois right. In Lenins
phrase it is a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie, and unless it is constantly subjected to
the direct control of the proletariat and its party it will always tend to turn against the class.
***
The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, already developed in the Manifesto but
finding a historical elaboration in the Commune of 1871, juxtaposed the idea of the
destruction of the bourgeois state with that of the withering away of the proletarian state.
With Marx, the idea of the final disappearance of the state can be found in embryonic form in
The Poverty of Philosophy; it was mainly developed by Engels in The Origins of the Family
and Anti-Duhring, while later on Lenin commented on the problem brilliantly in his State and
Revolution. The fundamental distinction between the destruction of the bourgeois state and
the dying away of the proletarian state was rigorously drawn by Lenin and we dont have to
go into it here, especially because our previous considerations have dealt with any doubt
about this question.
What we must keep in mind is that the hypothesis of the withering away of the state is bound
to become the touchstone of the content of proletarian revolutions. We have already indicated
that the revolution breaks out in a historical milieu which obliges the proletariat to tolerate the
existence of a state. But this can only be: a state in the process of withering away, that is, a
state so constituted that it begins to wither away from the start and cannot but wither away
(Lenin).
The great achievement of marxism is to have shown irrefutably that the state has never been
an autonomous factor in history, but is simply the product of a society divided into classes;
the existence of classes preceded the state, and the latter will disappear when classes
themselves disappear. After the dissolution of primitive communism the state has always
existed in a more or less developed form, since it is inevitably superimposed on any form of
exploitation of man by man; but at the same time it will inevitably die out at the end of a
period of historical evolution which will make all oppression and constraint superfluous, since

bourgeois right will have been eliminated and, in Saint-Simons phrase, politics will be
entirely reabsorbed into the economy.
But marxist science has still not elaborated a solution to the problem of how exactly the state
will wither away, a problem which is directly linked to the question of the relationship
between the proletariat and its state.
The Commune was the first attempt to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat and was an
experience of enormous importance, but it couldnt avoid defeat and confusion, because, on
the one hand, it took place in a period of historical immaturity; and, on the other hand,
because it lacked the theoretical guide, the party. It can thus provide us only with a vague
outline of the relationship between the state and the proletariat.
In 1875, in the Critique of the Gotha Progamme Marx was still posing the question: what
transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? [Marx is talking
about the period of transition here - ed. Note] In other words, what social formation will
remain in existence there that are analogous to the present functions of the state. This
question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the
problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state (our
emphasis - ed. note).[7] For Marx, the Commune was: a thoroughly expansive political form,
while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressiveit was the
political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of
labour.[8]
The Commune simply provided a framework for solving the fundamental problem of the
education of the masses, who had the task of progressively freeing themselves from the
burden of the state and ensuring that the state would finally disappear with the creation of a
classless society. In this sense, the Commune was a signpost on the road to emancipation. It
showed that although the proletariat could not immediately do away with the system of
delegation, it had to: safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring
them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. And, for Marx: Nothing could
be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage [in the
election of deputies - ed. note] by hierarchic investiture.[9]
The theoretical elaboration of the problem had to stay at this point. Forty years later, Lenin
was unable to go any further in this sphere. In State and Revolution he was limited to a few
summary and even banal formulae which emphasised the necessity to: transform the
functions of the state into functions of control and checking that are so simple that they can be
carried out by the enormous majority of the population and little by little by the entire
population.[10]
Like Engels, he was limited to the assertion that the state would disappear in an era of real
freedom, as would democracy, which would have lost all social meaning. As for the exact
process whereby all the habits of servitude left over from capitalism would be eliminated,
Lenin said that: the question of the concrete way in which the state will die out remains an
open one, since we dont have the historical data that would allow us to settle it.[11]
Thus the problem of the management of a proletarian state and economy in the interests of the
international revolution remained unsolved. In October 1917, when the Russian proletariat
embarked upon the most crucial of historical experiences, the class found that it lacked the

political principles to define the relationship between the state and proletariat. The Bolsheviks
inevitably suffered from the crushing weight of this theoretical deficiency.
The power of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition
Taking a step back and looking at the Russian experience, it seems probable that if the
Bolsheviks and the International had been able to acquire a clear vision of this fundamental
question, the reflux of the revolution in the West, despite being a considerable obstacle to the
October revolution, would not have altered the latters internationalist character and provoked
it to break with the world proletariat by straying into the impasse of socialism in one
country.
But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider
the Soviet state as an evil inherited by the proletariat whose worst sides the victorious
proletariatcannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible, but as an organism which
could be completely identified with the proletarian dictatorship, i.e. with the party.
The result of this important modification was that the foundation of the dictatorship of the
proletariat was no longer to be the party, but the state; and through the ensuing reversal of
roles the latter found itself in a course of development which led not to the withering away of
the state but to the reinforcement of its coercive and repressive powers. Once an instrument of
the world revolution, the proletarian state was inevitably converted into a weapon of the
global counter-revolution.
Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to
counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the
Russian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the
proletariat, sterilised them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution
devoured its own substance.
Even in Lenins thought, the idea of the dictatorship of the state began to predominate. At
the end of 1918, in his polemic against Kautsky, (The Proletarian Revolution and the
Renegade Kautsky[12]) he was unable to distinguish between two conflicting concepts: the
state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He replied resoundingly to Kautsky on the
definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on its basic class meaning (all power to the
soviets), but he made a connection between the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state and
crush the ruling class and the idea of transforming the proletariats organisations into state
organs. Its true, however, that this position wasnt an absolute for Lenin, since he was
referring to the period of civil war, of the overthrow of bourgeois rule, during which time the
main function of the Soviets was to be instruments of oppression against the bourgeoisie and
its state apparatus.
The enormous difficulty in finding the right answer to the question of the relationship
between the state and the proletariat, a question which Lenin was unable to resolve, derives
from this dual, contradictory necessity: the need, on the one hand, to retain the state, an organ
of economic and political coercion controlled by the proletariat (and thus by the party), while
at the same time ensuring a greater and greater participation of the masses in the running and
administration of the proletarian social order, even though this participation can for a whole
period only take place through state organs, which by their very nature tend to lead to
corruption.

The experience of the Russian revolution shows just how difficult it is to produce a social
climate which will allow the maximum development of the activity and culture of the masses.
The controversy about democracy and dictatorship centres round this problem, whose solution
is crucial to the success of future proletarian revolutions. Here we should emphasize the fact
that despite Lenin and Luxemburgs differences about proletarian democracy, they showed
a common pre-occupation - the desire to create the conditions for an incessant expansion of
the capacities of the masses. But for Lenin the concept of democracy, even proletarian
democracy, always implies the oppression of one class by another - whether it is the rule of
the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, or the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.
And as we have said democracy will disappear with the abolition of classes and the state,
i.e. when the concept of freedom becomes a reality.
Against Lenins idea of a discriminatory democracy, Luxemburg (in the Russian
Revolution) defended the idea of unlimited democracy, which for her was a precondition
for: the unobstructed participation of the popular masses in the dictatorship of the
proletariat.[13] This could only be realised through the total exercise of democratic
freedoms: unlimited freedom of the press, full political freedom, parliamentarism (even
though later on, in the Spartacus programme, the future of parliamentarism was subordinated
to the needs of the revolution).
Luxemburgs overriding concern not to see the organs of the state machine getting in the way
of the political life of the proletariat and its active participation in the tasks of the dictatorship
prevented her from grasping the fundamental role of the party, since she ended up opposing
the dictatorship of the class to the dictatorship of the party. However, she had the tremendous
achievement of showing the difference in social context between the rule of the bourgeoisie
and the rule of the proletariat, as Marx had done for the Commune: the class rule of the
bourgeoisie has no need for the political instruction and education of the mass of the people,
or at least for no more than an extremely limited amount; but for the dictatorship of the
proletariat, it is the vital element, the oxygen without which it cannot live.[14]
In the programme of Spartacus, she dealt with the crucial problem of the education of the
masses (which has to be solved by the party), saying that: history is not going to make our
revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions. In those revolutions it sufficed to
overthrow that official power at the centre and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority.
But we have to work from beneath.[15]
The inability of the Bolsheviks to maintain the state in the service of the revolution
Caught up in the contradictory process of the Russian revolution, Lenin nevertheless
continued to emphasize the need to pose a proletarian corrective: organs of workers
control, against the corrupting tendencies of the transitional state.
In his report to the Congress of Soviets in April 1918, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet
Government, he underlined the necessity to constantly supervise the functioning of the
Soviets and the Soviet power:
There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into
parliamentarians, or else into bureaucrats. We must combat this by drawing all members of
the Soviets into the practical work of administration.[16]

In order to achieve this Lenin said it was necessary:

to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, and all steps that
are taken in this direction -the more varied they are, the better - should be carefully recorded,
studied, systematised, tested by wider experience and embodied in law. Our aim is to ensure
that every toiler, having finished his eight hours task in productive labour, shall perform
state duties without pay; the transition to this is particularly difficult, but this transition alone
can guarantee the final consolidation of socialism. Naturally, the novelty and difficulty of the
change lead to an abundance of steps being taken, as it were, gropingly, to an abundance of
mistakes, vacillation - without this, any marked progress is impossible. The reason why the
present position seems peculiar to many of those who would like to be regarded as socialists
is that they have been accustomed to contrasting capitalism with socialism abstractly, and
that they profoundly put between the two the word leap.[17]
The fact that in the same report Lenin was led to justify giving dictatorial powers to
individuals was the expression not only of the grim contingent situation which gave rise to
War Communism, but also of the contradiction between a necessary coercive regime imposed
by the state machine, and the need to safeguard the proletarian dictatorship, to immerse the
regime in the growing activity of the masses.
The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the
dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely
executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in
order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet
government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy.[18]
But three years of civil war and the vital necessity to restore economic life prevented the
Bolsheviks from finding a clear political solution to the problem of the relationship between
the proletariat and state organs. Not that they were unaware of the mortal dangers which
threatened the whole development of the revolution. The programme of the 8th Congress of
the Russian Party in March 1919 talked about the danger of a political rebirth of bureaucracy
within the Soviet regime, despite the fact that the old Tsarist bureaucratic machinery had been
destroyed from top to bottom. The 9th Congress in December 1920 also dealt with the
question of bureaucracy. And at the 10th Congress, which saw the beginning of the NEP,
Lenin discussed the question at great length and came to the following conclusion: that the
economic roots of the Soviet bureaucracy were not implanted in the military and juridical
apparatus as in the bourgeois state, but that they grew out of the services; that the bureaucracy
had sprung out of the period of War Communism and expressed the negative side of this
period. The price paid for the necessarily dictatorial centralisation of this period was the
increasing authority of the functionaries. At the 11th Congress, after a year of the New
Economic Policy, Lenin vigorously emphasised the historic contradiction involved in the
proletariat being forced to take power and use it before being fully prepared ideologically and
culturally:
We have sufficient, quite sufficient political power, we also have sufficient economic
resources at our command, but the vanguard of the working class which has been brought to
the forefront to directly supervise, to determine the boundaries, to demarcate, to subordinate
and not be subordinated itself, lacks sufficient ability for it. All that is needed here is ability,
and that is what we do not haveNever before in history has there been [such] a
situation.[19]

Concerning the state capitalism that it was necessary to put up with, Lenin urged the party
thus:
You Communists, workers, you, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which
undertook to administer the state, must be able to arrange it so that the state which you have
taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to. Well, we have lived through a
year, the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we
wanted this past year?How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that
guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the
direction someone else desired[20]
By saying that the task was to build communism with non-communist hands Lenin was
only restating one of the fundamental problems of the proletarian revolution. By pointing out
that the party had to lead an economy managed by others in the direction that it wanted it to
go, he was simply showing that the function of the party is not the same as that of the state
machine.
The safeguard of the Russian revolution, the guarantee that it would stay on the tracks of the
world revolution, was therefore not the absence of all bureaucracy - which is an inevitable
excrescence of the transition period - but the vigilant presence of proletarian organs in which
the educational activity of the party could be carried out, while the party itself retained a
vision of its international tasks through the International. Because of a whole series of
historical circumstances and because of a lack of indispensable theoretical and experimental
equipment, the Bolsheviks were unable to resolve this basic problem. The crushing weight of
contingent events led them to lose sight of the importance of retaining the Soviets and trade
unions as organs which could be juxtaposed to the state, controlling it but not being
incorporated into it.
The Russian experience doesnt allow us to see the extent to which the Soviets could have
been, in Lenins phrase, the organisations of the workers and the exploited masses which
will allow them to organise and govern the state themselves; the extent to which they could
have concentrated the legislative, the executive, and, the judiciary into themselves if
centrism had not emasculated their revolutionary potential.
In any case, the Soviets appeared as the Russian form of the dictatorship of the proletariat
rather than having an international validity. What makes them an acquisition from the
experimental point of view is the fact that during the phase of the destruction of Tsarist
society, the soviets were the backbone of the armed self-organisation which the Russian
workers put in place of the bureaucratic and military machine and the autocracy, and then
used against the reaction of the dispossessed classes.
As for the trade unions their function was altered in the process of the degeneration of the
whole apparatus of the proletarian dictatorship. In his Infantile Disorder (early 1920) Lenin
underlined the importance of the trade unions: by means of which the Party is closely linked
up with the class and with the masses, and by means of which, under the leadership of the
Party, the dictatorship of the class is exercised.
After the seizure of power: the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the
old way, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are
and will long remain an indispensable school of Communism and a preparatory school

that trains the proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the
workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country
to the working class (and not to separate trades), and later to all the working people.[21]
The question of the role of the trade unions really came into its own at the end of 1920.
Trotsky, basing his position on his experience in the sphere of transportation, considered that
the unions had to become state organs responsible for maintaining labour discipline and the
organisation of production. He even went so far as to propose that the unions be done away
with, claiming that, in a workers state, they simply duplicated the tasks of state organs!
The discussion gathered pace at the 10th Congress of the party in March 1921 under the
pressure of immediate events (Kronstadt) Trotskys ideas were opposed both by the Workers
Opposition led by Shliapnikov and Kollontai, who called for management of production by
the unions, and by Lenin, who considered that the statification of the unions was premature
and that since the state is not a workers state, but a workers and peasants state with
numerous bureaucratic deformations, the unions had to defend the workers interests against
such a state. But Lenin emphasised that his disagreement with Trotsky was not over a
question of principle, but simply over contingent considerations.
The fact that Trotsky was defeated at this Congress did not mean that the confusion about the
role of the unions under the proletarian dictatorship had been cleared up. In fact the theses of
the 3rd Congress of the CI repeated this confusion, on the one hand saying that: before,
during, and after the seizure of power, the unions remain a broader, more massive, more
general form of organisation than the party, and in relation to the latter, to some extent play
the part of the circumference to the centre.
And also that: the communists and sympathising elements must form within the unions
communist groupings entirely subordinated to the communist party as a whole.
While on the other hand saying that: after the seizure and strengthening of proletarian
power, the activity of the trade unions will be concerned mainly with the tasks of economic
organisation and they will dedicate nearly all their energy to the building of the economy on
a socialist basis, thus becoming a truly practical school of communism.
We know that, after this, the unions not only lost any control over the management of
enterprises, but also became organs responsible for stimulating production and not for
defending the interests of the workers. In compensation for this, trade union leaders were
recruited into the administration of industry and the right to strike was maintained in theory.
But in fact strikes broke out in opposition to the trade union leadership.
***
The clearest criterion which marxists can use to back up their affirmation that the Soviet state
is a degenerated state, that it has lost any proletarian function and has become an instrument
of world capitalism, is the historical evolution of the Russian state between 1917 and 1936. In
this period the state, far from tending to wither away, has become stronger and stronger, a
process which could only lead it to becoming an instrument of oppression and exploitation
against the Russian workers. This is an entirely new historical phenomenon, the result of an
unprecedented historical situation: the existence within capitalist society of a proletarian state
based on the collectivisation of the means of production, but one in which we are seeing a

social process determining a frenzied exploitation of labour power; and at the same time this
exploitation cannot be ascribed to the domination of a class which has juridical ownership of
the means of production. We do not think that this social paradox can be explained by
saying there is a bureaucracy which has become a ruling class (from the standpoint of
historical materialism, these two notions mutually exclude each other); it can only be seen as
the expression of a policy which has delivered the Russian state into the hands of world
capitalism, whose laws of evolution are driving it towards imperialist war. In the part of this
study dedicated to the question of the management of the proletarian economy, we will come
back to the concrete aspects of this essential characteristic of the degeneration of the Soviet
state, which has meant that the Russian proletariat is at the mercy not of a national exploiting
class but of the world capitalist class. Such a political and economic relationship obviously
contains within it all the conditions for the restoration of capitalism in Russia in the turmoil of
a new imperialist war, unless the Russian proletariat, with the aid of the international
proletariat, manages to overthrow the forces which threaten to lead it into another massacre.
Bearing in mind what we have said about the historic conditions in which the proletarian state
is born, it is clear that the withering away of this state cannot be seen as an autonomous
process limited to the national framework, but only as a symptom of the development of the
world revolution.
It became impossible for the Soviet state to begin withering away as soon as the party and the
International stopped seeing the Russian revolution as a step towards the world revolution and
assigned to it the task of building socialism in one country. This explains why the specific
weight of the state organs and the exploitation of the Russian workers have increased with the
development of industrialisation and the economy; why the liquidation of classes has led
not to a weakening of the state, but to its reinforcement, as expressed by the re-establishment
of the three forces which have always been the backbone of the bourgeois state: the
bureaucracy, the police and the standing army.
This phenomenon in no way indicates the falsity of marxist theory, which bases the
proletarian revolution on the collectivisation of the productive forces and on the necessity for
a transitional state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is simply the bitter fruit of a
historic situation which prevented the Bolsheviks and the International from imposing an
internationalist policy on the state, and which on the contrary made them the servants of the
state against the proletariat by leading them onto the path of national socialism. In the face of
economic difficulties which confronted them, the Bolsheviks were unable to formulate a
policy which would have immunised them from confusing the apparatus of repression (which
should only have been used against the dispossessed classes) with the class organs of the
proletariat, which should have exercised control over the administration of the economy. The
disappearance of these organs obliged the proletarian state, in its efforts to carry out a national
programme and keep the economic apparatus going, to use its repressive organs against the
proletariat as well as against the bourgeoisie. The state, that necessary evil, turned against
the workers, despite the fact that, while the principle of authority will have to be recognised
during the transitional phase, bureaucratic coercion can never be justified.
The whole point was to try not to widen the gap between the political and cultural immaturity
of the masses and the historic necessity for them to run society. The solution that was aimed
at, however, tended to exacerbate this contradiction even further.

We are with Rosa Luxemburg in saying that in Russia the question of the life of the
proletarian state and the building of socialism could only be posed and not answered. It is up
to the marxist fractions today to draw from the Russian revolution the essential lessons which
will allow the proletariat to resolve the problem of the world revolution and of the building of
communism in the next revolutionary wave.
[1]. Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works,
Vol. 27.
[2]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[3]. Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works,
Vol. 27.
[4]. 1852. Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[5]. 1848, Collected Works, Vol. 6.
[6]. Manifesto. Ibid.
[7]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[8]. The Civil War in France, 1871, Collected Works, Vol. 22.
[9]. Ibid.
[10]. 1917, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.25.
[11]. Ibid.
[12]. 1918. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28.
[13]. In: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder press 1970.
[14]. Ibid.
[15]. Speech to the founding congress of the German Communist Party in Rosa Luxemburg
Speaks.
[16]. 1918. Collected Works, Vol.. 27.
[17]. Ibid.
[18]. Ibid.
[19]. Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP (B) , 1922. Collected Works,
Vol. 33.
[20]. Ibid.

[21]. Left-wing communism: An infantile disorder, 1920. Collected Works, Vol. 31

Part III
The stigmata of the proletarian economy
Marxism always bases its analyses and perspectives on dialectical materialism and not on
idealistic aspirations. Marx said that "even when a society has got upon the right track for the
discovery of the natural laws of its movement - and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay
bare the economic law of motion of modern society - it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor
remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal
development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs".[1] In the same way, the
proletariat, having taken society through a "leap" as a result of its political revolution, cannot
help but put up with the natural laws of evolution, while at the same time doing all it can to
speed up the process of social transformation. If it is to achieve its historic goals, the
proletariat has to ensure that the intermediate, "hybrid" social forms which arise in the phase
between capitalism and communism wither away; but it cannot abolish them by decree. The
suppression of private property - even if it's a radical step - does not ipso facto get rid of
bourgeois ideology or bourgeois right: "The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a
nightmare on the brains of the living".[2]
The persistence of the law of value in the transitional period
In this part of our study we will be looking at some length at certain economic categories
(labour-value, money, wages), which the proletarian economy will inherit from capitalism
without the benefit of an inventory. This is important because there has been a tendency
(we're thinking in particular of the Dutch internationalists, whose arguments we will be
examining) to make these categories the agencies of the decomposition of the Russian
revolution, when in fact the degeneration of the revolution occurred not so much at the
economic but at the political level.
To begin with, what is an economic category?
Marx responds: "Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of
the social relations of production ...The same men who establish their social relations in
conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in
conformity with their social relations.
"Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are
historical and transitory products".[3]
We might be tempted to deduce from this definition that a new mode of production (or the
establishment of its foundations) automatically brings with it the new social relations and the
corresponding categories: thus, the collective appropriation of the productive forces would
immediately eliminate capitalist relations and the categories which are their expression. From
the social point of view, this would imply the immediate disappearance of classes. But Marx
made it clear in the same passage that that within society "there is a continual movement of
growth in the productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas"; in
other words, there is an interpenetration of two social processes; one, the diminution of the
relations and categories belonging to the declining system of production, and secondly, the

growth of relations and categories engendered by the new system. The dialectical movement
imprinted on the evolution of societies is unchanging (even if this would take on different
forms in a fully-formed communist society).
There's all the more reason for the whole process to be especially turbulent and powerful
during a period of transition between two types of society.
Certain economic categories, which will have survived the revolutionary "catastrophe", will
thus only disappear along with the class relations which have given rise to them, i.e. with
classes themselves, when the communist phase of proletarian society has opened up. In the
transitional phase, their vitality will be in inverse proportion to the specific weight of the
"socialised" sectors of the proletarian economy, but above all in relation to the rhythm of
development of the world revolution.
The fundamental category to consider is labour value, because it is the foundation of all the
other capitalist categories.
We are not well endowed with marxist writings on the "future" of economic categories in the
transitional period. We only have a few dispersed passages by Engels in Anti-Duhring and by
Marx in Capital. From Marx too we have the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in which
every mention of the questions we are examining here takes on considerable importance, but
which can only be grasped in their full import by relating them to the theory of value itself.
Value possesses this strange characteristic that, while finding its source in the activity of a
physical force - labour - it has no material reality in itself. Before analysing the substance of
value, Marx, in his Preface to Capital, takes care to warn us about this: "The value-form,
whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless,
the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all,
whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex
forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic
whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms,
moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction
must replace both".
And in the course of this analysis of value, Marx adds that "the value of commodities is the
very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its
composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it
remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that
the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in
so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human
labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social
relation of commodity to commodity".[4]
Moreover, as regards the substance of value, i.e. human labour, Marx always implies that the
value of a product expresses a certain quantity of simple labour, when it affirms its social
reality. The reduction of compound labour to simple labour is a fact that is being constantly
realised "Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied
simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of
simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity
may be the product of the most skilled labour, but its value, by equating it to the product of

simple unskilled labour, represents a definite quantity of the latter labour alone". But we also
have to understand how this reduction takes place. But Marx was a man of science and he
limited himself to replying: "The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are
reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on
behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom".
This was a phenomenon which Marx noted but which he could not explain, because the state
of his knowledge about value did not permit it. What we do know is that in the production of
commodities, the market is the crucible in which you can find all individual acts of labour, all
the qualities of labour, in which we see the crystallisation of average labour reduced to simple
labour: "society does not form value from the accidental lack of skill of an individual, it
recognises as general human labour only labour of a normal average degree of skill at the
particular time...Individual labour contains general human labour only in so far as it is
socially necessary".[5]
At all the historical stages of social development, it has been necessary for men to know with
more or less precision the sum of labour expended in the production of the productive forces
and the objects of consumption. Up till now, this evaluation has always taken empirical and
anarchic forms; with capitalist production, and under the pressure of the fundamental
contradiction of the system, the anarchic form has reached its extreme limits, but what is
important to underline once again is that the measure of social labour is not established
directly, in an absolute, mathematical manner, but relatively, via a relationship that is
established on the market, with the aid of money: the quantity of social labour contained in an
object is not really expressed in hours of labour, but in another commodity which, on the
market, empirically appears to enclose the same quantity of social labour. In any case, the
number of hours of social and simple labour required as an average for the production of an
object remains unknown. Furthermore, Engels remarked that "the political economy of
commodity production is by no means the only science which has to deal with factors known
only relatively". And he drew a parallel with the natural sciences which use molecular
calculations in physics and atomic calculations in chemistry: "Hence, just as commodity
production and its economics obtain a relative expression for the unknown quantities of
labour contained in the various commodities, by comparing these commodities on the basis of
their relative labour content, so chemistry obtains a relative expression for the magnitude of
the atomic weights unknown to it by comparing the various elements on the basis of their
atomic weights, expressing the atomic weight of one element in multiples or fractions of the
other (sulphur, oxygen, hydrogen). And just as commodity production elevates gold to the
level of the absolute commodity, the general equivalent of all other commodities, the measure
of all values, so chemistry promotes hydrogen to the rank of the chemical money commodity,
by fixing its atomic weight at 1 and reducing the atomic weights of all other elements to
hydrogen, expressing them in multiples of its atomic weight".[6] If we consider the essential
characteristic of the transitional period, i.e. that it still expresses a certain economic deficiency
which demands a greater development of the productivity of labour, we can easily deduce that
there will still be a need to calculate the amount of labour consumed, not only with regard to a
rational repartition of social labour, which is necessary in any society, but above all because
there is a need for a regulator of social activities and relations.
The illusion of abolishing the law of value through the calculation of labour time
The central question is this: under what forms will labour time be measured? Will the value
form subsist?

The answer is all the more difficult in that our teachers didn't completely develop their
thinking on this matter and that it can itself appear rather contradictory.
In Anti-Duhring, Engels begins by saying that "From the moment when society enters into
possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the
labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at
the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need
not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how
much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour
are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square
yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the
quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in
their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative,
fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than
express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time".[7] And Engels adds,
supported by his affirmation about the possibilities of calculating in a direct and absolute
manner, that "just as little as it would occur to chemical science still to express atomic weight
in a roundabout way, relatively, by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express
them absolutely, in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or
quadrillionths of a gram. Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign
values to products".[8] But the problem here is knowing precisely whether the political act of
collectivisation, even if this is a radical step, provides the proletariat with a new, absolute law
for calculating labour time, which can immediately replace the law of value. No positive data
authorise such a hypothesis, which is still excluded by the fact that the reduction of compound
labour to simple labour (which is the real unit of measure) remains unexplained, and that as a
result the elaboration of a scientific method for calculating labour time, which is a necessary
function of this process of reduction, is impossible. Probably the conditions for the emergence
of such a law will only come together when it is no longer of any use: i.e. when production
can answer all needs and when, as a result, society will no longer need to calculate labour: the
administration of things will only require a simple register of what has been produced. In the
economic domain we can thus see an analogy with political life, when democracy will be
superfluous at the moment that it has been fully realised.
Engels, in a complementary note to the expose cited above, implicitly accepts value when he
says that "the balancing of useful effects and expenditure of labour on making decisions
concerning production was all that would be left, in a communist society, of the politicoeconomic concept of value". We can complete this correction by Engels with what Marx says
in Capital: "After the suppression of the capitalist mode of production, the determination of
value, if social production is to be maintained, will still be of prime importance, because it
will be more than ever necessary to regulate labour time, as well as the repartition of social
labour between the different sectors of production, and to keep account of it".[9]
The conclusion which can be drawn from an understanding of what the proletariat faces when
it overthrows capitalism is that the law of value will continue to exist in the transitional
period, even though it will go through profound changes in nature and progressively
disappear.
How and in what forms will this law exert itself? Once again, we have to start off with what
exists in bourgeois economy where the reality of the value materialised in commodities only
becomes manifest in exchange. We know that this reality of value is purely social, that it is

expressed only in the relation that commodities have between each other and in these relations
alone. It's in exchange that the products of labour are manifested as values, which is a social
existence distinct from their material existence as use values. A commodity expresses its
value by the fact that it can be exchanged against another commodity, that it can pose itself as
an exchange value, but it can only do it in this manner. However, while value manifests itself
in the exchange relation, it's not exchange which engenders value. This exists independently
of exchange.
In the transitional phase, we can only talk about exchange value and not some kind of
absolute, natural value, an idea which Engels rails against sarcastically in his polemic with
Duhring: "To seek to abolish the capitalist form of production by establishing true value' is
therefore tantamount to attempting to abolish Catholicism by establishing the true' Pope, or
to set up a society in which at last the producers control their product, by consistently
carrying into life an economic category which is the most comprehensive expression of the
enslavement of the producers by their own product".[10]
The survival of the market expresses the survival of value
Exchange on the basis of value, in the proletarian economy, will be an inevitable fact for a
more or less long period; but it is no less true that it has to be reduced and must tend to
disappear the more the proletarian power succeeds in subordinating production to social needs
and not the producers to production as in capitalism. Obviously, "no society will be able to
master its own products for long, or retain control over the social effects of its system of
production, without first getting rid of exchange between individuals".[11] But exchange can't
be suppressed simply as a result of human will; it can only happen through a whole dialectical
process. This is how Marx approaches the question in Critique of the Gotha Programme:
"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the
producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the
products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them,
since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect
fashion but directly as a component part of total labour".[12] Marx obviously situates this
evolution in a developed communist society and not "just as it emerges from capitalist
society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped
with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges" (ibid).
Collective appropriation on a more or less large scale makes it possible to transform the
nature of economic relations to a degree corresponding to the specific weight of the collective
sector in relation to the capitalist sector, but the bourgeois form of these relations remains,
because the proletariat does not have other ready-made forms to replace them with and
because it cannot abstract itself from a world economy which continues to evolve on a
capitalist basis.
With regard to the tax in kind instituted by the NEP, Lenin said that "The tax in kind is one of
the forms of transition from that peculiar War Communism, which was forced on us by
extreme want, ruin and war, to regular socialist exchange of products. The latter, in its turn,
is one of the forms of transition from socialism, with the peculiar features due to the
predominantly small-peasant population, to communism".[13] And in his report on the NEP at
the 4th Congress of the Communist International, Trotsky argued that in the transitional phase
economic relations had to be regulated through the market and through money.

The practise of the Russian revolution in this respect confirms the theory: the survival of
value and the market simply translates the impossibility for the proletarian state to
immediately coordinate all aspects of production and social life and thus to immediately
suppress "bourgeois right". But the evolution of the economy can only be oriented towards
socialism if the proletarian dictatorship more and more extends its control over the market to
the point of totally subordinating it to the socialist plan, i.e. to the point of abolishing it.
Consequently, if the law of value, instead of developing the way it did by going from simple
commodity production to capitalist production must go through the reverse process of
regression and extinction which leads from the "mixed" economy to full communism.
We are not going to deal at length with the category of money or currency, since it is only a
developed form of value. If we admit that value still exists, then we will have to admit that
some kind of money will also exist, even if has lost its character as "abstract wealth" capable
of appropriating any kind of wealth. The proletariat will annihilate the bourgeois power of
money on the one hand through the collectivisation of the essential bases of wealth and of the
land, which will become inalienable, and on the other hand through a class policy involving
measures such as rationing, price controls etc. Thus money will effectively, if not formally,
lose its function as a measure of value through a progressive alteration of the law of value; in
reality it will only retain its function as an instrument of circulation and payment.
The Dutch internationalists in their essay on the development of the communist society
(Foundations of Communist Production and Distribution, a resume of which by comrade
Hennaut was published in Bilan ns 18, 20 and 22) have been inspired more by an idealist
train of thought than by historical materialism. Thus their analysis of the transitional period
(which they don't distinguish with sufficient clarity from the communist phase) proceeds from
an anti-dialectical appreciation of the social content of this period.
Certainly the Dutch comrades begin from a correct premise when they establish the marxist
distinction between the period of transition and full communism. For them as well it is only in
the first phase that the measure of labour time is valid.[14] But they begin to leave the solid
ground of historical reality when they put forward an abstract method for the calculation of
labour time. The truth is that they don't respond as marxists to the essential question: how, in
the transitional phase, and through what social mechanisms will the costs of production be
determined on the basis of labour time? Rather they avoid the question through their
somewhat simplistic arithmetical demonstrations. They say that the unit of measurement for
the quantity of labour needed for producing an object is: the average hour of social labour.
But they don't offer any solution here: they simply assert what constitutes the foundation of
the law of value by transposing the marxist formula: the socially necessary labour time.
However, they do propose a solution: "Each enterprise calculates how much labour time is
incorporated into its production " (p 56), but without indicating by what mathematical
procedure the individual labour of each producer becomes social labour, or how we get
compound or qualified labour from simple labour, which as we have seen is the common
measure of human labour. Marx describes the social and economic process through which this
reduction takes place under capitalist commodity production; for the Dutch comrades, you
need only the revolution and the collectivisation of the means of production to bring in a law
of "accounting" which arises from who knows where and about whose functioning we remain
ignorant. For them, however, such a substitution is easily explained: since the revolution
abolishes the private social relation of production, it simultaneously abolishes exchange,
which is a function of private property (p 52).

"In the marxist sense, the suppression of the market is nothing other than the result of new
relations of right" (p 109). They note however that "the suppression of the market must be
interpreted in the sense that while the market appears to survive under communism, its social
content as regards circulation is entirely different: the circulation of products on the basis of
labour time is the basis of new social relations" (p 110). But if the market survives (even if its
form and basis are different) it can only function on the basis of value. This is what the Dutch
internationalists don't seem to see, "subjugated", as they are, to their formulation about
"labour time", which in substance is nothing but value itself. Furthermore, for them it is not
excluded that in "communism" we will still talk about "value"; but they refrain from drawing
out the significance of this with regards to the mechanism of the social relations that result
from maintaining labour time as a unit of measurement. Instead they conclude that since the
content of value will have changed, all we need to do is replace the term value with the term
production time. But this obviously doesn't change the economic reality at all; it's the same
thing when they say that there is no longer any exchange of products, but only the passage of
products (p 53-54). Equally: "instead of the function of money, we will have the registering of
the movement of products, social accounting on the basis of the average social labour time"
(p 55).
We will see how their misapprehension of historical reality leads the Dutch internationalists to
other erroneous conclusions, when we examine the problem of the remuneration of work.
[1]. Preface to Capital, Vol. 1.
[2]. Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[3]. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy , Collected Works, Vol. 6.
[4]. Capital, Vol.1, Chapter 1, section 3 .
[5]. Engels AntiDuhring, Chapter III, "Socialism", part IV, "Distribution" . Collected Works,
Vol.25.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. Ibid.
[8]. Ibid.
[9]. Our translation from the French
[10]. Anti-Duhring, ibid.
[11]. Engels, Origins of the Family. Our translation from the French.
[12]. Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[13]. "The tax in kind", 1921. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32.
[14]. In this respect, we need to point to a lapse in comrade Hennaut's resume, when he says
the following: "And contrary to what some people imagine, this method of accounting applies

not only to communist society that has reached a very high level of development, but to any
communist society - thus, from the moment that the workers expropriate the capitalists whatever level it has reached" (Bilan p 657).
Part IV
There has been a lot of chatter about "the product of social labour" and its "full" and
"equitable" distribution, confused formulations which can easily be taken over by
demagogues. But the essential question of the destination of the social product, i.e. of the sum
of the activities of labour, is concentrated around two basic issues: how is the total product to
be distributed? And how should the fraction of that product which enters immediately into
individual consumption be distributed?
Distribution of the products of labour destined for consumption
Obviously we know that there is no one response valid for all societies and the mode of
distribution is conditioned by the mode of production. But we also know that there are certain
fundamental rules which any social organisation has to keep to if it wants to survive:
societies, like the men that make them up, are subject to the laws of preservation, which
requires not just simple reproduction but enlarged reproduction. This is a truism that we have
to remind ourselves of.
At the same time, as soon as an economy breaks through its natural, domestic framework and
generalises into a commodity economy, it acquires a social character which, with the capitalist
system, takes on an immense significance, through the conflict which irreducibly opposes it to
the private character of the appropriation of wealth.
With the "socialised" production of capitalism, we are in the presence not of isolated
individual products, but of social products, i.e, products which not only don't respond to the
immediate use of the producers, but which are also the common result of their activity: "The
thread, the cloth, the metal objects that come from the factory are from that point on the
common product of numerous workers, through whose hands it has to pass in succession
before it can be completed. No individual can say about it that I made that, this is my
product."[1]
In other words, social production is the synthesis of individual activities and not simply their
juxtaposition; consequently, "in society, the relation of the producer to the product after its
completion is extrinsic, and the return of the product
to the subject depends on his relations to other individuals. The product does not immediately
come into his possession. Its immediate appropriation, moreover, is not his aim, if he
produces within society. Distribution, which on the basis of social laws determines the
individual's share in the world of products, intervenes between the producer and the products,
i.e., between production and consumption."[2]
This remains true in socialist society; and when we say that the producers must re-establish
their domination over production, which capitalism has taken away from them, we are not
talking about the overthrow of the natural course of social life, but of the relations of
production and repartition.

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx, in denouncing the reactionary utopianism of
Lassalle's idea of "the products of labour", poses the question in these terms: "What are the
proceeds of labour'? The product of labour, or its value? And in the latter case, is it the total
value of the product, or only that part of the value which labour has newly added to the value
of the means of production consumed?" (our emphasis - Mitchell).
Marx indicates how in social production - which is dominated not by the individual producer
but by the social producer - the concept of the "product of labour" differs essentially from the
product of the independent worker: "Let us take, first of all, the words 'proceeds of labour' in
the sense of the product of labour; then the co-operative proceeds of labour are the total
social product.
"From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production
used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance
funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc".
This transforms the "full product of labour" into a partial product, i.e., that fraction of the
objects of consumption which are distributed individually among the collective producers. In
sum, this "partial product" not only does not include the part materialised in former labour
provided by previous productive cycles, and which is absorbed by the replacement of the
means of production that have been consumed; it also does not represent the entirety of the
new labour added to social capital, since we have to take into account the deductions we have
just mentioned. This boils down to saying that the "partial product" is equivalent to the net
income of society, or the fraction of gross income which has to return to the individual
consumption of the producer, but which bourgeois society does not integrally restore to him.
Here then is the response to the first question: "how is the total product distributed?" The
simple conclusion is that surplus labour, i.e. the fraction of new or living labour required by
the totality of collective needs, cannot be abolished in any kind of social system. But whereas
under capitalism it is a barrier to the development of the individual, in a communist society it
has to be the condition for the latter's all-round development. "In the capitalist as well as in
the slave system, etc., it merely assumes an antagonistic form and is supplemented by
complete idleness of a stratum of society."[3]
What in effect determines the rates of capitalist surplus labour are the necessities of the
production of surplus value, which is the motor force of social production; the domination of
exchange value over use value subordinates the needs of enlarged reproduction and of
consumption to the needs of the accumulation of capital; the development of the productivity
of labour results in an increase in the rate and the mass of surplus labour.
By contrast, socialist surplus labour has to be kept to the minimum required by the needs of
the proletarian economy and to the necessities of the class struggle that continues on a
national and international scale. In reality, fixing the rate of accumulation and the rate of
administrative and unproductive costs (absorbed by the bureaucracy) will be located at the
centre of the proletariat's concerns; but we will examine this aspect of the problem in a
subsequent chapter.
We must now respond to the second question: "how is the partial product then distributed?"
i.e. that fraction of the total product which immediately falls under individual consumption,

and thus into the wage fund, since the capitalist form of the remuneration of labour persists
during the transitional period.
Collective appropriation, equalisation and disappearance of wages
Let's begin by saying that there is a conception among certain revolutionaries that has been
adopted rather too easily: the idea that if collective appropriation is to mean anything, it must
ipso facto result in the disappearance of wages and the installation of equal remuneration for
all; the corollary to this is the idea that the inequality of wages presupposes the exploitation of
labour power.
This conception, which we will find when we examine the arguments of the Dutch
internationalists, proceeds on the one hand - we have to emphasise this again - from a denial
of the contradictory movement of historical materialism, and on the other hand from a
confusion between two different categories: labour and labour power; between the value of
labour power, i.e. the quantity of labour needed to reproduce this labour power, and the total
quantity of labour which this labour power can supply in a given time.
It is exact to say that to the political content of the dictatorship of the proletariat there has to
correspond a new social content to the remuneration of labour, which can no longer be no
more than the equivalent of the products strictly necessary for the reproduction of labour
power. In other words, what constitutes the essence of capitalist exploitation, the opposition
between the use value and the exchange value of this particular commodity we call labour
power, disappears with the suppression of the private ownership of the means of production,
and consequently the private use of labour power also disappears. Obviously the new
utilisation of this labour power and of the mass of surplus labour which derives from it can
indeed be turned away from their proletarian objectives (the Soviet experience demonstrates
this), and in this way there can arise a mode of exploitation of a particular nature, which
strictly speaking is not capitalist. But this is another story that we will come back to
elsewhere. For the moment we don't have to remain at this proposition; the fact that in a
proletarian economy the basic motive force is no longer the ceaselessly enlarged production
of surplus value and of capital but the unlimited production of use values does not mean that
the conditions are right for a levelling of "wages" that translates into equality in consumption.
In fact, such an equality can exist neither at the beginning of the transitional period nor in the
communist phase, which is based on the formula "to each according to his needs". In reality,
formal equality can never exist, while communism will finally realise a real equality in
natural inequality.
It remains however to explain why the differentiation of wages subsists in the transitional
phase despite the fact that the wage, while preserving its bourgeois envelope, has lost its
antagonistic content. The question is immediately posed: what will be the juridical norms of
repartition prevailing in this period?
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx responds: "Right can never be higher than the
economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby". When he
notes that the mode of distribution of the objects of consumption can only be the reflection of
the mode of repartition of the means of production and of the mode of production itself, for
him this is only a schema which is realised gradually. Capitalism did not install its relations of
distribution immediately; it did it by stages, on the accumulated ruins of the feudal system.
The proletariat cannot also not immediately regulate distribution according to socialist norms.

It has to do it by virtue of "rights", which can only be those of "a communist society, not as it
has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist
society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped
with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges". But there is a major
difference between the conditions for the development of capitalism and those for the
development of socialism. The bourgeoisie, by developing its economic positions inside
feudal society, was also constructing the bases for the future juridical superstructure of its
system of production; and its political revolution codified these economic and juridical gains.
The proletariat does not benefit from any similar evolution and cannot base itself on any
economic privilege or any concrete embryo of "socialist right", because for a marxist there
can be no question of seeing the "social conquests" of reformism as such a right. It has to thus
temporarily apply bourgeois right, albeit in a limited way, to the mechanisms of distribution.
This is what Marx meant when, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he talked about
equal rights; and in turn, Lenin, in his State and Revolution, noted with his clear and powerful
realism "the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right'. Of course, bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of
consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing
without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.
"It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even
the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!"
Marx, again in the Critique of the Gotha Programme analyses how and in relation to which
principles bourgeois equal rights are applied: "The right of the producers is proportional to
the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an
equal standard, labour".[4]
And the remuneration of labour is carried out in the following way: "Accordingly, the
individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour [our
emphasis]. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of
work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working
day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has
furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common
funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as
much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to
society in one form, he receives back in another.
"Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of
commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed,
because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and
because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except
individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the
individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of
commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal
amount of labour in another form".[5]
The unequal distribution of consumer goods according to labour performed, rather than
need

When Marx talks about a principle analogous to the one which regulates the exchange of
commodities and of the individual quantum of labour, he undoubtedly meant simple labour,
the substance of value, which means that all individual labour has to be reduced to a common
measure in order to be compared, evaluated, and consequently remunerated through the
application of "right that is proportional to the labour supplied". We have already noted that
there is still no scientific way of reducing simple labour and, as a result, the law of value
persists in this function, although only within certain limits determined by the new political
and economic conditions. Marx also dispels any doubts about this when he analyses the
measurement of labour:
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the
same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be
defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This
equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because
everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual
endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of
inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the
application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different
individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as
they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only - for
instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them,
everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more
children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour,
and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than
another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead
of being equal, would have to be unequal.
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has
just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society".
From this analysis, it emerges clearly that, on the one hand, the existence of bourgeois equal
rights is indissolubly linked to the existence of value; and on the other hand, the mode of
distribution hides a dual inequality: one, which is an expression of the diversity of "individual
gifts", of "productive capacities", of "natural privileges"; and the other which, on the basis of
equal labour, arises from differences of social condition (family, etc): "In a higher phase of
communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of
labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished;
after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive
forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the
springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of
bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"[6]
But in the transitional phase, bourgeois right installs a de facto inequality which is inevitable
because the first phase of communism "cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences,
and unjust differences, in wealth will still persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have
become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production--the
factories, machines, land, etc.--and make them private property. In smashing Lassalle's pettybourgeois, vague phrases about equality' and justice' in general, Marx shows the course of
development of communist society, which is compelled to abolish at first only the injustice' of

the means of production seized by individuals, and which is unable at once to eliminate the
other injustice, which consists in the distribution of consumer goods according to the amount
of labour performed' (and not according to needs)."[7]
The exchange of equal quantities of labour, although in fact translating into inequality in
distribution, does not at all imply exploitation, since the foundation and form of the exchange
have been modified and the political conditions which determined this change continue to
exist, ie the real maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would thus be absurd to
invoke marxist theory to argue that the degeneration of this dictatorship results in a kind of
exploitation. On the contrary, the thesis that the differentiation of wages, the demarcation
between qualified labour and unqualified labour, simple and compound labour, are sure signs
of degeneration within the proletarian state and indications of the existence of an exploiting
class, this thesis has to be categorically rejected, on the one hand because it implies that this
degeneration is inevitable, and on the other hand because it can in no way serve to explain the
evolution of the Russian revolution.
We have already made it clear that the Dutch internationalists, in their attempt to analyse the
problems of the period of transition, are inspired much more by their desires than by historical
reality. Their abstract schema, in which as people who are perfectly consistent with their
principles, they exclude the law of value, the market and money, must logically entail an
"ideal" distribution of products as well. This is because for them "The proletarian revolution
collectivises the means of production and thus opens the way to communist life; the dynamic
laws of individual consumption must absolutely and necessarily be linked together because
they are indissolubly linked to the laws of production. This link is made by itself' though the
passage to communist production" ( p72 of their work).
The Dutch comrades thus consider that the new relation of production, thanks to
collectivisation, automatically determines a new right over the products "This right will be
expressed through equal conditions for individual consumption which resides solely in an
equal measure of consumption. Just as the hour of individual labour is the measure of
individual labour, it is at the same time the measure of individual consumption. In this way
consumption is socially regulated and is cast in the right direction. The passage to the social
revolution is nothing else than the application of the measure of the average hour of social
labour to the whole of economic life. It serves as a measure for production and also as a right
of the producers over the social product" (p 25).
The reactionary development of the USSR: economic causes or a result of abandoning
internationalism
But once again, this affirmation can only become a positive one if we draw out its concrete
significance, which is to say that when you talk about labour time and the measurement of
labour, you are talking about value. This is what the Dutch comrades leave out and this leads
them to adopt a false judgment of the Russian revolution, and above all to severely curtail the
scope of their research into the underlying causes of the reactionary evolution of the USSR.
They don't seek the explanation for the latter in the subsoil of the national and international
class struggle (one of the negative characteristics of their study is that they more or less
remove any consideration of political problems), but in the economic mechanism, as when
they say: "When the Russians restored production on the basis of value, they proclaimed there
and then the expropriation of the workers, their separation from the means of production,

ensuring that there would be no relationship between the growth of the mass of products and
the workers' share in this mass" (p 19).
For them maintaining value was the equivalent of maintaining the exploitation of labour
power, but we think we have shown, on the basis of marxist theory, that value can subsist
without its antagonistic content, i.e. without the remuneration of the value of labour power.
But apart from this, the Dutch internationalists falsify the significance of Marx's words about
the repartition of products. When they say that the worker receives from the process of
distribution a pro rata of the quantity of labour he has given, they only discover one aspect of
the dual inequality which we have underlined, and it is the one which results from the social
situation of the worker (p 81); but they don't dwell on the other aspect, which expresses the
fact that the workers, in the same amount of labour time, provide different quantities of simple
labour (simple labour which is the common measure exerted through the play of value), thus
giving rise to unequal repartition. They prefer to stick with their demand for the suppression
of inequality in wages, which remains hanging in mid air because the suppression of capitalist
wage labour does not immediately result in the disappearance of the differences in the
remuneration of labour.
Comrade Hennaut comes up with a similar solution to the problem of distribution in the
period of transition, a solution which he also draws from a mistaken, because incomplete,
interpretation of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. In Bilan, p 747, he said: "the
inequality which still exists in the first phase of socialism results not from an unequal
remuneration being applied to various kinds of labour: the simple work of the labourer or the
compound work of the engineer, with all the stages in between. No, all these types of labour
are of equal worth, only their duration and intensity has to be measured; inequality results
from the fact that men who have different capacities and needs are carrying out the same
tasks with the same resources". And Hennaut inverses Marx's thinking when he locates
inequality in the fact that "the part of the social profit remains equal - an equal amount of
remuneration of course - for each individual, whereas their needs and the effort made to
achieve the same remuneration are different"; whereas, as we have indicated, Marx saw
inequality in the fact that individuals received unequal shares because they provided unequal
shares of labour and this is the basis for the application of bourgeois equal rights.
A policy of equalisation of wages cannot be adopted in the transition phase, not only because
it would be inapplicable, but because it would lead inevitably to the collapse of labour
productivity.
If, during "war communism", the Bolsheviks applied the system of equal rations, independent
of qualification and of the amount of labour provided, this was not an economic method
capable of ensuring the systematic development of the economy; it was the regime of a people
under siege and concentrating all its energies on the civil war.
If we begin from the general consideration that variations and differences in the qualification
of labour (and its remuneration) are in inverse proposition to the technical level of production,
we can understand why in the USSR after the NEP very large variations in wages between
qualified and non-qualified workers[8] were the result of the greater importance of the
individual qualification of the worker in comparison to the highly developed capitalist
countries. In the latter, after the revolution, wage categories could be much more uniform than
in the USSR, by the virtue of the law that the development of labour productivity tends to

level out the qualities of labour. But marxists should not forget that the "enslaving
subordination of individuals to the division of labour" can only disappear through a
prodigious technical development placed at the service of the producers (to be continued).
[1]. Engels, Anti-Duhring.
[2]. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "Production, consumption,
distribution, exchange".
[3]. Capital Vol 3 ch 48.
[4]. We have judged it useful to reproduce the full text of the Gotha Programme as regards
distribution, because we see every part of it to be extremely important
[5]. Here Marx understands by value of labour' the quantity of social labour furnished by the
producer, since it goes without saying that since it is labour that creates value, that it forms its
substance, there is no such thing as value in itself, as Engels remarked, otherwise we would be
talking about a value of value, which would be like talking about the weight of weight or the
temperature of heat.
[6]. Marx Critique of the Gotha programme.
[7]. Lenin, State and Revolution.
[8]. We are obviously not thinking here about the forms of "Stakhanovism" which are simply
the monstrous product of centrism.
Part V
Some elements of a proletarian administration
The Russian revolution of October 1917 must without doubt be regarded as a proletarian
revolution because it destroyed a capitalist state from top to bottom and replaced bourgeois
domination with the first fully achieved proletarian dictatorship (the Paris Commune having
merely created the premises for such a dictatorship).[1] It is on this basis that it has to be
analyzed by marxists, as a progressive experience (despite its later counter-revolutionary
evolution), as a step along the way that leads to the emancipation of the proletariat and the
whole of humanity.
Material and political conditions for the proletarian revolution
From the considerable mass of material accumulated by this gigantic event it is not yet
possible, given the state of our research, to put forward definite orientations for future
proletarian revolutions. But a confrontation with certain theoretical notions, with certain
marxist deductions from historical reality, will make it possible to arrive at the fundamental
conclusion that the complex problems posed by the attempt to construct a classless society
must be intimately linked to a series of principles founded on the universality of bourgeois
society and its laws, and on the predominance of the international class struggle.

Moreover, the first proletarian revolution did not, contrary to expectations, break out in the
richest countries, the most materially and culturally developed ones, countries "ripe" for
socialism, but in a backward semi-feudal area of capitalism. From which we derive the second
conclusion - although it's not an absolute - that the best conditions for revolution came
together in a situation where a material deficiency corresponded to a lesser capacity of the
ruling class to cope with social conflicts. In other words, political factors prevailed over
material factors. Such an affirmation, far from being in contradiction with Marx's thesis about
the conditions needed for the advent of a new society, merely underlines the profound
significance we accorded to this factor in the first chapter of this study.
The third conclusion, the corollary of the first, is that the essentially international problem of
the building of socialism - the preface to communism - cannot be resolved in the framework
of one proletarian state, but only on the basis of the political defeat of the world bourgeoisie,
at least in the vital centres of its rule, the most advanced countries.
While it is undeniable that a national proletariat can only undertake certain economic tasks
after installing its own rule, the construction of socialism can only get going after the
destruction of the most powerful capitalist states, even though the victory of a "poor"
proletariat can take on a huge significance if it is integrated into the process of development
of the world revolution. In other words, the tasks of a victorious proletariat with regard to its
own economy are subordinated to the necessities of the international class struggle.
It is noteworthy that while all genuine marxists have rejected the theory of "socialism in one
country", most of the criticisms of the Russian revolution have focused essentially on the
modalities of the construction of socialism, looking at economic and cultural criteria rather
than political ones, and forgetting to go to the logical conclusions imposed by the
impossibility of any kind of national socialism.
This is a key question because the first practical experience of the dictatorship of the
proletariat has to dissipate the fog, which still surrounds the notion of socialism. And an
essential lesson of the Russian revolution is surely - and this in the most exacerbated form,
given that we are talking about a backward economy - the historic necessity for a proletarian
state, temporarily isolated, to put very strict limits on its programme of economic
construction.
The global balance of forces determines the rhythm and modalities of the construction
of socialism
The rejection of "socialism in one country" can only mean that it cannot be a question of the
proletarian state orienting the economy towards a productive development that will
encompass all areas of manufacture, that will respond to the most varying needs and build up
an integrated economy, so that, juxtaposed to other similar economies, this will make up
world socialism. At the most it is a question - and this only after the victory of the world
revolution - of developing the branches of each national economy which have a specific
function and can be integrated as such into the future communist society (it is true that
capitalism has realised this in a very imperfect way through the international division of
labour). With the less favourable perspective of a slow-down in the revolutionary movement
(the situation of Russia in 1920-21), it is a question of adapting the processes of the
proletarian economy to the rhythm of the world-wide class struggle, but only in the sense of

strengthening the class rule of the proletariat as a reference point for the new revolutionary
upsurge of the international proletariat.
Trotsky in particular has often lost sight of this fundamental line, even though he has
sometimes made it clear that for him the proletarian objective is not the realisation of integral
socialism, but only the preparation of the elements of a world socialist economy as a means
of politically strengthening the proletarian dictatorship.
In fact, in his analyses of the development of the Soviet economy, while beginning from the
correct premise that this economy is dependent on the capitalist world market, Trotsky often
approaches the question as if it was a "match" at the economic level between the proletarian
state and world capitalism.
While it is true that socialism can only affirm its superiority as a system of production if it
produces more and better than capitalism, such a historical verification can only be
established after a long process that has taken place in the world economy, after a bitter
struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and not as the result of a clash between a
proletarian economy and the capitalist economy, since it is certain that on the basis of
economic competitiveness, the proletarian state would inevitably be obliged to resort to
capitalist methods of the exploitation of labour which would prevent any transformation of the
social content of production. Fundamentally, the superiority of socialism cannot reside in its
capacity to produce more "cheaply" - although this is certainly the consequence of an
unlimited expansion of labour productivity - but has to express itself through the
disappearance of the capitalist contradiction between production and consumption.
Trotsky, it seems to us, has definitely supplied centrism with theoretical weapons by starting
off from such criteria as "the economic race with world capital"; "the allure of development as
a decisive factor", "the comparison between rates of development", "the criterion of the prewar level", etc, all of which bear a strong resemblance to the centrist slogan about "catching
up with the capitalist countries". This is why the monstrous industrialisation which has been
founded on the misery of the Russian workers, while being the direct product of centrist
policies, is also the "natural" child of the Russian "Trotskyist" Opposition. What's more this
position of Trotsky is the result of the perspectives he traced for the evolution of capitalism
after the retreat of the international revolutionary struggle. Thus his whole analysis of the
Soviet economy as it evolved after the NEP is, by his own admission, deliberately abstracted
from the international political factor: "it is necessary to find practical solutions for the
immediate period, by taking into account, as much as possible, all the factors in their
momentary conjunction. But when it comes to perspectives of development for a whole epoch,
it is absolutely necessary to separate the salient' factors, that is to say, the political factors
above all" (Towards capitalism or towards socialism?). Such an arbitrary method of analysis
naturally leads one to examining the problems of the management of the Soviet economy "in
themselves" rather than in function of the evolution of the world balance of class forces.
The question that Lenin posed after the NEP: "which one will win?" is thus transposed from
the political terrain - where he had placed it - to the strictly economic terrain. The emphasis
was put on the necessity to bring prices in line with those on the world market through
reducing the sales price (and thus, in practice, essentially through reducing the paid part of
labour, i.e. wages). Which amounts to saying that the proletarian state should not limit itself to
putting up with a certain exploitation of labour power as an unavoidable evil, but on the
contrary should adopt policies that sanction an even higher level of exploitation by making

this the determining element of the economic process, which would thus acquire a capitalist
content. In the end, the question goes back to the idea of a kind of national socialism from the
moment you envisage the prospect of "outdoing" capitalist production on the world market
with the products of the socialist economy (i.e. the USSR), when you see it as a battle
between "socialism" and "capitalism". With such a point of view, it is evident that the world
bourgeoisie can rest assured about the future of its system of production.
Here we want to open a parenthesis in order to try to establish the real theoretical and
historical significance of those two crucial phases of the Russian revolution: "war
communism" and the NEP, the first corresponding to the extreme social tension of the civil
war, the second to the end of the armed struggle and to a situation of reflux in the world
revolution.
War communism and the NEP
This examination seems all the more necessary in that, regardless of their contingent aspects,
these two social phenomena could well reappear in other proletarian revolutions with an
intensity and a rhythm in line with the level of capitalist development of the countries in
question. It is therefore necessary to determine their exact location in the period of transition.
It is certain that "war communism" in its Russian version would not be characteristic of a
"normal" proletarian administration. It was not the product of a pre-established programme,
but a political necessity imposed by the irresistible pressure of the armed class struggle.
Theory had to temporarily give way to the necessity to crush the bourgeoisie politically; this
is why economics had to be subordinated to politics, but this took place at the price of the
collapse of production and trade. Thus in reality the policies of "war communism" more and
more entered into conflict with the theoretical premises developed by the Bolsheviks in their
programme for the revolution - not because this programme was shown to be mistaken, but
because its very moderate character, the fruit of "economic reason" (workers' control,
nationalisation of the banks, state capitalism) encouraged the bourgeoisie to take up armed
resistance. The workers responded with massive and accelerated expropriations which the
decrees on nationalisation merely codified. Lenin issued a cry of alarm about this economic
"radicalism", predicting that the proletariat could not win at this level. In effect, in the spring
of 1921, the Bolsheviks had to recognise not that the workers had been beaten but that they
had failed in their involuntary attempt to create socialism by force of arms. "War
communism" had essentially been a coercive mobilisation of the economic apparatus aimed at
avoiding famine in the proletariat and feeding the combatants. It was essentially a
"communism" of equal consumption which had no real socialist substance. The method of
requisitioning agricultural surpluses could only cause a considerable drop in production; the
levelling of wages resulted in a collapse in labour productivity; and the authoritarian and
bureaucratic centralism imposed by the circumstances was a real deformation of rational
centralism. As for the stifling of exchange (which was accompanied by a flourishing of the
black market) and the practical disappearance of money (payment in kind and free services),
this was a product of the civil war and the collapse of any real economic life. They were not
the measures of a proletarian administration which has taken the historic conditions into
account. In sum, the Russian proletariat paid for the crushing of its class enemy through an
economic impoverishment which a victorious revolution in the highly developed countries
would have attenuated considerably by enabling it to "leap over" certain phases of
development, even if it would not have profoundly altered the meaning of "war communism".

Marxists have never denied that the civil war - whether it precedes, accompanies, or follows
the seizure of power by the proletariat - will contribute to a temporary lowering of the
economic level, because they now know just how much this level can fall during an
imperialist war. Thus in the backward countries, the rapid political dispossession of an
organically weak bourgeoisie was and will be followed by a long struggle aimed at
disorganising the new power if this bourgeoisie still has the ability to draw strength from
broad social layers (in Russia, it was the vast peasantry, uncultured and lacking in political
experience, which provided this source). At the same time, in the developed capitalist
countries where the bourgeoisie is politically and materially powerful, the proletarian victory
will very probably follow rather than precede a more or less long phase of bitter, violent and
materially disastrous civil war. On the other hand the phase of "war communism" after the
revolution could well be short-lived in such countries.
The NEP, considered from an absolute standpoint, and especially as it was placed in brutal
opposition to "war communism", undoubtedly appeared as a serious backward step towards
capitalism through the return to the "free" market, to "free" small production, to money.
But this "retreat" was established on real bases if we examine the actual economic conditions
behind it. In other words, the NEP (independent of its accentuated features and specifically
Russian elements) should be seen as a re-establishment of the "normal" conditions for the
evolution of a transitional economy. For Russia, it was a return to the initial programme of the
Bolsheviks, even though the NEP, coming after the juggernaut of the civil war, had to go well
beyond it.
In sum, the NEP, separated from its contingent elements, is the form of economic
administration which any other proletarian revolution will have to resort to.
Such is the conclusion imposed on those who don't make the possibilities of proletarian
administration depend on the prior abolition of all capitalist categories and forms (an idea
which derives from idealism, not marxism) and who, on the contrary, recognise that this
administration will have to deal with the inevitable, but temporary survival of certain
expressions of bourgeois servitude.
It is true that in Russia the pursuit of an economic policy adapted to the historic conditions for
the transition from capitalism to communism was carried out in the heaviest and most
threatening social climate, resulting from a phase of downturn in the international revolution
and an internal degree of distress expressed by famine and the total exhaustion of the workers
and peasants. This is why its particular historic traits tended to hide the general significance of
the Russian NEP.
Under the pressure of events, the NEP represented the sine qua non for maintaining the
proletarian dictatorship which it was effectively safeguarding. For this reason it was not the
result of a capitulation by the proletariat: it did not involve any political compromise with the
bourgeoisie but was merely an economic retreat aimed at re-establishing the original starting
point for a progressive evolution of the economy. In reality, the class war, by displacing itself
from the terrain of the armed struggle to the terrain of economic struggle, by taking on other
forms, less brutal, more insidious, but equally redoubtable, was not at all destined to attenuate,
on the contrary.

For the proletariat, the essential thing is to constantly strengthen itself in liaison with the
fluctuation of the international struggle. In its general acceptance of the transitional phase, the
NEP generated agents of the capitalist enemy - no more and no less than the transitional
economy itself - to the extent that it was not maintained on a firm class line. It is always the
political activity of the proletariat which remains decisive. Only on this basis can we analyse
the evolution of the Soviet state. We will come back to this.
The economic programme of a proletarian revolution
In the historic limits assigned to the economic programme of a proletarian revolution, its
fundamental points can be summarised as follows: a) the collectivisation of the means of
production and exchange already "socialised" by capitalism; b) the monopolisation of foreign
trade by the proletarian state, a decisively important economic weapon; c) a plan for
production and for the distribution of the productive forces based on the structural
characteristics of the economy and the specific function it is called on to assume in the
worldwide socialist division of labour, but which can also strengthen the material position of
the proletariat at the economic and social level; d) a plan for liaison with the world capitalist
market, based on the monopoly of foreign trade and aimed at obtaining the means of
production and objects of consumption which it lacks, and which must be subordinated to the
fundamental plan for production, with both directives being able to resist the pressures of the
world market and prevent it from integrating the proletarian economy into itself.
It is evident that while the progress and realisation of such a programme depends, to a certain
extent, on the degree of the development of the productive forces and the cultural level of the
mass of workers, the essential question remains the political strength of the proletariat, the
solidity of its power, the balance of forces at the national and international level, even if there
can never be any disassociation between the material, cultural and political factors, which are
closely interpenetrated. But, we repeat, when it comes for example to the mode of
appropriation of social wealth, while collectivisation is a juridical measure as necessary for
the installation of socialism as was the abolition of feudal property for the installation of
capitalism, it does not automatically result in the transformation of production. Engels has
already put us on guard against the tendency to see collective property as a social panacea,
when he showed that within capitalist society "the transformation, either into joint-stock
companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the
productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is
only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external
conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the
workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a
capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national
capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually
become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wageworkers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a
head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not
the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the
elements of that solution" (Anti-Duhring). And Engels adds that the solution lies in the
grasping the nature and function of the social forces acting on the productive forces, in order
to then subordinate them to the will of all and transform the means of production from
"despotic masters to docile servants".

It is obvious that the political power of the proletariat alone can determine this collective will
and ensure that the social character of property is transformed, that it loses its class
character.
The juridical effects of collectivisations can be singularly limited by a backward economic
structure and this makes the political factor even more decisive.
In Russia there was an enormous mass of elements capable of engendering a new capitalist
accumulation and a dangerous class differentiation. The proletariat could only have prevented
this through a highly energetic class policy, the only one that could have kept hold of the state
for the proletarian struggle.
It is undeniable that with the agrarian problem, the problem of small industry constitutes a key
issue for the proletarian dictatorship, a heavy legacy left by capitalism to the proletariat, and
one which can't be eliminated by decree. We can even affirm that the central problem posed
to the proletarian revolution in all capitalist countries (except perhaps for Britain) is the
implacable struggle against the small producers of commodities and the small peasants, a
struggle made even harder by the fact that it cannot be a question of expropriating these social
layers through violence. The expropriation of private production is only economically
realisable in relation to the enterprises which are already "socialised" and not to the individual
enterprises which the proletariat is still not capable of running at a lower cost and making
more productive, and which it can only control through the means of the market; this is a
necessary point of transition between individual and collective labour. Furthermore, it is
impossible to envisage the structure of the proletarian economy in an abstract manner, as a
juxtaposition of pure types of production, based on opposing social relations, "socialist",
capitalist or pre-capitalist, and which evolve solely on the basis of competition. This is the
thesis of centrism which it got from Bukharin, and which holds that everything that is
collectivised ipso facto becomes socialist, so that the petty bourgeois and peasant sectors will
inevitably be led into the fold of "socialism". But in reality, each sphere of production more or
less bears the imprint of its capitalist origins and there is not a juxtaposition but an
interpenetration of contradictory elements, combating each other under the pressure of the
class struggle, developing in a very bitter manner, even if in a less brutal form than during the
period of open civil war. In this battle, the proletariat, basing itself on collectivised industry,
must have the aim of subjecting to its control, to the point of annihilating them completely, all
the social and economic forces of capitalism, which have already been overcome politically.
But it cannot commit the deadly error of believing that, because it has nationalised the land
and the basic means of production, it has erected an impassable barrier to the activity of
bourgeois agencies: the whole process, both political and economic, continues in a dialectical
manner and the proletariat can only direct it towards the classless society on condition of
reinforcing itself internally and externally.
The agrarian question
The agrarian question is certainly one of the essential elements of the complex problem of the
relationship between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie posed after the revolution. Rosa
Luxemburg showed very rightly that "even in the West, under the most favourable conditions,
once we have come to power, we too will break many a tooth on this hard nut before we are
out of the worst of the thousands of complicated difficulties of this gigantic task!".

It is thus not a question of settling this question, even in its basic lines, and we will limit
ourselves to posing the fundamental elements: the complete nationalisation of the land and
the fusion of agriculture and industry.
The first is a perfectly realisable juridical act that can be accomplished immediately after the
seizure of power, parallel with the collectivisation of the large-scale means of production,
whereas the second can only be the product of a process throughout the economy, a result of
the worldwide socialist organisation. These are not therefore two simultaneous acts, but can
only be staggered in time, with the first conditioning the second, eventually resulting in the
socialisation of agriculture. In itself the nationalisation of the land or the abolition of private
property in land is not a specifically socialist measure. In fact it is essentially bourgeois, the
final act of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
Together with the equal enjoyment of the land, it constitutes the most extreme, revolutionary
stage of this revolution, but while being, to use Lenin's expression, "the most perfect
foundation from the standpoint of the development of capitalism, it is at the same time the
agrarian regime which is the most supple basis for the passage to socialism". The weakness
of the criticisms Rosa Luxemburg made of the agrarian programme of the Bolsheviks (The
Russian Revolution) concerns precisely these points: in the first place, she didn't underline
that "the immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants", while having
absolutely nothing in common with a socialist society - we agree with this entirely nevertheless represented an inevitable and transitional stage between capitalism and
socialism, above all in Russia, although she does admit that this was "the shortest, simplest,
most clean-cut formula to achieve two diverse things: to break down large land-ownership,
and immediately to bind the peasants to the revolutionary government. As a political measure
to fortify the proletarian socialist government, it was an excellent tactical move", which given
the situation was obviously the most fundamental issue. In the second place, she did not make
it clear that the slogan "land to the peasants", taken by the Bolsheviks from the programme of
the Socialist Revolutionaries, had been applied on the basis of the integral suppression of
private property in land and not, as Luxemburg declares, on the basis of the passage from
large landed property to a multitude of small individual peasant properties. It is not correct to
say (we only have to look at the decrees on nationalisation) that the division of the land was
extended to the large technically developed exploitations, since they actually formed the
structure of the "sovkozes", although it has to be admitted that these were not a major element
of the agrarian economy as a whole.
Let us say in passing that Luxemburg, in drawing out her own agrarian programme, says
nothing about the integral expropriation of the land, which was clearly seen as a link to
further measures. She only foresees the nationalisation of large and medium-sized property.
Finally, in the third place, Luxemburg confines herself to showing the negative side of the
division of the land (an inevitable evil), to denouncing the fact that it would not do away with
"but would increase social and economic inequality among the peasantry and aggravate class
oppositions", when it was precisely the development of the class struggle in the countryside
which allowed the proletarian power to consolidate itself by drawing towards it the rural
proletarians and semi-proletarian peasants, and which formed the social premise for extending
the influence of the proletariat and ensuring its victory in the countryside. Rosa Luxemburg
undoubtedly underestimated this political aspect of the agrarian problem and the fundamental
role that has to be played by the proletariat based on its political domination and the
possession of large-scale industry.

It would be pointless to ignore the fact the Russian proletariat faced an extremely complex
situation. Because of the extreme dispersion of the small peasants, the effects of
nationalisation were very limited. We should not forget that the collectivisation of the soil
does not necessarily lead to that of the means of production attached to it. In Russia this was
true of only 8% of the latter, while the remaining 92% remained in the private possession of
the peasants; by contrast, in industry, collectivisation reached 89% of the productive forces,
including 97% of the railways and 99% of heavy industry (the situation in 1925).
Although agricultural tools only represent about a third of the total amount of equipment, they
constituted a favourable basis for the development of capitalist relations, given the enormous
mass of the peasants. And it is obvious that, from the economic point of view, the central
method for containing and reabsorbing this development could only be the organisation of
large-scale industrialised agriculture. But this was subordinated to the general problem of
industrialisation and consequently to the problem of aid from the proletariat of the advanced
countries. In order to avoid getting stuck in the dilemma: perish or provide tools and
consumer goods to the small peasants, the proletariat - while trying as much as possible to
maintain a balance between agricultural and industrial production - had to devote the major
part of its efforts towards the class struggle, both in the country and in the towns, always with
the perspective of linking this to the international revolutionary struggle. Allying itself with
the small peasants in order to struggle against the peasant capitalists, while at the same time
trying to eliminate small-scale production, the precondition for creating a collective
production: such was the apparently paradoxical task imposed on the proletariat vis--vis the
villages.
For Lenin, this alliance alone would be able to safeguard the proletariat until other sections of
the proletariat rose up. It did not imply a capitulation to the peasantry but was the only
condition for overcoming the petty bourgeois hesitations of the peasants, who oscillated
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat because of their economic and social situation and
their inability to develop an independent policy, and thus for pulling them into the process of
collective labour. "Annihilating" the small producers did not mean crushing them violently,
but, as Lenin said in 1918, "helping them to move towards an ideal' capitalism, since equal
enjoyment of the soil is capitalism taken to its highest ideal as far as the small producer is
concerned; at the same time, they have to feel for themselves the defects of this system and
thus realise the need to go over to collective cultivation". It was not surprising that during the
three terrible years of civil war, the experimental method had not brought a "socialist"
consciousness to the Russian peasants. If they supported the proletariat to defend their land
against the Whites, this was at the cost of their economic impoverishment and vital
requisitions by the proletarian state.
And the NEP, while re-establishing a more normal field of experience, also restored "freedom
and capitalism", but this worked above all in favour of the peasant capitalists, a huge ransom
which made Lenin say that with the tax in kind, "the kulaks can push in places where they
could not push before". Under the leadership of centrism, which was incapable of resisting
this pressure from a renascent bourgeoisie on the economic apparatus, the state organs and the
party, the middle peasants were encouraged to enrich themselves and to break with the poor
peasants and the proletariat, with the results that we now see. A perfectly logical coincidence:
10 years after the proletarian insurrection, the shift in the balance of forces towards the
bourgeois elements corresponded to the introduction of the 5 Year Plans, whose realisation
depended on an unprecedented level of exploitation of the proletariat.

The Russian revolution tried to resolve the complex problem of the relationship between the
proletariat and the peasantry. It failed not because a proletarian revolution could not succeed
in a situation where only a bourgeois revolution was on the agenda, as the likes of Otto Bauer
or Kautsky claimed, but because the Bolsheviks did not arm themselves with the principles of
administration founded on historical experience, which would have ensured them economic
and political victory.
But because it brought out the importance of the agrarian question, the Russian revolution
contributed to the historic acquisitions of the world proletariat. We should add that the theses
of the Second Congress of the Communist International on this question can no longer be
maintained in their entirety, and that in particular the slogan "land to the peasants" must be reexamined and limited in its significance.
And, inspired by the works of Marx on the Paris Commune, further developed by Lenin,
marxists have succeeded in making a clear demarcation between centralism as a necessary
and progressive form of social evolution and the oppressive centralism crystallised in the
bourgeois state. While basing themselves on the first, they fight for the destruction of the
second. It is on this indestructibly materialist position that they scientifically refuted anarchist
ideology. And yet the Russian revolution breathed new life into this celebrated controversy,
which seemed to have been dead and buried.
There have been many critiques which see the origins of the counter-revolutionary evolution
of the USSR in the fact that economic and social centralism was not abolished and replaced
by a system of "self-determination" by the working masses. This amounts to demanding that
the social consciousness of the Russian proletariat should have jumped over the transitional
stage; at the same time, there is a call for the immediate suppression of value, of the market,
of wage differentials and other vestiges of capitalism. In other words, there is a confusion
between two notions of centralism, which are absolutely opposed to one another, and a return,
whether deliberate or not, to the typically anarchist opposition to "authoritarianism" as a way
of navigating the transition period. It is an abstraction to oppose the principle of autonomy to
the principle of authority; as Engels remarked in 1873, these are two very relative terms
linked to historical evolution and the process of production.
The economic and political centralism of the dictatorship of the proletariat
On the basis of an evolution which goes from primitive communism to imperialist capitalism
and which "returns" to civilised communism, the organic forms of capitalist "cartelism" and
"trustification" push away the forms of primitive social autonomy, laying the basis for the
"administration of things", which is actually an "anarchic" form of organisation even if it is
prepared by a system where authority persists, but "kept to strict limits as long as the
conditions of production make it inevitable" (Engels). The essential thing is not to try to leap
over stages in a utopian manner, or to believe that you can change the nature of centralism
and the principle of authority by changing the name. The Dutch internationalists, for example,
have not escaped an analysis based on anticipating social reality and the theoretical
convenience such an analysis provides (cf their work cited earlier).
Their critique of centralism in the Russian experience is made all the "easier" by the fact that
it relates uniquely to the phase of "war communism" which engendered a bureaucratic
dictatorship over the economy, whereas we know that, later on, the NEP favoured a wide
economic "decentralisation". It is argued that the Bolsheviks "wanted" to suppress the market

(we know that this wasn't at all the case) by replacing it with the Supreme Council of the
Economy, and thus they bear responsibility for transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat
into a dictatorship over the proletariat. Thus for the Dutch comrades, because, as a result of
the necessities of the civil war, the Russian proletariat had to impose an extremely centralised
and simplified economic and political apparatus, they lost control of the dictatorship, even
though, at the same time, they were politically exterminating the enemy class. Unfortunately
the Dutch comrades don't spend any time on this political aspect of the question, which for us
is fundamental.
At the same time, by repudiating the dialectical analysis and leaping over the problem of
centralism, they have ended up changing the meaning of words, since what they are looking at
is not the transitional period, which is the only one of interest to marxists from the point of
view of solving practical problems, but the higher sage of communism. It is then easy to talk
about "a general social accounting based on an economic centre to which all the currents of
economic life flow, but which has no right of directing production or deciding on the
distribution of the social product". And they add that "in the association of free and equal
producers, the control of economic life does not emanate from personalities or offices but
results from the public registration of the real course of economic life. This means that
production is controlled by reproduction". In other words, "economic life is controlled by
itself through average social labour time".
With such formulations, the solutions to the problems of proletarian management cannot
advance at all, since the burning question posed to the proletariat is not to work out the
mechanisms that regulate communist society, but to find the way that leads towards it.
The Dutch comrades have, it's true, proposed an immediate solution: no economic or political
centralism, which can only take on an oppressive form, but the transfer of management to
enterprise organisms which would coordinate production through a "general economic law"
(?). For them, the abolition of exploitation (and thus of classes) does not take place through a
long historic process involving the ceaseless growth of participation by the masses in social
administration, but in the collectivisation of the means of production, provided that this
involves the right of the enterprise councils to dispose of the means of production and the
social product. But apart from the fact this is a formulation which contains its own
contradiction - since it boils down to opposing integral collectivisation (property of all, and of
no one in particular) with a kind of restricted, dispersed collectivisation between social groups
(the shareholders' society is also a partial form of collectivisation) - it simply tends to
substitute a juridical solution (the right to dispose of the enterprises) for another juridical
solution, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. But as we have already seen, the expropriation
of the bourgeoisie is simply the initial condition for the social transformation (even though
full collectivisation is not immediately realisable), and the class struggle will continue as
before the revolution, but on political bases which will allow the proletariat to impose the
decisive direction.
The analysis of the Dutch internationalists undoubtedly moves away from marxism because it
never puts forward the fundamental reality that the proletariat is forced to put up with the
"scourge" of the state until classes have disappeared, that is, until the disappearance of world
capitalism. But to underline such a historic necessity is to admit that state functions are still
temporarily mixed up with centralisation, even though this takes place after the destruction of
the capitalist apparatus of oppression and is not necessarily opposed to the development of the
cultural level of the working masses and their capacity to take charge. Instead of looking for

the solution to this development in the real context of historical and political conditions, the
Dutch internationalists have tried to find it in a formula for appropriation which is both
utopian and retrograde and which is as not clearly distinct from "bourgeois right" as they
imagine. What's more, if one admits that the proletariat as a whole is in no way prepared
"culturally" to solve "by itself" the complex problems of social administration (and this reality
applies as much to the most advanced proletariat as to the least cultured), what then is the
exact use of the "right to dispose" of the factories and production?
The Russian workers did effectively have the factories in their hands and they were not able
to run them. Does this mean that they shouldn't have expropriated the capitalists and taken
power? Should they have "waited" to be schooled by western capitalism and acquire the
culture of the English or German workers? While it is true that the latter are a hundred times
more qualified to confront the gigantic tasks of proletarian administration than were the
Russian worker in 1917, it is also true that they were not able, in the pestilential ambiance of
capitalism and bourgeois ideology, to develop an "integral" social awareness which would
have permitted them to solve "by themselves" all the problems posed, something which can
only fully appear in a higher phase of communism. Historically, it is the party which
concentrates this social awareness and it can only do this on the basis of experience; in other
words, it does not bring fully worked out solutions but elaborates them in the fire of the social
struggle, after (above all, after) as well as before the revolution. And in this colossal task, far
from opposing itself to the proletariat, the party is a part of it, since without the active and
growing collaboration of the masses, it will become the prey of enemy forces.
"Administration by all" is the touchstone of any proletarian revolution. But history poses a
precise alternative: either we make the socialist revolution "with men as they are today and
who cannot do without subordination, without control by foremen, without accounting"
(Lenin, State and Revolution) or there will be no revolution.
The duality of the state in the period of transition in marxist analysis
In the chapter dealing with the transitional state, we already recalled that the state owes its
existence to the division of society into classes. In primitive communism, there was no state.
In the higher form of communism, there will also be no state. The state will disappear with the
subject that gave rise to it: class exploitation. But as long as the state exists, it conserves its
specific traits and cannot change its fundamental nature. It cannot cease to be a state, that is to
say, an oppressive, coercive, corrupting organism. What changes in the course of history is its
function. Instead of being the instrument of the slave masters, it became that of the feudal
lords, then of the bourgeoisie. It is the perfect instrument for conserving the privileges of a
ruling class. This isn't threatened by its own state, but by new privileges developing in society
with the rise of a new exploiting class .The political revolution which followed was the
juridical consequence of a transformation of the economic structure that had already got
underway, the triumph of a new form of exploitation over the old one. This is why the new
revolutionary class, on the basis of the material conditions which it had founded and
consolidated inside the old system, could without shame or distrust base itself on the state,
which it only had to adapt and perfect in order to organise and develop its own mode of
production. This is all the more true for the bourgeois class which is the first in history to rule
on a world scale and whose state is the most concentrated form of all the means of oppression
built up in the course of history. There is no opposition but an intimate, indestructible link
between the bourgeoisie and its state; and this solidarity does not stop at national frontiers. It
goes beyond them because it has its roots in the international capitalist system.

By contrast, with the foundation of the proletarian state, the historical relationship between
the ruling class and the state is modified. It is true that the proletarian state, built on the ruins
of the bourgeois state, is still the instrument for the domination of the proletariat. However,
this domination is not aimed at the preservation of social privileges whose material bases
were laid down inside bourgeois society, but at the destruction of all privileges. The new state
expresses a new relation of domination, that of the majority over the minority, and a new
juridical relationship (collective appropriation). On the other hand, because it remains under
the influence of the climate of capitalist society (because there can be no simultaneity in the
revolution), it is still the representative of "bourgeois right". This still lives on, not only in the
social and economic processes, but also in the heads of millions of proletarians. It is here that
the duality of the transitional state is revealed: on the one hand, as a weapon directed against
the expropriated class, it reveals its "strong" side; on the other hand, as an organism called
upon not to consolidate a new system of exploitation, but to abolish all exploitation, it exposes
its "weak" side because by nature and by definition it tends to become the pole of attraction
for capitalist privileges. This is why, while there can be no antagonism between the
bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state, such an antagonism does indeed arise between the
proletariat and the transitional state.
This historic problem has its negative expression in the fact that the transitional state can quite
easily be led to play a counter-revolutionary role in the international class struggle, even when
it maintains a proletarian character if the social classes upon which it was built have not been
modified. The proletariat can only stand against the development of this latent contradiction
through the class politics of its party and the vigilant existence of its mass organisations (trade
unions, soviets, etc), through which it has to exert an indispensable control over the activity of
the state and to defend its specific interests. These organisms can only disappear along with
the necessity which gave rise to them, i.e. the class struggle. Such a conception is inspired
entirely by the teachings of marxism, since the notion of the proletarian "antidote" within the
transitional state was defended by Marx and Engels as well as by Lenin, as we have already
pointed out.
The active presence of proletarian organisms is the condition for keeping the proletarian state
in the service of the workers and for preventing it from turning against them. To deny the
contradictory dualism of the proletarian state is to falsify the historic significance of the
period of transition.
Certain comrades consider, by contrast, that during this period there has to be an identification
between the workers' organisations and the state. (cf comrade Hennault's "Nature and
Evolution of the Russian State, Bilan p.1121). The Dutch internationalists go even further
when they say that since "labour time is the measure of the distribution of the social product
and the whole of distribution remains outside any politics', the trade unions have no function
in communism and the struggle for the amelioration of living conditions will have come to an
end" (p 115 of their work).
Centrism also starts off from the conception that since the soviet state is a workers' state, any
demands raised by the workers become an act of hostility towards "their" state, therefore
justifying the total subordination of the trade unions and the factory committees to the state
mechanism.
If we now say, on the basis of the previous considerations, that the soviet state has conserved
its proletarian character, even if it is being directed against the proletariat, is this just a subtle

distinction which has nothing in common with reality, and which we ourselves repudiate
because we reject the defence of the USSR? No! And we think that this thesis has to be
maintained above all because it is justified from the point of view of the theory of historical
materialism; secondly, because the conclusions we have to draw about the evolution of the
Russian revolution are not vitiated in their premises by the fact that we reject the identity
between the proletariat and the state and say that there should be no confusion between the
character of the state and its function.
If the soviet state is no longer a proletarian state, what is it? Those who deny this have not
succeeded in showing that it is a capitalist state. But do they fare any better by talking about a
bureaucratic state and discovering that the Russian state is a ruling class original in history
and linked to a new mode of production and exploitation? In fact, such an explanation turns
its back on marxist materialism.
Although the bureaucracy has been an indispensable instrument in the functioning of any
social system, there is no trace in history of a social layer that transformed itself into an
exploiting class on its own account. There are however many examples of all-powerful
bureaucracies within a society, but they were never confounded with the classes acting on
production, except as individuals. In Capital, Marx, examining the colonisation of India,
shows that the bureaucracy appeared there in the shape of the East India Company; that the
latter had economic links with circulation - not with production - whereas it really did exert
political power, but on behalf of the metropolitan capitalism.
Marxism has supplied a scientific definition of class. If we hold to it, we have to affirm that
the Russian bureaucracy is not a class, still less a ruling class, given that there are no
particular rights over production outside of the private ownership of the means of production,
and that in Russia collectivisation still exists in its basics. It is also true that the Russian
bureaucracy consumes a large portion of social labour. But this is true of any form of social
parasitism and this should not be confused with a class exploitation.
While it is undeniable that in Russia the social relations express a colossal exploitation of the
workers, this does not derive from the exercise of any right of property, group or individual,
but from a whole economic and political process, of which the bureaucracy is not the cause,
but only an expression, and in our view a secondary one, since this evolution is above all the
product of the policies of centrism which has shown itself incapable of containing the impetus
of the forces of the enemy both within Russia and on the international level. It's here that the
originality of the social context in Russia lies - in an unprecedented historical situation: the
existence of a proletarian state within a capitalist world.
The exploitation of the proletariat grows in proportion to the pressure of non-proletarian
classes on the state apparatus, then on the party apparatus, and consequently on the politics of
the party.
There is no need to explain this exploitation through the existence of a bureaucratic class
living from the surplus labour pillaged from the workers, but through the influence of the
enemy on the party which had integrated itself into the state machine rather than continuing
its political and educational role among the masses. Trotsky (in The Third International after
Lenin) underlined the class character of the pressures that were more and more being exerted
on the party, and the growing links between these pressures - from the bourgeois intellectuals,
the petty bourgeoisie, the kulaks - and the state bureaucracy; pressure as well from the world

bourgeoisie, acting through all these forces. This is why the roots of the bureaucracy and the
germs of political degeneration are to be sought in the social phenomenon of the
interpenetration of the party and the state as well as in an unfavourable international situation,
and not in "war communism", which took the political power of the proletariat to its highest
level, nor in the NEP, which was the expression of a compromise and of a more normal
regime for a proletarian economy. Souvarine, in his text "Apercu sur le bolshevisme",
reversed the real relationship between the party and the state by arguing that the party was
exerting a machine-like grip over the whole state apparatus. He quite correctly characterised
the Russian revolution as a "metamorphosis in the regime that took place unbeknownst to its
beneficiaries, without any premeditated intent or preconceived plan, through the triple effect
of the general lack of culture, the apathy of the exhausted masses and the efforts of the
Bolsheviks to overcome the chaos" (p245).
But if revolutionaries are to avoid falling into a kind of fatalism, diametrically opposed to
marxism, derived from the idea of the "immaturity" of the material conditions and the cultural
incapacities of the masses, if they are to reject the conclusion that the Russian revolution was
not a proletarian revolution (when the historical and objective conditions for the proletarian
revolution existed then and exist now on a world scale, which is the only valid basis for
posing the question from the marxist point of view), then they have to focus their attention on
the central issue: the political factor, i.e., the party, the indispensable instrument for the
proletariat at the level of historic necessity. They would also have to conclude that in a
revolution the only possible form of authority for the party is the dictatorial form. The terms
of the problem cannot be rewritten by positing a kind of irreducible opposition between the
proletariat and the dictatorship of the party, because that would mean turning one's back on
the proletarian revolution itself. We repeat: the dictatorship of the party is an inevitable
expression of the transitional period, whether in a country that has been highly developed by
capitalism or in the most backward of colonies. The fundamental task for marxists is
precisely, on the basis of the gigantic experience of the Russian revolution, to examine the
political bases on which this dictatorship can be maintained in the interests of the proletariat,
i.e. how the proletarian revolution can and must flow into the world revolution.
Unfortunately, the "fatalists" have never tried to deal with this problem. If little progress has
been made towards a solution to this question, the difficulties lie as much in the painful
isolation of the weak revolutionary nuclei today as in the enormous complexity of the
problem. The essential question posed here is the relationship between the party and the class
struggle, and within this context, the question of the party's mode of organisation and internal
life.
The comrades of Bilan are right to attach so much importance in their research to two
activities of the party, which they see as fundamental to the preparation of the revolution (as
the history of the Bolshevik party has shown): the fractional struggle inside the party and the
struggle within the mass organisations. The question is to know whether these forms of
activity must disappear or transform themselves radically after the revolution, in a situation
where the class struggle does not attenuate in the least, but develops in other forms. What is
evident is that no organisational method or formula can prevent the class struggle from having
its repercussions within the party, through the growth of tendencies or fractions.
The "unity at any price" of the Russian Trotskyist opposition, like the "monolithism" of
centrism, fly in the face of historical reality. By contrast the recognition of fractions seems to
us to be much more dialectical. But this simple affirmation does not in itself resolve the

problem; it simply poses it or rather puts it in its proper context. The comrades of Bilan are
certainly agreed that a few lapidary phrases don't constitute a solution. What remains to be
examined is how the struggle of fractions and the opposition between programmes that goes
with it can be reconciled with homogeneous leadership and revolutionary discipline. In the
same way we have to look at how the liberty of fractions inside the union organisations can
coincide with the single party of the proletariat. It's no exaggeration to say that the outcome of
the future proletarian revolution depends on the answers to these questions.
[1]. The scepticism declared today by certain internationalist communists can in no way
undermine our conviction about this. Comrade Hennaut in Bilan n34 (p1124) coldly
proclaims that "the Bolshevik revolution was made by the proletariat but it was not a
proletarian revolution". Such an assertion is quite stupefying when you consider that this
"non-proletarian" revolution succeeded in forming the most formidable proletarian weapon
that has ever threatened the world bourgeoisie - the Communist International.
Part VI
It remains for us to examine some of the norms of economic administration which, in our
view, condition the relationship between the party and the masses, the basis for strengthening
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It's true that any system of production can only develop on the basis of enlarged reproduction,
i.e. the accumulation of wealth. But a type of society is expressed less by its external forms
and manifestations than by its social content, by the motivation for producing, i.e. by the class
relations. In the evolution of history, the two processes, internal and external, are engaged in a
constant contradiction. The development of capitalism has shown that the progress of the
productive forces also engenders its opposite, the regression in the material conditions of the
proletariat, a phenomenon which is expressed in the contradiction between use value and
exchange value, between production and consumption. We have already noted that the
capitalist system is not progressive by nature, but by necessity, spurred on by accumulation
and competition. Marx underlined this contrast by saying that "the development of the
productive forces only has any importance to the extent that it increases the surplus labour of
the working class and not to the extent that it diminished the time necessary for material
production" (Capital, Book X).
Beginning from an observation that is valid for all types of society, i.e. that surplus labour is
inevitable, the problem is thus essentially concentrated on the mode of appropriation and of
destruction of surplus labour, the mass of surplus labour and its duration, the relation between
this mass and the total labour, and finally the rhythm of its accumulation. And immediately
we can bring out another remark by Marx: "the real wealth of society and the possibility of the
continual enlargement of the process of reproduction do not depend on the duration of
surplus labour, but on its productivity and the more or less advantageous conditions in which
this productivity is set to work" (Capital Book XIV). And he adds that the fundamental
condition for the advent of the "realm of freedom" is the reduction in the working day.
These considerations enable us to grasp the tendencies that have to be imprinted in the
evolution of a proletarian economy. It also allows us to reject the conception that sees the
growth of the productive forces as the absolute proof of "socialism". This is a conception
defended not only by Centrism but also by Trotsky: "liberalism pretends not to see the
enormous progress of the Soviet regime, i.e. the concrete proofs of the incalculable

advantages of socialism. The economists of the classes who have been dispossessed by it pass
over in utter silence its rhythms of industrial development, unprecedented in world history"
(Lutte de classes, June 1930).
We have already noted at the beginning of this chapter that this question of "rhythm" is at the
forefront of the preoccupations of Trotsky and his Opposition, when in fact it does not at all
correspond to the mission of the proletariat, which consists of modifying the motivation for
production and not of accelerating its rhythm on the back of the impoverishment of the
proletariat, exactly as under capitalism. The proletariat has all the less reason to be attached to
the factor of "rhythm" given that this has to be seen on an international scale; the rhythm of
production taking place in the USSR at present is as nothing compared to the contribution that
the most advanced capitalist technology would bring to a world socialist economy.
The reorientation of production towards consumption
When we pose the necessity to change the motive for production, gearing it towards the needs
of consumption, as a primordial economic task, we are obviously talking about a process and
not about an immediate result of the revolution. The very structure of the transitional
economy, as we have already shown, cannot engender any such economic automatism, since
the survival of "bourgeois right" means the subsistence of certain social relations of
exploitation and labour power still to a certain extent retains the character of a commodity.
The politics of the party, stimulated by the workers' struggles for immediate demands through
their trade union organisations, must precisely tend to overcome the contradiction between
labour and labour power, which has been developed to an extreme by capitalism. In other
words, the capitalist use of labour power for the accumulation of capital must be replaced by
the "proletarian" use of this labour power for purely social ends, which will facilitate the
political and economic consolidation of the proletariat.
In the organisation of production, the proletarian state must be inspired above all by the needs
of the masses, developing the branches of production which can respond to those needs,
obviously in relation to the specific material conditions that prevail in the economy in
question.
If the economic programme that has been elaborated remains in the framework of building the
world socialist economy, and thus remains tied to the international class struggle, the
proletarian state will be all the more able to confine its tasks to developing consumption. On
the other hand, if this programme takes on an autonomous character which aims directly or
indirectly at a form of "national socialism", a growing part of the surplus labour will be
siphoned off into the construction of enterprises which in the future will have no justification
in the international division of labour; at the same time these enterprises will inevitably be
obliged to produce the means for the defence of the "socialist society" under construction. We
will see that this is exactly what has happened in the Soviet Union.
It is certain that any improvement in the material situation of the proletarian masses depends
in the first place on the productivity of labour, and this in turn depends on the technical level
of the productive forces, and consequently on accumulation. In the second place it is linked to
the output of labour that corresponds to the organisation and discipline within the labour
process. Such are the fundamental elements that exist in the capitalist system as well, with the
characteristic that the concrete results of accumulation are diverted from their human

destination to the benefit of accumulation "in itself"; the productivity of labour does not
translate into objects of consumption, but into capital.
It would be pointless to hide that the problem is far from being solved by proclaiming a policy
aimed at enlarging consumption. But you have to begin by affirming it, because it is a major
directive which is irreducibly opposed to the one that pushes first and foremost towards
industrialisation and accelerated growth, inevitably sacrificing one or several generations of
workers (Centrism[1] has declared this openly). A proletariat that has been "sacrificed", even
for objectives that may seem to correspond to its historical interests (though the reality of
Russia demonstrates that this is not at all the case) cannot constitute a real strength for the
world proletariat. It can only be turned away from the latter under the hypnosis of national
objectives.
Continuing on the basis of the internationalist considerations we have developed, we thus
have to affirm (unless we want to fall into abstraction) that the economic tasks of the
proletariat, from the historical point of view, are primordial. The comrades of Bilan, animated
by the correct concern to show the role of the proletarian state on the global terrain of the
class struggle, have singularly restricted the importance of the question, by arguing that "the
economic and military domains[2] can only be accessory questions, questions of detail, in the
activity of the proletarian state, whereas they are essential for an exploiting class" (Bilan p
612). We repeat: the programme is determined and limited by the world policies of the
proletarian state, but having established this, the proletariat can still not invest too much
vigilance and energy into searching for a solution to the redoubtable problem of consumption,
which still conditions its role as a "simple factor in the struggle of the world proletariat".
In our view the comrades of Bilan make another mistake[3] when they make no distinction
between a form of administration that tends towards the "building of socialism" and a
socialist administration of the transitional economy, declaring that "far from envisaging the
possibility of a socialist administration of the economy in a given country and the
international class struggle, we must begin by proclaiming that such a socialist
administration is impossible". But what is a policy which aims at improving the living
conditions of the workers if not a truly socialist one, seeking precisely to overturn the
capitalist process of production. In the period of transition, it is perfectly possible to develop
this new economic course towards a production based on need even while classes still exist.
But the fact remains that the motivation of production does not depend solely on adopting a
correct policy, but above all on the proletariat's organisations exerting pressure on the
economy and adapting the productive apparatus to its needs. Furthermore the amelioration of
living conditions does not fall from the sky. It is a result of the development of productive
capacity, whether that is the consequence of an increase in the mass of social labour, a greater
output, through better organisation of the labour process, or through an increase in labour
productivity thanks to the use of more powerful means of production.
As regards the mass of social labour - if we take the number of workers to be constant - we
have said that it is given by the length and intensity of the use of labour power. Now, it is
precisely these two factors, linked to the falling value of labour power as a result of its greater
productivity, which determines the degree of exploitation imposed on the proletariat in the
capitalist regime.

In the transitional phase, labour power still conserves its character as a commodity to the
extent that wages are directly linked to its value. By contrast, it throws off this character to the
extent that wages moves towards the equivalent of the total labour provided by the worker
(once the surplus labour earmarked for social needs is deducted).
Unlike the policy of capitalism, a truly proletarian policy seeking to increase the productive
forces can certainly not be based on surplus labour that derives from a greater length of
intensity of social labour, which in its capitalist form constitutes absolute surplus value. On
the contrary it has to be linked to the rhythms and duration of labour that are compatible with
the existence of a real dictatorship of the proletariat; it must therefore preside over a more
rational organisation of labour, over the elimination of any wasted social activity, even if in
this domain the possibilities of increasing the mass of useful labour are quickly exhausted.
In these conditions, "proletarian" accumulation must find its essential source in labour that
has become available through a higher level of technique.
This means that increasing the productivity of labour poses the following alternative: either
the same mass of products (or use values) determines a reduction in the total volume of labour
consumed, or, if the latter remains constant (or even if it diminishes depending on the level of
technical progress), the quantity of products to be distributed will increase. But in both cases,
a diminution in relative surplus labour (relative that is to the labour strictly necessary for the
reproduction of labour power) can perfectly well be conjoined to greater consumption and
thus to a real rise in wages and not fictional ones as in capitalism. It is in the new use of
productivity that we will see the superiority of proletarian administration over capitalist
administration, rather than competition over production costs, since on this basis the
proletariat will inevitably be beaten, as we have already indicated.
In effect it is the development of the productivity of labour which has precipitated capitalism
into its crisis of decadence where, in a permanent manner (and no longer only through
cyclical crises) the mass of use values is set against the mass of exchange values. The
bourgeoisie is overcome by the immensity of its production and yet is pushed towards suicide
by a huge mass of unsatisfied needs.
In the period of transition, the productivity of labour is of course still a long way from
responding to the formula "to each according to his needs", but the possibility of using it fully
for human ends overturns the givens of the social problem. Marx already noted that although
it was well below its theoretical maximum, the increasing productivity of labour was basic to
capitalism. But after the revolution it will be possible to reduce, then suppress, the capitalist
antagonism between the product and its value, provided that the proletarian policy tends not to
reduce wages to the value of labour power - a capitalist method which diverts technical
progress to the benefit of capital - but to more and more elevate it above this value, on the
basis of the development of productivity.
It is obvious that a certain fraction of relative surplus labour cannot return directly to the
worker, given the basic necessities of accumulation without which there can be no technical
progress. And once again we are faced with the problem of the rhythm and rate of
accumulation. And while it appears to be a question of measurement, any arbitrary element
will be excluded on a principled basis that defines the economic tasks of the proletariat.
The determination of the rhythm of accumulation

Furthermore, it goes without saying that determining the rate of accumulation is based on
economic centralism and not on the decision of the producers in their enterprises, as in the
view of the Dutch internationalists (p 116 of their work). What's more they do not seem very
convinced of the practical value of such a solution, since they bring it in immediately after
affirming that "the rate of accumulation cannot be left to the free choice of the separate
enterprises and it is the general congress of the enterprise councils that will decide on the
obligatory norms", a formula which seems to be a kind of disguised centralism.
If we apply this to what has happened in Russia, we can see all the more clearly the fraud of
Centrism, which claims that the suppression of the exploitation of the proletariat flows
directly from the collectivisation of the means of production. We can see that the economic
processes in the Soviet Union are those of the capitalist economy; even if they begin from a
different basis they have ended up flowing towards the same outlet: imperialist war. Both
have unfolded on the basis of a growing extraction of surplus value which is not returned to
the working class. In the USSR, the labour process is capitalist in substance, if not in its social
aspects and in the relations of the production. There is a drive to increase absolute surplus
value, obtained through the intensification of labour, which has taken the form of
"Stakhanovism". The material conditions of the workers are in no way linked to the technical
improvements and the development of the productive forces, and in any case the relative
participation of the proletariat in the patrimony of society is not increasing but diminishing.
This is a phenomenon analogous to what the capitalist system has always engendered, even in
its most prosperous periods. We lack elements to establish the extent to which there is a real
growth of the absolute part that goes to the workers.
Moreover, the USSR practises a policy of wage reductions, which tends to substitute
unqualified workers (coming from the immense reserves of the peasantry) for qualified
workers, who are also the most class conscious.
To the question of how this enormous mass of surplus labour becomes congealed, we are
given the facile answer that a major part goes to the bureaucratic "class". But such an
explanation is disproved by the very existence of an enormous productive apparatus which
remains collective property, and in comparison to which the beefsteaks, automobiles and
villas of the bureaucrats cut a small figure! The official statistics and others, as well as the
inquiries, confirm that there is an enormous and growing disproportion between the
production of means of production (tools, buildings, public works, etc) and the objects of
consumption destined for the "bureaucracy" and for the worker and peasant masses. If it was
true that the bureaucracy is a class which disposes of the economy and appropriates surplus
labour, how are we to explain how the latter is to a large part transformed into collective
wealth and not private property? This paradox can only be explained by discovering why this
wealth, while still remaining within the Soviet community, goes against it in the way that it is
distributed. Let's note that today we are seeing a similar phenomenon within capitalist society,
i.e. that the major part of the surplus value doesn't end up in the pockets of the capitalists but
is accumulated in the form of goods which are only private property from the juridical point
of view. The difference is that in the USSR this phenomenon doesn't take on a capitalist
character properly speaking. The two evolutions also start from a different origin: in the
USSR it doesn't arise out of an economic antagonism, but a political one; from a split between
the Russian proletariat and the international proletariat; it develops under the banner of the
defence of "national socialism" and of its integration into the mechanisms of world
capitalism. By contrast, in the capitalist countries, the evolution is determined by the
decadence of the bourgeois economy. But the two social developments end up in a common

objective: the construction of war economies (the Soviet leaders boast of having set up the
most formidable war machine in the world). This, it seems to us, is the answer to the "Russian
enigma". This explains why the defeat of the October revolution does not come from an
overturn in the relations between classes within Russia, but on the international arena.
Let's now examine the policies that are orienting the course of the class struggle towards
imperialist war rather than the world revolution.
The exploitation of the Russian workers in the service of the war economy
For certain comrades, as we have already said, the Russian revolution was not proletarian and
its reactionary evolution was determined in advance by the fact that it was carried out by a
proletariat which was culturally backward (even though, at the level of class consciousness, it
was in the vanguard of the world proletariat) and which was obliged to take over a backward
country. We will limit ourselves to opposing such a fatalist attitude by referring to that of
Marx with regard to the Commune: although the latter expressed a historical immaturity of
the proletariat vis--vis the taking of power, Marx nevertheless saw its immense importance
and drew fertile lessons from it, the precise lessons that would inspire the Bolsheviks in 1917.
While acting in the same way towards the Russian revolution, we don't deduce from this that
future revolutions will be photographic reproductions of October. What we do say is that the
fundamental traits of the October revolution will indeed be found in these revolutions,
recalling what Lenin meant when he talked about the "international value of the Russian
revolution" (Left Wing Communism). A marxist does not "repeat" history but interprets it to
forge the theoretical weapons of the proletariat, to help it avoid errors and finally triumph
over the bourgeoisie. To search for the conditions that would have placed the Russian
proletariat in a position to have won a definitive victory is to give the marxist method of
investigation all its value by adding a new stone to the construction of historical materialism.
While it's true that the retreat of the first revolutionary wave led to the temporary isolation of
the Russian proletariat, we think that it's not there that we have to look for the decisive cause
of the evolution of the USSR, but in the interpretation which was subsequently made of the
events, and in the false perspectives about the evolution of capitalism that derived from this.
The conception of the "stabilisation" of capitalism naturally engendered the theory of
"socialism in one country" and consequently the "defensive" policy of the USSR.
The international proletariat became the instrument of the proletarian state, a force to defend it
against imperialist aggression, while the world revolution faded into the background as a
concrete objective. If Bukharin still talked about the latter in 1925 it was because "for us the
world revolution has this importance, that it is the only guarantee against interventions,
against a new war"
He thus elaborated the theory of the "guarantee against interventions", which the CI took up
as it became the expression of the particular interests of the USSR and no longer the interests
of the world revolution. The "guarantee" was no longer sought in linking up with the
international proletariat but in modifying the character and content of the relations between
the proletarian state and the capitalist states. The world proletariat remained only as a point of
support for the defence of "national socialism".
As regards the NEP, basing ourselves on what we said previously, we don't think that it
offered a specific terrain for an inevitable degeneration, although it did give rise to a very

considerable recrudescence of capitalist ambitions among the peasantry in particular; and,

under Centrism, the alliance with the poor peasants (the smytchka), which Lenin saw as a
means to strengthen the proletarian dictatorship, became a goal, at the same time as a union
was forged with the middle peasants and the kulaks.
Contrary to the opinion of the comrades of Bilan, we also don't think that we can infer from
Lenin's declarations about the NEP that he would have advocated a policy of separating the
economic evolution of Russia from the course of the world revolution.
On the contrary, for Lenin, the NEP was a "holding" policy, a policy of respite, until the
revival of the international class struggle: "when we adopt a policy that has to last for many
years, we don't forget for a moment that the international revolution, the rapidity and the
conditions of its development, can change everything". For him it was a question of reestablishing a certain economic balance, making concessions to capitalist forces without
which the dictatorship would have collapsed, but not of "calling for class collaboration with
the enemy with the aim of building the foundations of the socialist economy".
By the same token it is incorrect to say that Lenin was a partisan of "socialism in one country"
on the basis of one apocryphal document.
On the other hand, the "Trotskyist" Russian opposition is helping to accredit the opinion that
the key struggle is the one between the capitalist states and the Soviet state. In 1927 it saw an
imperialist war against the USSR as inevitable, at the very time that the CI was tearing
workers away from class positions and hurling them onto the front of the defence of the
USSR, simultaneously presiding over the crushing of the Chinese revolution. On this basis the
Opposition is getting involved in the preparations of the USSR - the "bastion of socialism" for war. This position means theoretically sanctioning the exploitation of the Russian workers
in order to build a war economy (the Five Year Plans). The Opposition is even going so far as
to agitate the myth of the unity of the party "at any cost" as a precondition for the military
victory of the USSR. At the same time it makes equivocal statements about the "the struggle
for peace" (!) by considering that the USSR should try to "put off the war", even to pay a
ransom while "preparing the economy, the budget etc to the maximum with a view to war",
and considers that the question of industrialisation is decisive for ensuring the technical
resources needed for defence (Platform).
Subsequently Trotsky, in his Permanent Revolution, took up this thesis of industrialisation at
the quickest possible pace as a guarantee of "external threats" while also serving to raise the
living standards of the masses. We know that the "external threat" comes not from a "crusade"
against the USSR, but through its integration into the front of world imperialism; and at the
same time that industrialisation in no way implies a better existence for the proletariat, but the
most frenzied exploitation with the aim of preparing for imperialist war.
In the next revolution, the proletariat will win, independently of its cultural immaturity and its
economic deficiencies, provided that it bases itself not on the "building of socialism" but on
the extension of the international civil war.
[1]

. It should be noted that at the time Bilan published this contribution the whole of the Italian
left still qualified the Stalinist policy that guided the Communist International as "Centrism".
It was only later, notably by Internationalisme after the war, that the current coming from the

Italian left clearly qualified Stalinism as counter revolutionary. We refer the reader to the
critical presentation of these texts published in International Review n 132.
[2]

. We agree with the comrades of Bilan that the defence of the proletarian state cannot be
posed on the military terrain but on the political level, through its links with the international
proletariat
[3]

. Which may be just a question of formulation, but it is still important to raise it since it is
connected to their tendency to minimise economic problems.