L. Trotsky

Problems of the Soviet Regime

(The Degeneration of Theory and the Theory of Degeneration)

(1933)


Written: Spring 1933.
Source: The Militant, Vol. VI No. 29, 3 June 1933, p. 3.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Einde O’Callaghan for the Trotsky Internet Archive.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.



(Continued from last issue)

3. Official Explanation of Bureaucratic Terror

Some comrades,” Stalin said at the January Plenum of the C.C. “understood the thesis on liquidation of classes, creation of a class less society and withering away of the state as justification for laxity (?) and placidity(?), justification for the counter-revolutionary theory of the slow extinguishing of the class struggle and weakening of state power.” Vagueness of expression serves Stalin in this case as in so many others, to cover up the logical gaps. A programmatic “thesis” on the liquidation of classes in the future need not mean as yet, it is understood, the extinguishing of the class struggle in the present. But it is not a question of a theoretical thesis but of an officially proclaimed fact of the liquidation of classes. Stalin’s sophism consists in the fact that he times the idea of the inevitable strengthening of state power in the transitional epoch between capitalism and socialism, an idea which following Marx, Lenin advanced for the explanation of the necessity of the proletarian dictatorship in general, to a definite period of the dictatorship, after an allegedly already accomplished liquidation of all capitalist classes.

To explain the necessity for the further strengthening of the bureaucratic machine, Stalin said at the same plenum: “The Kulaks are routed as a class but not finished off.” If we should accept this formula, it would seem that to finish the routed Kulaks off, a more concentrated dictatorship is necessary in the literal expression of Stalin – “to finish off the remnant of the dying classes.” The finished expression is, in its way, given to this paradox of bureaucratism oy Molotov, who has, in general, a fatal inclination to develop the idea of Stalin to completion. “In spite of the fact,” said he at the January Plenum, “that the forces of the remnants of the bourgeois classes of our country melt, their resistance anger and fury grow, knowing no bounds.” The forces melt, but the fury grows! Molotov does not suspect, it seems, that the dictatorship is needed against force and not against fury: fury which is not armed by force ceases to be dangerous.
 

Class Enemy Powerless – Why the Repression?

It cannot be said,” Stalin admit on his part, “that these former people could change anything in the present situation of the USSR by their damaging and thieving machinations. They are too weak and impotent to resist the measures of the soviet power.” It seems cleat that if all that is left from these former classes are “former people” if they are too weak “to do any thing (!) to change the situation in the USSR” – that from this should have followed both the extinguishing of the class struggle and the easing of the regime. No, Stalin argues: “the former people can play us some tricks.” But revolutionary dictatorship is needed not against impotent tricks but against the danger of capitalist restoration. If, for the struggle with powerful class enemies, it was necessary to put into use the steel-clad fists, against “tricks” of former people the little finger will do.

But here Stalin introduces still another element. The dying remnants of the routed classes “appeal to the backward strata of the population and mobilize them against the Soviet power” ... But have the backward strata grown in the period of the first five year plan? It would seem, not. Does it mean that their attitude toward the state changed for the worse? That would mean that the “maximum strengthening of state power” (more correctly repressions) is necessary for the struggle against the growing discontent of the masses. Stalin adds: “through the mobilization of the backward strata of the population, ‘fragments’ of counter-revolutionary opposition elements from the Trotskyites and Right wingers may again stir and come to life.” Such is the final argument: since the fragments (only fragments!) may stir (so far they only may) ... the greatest concentration of the dictatorship is necessary.

Entangled hopelessly in the “fragments” of his own ideas, Stalin unexpectedly adds: “Of course, we have no fear of that.” Then why be frightened and frighten others, if “we have no fear of that.” And why introduce a regime of terror against the party and the proletariat if it is only a matter of impotent fragments incapable of “changing anything in the USSR?”

All this piling up of confusion, leading to pure nonsense is a consequence of the inability to tell the truth. In reality, Stalin-Molotov should have said: due to the growing discontent of the masses and an ever stronger gravitation of the workers to the Left Opposition, the intensification of repressions is necessary for the defense of the privileged positions of the bureaucracy. Then everything would easily fall into place.
 

4. The Withering Away of Money and the Withering Away of the State

The knot of contradictions in which the theory and practice of bureaucratic centrism got itself hopelessly entangled will become clear to us from a new side when we draw an analogy between the role of money and the role of the state in the transitional epoch. Money, just as the state, represents a direct heritage of capitalism: it must disappear but it cannot be abolished by decree, it withers away. Different functions of money, as those of the state, expire by different deaths. As a means of private accumulation, usury, exploitation – money expires parallel with the liquidation of classes. As a means of exchange, standard of measurement of labor value, regulator of the social division of labor, money is gradually dissolved in the planned organization of social economy, ft finally becomes an accounting slip, a check for a certain portion of social goods for the gratification of productive and personal wants.

The parallelism of both processes of withering away, that of money and that of the state, is not accidental; they have the same social roots. The state remains a state so long as it has to regulate the relations between various classes and strata, each of which draws up its accounts, endeavoring to show a profit. The final replacement of money as a standard of value by the statistical registration of live productive forces, equipment, raw materials and needs will become possible only at the stage when social wealth will free all the members of society from the necessity of competing with each other for the size of the dinner-pail.

This stage is far off yet. The role of money in Soviet economy is not only not completed but in a certain sense, is only about to be developed to completion. The transition period, in its entirety, means not the curtailment of the turnover of goods, but, on the contrary, an extreme expansion thereof. All branches of economy are transformed, are growing and must determine their relation to each other qualitatively and quantitatively. Many products, which under capitalism are accessible only to the few, must be produced in immeasurably greater quantities. The liquidation of the peasant economy, with its internal consumption, the closed family economy means the transition to the field of social (money) turnover of all that productive energy which is now being used up within the limits of the village and the walls of a private dwelling.
 

Money Socialized Under Planned Economy

Taking complete stock of all the productive forces of society, the social state must know how to apportion and use them in a manner most advantageous for society Money as the means of economic accounting evolved by capitalism is not thrown aside but socialized Socialist construction is unthinkable without the inclusion, in the planned system, of the personal interest of the producer and consumer. And this interest can actively manifest itself only when it has at its disposal a trustful and flexible weapon: a stable monetary system. Increase in the productivity of labor and improvement in the quality of goods, in particular, are absolutely unattainable without an exact measuring instrument which penetrates freely into all the pores of economy, that is, without a stable monetary unit.

If capitalist economy which reached its unstable proportions with the aid of wasteful fluctuations of the conjuncture, needs a stable monetary system, the more so is such a system necessary for the preparation, make-up and regulation of planned economy. It is insufficient to build new enterprises; an economic system must familiarize itself with them. This means testing in practice, adapting and selecting. The mass, nationwide check-up of productivity can mean nothing else but a test by means of the rouble. To erect a plan of economy on a slipping valuta is the same as to make a blue print of a machine with a loose compass and a bent ruler This is exactly what is taking place. The inflation of the Chervonetz is one of the most pernicious consequences and also instrument of the bureaucratic disorganization of Soviet economy.
 

The Official Theory of Inflation

The official theory of inflation stands at the same level as the official theory of the dictatorship analyzed above. “The stability of Soviet valuta,” said Stalin at the January Plenum, “is guaranteed first of all by the tremendous quantity of goods in the hands of the state, which are put into circulation at fixed prices.” If this phrase has any meaning at all it can be only that Soviet money has ceased being money; it no longer serves to measure values and by that the fixation of prices: “stable prices” are fixed by government power; the Chernovetz is only an accounting tag of planned economy. This idea is entirely parallel and equivalent to the idea of the “liquidation of classes” and “entry into the realm of socialism.” Consistent in his half-heartedness, Stalin does not dare, however, to reject the theory of a gold reserve completely. No, a gold reserve “also” does not harm but its importance is only a secondary one. At any rate, it is needed for external trade, where payment must be made in specie. But for the well-being of the internal economy, stable prices fixed by the secretariat of the Central Committee or by its assignees are sufficient.

That the rate of decline of the purchasing power of bills of exchange depends not only on the number of revolutions of the printing press but also on “the quantity of goods” is known to any student of economies. This law is applicable to capitalist as well as to planned economy. The difference is that in planned economy it is possible to hide inflation, or at any rate its results, for a much longer period. The more terrible therefore will be the day of reckoning! In any case, money regulated by administrative prices fixed for goods loses the ability to regulate such prices and consequently the ability to regulate plans. In this field as in others, “socialism” for the bureaucracy consists of freeing its will from any control: party, Soviet, trade union, or money ...
 

A Purely Bureaucratic Economy

Present Soviet economy is neither a monetary nor a planned one. It is an almost purely bureaucratic economy. Exaggerated and disproportionate industrialization undermined the foundations of agricultural economy. The peasantry tried to find salvation in collectivization. Very early experience showed that a collectivization of despair is not yet a socialist collectivization. The further decline of agricultural economy struck a hard blow at industry. To support unreliable and disproportionate tempos, a further intensification of pressure on the proletariat became imperative. Industry, freed from the material control of the producer, took on a super-social, that is, bureaucratic character. In consequence of which it lost the ability of satisfying human wants even to the degree to which it had been accomplished by the less developed capitalist industry. Agricultural economy retaliated on the impotent cities with a war of exhaustion. Under the constant burden of disproportions between their productive efforts and the worsening conditions of existence, workers, kholhoz members and individual peasants lose interest in their work and are filled with irritation against the state. From this, and from this alone, and not from the malicious will of the “fragments” flows the necessity for the introduction of coercion into all cells of economic life (strengthening of the power of shop managers, laws against absentees, death penalty for spoliation of kholhoz property by its members, war measures in sowing campaigns and harvest collections, forcing of individual peasants to lend their horses to kholhozes, the passport system, political departments in the kholhoz village, etc., etc.)

Parrallelism between the fate of money and the fate of the state looms up before us in a new and brilliant light. Disproportions of economy lead the bureaucracy to the road of ever growing paper-money inflation. Discontentment of the masses with the material results of economic disproportions, pushes the bureaucracy on the road of open coercion. Economic planning frees itself from value control as bureaucratic fancy frees itself from political control. The rejection of “objective causes,” that is, of material limits for the acceleration of the tempos as well as the rejection of the gold basis of Soviet money, represent “theoretical” ravings of bureaucratic subjectivism.
 

Stalinist System Exhausted

If the Soviet monetary system withers away, it withers away not in a socialist sense but in a capitalist one: in the form of inflation. Money ceases to be a working tool of planned economy and becomes a tool of its disorganization. It can be said that the dictatorship of the proletariat withers away in the form of bureaucratic inflation, that is in the extreme swelling of coercion, persecutions and violence. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not dissolved in a classless society but degenerates into the omnipotence of bureaucracy over society.

In the sphere of money inflation as in that of bureaucratic arbitrariness is summed up all the falseness of the policy of centrism in the field of Soviet economy as well as in the field of the international proletarian movement. The Stalinist system is exhausted to the end and is doomed. Its break-up is approaching with the same inevitability with which the victory of Fascism approached in Germany But Stalinism is not something isolated; as a parasitic growth it has wound itself around the trunk of the October revolution. The struggle for the salvation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is inseparable from the struggle against Stalinism, This struggle has reached the decisive stage. The denouement is approaching. But the last word ha’ not yet been spoken. The October revolution will yet know how to fend for itself.

L. Trotsky


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Last updated on: 3 September 2015