Stephen A. Resnick - Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR

CLASS

THEORY

AND

HISTORY

CLASS

THEORY

AND

HISTORY

Capitalism and Communism in the USSR

Stephen A. Resnick & Richard D. Wolff

First published 2002 by Routledge

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Copyright 2002 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data

Resnick, Stephen A.

Class theory and history : capitalism and communism in the USSR / Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-415-93317-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-93318-6 (pbk)

1. Social classesSoviet Union. 2. CommunismSoviet Union. 3. Soviet UnionSocial conditions. 4. Soviet UnionSocial policy. 5. Communism. 6. Capitalism. I. Wolff, Richard D. II. Tide.

HN530.Z9 S6394 2002

Contents

This book offers a new interpretation of the USSRs birth, evolution, and death. We rely on the available literature in important ways. However, the surplus theory of class we find in Marx and use to analyze Soviet history differs sharply from the theories used by both its defenders and its critics. Thus, our focus on the multiple class structures that interacted across Soviet history enables us to extract and construct an argument not found in the available literature. That argument develops two especially controversial points: (1) that a particular kind of capitalist class structure comprised the actual class content of Soviet socialism, and (2) that communism occurred only in very limited, subordinated realms of the Soviet economy and took the form of a communist kind of class structure. Our stress on class builds on earlier work (Resnick and Wolff 1986, 1987). Therefore, below, we only summarize the distinctive surplus concept of class that we deploy throughout. Applying our class analysis to communism, to a state form of capitalism, and to Soviet history continues the effort to insert classin its particular surplus definitioninto both popular and scholarly discourses on how societies work and especially on how they ought to be changed. Confrontations between capitalism and socialism/communism, globally as well as in the USSR, were a central part of twentieth-century history. In highlighting certain class dimensions of the lessons and legacies of those confrontations, we hope thereby to give this centurys confrontations a more developed class consciousness.

Unlike other studies, this book begins ( Our goal in developing the concept of a communist class structure and exploring some of its variant forms is to pose and answer this question: Did the USSR ever establish any forms of a communist class structure, and if so, where, when, and what happened to them?

to clarifying that difference. Our goal in developing a new concept of state capitalism is to pose and answer the question: Did the USSR establish a state capitalism, and if so, where, when, and with what consequences for the evolution of Soviet socialism?

The two opening sections of the book enable the much larger That plus the states ownership and operation of industry made this society the opposite (and the transcendence) of capitalism. Their socialism was an early step on the road to the more fully developed future they called communism, where work would be based on ability and product distribution on need. Our goal instead is to show that Soviet socialism was not a step to communism but rather a state capitalist class structure.

From 1917 through the 1960s, Soviet state capitalism overcame several serious economic crises with remarkable successes. It mobilized its own resources as the worlds first claimed and sustained, albeit surrounded, socialism. It built a global support network based on opponents of capitalism everywhere. And its definition of its own state capitalism as socialismand thus the negation of capitalismbecame the standard conception for the twentieth centurys confrontation between the two great systems for most people on both sides. However, Soviet state capitalism eventually encountered a set of problems that proved insurmountable. As the economic downturn of the 1970s matured into a general social crisis in the 1980s, it spelled collapse. As we shall argue, the USSR had come full circle. Where the 1917 revolution had replaced private with state capitalism, the collapse of the 1980s served to accomplish the reverse shift. In such an oscillation, Russian capitalism displayed swings between private and state forms of capitalism that have likewise characterized capitalism in other countries (including the state capitalisms of the USSRs allies).

The class analysis used in crafting this books arguments derives from the Marxian tradition, but not in the usual way, nor with the usual results. Marxism is now the richest, most developed repository of class-based critiques of capitalism. It became that over the last hundred years, as it spread from Europe to become a globally dispersed accumulation of many theoretical and practical efforts aimed at anti-capitalist class transformations. The Marxian traditions deepening diversity has made it an indispensable analytic resource. From among its contesting theories, we deploy onethe kind of class analysis we have found most persuasiveto criticize the other theories used by the defenders and critics of the USSR over at least the last seventy years.

The key distinction between our kind of class analysis and theirs lies in the different concepts/definitions of class itself. Official Sovietand most otherconceptions of class define it chiefly in terms of property and/or power. In the property definition, populations are divided into classes according to how much and what kind of property they do or do not own: the rich versus the poor and so on. In the power definition, populations divide into those who give versus those who take orders: the rulers versus the ruled. In short, these class analyses focus on the social distributions of property and/or power. In the classic economic formulation: capitalism represents private property and private market transactions, while socialism and communism represent state property and state-planned distributions. Here, socialism arrives once the state, as the representative of the whole population, has (1) taken property from its private owners and socialized it, and (2) abolished private market transactions (and hence the power of private transactors) and substituted state planning (state power) as the mechanism for distributing all resources and products.

In contrast, we define class differently. For us, class refers to how society organizes the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus. Stated simply, this definition of class presumes that in all societies, one part of the population interacts with nature to produce a quantity of output. The total quantity of output always exceeds the portion that is returned to this part of the population (the workers) for its consumption and reproduction. This excess is the surplus. A second part of the population immediately receives this surplus from the producers. Finally, a third part of the population obtains distributions of portions of the surplus from the second part. Any societys class structure refers to how it organizes its population in relation to the surplus as (1) surplus producers, (2) surplus appropriators (and hence distributors), and/or (3) recipients of distributed shares of the surplus.