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IN DEPTH |
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In Cliff's state capitalism in perspective, Sean Matgamna examined the record of Tony Cliff's theory of state capitalism by way of explanation for the SWP's collapse into Serb chauvinism. In this short piece, he looks at Cliff's writings in response to those who argued against state capitalism that the soviet union was a new form of exploiting society. |
In early 1968 Tony Cliff published in the journal International Socialism an article called ÔThe theory of bureaucratic collectivism Ñ a critiqueÕ. It was presented together with a curious note explaining that it dated from 1948, but that no ÒoriginalÓ could be found... No explanation was offered as to where, then, their text came from. The 1968 text has since been added as an appendix to editions of CliffÕs 1948 Russia, a Marxist analysis. In this odd way the IS group again began to deal openly with a theory and a tendency with which in its founding document and throughout its entire history it had been conducting a usually hidden and occasionally open debate.
cliffÕs critique of bureaucratic collectivism, though its purpose is to buttress his Òstate capitalismÓ, is essentially criticism from the point of view of 1940s ÒofficialÓ Trotskyism at the end of its tether.* Cliff criticises Òthe theory of bureaucratic collectivismÓ under 8 headings.
Here Cliff is a jeering sectarian critic of people who are dealing with an unfolding new phenomenon, and, at the beginning of their independent existence, still carrying much of the analysis and politics of Trotsky, who argued after 1937 that the USSR was economically progressive, whatever class ruled. Some of them have already abandoned the idea that this system is progressive (Carter, Draper) but the majority, led by Max Shachtman, though they have (1941) jettisoned TrotskyÕs name for the USSR (degenerated workersÕ state), have scarcely moved from TrotskyÕs analysis. That analysis is shot through, in Trotsky and in the WorkersÕ Party, with the awful combination of simultaneously seeing the economic system as progressive vis ˆ vis declining capitalism, and its totalitarian political system as identical with Nazism, Òexcept for its more unbridled savageryÓ.
Cliff had come through the war as part of an international tendency cheering for the Russians, seeing Russian victories as victories for the working class, indifferent to the horrible realities attendant on Russian progress in the war. Even after heÕd hatched out as a state capitalist, Cliff had merely traded one set of labels for another, one dogma into which to cram the unfolding realities for another.
Ridiculously Cliff asserts that there have been only two consistent elements in bureaucratic collectivism: the conclusions that Òin any concrete conditions, Stalinist Russia must not be defended (no matter that the concrete conditions change all the time).Ó
The name exercises Cliff overmuch. ÒAs for the nameÓ he repeats what Karl Marx quoted against JP Proudhon: Òwhere there is a lack of ideas, an empty phrase will do.Ó A lack of ideas? CliffÕs large and impressive collection of quotations from the classics of Marxism in Russia: a Marxist Analysis are all lifted without change from articles in New International, where they have been the common coin of the discussion of Stalinism for a decade; much of his concrete assessment of Russia is taken from the WorkersÕ Party! What Trotsky once wrote of certain sectarians on the fringe of the Trotskyist movement fits CliffÕs relationship to the WorkerÕs Party: he fed on crumbs from its table and Òrepaid with blackest ingratitudeÓ. CliffÕs addition is to cram the Trotsky/WorkersÕ Party analysis of Russian reality into categories and labels (which he can only sustain by going outside Marxist economics, using ÒcapitalÓ to mean plant and machines and world competition not of exchange but of use values to carry the idea that the USSR is capitalist!) By ideas Tony Cliff evidently means names!
He justifies himself by writing nonsense about the history of Marxism, contrasting it with Max Shachtman, etc. ÒIn MarxÕs and EngelsÕ analysis of capitalism, the fundamentals ÑÊthe place of capitalism in history, its internal contradictions, etc. Ñ remained constant from their first approach to the problem until the end of their lives. Their later years brought elaborations of and additions to the basic theme.Ó He then repeats that Shachtman first thought bureaucratic collectivism progressive and later concluded it was barbaric. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital Vol 1, (1867) were only elaborations? Karl MarxÕs two decades in the British Museum Library were devoted to sorting out a few details? Unless one recalls that it was not until the 1850s that Marx finally solved the great mystery of proletarian exploitation within formal bourgeois equality and the free sale and purchase of labour power, then the deep foolishness of what Cliff writes here will not get its proper appreciation. In 1948, Stalinism was 20 years old; in 1968 (when this text was ÒfinalisedÓ) 40. Cliff is indecently eager to denounce those who have, building on Trotsky, been analysing a new historical phenomenon. CliffÕs grievance is that they do this necessarily open-ended work rather than follow him into scholastic and semantic exercises which by cramming the unfolding reality into old labels would, he thinks, render work other than defining and redefining words Ñ and collecting statistics to illustrate preconception Ñ unnecessary.
The formidable pretentiousness here is dwarfed by the sheer disloyalty. Marx and Engels began work on the analysis of capitalism in the 1840s. According to Marx, capitalism was then already over 400 years old! It had had its bourgeois revolution in Holland, England, France. It had a very substantial analytical literature, on which Marx built Ñ including even a number of differentiated labour theories of value. The place of capitalism in the flow of history was impossible not to see. To belabour those analysing the new phenomenon of Stalinism like this, was only possible for someone who had fled from the task, and taken refuge in word games and dogmatism, who superstitiously felt that the naming of complicated unfamiliar things with old ÒMarxistÓ names gave him the strength of Marx and EngelsÕ analysis of a radically different system!
But, but, but! In the 19th century capitalism was championed against quasi-feudal and feudal reaction and against, for example, the US slave states. There would be nothing new for Marxists in such a pattern if the facts led to such a conclusion; nor for revolutionary socialists would it imply self-subordination to comparatively progressive capitalism. Even in a common war front, should that make the best political sense, the revolutionaries and the workers they influenced would maintain political and even military independence from their allies. In 1851 Marx outlined the tactics of the Communists in such an alliance with bourgeois forces against reaction: ÒStrike (at the common enemy) together, march separatelyÓ. The ÔTheses on the national questionÕ from the Second Communist International Congress based its tactics in backward countries on Ò1851Ó. Maintaining political, etc., independence, Communists would form a de-facto common front with bourgeois liberals against an immediate fascist or Stalinist attempt to take power. The independent Communist forces would simultaneously strive to displace and overthrow their allies. Cliff argues backwards, impermissibly: if that is true, than this unexpected and undesirable conclusion follows. Serious people, Marxists and non-Marxists, reject such an approach as inimical to rational thought. If the USSR has on the facts to be considered barbarism, what objection could be raised to the above? Marxists never thought of such a thing in such a context? Neither the WorkersÕ Party, nor, after 1949, its successor, the ISL, backed capitalism against Stalinism. That Shachtman did in the Õ60s is neither here nor there: it did not follow logically from the idea that Russia was barbarism.
In the 1940s especially the argument that Russian Stalinism was barbarism was well nigh unanswerable. Cliff himself had compiled a vast amount of evidence for it. Slave labour (10 million perhaps at any time from the early Õ30s to the early mid Õ50s); every aspect of life regulated by a savage totalitarian, utterly lawless state; the complete loss of every advance in social, legal, political intellectual and spiritual freedom, and of every right Ñ of speech, writing, publishing, assembly, association, social organisation, working class organisation, etc., etc., etc. Ñ that humankind had gained since the middle ages: that was the USSR and its replications. Against this Cliff argues in part by defining barbarism rather narrowly.
ÒWhen Marx spoke of Ôthe common ruin of the contending classesÕ Ñ as in Rome after slave society disintegrated Ñ it was associated with a general decline of the productive forces. The Stalinist regime, with its dynamic development of the productive forces, certainly does not fit this description.Ó
This is the criterion that had led Trotsky after 1937 to maintain that the USSR was progressive, whatever its class character, in the face of the decline of capitalism. Here, against the idea that Stalinism is barbarism, Cliff comes as near as makes little difference to the idea (not the statement) that it is progressive. Cliff can be ÒoptimisticÓ Ñ can go through a very long post-1948 political life soothed by his Òstate capitalistÓ labels, ignoring most of the problems. He isolates the economic life he ascribes to the USSR from the entire complex social, economic and political network that made up the socio-economic formation that was Russian Stalinism. Trotsky had well understood the dead weight of bureaucratic rule on USSR society; he did not separate it from the economy; that was one reason why he was sure the system simply could not be viable. It survived for a qualitatively longer time than he thought, but ultimately it did not survive.
Cliff, though he is very critical of USSR economic reality (1964), has bought into the idea that this system ÒworksÓ and that its problems and contradictions will serve to prepare the proletarian revolution. In fact, the verdict of history on this system cannot but be that the Òembryo of the futureÓ, the working class future we all fervently hoped would succeed Stalinism until the events of 1989 and after crushed our hopes, had indeed died Òin the womb of the old societyÓ.
The enormous, economic-social devastation that has succeeded Stalinism in the USSR, and, less so, in other countries Ñ what is that? The collapse, regression, disintegration of a Stalinist society whose womb was barren of any progressive successor. A society whose conditions of life for many decades rendered its working class incapable of learning, thinking, or of understanding society, and which used Nazi-style totalitarian police state repression to prevent it from organising, debating, communicating with the different parts of itself or expressing itself orally, on the air or in print. Trotsky understood. He thought in 1939/40 that it would take outside working class stimulus to make Russian working class action possible.
Here, as in virtually every question Cliff has touched on, he is an ÒeconomistÓ Ñ a totalitarian economist, for whom the social and political consequences are of little ultimate importance so long as the economy is ÒdynamicÓ. Unlike Trotsky, he gives virtually no weight in the scale of history, or in the perspective for history, to the non-economic factors. He has only a narrow, limited, partial view of USSR society. He draws no conclusions from the rest of the picture he sketches.
No politically literate nine year old could in 1948 or 1968 write a description of the situation of the USSR and not include its struggle to catch up or keep up with other states including in the arms race. Cliff would add nothing to any intelligent description, except the insistence that arms competition is Òcapital accumulation dictated by the anarchic competition between capitalistsÓ. This is a) infantile sectarian pedantry: Òsay it as I do or it doesnÕt countÓ, and b) a belief in word magic (repeat the words in quotes above!)
The argument that the Russian worker was not a proletarian rested on conditions in the society as a whole: the fact of one employer owning everything, who also controls what is produced or imported for the worker to buy with his wages; the worker is controlled, regimented and for decades was subject to reduction to a chattel slave by a totalitarian state, and so on. Cliff (in 1968) muddies the issue by reducing it to the high-Stalinist restriction on the movement of workers from one factory to another. ÒBut is this a sufficient reason to say that the Russian worker was not a proletarian?Ó
He preposterously argues that US slavery, linked to perhaps the most advanced industry in the world, [the Lancashire cotton industry] was abolished because of its low productivity! (To be replaced for 100 years by a quasi-slave share-cropping system, and only in the last few decades by cotton harvesting machinery.)
Cliff talks about the general trend of history being against slave labour. ÒHence its almost complete disappearance since the death of Stalin, since Russia reached industrial maturity.Ó If the Russians are not proletarians, Marxism as a method, as a guide for the proletariat as the subjects of historical change becomes superfluous, meaningless. To speak of Marxism in a society without proletariats is to make a supra-historical theory. Yes, but! This is the dogmatic argument for the superstition of safe known labels: if something is so far unknown, it is therefore impossible. Close your eyes. Cliff solves the problem by defining, or rather scaring it away. Considering what he wrote in 1948, and what was in circulation, this is quite a performance. It is the political and moral measure of him.
From the assumption that bureaucratic collectivism is more reactionary than capitalism, Shachtman argued that socialist should side in the labour movement with social democrats against local Stalinist agents of bureaucratic collectivism. There follows nearly half a column of [misdated] quotations from Shachtman arguing that Stalinists were in the labour movement but not of it; that they represented a totalitarian programme of destroying the labour movement, in contrast to reformists, who, in their own way, stood for preserving the labour movement. Cliff thinks this too shows Òa lack of historical perspectiveÓ, an oversimplification. The Stalinist parties are agents of Moscow and assemblies of fighting individuals Òstrangled by the same bureaucraciesÓ. ShachtmanÕs attitude to the CPs would strengthen the right wing social democratic parties [who have no contradictions?] and help the CP leadership hold the militants to them. That it was necessary to adopt a more flexible attitude to the CPers than the ISL had before Õ56 is, I believe true. Yes! But did that mean refraining from saying clearly what was what? Trotsky, not Shachtman, wrote this, three days before he was struck down:
ÒThe predominant type among the present ÔCommunistÕ bureaucrats is the political careeristÉ their ideal is to attain in their own countries the same position that the KremlinÕs oligarchy gained in the USSR.Ó The Comintern and the GPU, 17 August 1940
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