The New Economic Policy of Soviet Russia and the Perspectives of the World Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
The Russian Revolution demonstrated that the conquest of power is a practical task rather than a mere regulative idea, yet the specific conditions of Russia's cultural and political backwardness shaped the entire trajectory of the civil war. Unlike in advanced capitalist countries, where the bourgeoisie is more far-sighted and prepares counter-revolutionary cadres in advance, the Russian bourgeoisie only grasped its loss after October, mobilising peasant and petty-bourgeois reserves under the leadership of reactionary noble officers. The peasantry played a decisive role but only as a vacillating mass incapable of independent leadership; the Bolsheviks' resoluteness forced peasants to choose between the proletariat and counter-revolution, while democratic parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries repeatedly served as counter-revolution's bellwethers.
War Communism—grain confiscation, rationing, and state industry regulation—was not a socialist economic system but a beleaguered fortress regime imposed by civil war necessity. The state took physical possession of enterprises via the trade unions, creating a cumbersome centralised apparatus that sufficed only to supply the army and win the war. This policy of confiscating peasant surpluses, equal wages, and bureaucratic management inevitably led to declining agricultural production and falling labour productivity. The Bolsheviks had hoped for swift European revolution to provide technical and organisational aid; when this did not occur, the shift from military necessity to economic expediency became unavoidable.
Hence the New Economic Policy was introduced as a retreat but not a capitulation to capitalism. The Soviet state retained ownership of land, railways, industry, the credit system, and monopoly on foreign trade. Market relations were reintroduced because, without a free market, the peasant had no incentive to expand production, and state-owned industry could not function planfully without first learning to operate through market mechanisms. Even in a centralised sector like railways, abstract socialist planning proved impossible without commercial calculation and profit-and-loss accounting. The central question is whether NEP leads to capitalism or socialism. Private capital is reviving, but the state holds decisive advantages: state power, the entire railway system, all major industrial enterprises, and control of land, foreign trade, credit, and taxation. Private capital's economic resources are less than modest and its political resources zero. The real danger is world capitalist encirclement, but the bourgeoisie cannot conduct long-range policy due to epochal instability.
Otto Bauer's claim that NEP represents capitulation to capitalism is false. Where concessions to bourgeois relations occur, they do so at a rate and scale that excludes the danger of losing political control. The Communist Party determines the limits of concessions and retains the key to state power. The Third Congress of the Communist International determined that revolutionary parties now commanded only a minority of the working class; their task remains winning the majority through struggle for transitional demands under the proletarian united front slogan. Capitalism is on the offensive, but the working class shows growing readiness to resist. A reformist-pacifist orientation in France and Britain would revive conciliationist hopes in Germany, meaning an epoch of European Kerenskyism. Communists must enter this period purged of pacifist illusions, or risk shipwreck alongside them.