3. Socialism and the State¶
Core Argument¶
In Socialism and the State, the chapter argues that the Soviet Union under Stalin cannot be considered socialist, but rather a transitional regime from capitalism to socialism, defined by a fundamental contradiction between its forms of property and its actual level of productive development. Marx held that the lowest stage of communism presupposes a higher economic development than the most advanced capitalism. The Soviet Union, poorer in technique, culture, and living standards than capitalist countries, has not met this condition. The official claim that socialism has been achieved rests solely on property relations, ignoring the achieved productivity of labour. This is not pedantry: a genuinely socialist economy, with superior technique, would guarantee its own development automatically, a claim that cannot be made for the Soviet economy. Time is not a secondary factor; evolution proceeds through contradictions, crises, and leaps. The Soviet Union’s economic contradictions produce social antagonisms—as with the kulaks—that do not await the growth of productive forces, and the bureaucracy itself may not peacefully grow into socialism.
Lenin, following Marx and Engels, held that the proletarian revolution would abolish the bureaucratic apparatus, police, and standing army from the first day, creating a state that immediately begins to “die away.” After two decades, the Soviet state has not begun to die away; it has grown into an unprecedented apparatus of compulsion. The bureaucracy dominates the masses; a privileged officer caste has replaced the armed people. Engels wrote that the state will disappear when class domination and the struggle for individual existence disappear, but socialisation of the means of production does not automatically remove that struggle. Marx noted that bourgeois law is inevitable in the first phase of communism. Lenin concluded that under communism, a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie survives for a time. The Soviet state thus has a dual character: socialist in defending social property, bourgeois in distributing goods by capitalist measures. To enforce bourgeois law—inequality in consumption—the workers’ state must create a bourgeois instrument, the gendarme. Bureaucratism is not a secondary relic but the result of the iron necessity to support a privileged minority while genuine equality is impossible. The poorer the society emerging from revolution, the more acute this necessity becomes.
The distance between tsarist Russia and the West required several more five-year periods to assimilate achievements capitalism took centuries to produce. The Soviet Union applied socialist methods to pre-socialist problems. A socialist society is unthinkable without automobiles, radios, films, and aeroplanes. So long as a modest Ford remains a minority privilege, bourgeois relations and customs survive, and with them the state as guardian of inequality. Lenin, in The State and Revolution, did not draw conclusions about the state’s character from economic backwardness and isolation; the programme assumed an international perspective, not “socialism in a single country.” The post-war revolutionary crisis did not bring European victory. The “breathing spell” stretched into an epoch. The Soviet Union’s contradictory social structure and ultra-bureaucratic state are consequences of this unforeseen pause. Privileged groups necessary for defence, industry, technique, and science crystallised into a powerful caste of specialists in distribution. Economic successes sharpened inequalities and grew bureaucratism into a system of administration. The bureaucracy’s announcements of socialism’s “complete triumph” contradicted the need to “reinforce the dictatorship.” Social conflicts created by want resurrected “all the old crap.” Socialism requires higher productivity of labour than capitalism; the Soviet Union had one-third the electrical energy per head of advanced countries. Stalin’s definitions retreated from categorical claims, implying the productive forces were not mighty enough for the socialist trunk and its leafage: human welfare.