9. Social Relations in the Soviet Union¶
Core Argument¶
In Soviet industry, state ownership is nearly universal, while in agriculture only ten percent of tilled land belongs to Soviet farms; collective farms combine state, group, and private ownership. By 1936, the official “socialist sector” claimed 98.5 percent of production, but this figure is inflated by including private allotments. The real question is the strength of bourgeois tendencies within the “socialist” sector itself. Petty-bourgeois appetites pervade the economy, expressed in the desire to give as little as possible to society and take as much as possible. The bureaucracy is the chief reservoir of personal accumulation. State property becomes socialist property only as it ceases to be state property; the higher the state rises above the people, the more it testifies against the socialist character of that property.
Social distances between city and country, and between intellectual and physical labour, have increased, not decreased. The “cadres” are organs of domination, demanding rising salaries. Distribution is profoundly unequal: the privileged minority lives at the expense of the deprived majority. The worker is not a free workman but is compelled to live in want, with no influence over factory management. In the countryside, collective farms have transformed juridical forms but left old relations largely intact. The bureaucracy conceals real social divisions behind socialist abstractions. Two opposing tendencies grow: developing productive forces prepares the economic basis for socialism, while bourgeois norms of distribution prepare a capitalist restoration.
The bourgeoisie could theoretically constitute itself as a single stock company administering the whole national economy through the state, but this has never existed and will not, because the state would become too tempting a target for social revolution. State capitalism, meaning substitution of state property for private property, is opposite to statism, which means state intervention on the basis of and to preserve private property. The fascist state is not an owner of enterprises but an intermediary. The Soviet bureaucracy is not a ruling class: it has no stocks or bonds, cannot transmit rights to heirs, and conceals its income as social parasitism. It defends state property as the source of its power, so remains a weapon of proletarian dictatorship in that aspect. A collapse of the Soviet regime would mean a return to capitalist relations. The bureaucracy has betrayed the revolution but not overthrown it. The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism; its accumulating contradictions can lead either to socialism or back to capitalism, decided by a struggle of living social forces.