Chris Burford wrote: > > Although Stalin tried to maintain his crisp and brisk style of writing, his > late work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1951) is a much more > reflective work than many might expect. > > In his section on the Law of Value under Socialism, he does not at least at > that date dismiss the LOV, and rather actively permits attention to it: > > ""In this connection, such things as cost accounting and profitableness, > production costs, prices, etc., are of actual importance in our > enterprises. Consequently, our enterprises cannot, and must not, function > without taking the law of value into account. > > Is this a good thing? It is not a bad thing. Under present conditions, it > really is not a bad thing, since it trains our business executives to > conduct production on rational lines and disciplines them. ... It is not a > bad thing because it teaches our executives to look for, find, and utilize > hidden reserves latent in production, and not to trample them underfoot. It > is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives systematically to > improve methods of accounting, and to make their enterprises pay. It is a > good practical school which accelerates the development of our executive > personnel and their growth into genuine leaders of socialist production at > the present stage of development." There is a view that this volte face of Stalin's, which happened just before his death, was either a recognition that he'd been wrong all along, or more likely a political preparation for the introduction of market reforms in the USSR, of a kind which were later tried by Khrushchev, Kosygin and others and then abandoned in the Brezhnev period of stagnation. Stalin perhaps came to recognise that the emergence of inter-enterprise 'grey' markets, debt-swaps and bill-discounting (all crminal activities which enterprise directors nonetheless massively engaged in) were the inevitable price paid for the inefficiency of the planning process; these grey and black markets oiled the works. These informal, illegal markets also, as Chris rightly says, created the preconditions for the eventual collapse of the Soviet planned economy and the Party monopoly of power, so the question posed by the re-emergence of such markets even in periods of fierce repression, is actually a very interesting question about the practicability or not of socialism as an economic system. It is also a clue as to why it was precisely the party apparatus and the enterprise managers themselves: ie, people who were mostly on the face of it, good, loyal Stalinists and Soviet patriots, who nonetheless bore the brunt of the purges and repressions of the 1930s and late 1940s. The repressions were an admission of the failure of planning and 'forced industrialisation' and a rearguard attempt to prevent the system from spontaneously transforming itself into open capitalism. This is precisely what happened after 1989, when the grey-black markets blossomed. Interestingly, the problem of inter-enterprise debt, 'soft' loans and non-monetised capital instruments, continues to be a bugbear of Russian capitalism and a major impediment to its incoporation into the world market. It was not just the self-ineterst of an allegedly 'petit-bourgeois' bureaucracy which led to the restoration of capitalism in Russia; these social layers and the interests they acquired and represented, only survived and grew because they were based on something materially real, namely the re-em,ergence of value-relations in the interstices of the command economy, because *without these value relation*, the system could not function at all, and the planning process would collapse into total anarchy (something it constantly threatenmed to do anyway). On the face of it, this looks like an argument for Hayekian markets, but the truth is different again. What the USSR showed is that it is possible in *some* historical circumstances (which occur very rarely) to create enclaves outside the world market which are able to defend themselves and to replicate (with important differences) the industry, science and technology of the capitalist economy. The ultimate justification for doing this, and for embracing all the forced mobilisations, terror, and bureaucratic chaos and corruption which always occur in every state of siege, is that the alternatives are far worse. It was clear by 1914 that not only was the tsarist autocracy doomed politically, but also that Russia had lost the great race to complete *inner* (not inter) continental development which began after 1850. North America succeeded brilliantly, Germany less well, but Russia despite many efforts at stimulating capitalist development in the 1860s and after, failed comprehensivle.y Russian society went into open crisis and the Russian empire was a new faultline of major instability; by 1914 it was ripe for dismemberment and liquidation, unable to defend itself against encircling predatory colonial powers. The future of Russia was to be what it has now become: a colonialised raw-material appendage of the world economy with a collapsed culture, science and technology and a declining, impoverished population. The wealth now sucked from Russia helps fuel continued accumulation, science and technology growth etc in the victor states, principally Germany and Japan. Menawhile Russia is bled white and has become a continent of cold, dark and hunger. The Soviet era was an attempt to forestall this dire outcome by forced mobilisation, planning, the construction of socialism, and by a forward policy of subversion and aggression directed at the beseiging imperial states. On balance, it worked better than most contemporaries ever expected. The 'Stalin system' not only industrialised the country, its industry and armies were powerful enough to utterly crush the Hitler Reich. That was an extraordinarily unexpected historical upset. Contenmporaries who were close to events had greatly difficulty psychologically accepting what they saw with their own eyes: from Avereall Harriman to Anthony Eden to many others who were present in or visited the USSR during the Second World War, their diaries, reports and memoirs express constant astonishment and even incredulity at the utterly-unexpected success of the 'Soviet system' and the Red Army (as for Hitler, his stupefaction is a matter of record). I think it is clear that since 'peaceful coexistence' was always a chimera, the only way the USSR could have succeeded AFTER WW2 was by continuing to extend its forward policy and aggression towards the West, and above all, by creating a solid and truly unbreakable alliance with communist China. Stalin himslef said as much in a secret telegram to Mao: if we hold together, we shall win and world capitalism will be destroyed. If we split, we shall BOTH be destroyed. Prescient stuff. This leaves the larger question of whether we should all become market socialists a la Doug Henwood, because the USSR is final proof that planned economies don't work *over the long term*. The answer is that socialism cannot survive as an enclave within capitalism. It must become the dominant world system and it will only do that when and because world capitalism has failed on its own terms, so that there is no longer a 'capitalist alternative'. In the post-capitalist world there may still be markets and commodity exchange for centuries to come, but these phenomena will have an entirely subordinate role because the markets will lose their capacity to work as vehicles for social accumulation. The future-world will be one which has access to enormous knowledge bases-- the main legacy of the 500-year long capitalist era, which began in earnest when Columbus discovered America. But it is bound to be a society in which markets, however important they may be to the quality of everyday life, will be working only at the margins, trading surpluses which arise from essentially non-market production processes. In an important sense, therefore, the Soviet Union DID prefigure a post-market world, one where the core economic processes occur outside the market (if left to the market, the huge industrialisation of the 193os in Russia, simply could not have happened). This is inevitable in the future energy environment, when energy is extremely scarce and very expensive, too expensive, in fact, to be the subject of market exchange. When energy is no longer a commodity, as was the case for most of human history, exponential economic growth will become simply impossible, and therefore capitalism itself, which cannot function without profits and therefore growth. IMO the world entered this new energy-scarce era more than 20 years ago, and the implications are only now beginning to become apparent and even to register dimly in mass consciousness (not the consciousness of economists, of course, they have no understanding whatsoever of this, most important of all issues). Was Stalin himself planning to restore capitalism, thus admitting defeat? I don't think so. He wanted to bring transparency to the process of marketisation by decriminalising important elements of it. This might help reduce the bureaucractic chaos in industry and also create a more rational allocation of labour by introducing freer labour markets. It was already clear that forced labour, the conscription of workers, could only be a short-term solution to the initial problems of rushed industrialisation and then to postwar recovery. In 1945 the USSR was economically very weak but politically very strong. There might have been space for an experiment: to let the markets come out in the open, the better to understand them and control them. Since Stalin planned to increase the rates of growth of the heavy industries which were the motors of the Soviet economy, it was perhaps reasonable to hope that the always-spectacular achievements of this 'socialised' sector would continue to eclipse the markets; at the same time, markets on the fringes: literally, bazaars and street-markets, might do much to enliven a weary populace while being kept within strict limits, and not allowed to burgeon into the criminalised cancer which eventually destroyed the USSR. Stalin's sucessors all tried some mix of these policies, but they lost the strategic initiative when they lost China. After that, the space for experiments disappeared and in reality the only subsequent chance for victory occurred in the moment of US weakness in the 1960s and early 1970s. But they threw that away too, and the rest, as they say, is history. Mark _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
