"Program and Principles of the Revolutionary Soviet Communists
"Section 3
"The Domination of the Bureaucracy"
"Stalin's death untied the hands of the bureaucracy. A minority had followed Stalin's line, kept faith with the Socialist State and wholeheartedly served it, considering that to be their sole duty. A large sector, which had been pursuing its own selfish ends for some time, saw after Stalin's death the possibility of being "liberated" from proletarian control in general and from centralized leadership which dealt constant blows against the selfish elements in the bureaucracy. This element readily grasped at the opportunity offered by Stalin's death to further pursue its deviation through more "liberal" forms of popular power and away from the revolutionary road of Socialism. But could the bureaucracy openly proclaim its domination without carrying out an immediate coup in our country? Certainly Not.
"To entrench themselves within the organs State power the bureaucracy had to claim that it was following the correct path, in other words, not only that it was true to revolutionary ideals, but also that it was more devoted to Soviet power than Stalin himself. The opportunist had to present their "liberation" from "Stalinist domination" as the "liberation" of all the Soviet people from that "domination." Of course it was not a simply trick to carry out such a maneuver - first, because from the very beginning the working class of the Soviet Union refuted all the inventions of the opportunist and adopted a thoroughly antagonistic attitude towards them, and second, because one sector of the Party and State leadership (Molotov, Malenkov, etc.), faithful to the dictatorship of the proletariat, resisted the bureaucracy.
"Since the bureaucracy represented the embodiment of the centralization of power, it had to attribute its own glaring weaknesses to Stalin and thus divert from itself the criticism of the Soviet workers. For if Stalin "erred," then it was necessary to firmly renounce the methods of the "cult of the personality" - such had to be their logic. But bureaucrats never try to change their own habits and proverbial stupidity, hat is precisely why, at the same time that they "annihilated" the "cult of the personality" in theory, in practice they treat with exceptional irritation and scorn any practical measure for democratization and the limitation of their power. Obviously the methods of the "cult of the personality" are not Stalin's methods at all but those of the bureaucracy itself, which in Stalin's time poisoned Soviet life, and after Stalin's death stifled and persecuted all that is living, active and truly Soviet.
"In fact, the "cult of the personality," if we speak of this phrase, is a simple repetition (probably the highest repetition) of the cult of the bureaucracy, in which each representative is a "personality" in his bureau. The opportunists make of the "cult of the personality" the pretext for bureaucracy, when it is nothing but the result of bureaucracy. It is precisely the bureaucrats who are trampling under foot the love the people bear for Stalin b y transforming it into a ritual - a mechanical thing - for that facilitates their demand for a similar attitude to be taken towards themselves. While praising Stalin to the skies in public, the bureaucrats hiss and grin their teeth among themselves. They hate Stalin because he was the main support of the Socialist State, marrow and bone of the people, while they are nothing but the excretion of the State. It is not at all surprising then that the bureaucrats are forced to present their intentions in regard to Stalin under "hu!
manitarian" and "democratic" forms. Under the guise of "criticizing" Stalin, the bureaucrats spew forth their hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which they served in the past only because Stalin forced them to.
"Can the usurpation of power by the bureaucracy and the struggle against it be considered a manifestation of the class struggle? The opportunist in general deny the existence of the class struggle in the Soviet Union, but it is obvious that for they to speak of class struggle would be dangerous, when they are playing a counterrevolutionary role. It simply would not fit their game. This question merits a careful and thorough analysis.
"The bourgeois class policy of the Soviet bureaucracy is clearly seen in the fact that their first step was the official elimination of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course that was done under the pretext that the dictatorship of the proletariat "was no longer necessary" in the Soviet Union. The opportunist counterpoised the concepts of "the State of the Whole people" and "the party of the whole people" to the Marxist Leninist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Party of the proletariat. Therefore, when they speak of "the State of the Whole people" and "the party of the whole people" they only assert that the "State" and that the "Party" are led by "leaders," namely bureaucrats, who represent not the working class but themselves alone."
(end of quote)
>>> so the political monopoly of the North Korean communist
>>>party and its planning efforts had nothing to do with it?
>> Kim Il and his son had nothing to do with it? & protection from them.
>But I asked if it's possible that the self-appointed and self-perpetuating
>elite (or ruling stratum) of NK helped to create those problems.
And
>By analogy, if we want to
>understand NK's problems, it's a mistake to simply look at external causes,
>especially when the people there don't seem to have any control over their
>government: remember that power corrupts unless those who wield it are held
>responsible democratically. (How else could the leadership of the country
>be passed to Kim Il Sung's son, in imitation of a feudal lord?)
>Jim Devine
Reply
The material quoted from the old Soviet Bolsheviks presents on the ideological plane how classes fought to allocate resources and govern Soviet society. The sum total of their analysis of the bureaucracy and the interplay of classes is remarkable. The concrete problem the Marxist and Marxist economist faced in America in unraveling what took place in the Soviet Union is inexplicably fused with the material bribery of American society at large, the incredible strength of our imperialist and the inability of the Marxist to develop a class outlook. How else can one speak of
> "the political monopoly of the North Korean communist party"<
suspended from the concreteness of class rule.
The universal lack of class concepts in American society and among the intelligencia means that the social questions are examined in their external mode of operations.
Stalin was a class policy and most certainly understood the law of value as a theoretical construct and its evolution under public property relations in the industrial infrastructure. Anyone that reads "The Right Deviation in the CPSU(B), Speech at a Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the CPSU(B), April 1929 and Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR , 1951 cannot but be amazed at Stalin's clarity.
Nikita was a class policy. George Bush Jr. is a class policy as was Bill Clinton. Molotov - who coined the expression, "all roads lead to communism (the society of associated producers) more or less," was a class policy. Kim IL Sung's ("Glorious leader and all that") was a class policy as is his son, "in imitation of a feudal lord." Gorby was a class policy as was L.B. as is Putkin a class policy.
The question of a labor shortage in the Soviet Union is the external appearance of the productive forces organized a certain way and begs the question "what is the class policy" that governs the resolution of the relationship between man and machines. The words "labor shortage" is not reducible to simply a quantitative description of "how many human beings." "How many human beings" is the external mode of something else because we must presuppose that we are talking about the material factors of production - yes? This is a class question because the material factors of production are driven on the basis of the law system that governs its utilization.
The problem is deep and profound in examining the former Soviet Union and appears as the theory of value in the imperial centers. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor embodied in the production of commodities. No more and no less and this is always the dispute within Marxism.
The theoretical problem is that the law of value is not the basic law of capitalism. This is not a typographical error. "Is not the basic law of capitalism." The law of value is primarily a law of commodity production. The law of surplus value is not the basic law of capitalism either. "Is not the basic law of capitalism." The law of surplus value is to general and does not cover the problem of the highest rate of profit or the emergence of monopoly capitalism, financial industrial imperialism and speculative capital emergence as dominator.
The basis law driving capital is the internal impulse for maximum profits. The securing of the maximum profits through the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the population of a given country, through the enslavement and systematic robbery of the people of other countries, especially less developed countries, and lastly, through wars and militarization of the national economies, which are utilized for the obtaining of the highest profits.
The basic law driving Soviet socialism was securing the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society through the continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher technique.
The question of the labor shortage in the Soviet Union means "on what basis are the instruments of production revolutionized" and this is not simply a question of technology, although technology is fundamental to the resolution. Specifically, tool development in the Soviet Union was governed by a different law system. There is a law of tool development I have lived and can be roughly articulated as follows: the more functions a particular tool or productive process embodies, the less productive the tool and process becomes. This is how tool development appears in its external mode because the concept of "productive" is a class concept. Under capital productivity is a measure of not things but the production of surplus value as maximum profits, whose external mode appears as things.
It gets a little tricky here for me in explaining this matter because categories must be used to describe an interactivity that is not a category but a process. Under public property relations Soviet industry developed as huge industrial complex that would product all kinds of goods as opposed to the single product industrial complexes in the capitalist world. There did not exist an internal impulse of production to speed up the workers as such and the law system of production operated in the opposite direction of speedup because technological development is implemented - (no matter from where it comes) not from the standpoint of the production of maximum profits but creating a larger supply of various goods.
Creating a larger supply of various goods contains its own features that operate as a law system based on property relations. If the Soviet Union was such a terrorist state internally how on earth could the working class "pretend to work," engage in the "two hour coffee break" after taking 90 minutes to read the party press? The essence of democracy is the "two hour coffee break" and reading the newspaper. Only one who does not do physical labor under industrial conditions can state otherwise. The reason this does not take place in America and one has to fight for a 25-minute break in an eight-hour day is due to the law of maximum profits.
I am familiar with the expert arguments about efficiency by those who do not do the work under industrial conditions of production. The question of the qualitative definitions of the social products is another matter dealing more with a historically evolved culture and not the law system governing the productive forces or rather in which the productive forces operate as means of production.
Furthermore, the question of electoral democracy is more than less a bourgeois prejudice, clearly understood by the majority of nonvoting Americans and those proletarians who have more than less lived under conditions akin to a permanent state of police violence and terror. What is different today is that all of American society is more than less in the process of experiencing the terror always present and a permanent part of the life of millions upon millions of homegrown proletarians. Is this not true? This of course is the external mode of the law of maximum profits in the political and ideological superstructure.
Generally speaking, capitalism was not more productive than socialism not because of its internal components or its free market system, but because it is historically evolved over hundreds of years and entered the transition to industrial production half a century before socialism.
Nikita Khrushchev and his predecessors programs or class policy was bourgeois and operated in the opposite direction of the law system governing the revolutionizing of machinery and tools. Specifically, Nikita and his predecessors sought to apply the law of value as it operates under capital to the Soviet infrastructure and internally sought to decentralize the economy believing that accounting was the key issue and holding the bureaucracy accountable for production plans. This was to be accomplished by shifting the weight of investment - or rather resources, to the development of light industry.
Additionally, the labor shortage issue was to be solved by relaxing the military buildup and freeing up manpower for the economy. This set the basis for enormous problems because Soviet power emerged as an insurrectionary force against world capital through its Russian subsidiary and was charged with the task of creating a new law system of production without private owners. This meant in the real world that Soviet Power had to evolve as a military apparatus first or it could not exist. This is what actually happened and that is why years of Civil War were fought before economic reconstruction began.
On the plane of ideology the class program of Nikita's was articulated as elevating peace over class warfare against world capital and the unity with imperialism was cemented in the ideology called the "Third World." Newly independent China rebelled and the communist movement split.
I do not want to venture to far away from the law system of socialism and why the Soviet system stagnated but it is necessary to show why leaders are classes and how this is expressed in the ideological sphere. One must keep in mind that the Soviet proletariat and the Soviet State were at the apex of the class struggle with world imperialism and their military capacity allowed them to exist. The Soviet Bolsheviks in combat with Nikita stated the following:
"Only the opportunists fail to understand that to project peace as the fundamental and principle task of the international Communist movement means total surrender to the class enemy. It means utter capitulation, since the imperialist thus acquire the possibility of utilizing the threat of war to attain their objectives in all specific political and international questions. According to the revisionists, in order to "save humanity" we must be ready to make unlimited concessions to the class enemy. The logical outcome of such a so-called humanitarian road could only be that the totality of mankind must bow down and become slaves under the imperialist yoke.
" 'It is a lie,' says the opportunist, 'we do not intend to retreat that far.' Then how far do you intend to retreat, Messieurs? In other words you mean you cannot agree that the struggle for peace has a limit for all those who refuse to buy peace at the price of slavery. So it is not at all a question that the 'leadership' of the CPSU is o the side of peace while the Marxist Leninist of China and Albania are o the side of war. The truth is that the modern revisionists and the Marxist Leninist have two fundamentally different conceptions of the importance and significance of the struggle for peace in the program and practice of Marxism Leninism."
We have of course seen exactly how far the opportunist have retreated - based on their class program. The overthrow of Soviet Power makes it very possbile for a century or more of reaction on earth.
Nikita's peace program set the basis for the rebellion of a sector of the Soviet military and this would later force the hand of Brezhnev. It was the military that sought to overthrow Gorby. Socialism could only exist as a highly militarized society because capital is highly militarized.
The point of course is that the environment of imperialism does in fact explain the character of the class policy of the Soviets and Lou is correct in his standpoint on this issue. The law system that drives the development of the productive forces in the Soviet Union was expressed as the substance of class policy. Words like "opportunist" and "revisionist" describes more than a mistaken notion of Marxism but how capital reconfigured itself within public property relations and accounts for the intensity of the class struggle in the Soviet Union which was denied by the Communist Party's in the imperial nations, especially the Communist Party of America, which long ago went over to the side of the bourgeoisie.
This could not be stated in the beginning because the external mode in which the law system is revealed was the context in which Jim D presented his classless assertion and law system-less formulation.
Nikita of course had an agricultural program and this class policy stagnated agriculture. The barrier one encounter is that very few people within "Marxism" have any conception of a class program and proceed from sector movement logic. Further, there were no feudal economic and social relations in our developmental history and a vast sector of the intelligencia speaks of the exploitation of the peasants when the issue of agriculture in the Soviet Union is discussed.
End of part 2
Melvin P.
