Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 09:55:12 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


Greg Schofield wrote:

> Consider the merest possiblity that the correct economic approach under
> socialism may be  something like the NEP. The idea that, in the
> transition from capitalism to communism, capital by necessity persists.
> What else other than guided capitalism (state capitalism) is possible
> in the first stage of socialism?

Firstly: we're not talking here about economic policies under socialism.
The Bolshevik leadership did *not* consider the Soviet Union to be
socialist. The question that they addressed in developing both the
policies of "War Communism" and the NEP was how to "take steps towards
socialism" (Lenin). Thus, the NEP was viewed as a temporary, necessary
retreat *away from socialism*. If the NEP was extended indefinitely, how
would the USSR ever become socialist (let alone the transition to
communism)? The *only* hope, according to the Bolsheviks who advocated
the NEP like Lenin and Trotsky, for socialism was the spread of the
international revolution. The idea that one could become socialist with
NEP policies was an extension of Stalin's infamous doctrine of "socialism
in a single country."

> Our collective problem is that socialist revolution in backward and
> limited economies can
> only use brute force (i.e. War Communism) to survive, but we have
> raised this historical
> by-product into a collective objective.

I don't think that War Communism was synonymous with "brute force."

> It is obscene that socialism has become reduced to
> bureactratic planning or its mirror opposite anarchic, "worker's control".

I wouldn't be so quick to put down the concept of workers' control which
can play an important role in transitional economies and is not
necessarily "anarchic".

> The NEP was a return to sane economic development (Bukharin's
> "equilibrum") which offered
>  the opprotunity for the working class to guide the economy in their
> interests. The return
> to bureacratic planning represented nothing other than the defeat of
> the dictatorship of
> the proletariat by a rising bureactratic class. This is what Stalin
> symbolised.

If you think that the NEP represented an "opportunity for the working
class to guide the economy", you should read what Lenin and Trotsky wrote
at the time of the introduction of the NEP about factory management and
trade unions. I also think that your expression "return to bureaucratic
planning" is misleading since it suggests that there was bp and a
bureaucracy before the NEP. Whether Stalin represented a "bureaucratic
class" (as is held be some who advocate that the USSR was or became state
capitalist) or a bureaucratic caste (as explained by Trotsky) is a rather
large question.

> It should be obvious today that the NEP deserves more attention than to
> dismiss it out-of-hand.

What is obvious is only that socialists need to study Soviet history more.

>  I would draw attention to the fact that what
>  Lenin stated in "The Impending
> Catastrophe" and "The April Thesis" was repeated in the "Tax in Kind"
> which initiated the NEP. There is no inconsistancy in Lenin's views on
> this subject, but there is a terrible
> inconsistancy in the traditional beliefs of the communist movement,
> molded as they were by
> defending Stalin as against Trotsky and vice versa when in fact both
> shared the same
> economic approach!

Yes, - at the time of the introduction of the NEP - it was advocated by L,
T, and S. Later, during the industrialization debate, the economic
policies advocated by T (and the Left Opposition: see Preobrazhensky's
major book) and S (and the Right Opposition: see especially the writings
and speeches of Bukharin during this period) were dramatically different.

> Perhaps it was
> Bukharin who was right all along!

As I have explained previously, Bukharin was not an advocate of the NEP at
the time of the industrialization debates. And the problem of a developing
privaleged bureaucracy (that Lenin was becoming increasingly alarmed
by in the last year of his life) would not have been thwarted by the
economic policies proposed by the Right Opposition. In fact, one can argue
that those policies would have only increased the role of the bureaucrats
and moved the Soviet system further away from socialism.

Jerry



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