Chattopadhyay Review Class Theory and History Capitalism and Communism in the USSR Chattopadhyay Historical Materialism 2006/1

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Historical Materialism

, volume 14:1 (249–282)©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006Also available online –www.brill.nl

Review Articles

Class Theory andHistory: Capitalism andCommunism in theUSSR

S

TEPHEN

A.R

ESNICK AND

R

ICHARD

D. W

OLFF

London: Routledge, 2002(i) Reviewed by

P

ARESH

C

HATTOPADHYAY

The book under review is not just one more addition to the numerous works on theUSSR that have so far appeared in print. This is an unusual work. It attempts toanalyse the whole Soviet experience (1917–90) in terms of the concept of ‘class’ derivedfrom Marx. According to the authors, the USSR was all along a ‘state form of capitalism’.The Bolsheviks had simply replaced pre-1917 ‘private capitalism’ with ‘state capitalism’.

I.The argument

The authors distinguish their kind of class analysis from the rest of such analysis.Contrary to the latter, which they say understands class analysis in terms of propertyand/or power, their own class analysis is grounded in Marx’s concept of ‘surplus,’its production, appropriation and distribution involving different groups – ‘classes’ –in all societies (pp. x–xi). The organisation of the whole process constitutes ‘society’sclass structure’. A‘communist class structure’ is one where production and appropriationof surplus are effected by the same group of people – unlike in other class societies– but the distribution of the surplus still brings in a different group of people whosimply receive a part of the surplus without being involved in the ﬁrst two processes–and, so, constitute a different class. Let it be noted that, in their class analysis, theauthors are guided by what they call the ‘Marxian notion of over-determination’, thatis, all aspects of society conditioning and shaping one another (pp. ix, xiv, 9). Givenmore than one class in communism – in fact, ‘two groups of people’ as mentionedearlier – communism is neither ‘classless’ nor without ‘class conﬂict’. The secondgroup is paid a part of the surplus in order to perform various ‘non class processes’so as to sustain communist society (pp. 14–16). The authors distinguish communismfrom socialism. Unlike communism, socialism is not a distinct class process, with itsown form of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus (pp. 76–7).

250 • Paresh Chattopadhyay

After discussing their notion of ‘communism’, the authors turn to ‘capitalism’ –focusing on ‘state capitalism’. The latter they ‘deﬁne’ as the ‘capitalist process ofproducing, appropriating and distributing surplus, consisting of and interacting withprocesses that place state ofﬁcials in the class position of appropriators and distributionof surplus’ (p. 85). For the authors, the USSR is a ‘state capitalism’ rather than someother kind of exploitative class structure. In the USSR, collective property replacedprivate property in the means of production and plan replaced market but did noteliminate workers’ exploitation (pp. 90–7). They also discuss different kinds of ‘statecapitalism’ in Lenin and summarise the basic alternative theories of state capitalism(particularly with respect to the USSR) (Chapter 4

passim

).In the historical part of their study, Resnick and Wolff first discuss the class situationin the pre-1917 Russia in order to show how what they call the ‘1917 revolution’ aroseout of the existing multiple and contradictory class structures of the country (1861–1917),which they describe as being, essentially, a combination of ‘feudal,’ ‘ancient’ and‘capitalist’ class structures where ‘communist class structures’ lay almost completelyoutside the experience of pre-1917 Russia’ (p. 144). In their account of the post-1917period, based on standard ‘Western’ sources, they argue that the ‘1917 revolution’ atfirst simply displaced private capitalism in industry with state capitalism and eliminatedprivate capitalism in agriculture with its vast number of small farmers. The NEPledto the re-emergence of private capitalist farms. However, with the exception of‘communist class structures generated by collectivization of the late 1920s, exploitationremained a significant reality of soviet agriculture’ (p. 157). As regards the Soviethouseholds, they retained ‘mostly feudal and significant ancient class structures’.Soviet workers in fields and factories and at home ‘did not free themselves from classexploitation’ (p. 157). After the NEP, the state-capitalist class structure of industryreturned to a more centralised form. The collectivisation of agriculture establishedcommunist class structures (particularly in agriculture). However, the state’s subsequentpolicies did much to undermine them (p. 256). Finally, while the ‘1917 revolution’had eliminated private in favour of state capitalism, in the 1980s, it was state capitalismthat was in decay. ‘The crises reversed the direction of 1917: the last transition wentfrom state back to private capitalism’ (p. 281).This unusual work, closely argued, raises many important – particularly

theoretical

–issues which deserve careful discussion. In what follows our focus mostly will be ontheoretical issues, the most challenging in the book. However, given the limited spaceavailable, we propose to take up only some of them (naturally, arbitrarily).

II.Marx on capitalism – a particular reading

Most of the

theoretical

discussion in the book concerns the authors’ very original ideasabout surplus and class and, connected with these questions, their innovative notion

Review Articles • 251

1

Marx 1962a, pp. 12, 15–16.

2

Marx 1964a, p. 452; 1992, p. 502; emphasis in the manuscript, not in Engels edition.

3

Marx 1956, p. 21; 1964a, p. 823; 1992, p. 843.

4

See Marx 1966b, pp. 71–3; 1971, p. 75.

of ‘communist class structure’. However, before we come to look at those interestingideas, it is, perhaps, only proper to say a few words about the authors’ view of Marx’sapproach to capitalism.According to the authors, Marx’s analysis of capitalism ‘concentrated on the particularkind of capitalism dominant in his day’, that is, ‘private capitalism’. To ‘understand’this he devised his value formula (c

+

v

+

s = w) (pp. 13, 86, 171). To support thiscontention, they refer to the well-known opening lines of

Capital

about capitalist‘wealth’ consisting of an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ where the ‘individualcommodity appears as its elementary form’. They interpret this to mean the ‘exchangeof privately owned and produced commodities’. Unfortunately, we do not agree withthis reading of Marx. To start with, Marx’s

Capital

is an ‘enquiry into the capitalistmode of production and corresponding relations of circulation’ with a view to‘discovering the law of motion of the modern society.’

1

It is a question of capital

assuch

independently of the speciﬁc juridical form of ownership, whether ‘private’ or‘public’ (state). In his manuscript for

Capital

, Volume III, composed before

Capital

,Volume I, Marx takes full account of the evolution of capital’s ownership form, which,he argues, is dictated entirely by the demands of capital accumulation, till the stagewhen capital remains no longer ‘private’ and becomes ‘directly social’ – signifyingthe ‘abolition of capital as private property

within

the limits of the capitalist mode ofproduction itself’.

2

On the other hand, virtually neglected by Marx’s partisans as well as by his detractorsand, needless to say, totally unrecognised by bourgeois jurisprudence, private ownershipof capital has another and more profound meaning in Marx – beyond that of individualprivate ownership by household or by corporation. In this sense, capital is

always

private property even when it exists in the form of ‘public’ (state) property. This isthe sense in which Marx speaks of the objective conditions of labour becoming capital:when, separated from the immediate producers and confronting them as an ‘autonomouspower’, they are ‘monopolised by a part of society’ as ‘private property of a part ofsociety’.

3

They become the ‘class property’ of the capitalist class.

4

Private ownershipof capital disappears only with capital itself, that is, only when the conditions ofproduction are collectively appropriated by the associated producers themselves.With regard to the ‘individual commodity as the elementary form of capitalistwealth’, the ‘individual commodity’ does not necessarily mean ‘

privately owned

andproduced commodities’ as the authors contend (our emphasis). When Marx speaksof the commodity as a product of ‘private labour’, ‘private’ does not necessarily mean juridical private

ownership

. ‘Private’, in this case, means not directly social labour,

of 00

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