INTERNASYONALISMO

“State Socialism” is State Capitalism

Many Leftist currents today (i.e., Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyists) faithfully believe that the state is the sole vehicle towards socialism and communism. They argue that the class dictatorship of the proletariat is “through the state”. With this kind of thinking, they all said that state industries and nationalization is the only road toward socialism or it is already socialism. In the late 20s in the last century, Stalin raised this into “theory”: “Socialism in one country”.

How Marx and Engels Struggled Against “State Socialism”

It is better to review the revolutionary history of the proletariat in the times of Marx and Engels so it would be clear to us now what is the stand of Marxism on this question. If we remember, the Lenin with his State and Revolution was accused by the ‘orthodox’ Marxists (led by Kautsky) as Bakuninist anarchist because he elaborated the Marxist positions concerning the state.

Aside from anarchism, Marx and Engels struggled against ‘state socialism’ and reformism. Let us focus on their struggle against ‘state socialism’.

Marx was firm that capital is a social relation, and cannot be defined in a purely juridical manner. The whole thrust of Marx’s work is to define capitalism as a system of exploitation founded on wage labor, on the ex­traction and realization of surplus value. From this stand­point, it is entirely irrelevant whether the agent that sucks surplus value from the workers, which realizes that value on the market in order to accrue a profit and expand its capital, is an individual bourgeois, a corporation, or a na­tion state. As what Engels said in Anti-Duhring, "the transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the work­ers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total na­tional capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the na­tional capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head". 

Among the more sophisticated apologists for Stalinism have been those currents, usually Trotskyists or their off­spring, who have argued that while the monstrous bureaucratic nightmare of the former USSR and similar regimes could not be called socialist, neither can it be called capi­talist, because when you have the total nationalization of the economy (although, in fact, none of the Stalinist regimes ever reached this point), production and labor power lose their commodity character. Marx, by contrast, was able to theoretically envisage the possibility of a coun­try in which all social capital was in the hands of a single agency, without this country ceasing to be capitalist: "Capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were fused into a single capital. In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company" (Capital, Vol 1, chap XXV, section 2).

The German ‘state socialism’ of Lasalle (Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany, later became the SDP) embedded in its Gotha Program in 1875 was severely criticized by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme in the same year. Marx mercilessly criticizes this Lassallean "prophet’s remedy": "Instead of being the result of the revolutionary process of social transformation in society, the ’socialist organisation of the whole of labour’ ‘arises’ from ’state aid’ to producers’ co­operatives which the state, not the workers, is to ‘call into being’. The notion that state loans can be used for the con­struction of a new society as easily as they can for the con­struction of a new railway is worthy of Lassalle’s imagina­tion!". This is an explicit warning against listening to those who claim that the existing capitalist state can in some way be used as an instrument for creating socialism - even if they present it in more sophisticated terms than those of the Gotha.

Marx lambasted the Gotha Program’s call for a "free people’s state and a socialist society" as a nonsensical phrase, since the state and freedom are two opposed princi­ples: "freedom consists in converting the state from an or­gan standing above society into one completely subordi­nated to it" (Critique). In a fully developed socialist soci­ety, there will be no state at all. But more important still is Marx’s recognition that this call for a "people’s state", to be realized by the granting of "democratic" reforms which a number of capitalist countries have already conceded, is a way of avoiding the crucial question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is in this context that Marx raises the question: "what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what so­cial functions will remain in existence that is analogous to present functions of the state? The question can only be an­swered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand fold combination of the word people with the word state”.

In the interests of historical accuracy, however, it is necessary to point out that even Marx and Engels them­selves had not fully assimilated the lesson of the Paris Commune of 1871. In a speech to the Hague congress of the International, in September 1872, Marx could still argue that "heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various coun­tries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such a America and England, and if I was familiar with its insti­tutions, Holland, where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour".

It has to be said that this idea was an illusion on Marx’s part - a measure of the weight of democratic ideology on even the most advanced elements in the workers’ move­ment. In the years that followed, all sorts of opportunists were to seize upon such illusions to give Marx’s seal of ap­proval to their efforts to abandon any idea of a violent rev­olution and to lull the working class into believing that it could get rid of capitalism by legally and peacefully using the organs of bourgeois democracy. But the authentic Marxist tradition does not lie with them: it lies with the likes of Pannekoek, Bukharin and Lenin, who took the most daring and revolutionary elements in Marx’s thinking on the question, those which led inexorably to the conclu­sion that in order to establish the rule of labour in any country, the working class would have to use the lever of force, and first and foremost against the existing state ma­chine, no matter how democratic its forms. What’s more, reality, the real evolution of the democratic state, had as­sisted them in reaching this conclusion, for as Lenin put it in State and Revolution:

"Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperial­ist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and last representa­tives - in the whole world - of Anglo-Saxon ‘liberty’, in the sense that they had no militarist clique and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subor­dinate everything to themselves. Today, in Britain and America, too, "the precondition for every people’s revolu­tion" is the smashing, the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery"".

The question of ‘socialist state’ was deepened by the Marxists who survived the repression of Stalinist barbarism in the 1930s up to 1940s particularly the Italian communist-left. Firmly upholding the lessons of the workers movement in from mid-1800s to the degeneration of the Russian revolution, the conclusions reached by these surviving Marxists about the state capitalist character of USSR only affirm the Marxist tradition of the founders of Marxism concerning the state.  

From the above brief review on Marxist conception about the state in relation to the actual experience of the proletarian movement, we can clearly differentiate Marxism from Leftism, socialism from state capitalism. And the true inheritors of Marxism today are definitely not the Maoists, Stalinists and the Trotskyists.