A CANADIAN ESTIMATE

Grey River Argus, 19 April 1948, Page 3

A CANADIAN ESTIMATE

Russia is Not an Experiment

(By

Frank Colson

n in Canadian

“Western Socialist”).

■ “Our task' is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws. There, are no fortresses which... .Bolsheviks cannot storm. The question of tempos is subject to decision by human beings.” (Grinko, Soviet economist).

“And' even when' a' society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural.laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work to' lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by. bold steps, nor remove by legal enactments the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.” ’ (Karl’ Marx, in Capital)). •

Soviet economists are not the only ones who believe that there is no fortress which Bolsheviks, cannot, overcome. Soviet , supporters in America believe that Russia has already. overcome - the Jaws of capitalistic development and is “experimenting with a new form of society. These people seem to think that a society lends itselt to experimentation in much the same way that the controlled factors in a laboratory do. They will admit that American capitalism is subject to certain economic laws, such as the law of supply and demand and the law of diminishing returns. But in Russia, these people believe, the Bolsheviks have completely ended capitalism and have largely, succeeded in pioneering an alternative society. ' It is the aim of this article to show that the Bolsheviks have not abolished capitalism but have constantly instituted measures in conformity with the form of capitalism peculiar to Russia. And it i? the aim of this article, moreover, to make clear that those who are carried away by the so-called “Russian experiment” have been led astray by superficial, secondary differences between the economy of the U.S.R.R. and that of other countries. The Russian Revolution in 191 < was essentially a capitalist revolution. Russia under the Czarist regime was a feudal country, a country of hay stacks, not smoke stacks. No less than 87 per cent, of the people were of the peasant class. True, there were large concentrated units of capitalist enterprise in the leading industrial centers. But this concentrated industrialism, the product mostly of foreign capital investments, made up a small island in an ocean of peasant economy. The Czarist government was a feudal government, as corrupt as Prussian feudalism was outworn. That government fought every measure proposed to mitigate the restrictions hampering industrial development. By 1917 after almost, three years of war. the feudal structure had broken down altogether. The land-hungry peasants were in sore need of equipment which simply did not exist. Of the 17,000 farm implements for tilling the land, only onethird were steel plows, the others were made of wood, and some were in the form of crooked sticks, not unlike those used by savages, in primitive times. Industry was in a state of collapse and hunger was rife in the cities. And as for the soldiers, they were so poorly equipped that many had to stand idly by in the trenches waiting for rifles to drop from the hands of wounded comrades.

Human beings can take just so much and then things begin to happen. Things really began to happen in the land of the Czars in March, 1917. Peasants proceeded to seize the landed estates and carve them up. Workers went on strikes and demonstrated in the streets. Soldiers turned their backs on their officers and their faces toward Russia and trekked homeward. To this day there are neople who believe that the Russian Revolution was engineered by small groups. Actually the Russian Revolution was the result of .the spontaneous action on the part of the great mass of the people who responded in the only way they could react to social conditions which became no longer humanly endurable. . But every great upheaval in history, however spontaneously generated, was accompanied by the activity of small groups. In Russia a Provisional government was formed, consisting of pseudo socialists and liberal capitalists. A dual power also arose—the soviets, composed of delegates representing workers, soldiers and neasants. In the beginning the soviets were genuinely democratic councils in which delegates voted on all important decisions. They were not subject to the will of a higher authority, but represented a force which the government did not dare to ignore.' Whoever had the support of the soviets also controlled the government. Kerensky became the head of the government due to the fact that he ha,d the support of the Soviets. The Bolsheviks, who were making an open bid for power, could not make headway against Kerensky’s regime so long as the latter had the backing of the soviets. Bolsheviks Seize Power

But the influence of the Bolsheviks grew. The Kerensky government soon proved that it had no intention of giving official approval to the action taken by the people. Above all else, the government wanted to continue Russia’s participation in the War, the one thing the people hated most. By November (Western calendar! the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the soviets and forthwith proceeded to plan an uprising against the government. Since the government had lost popular support, the uprising was successful—in the words of Lenin, “It was easier than lifting a feather.” The Bolshevik coup was not, as some writers contend, a second revolution, but a culmination of the capitalist revolution. The Bolsheviks had no intention of turning back the tide, but achieved power by going with the tide, and. then proceeded to consolidate their power by adjusting their policies to the exigencies of the moment. The ' Bolshevik rulers put their stamp of approval on the peasant land seizures. They let the world know that they were finished with the w-*r. They repulsed attempts of foreign- governments to overthrow them. Under this rule Russia became unified. They nulled the country through the famine of 1921. Having withstood the terrific shocks that came from within and without, the Bolsheviks firmly established their hold on the . country; stripped all other organisations, including the soviets, of any real power, and began to apply their theories to industry and agriculture. Every economic policy inaugurated by the Soviet government, has been dictated by conditions in a country historically ripe for capitalism, nffi. socialism. Those who identify capitalism exclusively with its laissez faire form are easily persuaded that the Bolsheviks have pioneered an alternative to capitalism. Many of the familiar features of capitalism are absent in Russia. First of all, taere are no entrepreneurs in that country, no Fords, Morgans, Rockfellers, and so on. In Russia, many of the free market aspects of capitalism are lacking. Goods aren’t dumped on the market by competitive firms, but allocated to the markets according to plan. ■ Capital is not freely attracted to the different spheres of industry by virtue or the rate of profit, but by decision of the planning bodies. Workers are not free to quit their jobs and seek work where wages are highest, but are rigid-

ly restricted by state regulations.

Foreign trade is not the business of private import and export companies, but is a strict government monopoly. “Free farming” as it is known in America, England and other countries has been virtually supplanted by, state farms and huge agricultural collectives. Admittedly the Soviet economy possesses many trails not peculiar to capitalism in the West. But the same thing can be said for the economy of other countries in which the formulative stages of capitalism did not get underway until the twentieth century. The forms of industrial development of Turkey,' to take one Instance, resemble" those of 'Russia more than they resemble those of England or America. A backyard country can' immediately make use of the highly productive technological methods which the advanced countries required a long time to develop. Only the state;, however, has the huge resources needed to procure these - technical - npans and to put them, into operation. In America the first - auto factories were makeshift alley shops manned by individual experimenters like Henry Ford. Forty years labor Russia could, with the help of American experts and equipmient construct giant auto plants with stream-lined conveyor system and the latest automatic machines. Similarly Russia could construct modern power dams, erect vast steel mills, build large tractor factories. In embarking on this program of unprecedented industrial construction, the Soviet state was not guided by the rate of profit on ever? single capital investment in the way American or British capitalists are. The following passage from Dallin’s The Real Soviet Russia (page 100) indicates how the procedures of state capitalism differ from those of private capitalism: “Soviet industrial development in peacetime offers a model of the political development of an economy. It is guided by political principle, not by the calculation of surpluses, cost and price; although every new plant must, of course, take into consideration the factors of cost of construction and production, these calculations do not have any great significance. Only rarely hap the cost, of construction been kept down to the figure originally set for the erection of new or expansion of old industrial units, involving the expenditure of hundreds of millions of rubles. In nearly all instances huge additional appropriations were required If the state-directed economy of Russia differs in so many secondary respects from the so-called “free enterprise” capitalism in America, there is, nevertheless, one thing both systems have in common: Their basic social relationships are essentiallv the same. In Russia as in America, the immense majority of the people are separated from the means of production. The Russian workers have no individual or collective power over the means of production. They have no decisive voice as to what is to be produced or how production is to be carried on. Those people do not even have an effective voice in the determination of the conditions of their work. In order to live they must sell their labor-power to those who control the tools of production. Their wages are pitifully low, the discipline under which they must work is harsh, and they are denied the right to organise into independent unions to resist the downward pressure on their working conditions imposed on them from above. They are the exploited working-claSs An exploited class cannot. . exist without an exploiting class. In Russia the exploiters consist of those who control the national apparatus of production. They decide what is to be produced and how production is to be carried on. They decree what bonuses are to be allowed, and how the .social products are to be distributed. They constitute a vast bureaucracy organised in hierarchical layers, ‘each layer being unrestricted from below, but subordinated by every layer above. Administering Russia economically and politically through the state power, •, hese rulers are able to appropriate the choice share of the national income for themselves. Russian society is like a triangle, with the privileged class at the apex, receiving high salaries, bonuses, interest payments on government bonds, and in addition many other social advantages. The Soviet, millionaires, like Comrade Berdyebekov, Director of a state farm in Kasakstan, are in this class. Also in this class are the higher aristocracy of Soviet society: artists,, engineers, top-ranking state officials. These privileged people, unlike the average run of workers are able to send their children to high schools and universities. They have the satisfaction of knowing, thanks to Russian inheritance laws, that their children can inherit their wealth when they die. The lower area of the pyramid is represented by the various sections of the working class —poor farm and industrial workers, and slave labourers. Citing official Soviet sources, Arthur Koestler, in the Yogi and the Commoksar, showed that for industrial workers, “tjie average standard of living had risen from the Revolution to 1929 bv 54 per cent, and had by 1937 dropped to a level of 32 per cent lower than the pre-reyolution-ary standard.” In 1929 the first Five Year Plan was already underway. The Plan was in reality a glorified program of industrial rationalisation designed to hasten the growth of Russian industry. There is only one way to accifrnulate capital in such immense proportions as the Russian plans call for and that is bv sweating surplus labour of the working class. To this end the Russian ruling class has used every means within its tremendous power to heighten labour productivity. The Soviet dictatorship has suppressed genuine collective bargaining and converted the unions from agencies to check exploitation into instruments to intensify exploitation. The major role of the Soviet state-dominated unions to-day is to work out ways and means for increasing production. Fiece-work. which Marx called the most fruitful source of capitalist cheating, and which is bitterly resisted by large sections of organised laboui’ in England and America, is in, Russia the prevailing form of wage - payment.. Piece-work, especially Russian “Stakhanovism,” is admittedly the most exacting kind of exploitation. But the U.S.S.R. has the distinction of having pioneered on a large scale in an even more brutal form of exploitation, namely, twentieth century slave labour. Some 6.000,000 human beings are impressed in slave labour battalions to-day in the “Socialist Fatherland.” For a documented account of the nature and scope of Russian forced labour, the reader is referred to David Dallin’s “Forced Labour in Russia.” Despite this abundance, of slave labour, however, the Russian system rest preponderantly on wage labour. And wage labour spells capitalism. The polarisation of wage labour and capital constitutes the foundation of capitalist society. Wage labour is alienated labour which capital, whether personfied by the entrepreneur or by the state consumes in the process of production. Those who look upon the Soviet system as a de-sirable-alternative to capitalism overlook completely this alienation of labour in the productive process. “Hew can capitalism exist in Russia when there is no capitalist class there?” This challenge is reiterated by pro-Soviet enthusiasts. They forget that a privileged bueraucracy can dispose of surplus labour as well as any set of private capitalists can. More important, they . forget that wage labour is the major foundation stone of the capitalist system. And in Russia, wage labour —which means the estrangement of labour from the products of its toil—assume its most degrading form.