Future society by Joseph Stalin (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The following article first appeared in 1906 in Akhali Tckhovroba, an obscure Social Democratic journal published in Georgia, and was part of a series on "anarchism or socialism". We have many disagreements with this article but we republish it not only because it gives a definition of socialism as a society without buying and selling, the wages system or a coercive government machine, but also because its author was the man who was later to become the dictator of Russia — Joseph Stalin. In comparing what Stalin wrote in 1906 with what he later claimed was "socialism” it can be seen to what  extent the so-called Communist Parties everywhere have distorted the original meaning of the word. In view of certain  observations in the article, we must add that it is our view that  the means of production are now sufficiently developed to  permit the implementation of the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” with the establishment of socialism.

Editorial Committee

Future society will be socialist society. This means, primarily, that there will be no classes in that society; there will be neither capitalists nor proletarians and, consequently, there will be no exploitation. In that society there will be only workers engaged in collective labour.

Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed there will be only free workers.

Future society will be socialist society. This means, lastly, that in that society the abolition of wage labour will be accompanied by the complete abolition of the private ownership of the instruments and means of production; there will be neither poor proletarians nor rich capitalists—there will be only workers who collectively own all the land and minerals, all the forests, all the factories and mills, all the railways, etc.

As you see, the main object of production in the future will be directly to satisfy the needs of society and not to produce goods for sale in order to increase the profits of the capitalists. Here there will be no room for commodity production, struggle for profits, etc.

It is also clear that future production will be socialistically organised, highly developed production, which will take into account the needs of society and will produce as much as society needs. Here there will be no room either for disintegrated production, competition, crises or unemployment.

Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power.

That is why Karl Marx said as far back as 1846:

  The working class in the course of its development will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so- called . . . (see The Poverty of Philosophy).

That is why Engels said in 1884:

  The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no conception of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity . . .We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe. (See The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.)

At the same time, it is self-evident that for the purpose of administrating public affairs there will have to be in socialist society, in addition to local offices which will collect all sorts of information, a central statistical bureau, which will collect information about the needs of the whole of society, and then distribute the various. kinds of work among the working people accordingly. It will also be necessary to hold conferences and particularly congresses, the decisions of which will certainly be binding upon the comrades who are in the minority until the next congress is held.

Lastly, it is obvious that free and comradely labour should result in an equally comradely and complete, satisfaction of all needs in the future socialist society. This means that if future society will demand from each of its members as much labour as he can perform, it, in its turn, must provide each member with as much products as he needs. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! —such is the basis upon which the future collectivist system must be created. It goes without saying that in the initial stage of Socialism, when elements which have not yet grown accustomed to work are being drawn into the new way of life, when the productive forces also will not yet have been sufficiently developed and there will still be “dirty" and “clean” work to do, the application of the principle: “to each according to his needs”, will undoubtedly be greatly hindered and, as a consequence, society will be obliged temporarily to take some other path, a middle path. But it is also clear that when future society runs into its groove, when the survivals of capitalism will have been eradicated, the only principle that will conform to socialist society will be the one we have pointed to above.

That is why Marx said in 1875:

  In a higher phase of communist (i.e. socialist) society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual. . . only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.” (See Critique of the Gotha Program.)

Such, in general, is the picture of future socialist society according to the theory of Marx.