Marx was right (2022)

Book Review from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx. By Steve Paxton, Zero Books, 2021. 165pp.

The thesis of this interesting book is that the failure of the Bolsheviks to establish a socialist society in Russia following the 1917 revolution shows the correctness of Marx’s contention that such a society can only arise from advanced capitalism. And since Russia was not an advanced capitalist society in 1917, it could not ‘jump’ the capitalist stage and go straight to socialism. This is not of course a new argument. In fact, it’s one of the arguments against Bolshevism posing as socialism that appeared in the Socialist Standard in the period immediately following the Russian revolution. Those early members of the Socialist Party were clear that, whatever was happening in Russia, it wasn’t and couldn’t be socialism. But this book has the merit of going to extensively researched lengths to prove beyond any conceivable doubt not only that Russia was massively backward in terms of capitalist development in 1917 but probably more so than has previously been thought. To do this it goes into enormous detail on economic developments in Russia throughout the 19th century and right up to the revolution, often comparing these to what was happening in Western Europe and in particular in the motor of capitalist development that was England. Such detail is used to demonstrate conclusively ‘the failure of capitalist production to penetrate the lives of the mass of ordinary Russian producers’ and so the inevitably premature nature of the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘in the name of the proletariat’.

The author follows this by discussion, again highly detailed and documented, of how the Russian economy was built up by the Bolsheviks after the post-revolution period of ‘War Communism’ (1917-22), first under Lenin and then under Stalin, often of course with unbridled violence and brutality inflicted on much of the population. And far from being the development of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ as the regime presented it, he sees this period as representing the transition stage from feudalism to capitalism that Western Europe had undergone earlier and much more gradually over a period of several centuries. He rejects too the idea that what Russia had during this period was ‘state capitalism’, on the grounds that capitalism was not sufficiently developed there for that name to be attached to it (more like ‘state feudalism’ at least at the beginning, he suggests). And indeed he argues that capitalism didn’t in fact come to Russia until the end of the Soviet Union in 1989 when the Soviet system reached peak ‘stagnation’. This is debatable as before then Russia had all the typical features of capitalism – a money economy, wage labour, capital investment, buying and selling, a small privileged class in control (in this case Party bosses and bureaucrats) and in effect ownership of the means of production, and a large mass of workers with no control over the means of living.

His book also presents the opportunity for the author to effectively put to bed common misrepresentations of Marx and his ideas. He does this, in the sections that focus on it, in a highly readable and credible way. So, far from the collapse of the Soviet Union being ‘a fatal blow to important Marxian theses’, he makes it clear that ‘Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail’ and that such an outcome does not in any way mean that ‘socialism has been tried and found wanting’. A further merit of this book is the nuanced discussion of class to be found in the section entitled ‘Deeper into Marx’ which recognises that a relatively small number of exceptions to the Marxian model of the class divide between those who own and control the means of production and those who have to work for a wage or salary to survive may blur the overall picture, but at the same time makes short shrift of the idea of a large number of classes in capitalist society and correctly sees the key to class not in whether someone actually works for a wage or salary but the ‘economic pressure’ on that person, i.e. whether that person has to work in order to survive or can choose not to if they want.

The book’s short concluding chapter which looks to the future is also encouraging. Using Marx’s theory of historical development (historical materialism) as a framework, as the writer has done throughout the book, it states tellingly of capitalism that ‘it has provided the means to produce more and better and faster’, that it has developed ‘technology to the point where we can produce the material abundance required by a free society’ and that ‘the level of technological development it has delivered means that we have now entered a post-scarcity world’. Yet, as he points out, ‘Twenty thousand people starve to death every day. Not because we don’t have the food to feed them – but because our current economic and social mechanisms don’t allow us to deliver that food to them.’ At the same time, he sees no virtue in violent revolution: ‘We are not going to progress past capitalism by seizing the means of production in armed conflict.’ Nothing here that socialists can disagree with, but this reader was left a little bemused by the remedy proposed, as a way of organising our ‘post scarcity world’, consisting as it does of ‘new approaches to the relationships between work and leisure, between work and reward, between possession and ownership and between private property and public value’ and not a democratic system of free access to all goods and services.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

This same book was previously reviewed in the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard by another writer.