A Marxist Analysis of the Soviet Economy. By Erwan Moysan. Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy.
At one time ‘the nature of the USSR’ was a burning issue. That was before 1991, while it still existed. The regime itself and its supporters in other countries claimed that it was ‘socialist’, a view that had to be refuted. The Trotskyists couldn’t decide whether it was a ‘degenerate workers state’ or a new class society of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ or a form of ‘state capitalism’. Eventually they split into rival factions over the issue. Today the question is largely of academic and historical interest. However, there is one aspect that can usefully be addressed: why did it collapse?
Our view was that the USSR was capitalist because the defining features of capitalism (class property, wage-labour, production for the market, and capital accumulation) all existed there and that, given that most industry was state-owned, ‘state capitalism’ was the best description. Moysan has essentially the same position and, like us, notes that ‘Marx and Engels’ understanding of socialism as a worldwide society without classes, state, wage labour, commodity production, value and surplus-value, money, or competition of capitals is directly in contrast to the Stalinist view’. Chapter 1 is a very good description of the ‘capitalist mode of production’.
The view that the USSR was socialist or that it was a ‘degenerate workers state’ is easily disposed of. Unless you redefine socialism (as the ‘Stalinists’ did) then the existence of widespread (and spreading) wage-labour was proof that it wasn’t socialist; while the fact that the workers there were oppressed and exploited refuted the claim that it was a place where the workers ruled. Little wonder then that more independent-minded Trotskyists came up with the idea that it was either a new class society or a form of state capitalism.
The collapse of the economic system in the USSR was not something that the alternative Trotskyists expected; they — those who talked of ‘state capitalism’ as well as those who saw a new class society — thought that the system was more advanced than classical capitalism. Some of them saw that this was where the rest of the capitalist world was heading.
Moysan rejects this — which in any event was disproved by events — and argues that the USSR was less advanced and that the greater role of the state in the economy was a sign that ‘the Soviet economy was a catch-up economy’, writing that ‘countries that develop later must, in order to compete with countries with a high organic composition of capital, “catch up”, and this entails brutal state-led accumulation of capital’ (p. 111).
His explanation for the collapse of such state-led capital accumulation was that in the USSR it led to a ‘crisis of absolute overproduction of capital’ — and so to a slowing down of capital accumulation — due to a labour shortage caused by agriculture being so backward that not enough workers were being released to work in industry. The only way out was abandonment of the type of state capitalism that existed in industry there and a move towards the sort of capitalism that existed in the other capitalist countries.
We get a brief mention in a footnote referring to a debate at our conference in 1969 about the nature of the ruling class in the USSR. During the debate, Moysan notes, some members argued that ‘the private sector was more important than commonly thought, and that the Soviet Union was going towards a Western-style capitalism’, which turned out to be what happened.
Adam Buick
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