Conclusion

As we pointed out in Part I, the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the first ‘workers state’ has had a profound impact in shaping our world. At first the apparent success of the Russian Revolution showed that there was a realistic alternative to capitalism. It showed that capitalism could be overthrown by the working classes and that a socialist, if not communist, society could be constructed on its ruins. As such it inspired generations of socialists and workers in their conflicts with the capitalism system, defining both their aims and methods.

However, as the true nature of the USSR began to emerge the perception that it was ‘actually exiting socialism’ became an increasing barrier to the development of an opposition to capitalism. If the socialist alternative to capitalism was a totalitarian police state in which you still had to work for a boss then most workers concluded that it might be better to merely reform capitalism. At the same time the attempts of the Stalinist Communist Parties across the world to subordinate the worker class movements to the foreign policy needs of the USSR further compounded this problem.

The struggle against both Stalinism and social democracy demanded an understanding of the USSR. The question of what was the USSR therefore became a central one throughout much of the twentieth century. It was a question, which as we have seen, was bound up with the associated questions of what is socialism and communism? What was the Russian Revolution? And indeed what is the essential nature of Capitalism?

Although from a communist perspective that takes as its touchstone the abolition of wage-labor as the defining feature of communism it would seem intuitive that the USSR was a form of capitalism, we have seen that the theories that the USSR was state capitalist have proved inadequate compared with the more sophisticated theories that have developed out of the Trotskyist tradition. To the extent that they have shared the tradition Marxist conception of the Second and Third Internationals that state capitalism is highest form of capitalism, state capitalist theories of the USSR have proved unable to explain either the apparently non-capitalist aspects of the USSR nor its decline and eventual collapse.

Indeed, while the Trotskyist theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state has become untenable given the chronic economic stagnation of USSR that became increasingly apparent after the 1960s, and which culminated in the collapse of the USSR in 1990, it has been Ticktin’s radical reconstruction of this theory that has so far provided the most convincing understanding of the Soviet system and its decline and fall.

However, as we showed in Part II, Ticktin’s theory still falls short of the mark. Rather than seeing the USSR as being a social system stuck in the transition between capitalism and socialism, we have taken up the point of departure suggested by Bordiga to argue that the USSR was in transition to capitalism.

We have argued that in order to break out of its backwardness and subordinate position within the world division of labor the state bureaucracy, which had formed after the Russian Revolution, sought to make the transition to capitalism through the transitional form of state capitalism. In its efforts to industrialize the Russian state sought the forced development of productive-capital that required the suppression of the more cosmopolitan and crisis ridden forms of money and commodity capital. However, while such forced capitalist development allowed an initial rapid industrialization the distortions it produced within the political economy of the USSR eventual became a barrier to the complete transition to capitalism in Russia.

As such we have argued that the USSR was essentially based on capitalist commodity-production. However as a consequence of the historical form of forced transition to capitalism there was dislocation between the capitalist nature of production and its appearance as a society based on commodity-exchange. This dislocation led to the deformation of value and the defective content of use-values that both provided the basis for the persistence of the distinctly non-capitalist features of the USSR and led to the ultimate decline and disintegration of the USSR.

As we saw in the last issue in relation to the war in Kosovo the question of Russia remains an important one on the geo-political stage. The economic and political problems of breaking up and reintegrating the Eastern bloc in to the global structure of capitalism is one that has yet to find a solution, and this is particularly true of Russia itself.

The forced development of productive-capital for over half a century has left Russia with an economy based on huge monopolies unable to compete on the world market. At the same time the insistence by the ideologists of Western capitalism that all that Russia needed was deregulation and liberalization has simply given rise to the emergence of money-capital in its most parasitical and predatory form. As a consequence, Russia re-subordination to the dictates of the international law of value has left it with one part of its economy reverting back to barter while the other is dominated by a mafia-capitalism that is blocking any further economic development. Hence, despite all the efforts of the USA and the IMF Russia still remains mired in its transition to capitalism.