Lenin said if you take the economic content provided by monopoly capitalism and “a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, (and) you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism” However, this is not quite true, as the experience in Russia itself demonstrated. The state is an executive body, it acts as the executive committee of the ruling-class, but the class itself can never act as the state, nor can it act to directly supervise and control its actions. That is clear under conditions of Bonapartism. The bourgeoisie did not resort to fascism out of choice, but necessity, and the cost of doing so was that it lost its means of direct control over the state, which is usually exerted via the regime of bourgeois democracy. Bourgeois democracy is the favoured regime of the bourgeoisie, and keeps it firmly in control, precisely because it reflects the hegemony of bourgeois ideas in society as a whole. It is a reflection of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in society, manifest in its day to day control over all aspects of that society.
Similarly, for the working-class to exert such hegemony, and thereby to be able to operate via a system of workers democracy to control and supervise the actions of a workers state, it too must exercise day to day control over all aspects of life. As a minimum, it must exert democratic control over all of the socialised capital, in the same way it does over the worker owned cooperatives. This self-government, and self-activity by workers is the basic element of exerting this social hegemony.
The idea that socialism could be constructed simply on the basis of these huge monopolies, but simply under the aegis of a Workers' State, was rejected by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organisation of the total labour" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!..
That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”
Given everything that Lenin has said previously, about this same need to first transform society, to transform the social relations, it is surprising that in 1917/18, he adopts this Lassallean stance that all that is required is to seize control of the state apparatus, and then use it to turn the wheel of state in a different direction, and thereby to turn the wheel of society also in a different direction. That seems to be a capitulation to the ideas that the Narodniks were proposing in the 1890's. What is more, as he predicted, when he was arguing against those ideas, in the 1890's, it led to inevitable failure and disaster.
Control and supervision over the state apparatus could never be exercised by the working-class itself. The bourgeoisie, as a much smaller, more compact, and developed class cannot achieve that, let alone the working-class. It is only ever the vanguard of such a class that can act in such a manner, but if this vanguard itself becomes too detached from the class, then it ceases acting as a vanguard of the class, and instead acts as a privileged social layer, pursuing its own interests.
Simon Clarke wrote some time ago,
“The social base of state socialism lies in the stratum of intellectual workers, including such groups as managers, administrators, scientists, technicians, engineers, social workers and teachers as well as the intelligentsia more narrowly defined.” These groups believe that the key to a more just society lies “in their mobilisation of their technical, administrative and intellectual expertise... The ability of this stratum to achieve its rationalist ambitions depends on its having access to positions of social and political power.”
“For the working-class the Party is a means of mobilising and generalising its opposition to Capital and its State, and of building autonomous forms of collective organisation, while for the intellectual stratum it is a means of achieving power over capital and the state... As soon as the party has secured state power, by whatever means, it has fulfilled its positive role as far as the intellectual stratum is concerned. The latter's task is now to consolidate and exploit its position of power to secure the implementation of the Party's programme in the interests of the 'working class'. Once the Party has seized power, any opposition it encounters from the working class is immediately identified as sectional or factional opposition to the interests of the working class as a whole, the latter being identified with the Party as its self-conscious representative.”
(“Crisis of Socialism Or Crisis Of the State?”, in Capital & Class 42, Winter 1990)
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