16. The Soviets and the Class Character of the Revolution
The question of soviets illustrates the distinction between permanent revolution and socialism in one country, as well as between form and content, between the revolutionary perspective and the reformist, bureaucratic perspective.
The Second Congress of the Communist International had set out the conditions for establishing soviets as revolutionary organs of workers' power. That distinguished these revolutionary soviets from the attempt, by Kautsky, and others, to neuter their revolutionary content, retaining their form, but as mere parliamentary bodies, used as adjuncts to bourgeois parliaments.
The whole point of the revolutionary content of the soviet is that they serve as transitional forms, in the same way that Marx describes cooperatives and joint stock companies (socialised capital) as the transitional forms of property between capitalism and socialism, in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, with Engels, in Anti-Duhring. It implies that capital, and bourgeois relations, still exist, but a period of transition is underway, from one state to the other, driven by a heightening of the contradictions.
As Marx sets out, in Capital III, Chapter 27. the socialised capital of the cooperative and joint stock company, including the forms of the trust, cartel, or statised capital, means that, objectively, this capital is the collective capital of “the associated producers” (workers and managers) within the enterprise. Yet, only in the worker cooperative do these associated producers actually exercise control over that capital. Even in consumer cooperatives, where most of the consumers are workers, it is the customers of the co-op, not the workers within it, that become its voting members, with the actual workers of the co-op frequently excluded. As I have described, elsewhere, the reality of this is that this democracy of the consumers is a fallacy, as few take part, meetings are held in a way that discourages participation, and the full-time bureaucracy of the co-op, much as with the development of the permanent bureaucracy, in Russia, after 1917, or as in a trades union, usurps actual control.
As Trotsky describes, in relation to the class nature of the USSR, therefore, they become workers' organisations, but ones in which the workers do not exercise control. As with the Labour Party, and Lenin's description of it as a bourgeois workers' party, they are workers' organisations, but the workers do not exercise control, and that control is exercised by a petty-bourgeois, managerialist bureaucracy. This is typical of social-democracy, as a transitional, highly contradictory phase between capitalism and socialism.
As Marx says of the workers' cooperative, they resolve the contradiction between labour and capital by making the labourers into their own collective capitalist, but the cooperative still exists in the capitalist economy, just as the USSR existed in the capitalist world economy. The cooperative still produces commodities, which it must sell in the market place, against competitors, just as the USSR had to do in the world market. The laws of capital and commodity production did not cease to exist for the USSR, as a workers state, any more than they do for a workers' cooperative, and it is this dynamic, this contradiction that drives permanent revolution, as against the stasis implied by the concept of socialism in one country.
As Marx put it, in Capital III, Chapter 27,
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage... The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
And, the reality, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky also realised, is that there can be no condition of stasis. The worker cooperative, although Marx showed it was more efficient than the privately owned or controlled company, could not simply out compete and replace these private capitals. The capitalists charged the coops higher rates of interest on any money borrowed, private capitals restricted the commercial credit given to them, and even boycotted trade with them, much as the workers' state, in the USSR, encountered.
In order to overcome that, the coops needed to form their own monopolies and cartels, but the bourgeois laws are, then, used against them. In these conditions, the generally smaller capital of the worker cooperative, no matter how efficient, cannot compete with the much larger, privately owned or controlled capitals. Those larger capitals, in the form of the joint stock company/corporation, are also, objectively, the collective property of the workers. The shareholders and bondholders are only creditors of the company that lend it money, in exchange for the payment of interest, be it as dividends or coupon. Yet, the workers do not exercise control over their property, and that is even more the case when the capital is statised.
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