As Engels set out in The Critique of the Erfurt Programme, this planned production was already the characteristic of the large-scale socialised capital of the late 19th century, and, increasingly, from then, became the characteristic of developed economies, in the age of imperialism. As Lenin described in Left Wing Childishness, the ultra-Lefts had failed to assess the nature of economic reality in Russia, as still dominated, not even by small private capitals, but still by petty producers and peasants. So, when they accused he Bolsheviks of a “Right deviation” that was leading back to state-capitalism, they simply illustrated they had no compass, because, Lenin points out, in Russia, state-capitalism would represent a huge step forward!
“It has not occurred to them that state capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in our country.”
Of course, that would not be the case in the developed capitalist economies of Western Europe and North America, where that process of the development of large-scale, monopoly capital was already a fact of history, and in the era of imperialism, became manifest as, already, state monopoly capitalism, with those huge monopolies/oligopolies and trusts and cartels, via the stock markets and financial institutions, the central banks and so on, increasingly planning production, and planning and regulating the economy itself, as Marx and Engels set out in Capital III, Chapter 27, and later, in more detail in Anti-Duhring, and Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.
As Lenin continued, it is imperialism/state monopoly capitalism which is the material basis of socialism.
“Here we come to the root of the economic mistake of the “Left Communists”. And that is why we must deal with this point in greater detail.
Firstly, the “Left Communists” do not understand what kind of transition it is from capitalism to socialism that gives us the right and the grounds to call our country the Socialist Republic of Soviets.
Secondly, they reveal their petty-bourgeois mentality precisely by not recognising the petty-bourgeois element as the principal enemy of socialism in our country.
Thirdly, in making a bugbear of “state capitalism”, they betray their failure to understand that the Soviet state differs from the bourgeois state economically”.
Of course, in the years following the Stalinist degeneration, and its impact on the global labour movement, as it sank into social-democracy, this “petty-bourgeois mentality” became pervasive. In the form of the Popular Front, it subordinated the working-class to the interests of petty-bourgeois nationalism to oppose “imperialism”, and also subordinated the working-class to the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie to oppose “monopoly capitalism”, and “fascism”, despite the fact that the petty-bourgeois nationalists are, as with all petty-bourgeois, the most reactionary oppressors of workers, and also form the foot soldiers of fascism. In the 1960's, as a New Left arose, often describing itself as Trotskyist, in the student milieu, and in the various anti-imperialist movements of that time, this petty-bourgeois mentality, and popular frontism became pervasive, and has continued since, in the form, also, of “anti-capitalism”, as well as all of the alliances with vicars, such as the Anti-Nazi League, and, today social-imperialist, popular fronts such as The Ukraine Solidarity Committee.
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