09.12.1999

Vacuous definitions

Aufheben and state capitalism

Recent issues of the yearly magazine Aufheben have seen an interesting attempt to develop a coherent theory of the USSR from a left communist perspective.

The comrades have been working “towards a theory of the deformation of value under state capitalism” through a detailed critique of Leon Trotsky and Tony Cliff (1997), Hillel Ticktin (1998) and various Russian, German and Italian left-communist thinkers (1999). Although readers will have to wait until around autumn 2000 for a fully worked out theory, the relative breadth of theoretical issues that the Aufheben collective has chosen to address, and the manner in which its logic is developing, make an initial critique a worthwhile exercise.

The 1999 issue contains an analysis of the various state capitalist theories of the USSR that arose from the ultra-left elements that were initially attracted to, and subsequently repelled by, the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Comintern - the German/Dutch left, whose main theorists were Pannekoek and Gorter, and the Italian left current around Bordiga.

Gorter took as his point of departure the works of Rosa Luxemburg in which she had argued that the Russian Revolution had degenerated into a Bolshevik dictatorship over the Russian working class. Gorter, however, hinged his analysis on Russian backwardness and the concurrent minority status of the proletariat, which had forced the Bolsheviks into ‘bourgeois’ political and economic measures. Ruhle developed this analysis into what the Aufheben comrades correctly call a “semi-Menshevik and fatalistic interpretation” (Aufheben 1999, p36), moving from Gorter’s dualistic viewpoint toward arguing that the revolution had been bourgeois in character from the very start - all that could be objectively achieved in Russia was a bourgeois revolution. It was from this national-centred perspective that the German/Dutch left sought to launch their critique of the developing productive relations of the Soviet Union in the 1934 Theses on Bolshevism.

Unfortunately this pedantic schematism was used as the source for a thoroughly erroneous critique. The Theses went considerably further than either Gorter and Ruhle in arguing that the Bolsheviks had intentionally carried out a bourgeois revolution. This dubious concoction of conspiracy and objectivism only serves to highlight further thefalse appreciation in the Theses of the Soviet economy (in the period roughly around the fruition of Stalin’s first five-year plan) as resting

“on the foundation of commodity production: it is conducted according to the viewpoint of capitalist profitability; it reveals a decidedly capitalist system of wages and speed-up; it has carried the refinements of capitalist rationalisation to the utmost limits” (cited in ibid).

This essentially formalist approach is effectively debunked by the Aufheben comrades:

“The problems with grounding the accusation of state capitalism on the basis that all the capitalist categories continued to exist soon became apparent. To say that production was oriented to capitalist profitability seemed questionable, when the immediate aim seemed to be the production of use-values, particularly of means of production, with no concern for the immediate profitability of the enterprise. Also to say that goods were produced as commodities, when it was state direction rather than their exchange value which seemed to determine what and how many goods were produced, also required more argument. While the state unquestionably seemed to be extracting and allocating surplus products based on the exploitation of surplus labour, to say that it took the form of surplus value seemed precisely a point of contention. It was these apparent differences between Russian and western capitalism that led them to use the terms of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘state socialism’ interchangeably” (ibid p37).

Despite this riposte to the fairly desperate reasoning of the German left, careful readers will notice the insertion of an escape clause. Whilst questioning the extension of concepts such as ‘commodity’ and ‘exchange value’ to production under Stalin, the sub-text of this passage is contained in the argument that such theoretical positions “required more argument”. What we are witnessing here is a careful rearguard action on which to hang Aufheben’s developing theory of ‘the deformation of value under state capitalism’.

This thrust becomes even more apparent when the article in question moves on to consider the perspective of the Italian left, and in particular the writings of Bordiga. The foundation of Bordiga’s position was his concentration on the agrarian question in the Soviet Union. He disagreed profoundly with Preobrazhensky’s emphasis in the 1920s on the clash between the ‘socialist’ state industrial sector and a petty ‘capitalist’ agrarian economy in the countryside. Bordiga suggested that the Russian Revolution could only attack productive tasks in an essentially bourgeois manner due to its agrarian backwardness and peripheral position in the world capitalist market in the decades preceding World War I (although Bordiga classed the 1917 revolution as ‘proletarian’ due to the political prerequisite represented by the Bolsheviks). Hence, Stalin’s bureaucratic counterrevolution was, for Bordiga at least, premised on the clash between pre-capitalist and capitalist forms - forced collectivisation and the five-year plans being an expression of a primitive capitalist accumulation.

Again, whilst the Aufheben collective shows itself willing to confront Bordiga’s erroneous conflation of the appearance of forms such as the commodity and money with claims that the state sector was governed by a functioning law of value, the tendency is to extrapolate fall-back positions on which to hang a ‘state capitalist’ theory of the USSR. Therefore the comrades prove to be distinctly enthusiastic in relation to Bordiga’s argument that

“Russia was ... a transitional society, but transitional towards capitalism. Far from having gone beyond capitalist laws and categories, the distinctiveness of Russian capitalism lay in its lack of full development” (ibid p41).

Some of the more substantial theoretical foundations of Aufheben’s yet to be completed presentation of ‘the deformation of value under state capitalism’ are elaborated in the 1998 issue, which contains a detailed analysis of Ticktin’s writings on the Soviet Union, recognising that the theory of the Soviet Union as a ‘non-mode of production’ “provides a formidable challenge to any approach which sees the USSR as having been in some sense a capitalist system” (1998, p38). Indeed, as we have seen above, Aufheben is more than adept at using elements of Ticktin’s approach to debunk some of its state capitalist compatriots.

For Ticktin of course, Soviet society did not represent an immense accumulation of commodities: rather buying and selling was subordinated to the central plan, prices being set by the bureaucracy. Therefore, exchange value and the commodity did not exist as under capitalism - money essentially performed the role of an accounting device. The bureaucratic plan was formally concerned with the delivery of use-values, not with the pursuit of profit (although the bureaucracy certainly attempted to extract a surplus from the working class). However, the alienated circuit of state ‘planning’ in the USSR meant that the reality of Soviet society was endemic waste and chronic shortage. From these seeds sprouted the Soviet Union’s eventual decline and fall in 1991.

In attempting to provide a substantive critique of Ticktin’s outlook, the Aufheben comrades broach the important epistemological issue of the relation between form and content:

“Ticktin himself has to admit that many categories of bourgeois political economy appeared to persist in the USSR. Categories such as ‘money’, ‘prices’, ‘wages’ and even ‘profits’. In capitalism these categories are forms that express a real content even though they may obscure or deviate from this content. As such they are not merely illusions, but are real. Ticktin, however, fails to specify how he understands the relation between the essential relations of the political economy of the USSR and how these relations make their appearance, and is therefore unable to clarify the ontological status of such apparent forms as ‘money’, ‘prices’, ‘wages’ and ‘profits’. Indeed, in his efforts to deny the capitalist nature of the USSR, Ticktin is pushed to the point where he has to imply that such categories are simply relics of capitalism, empty husks that have no real content. But, of course, if they have no real content, if they are purely nominal, how is it that they continue to persist?” (ibid p39).

Implicit in this passage is Marx’s exposition of bourgeois ideology in Capital. The problem with using this ‘ideal type’ in such a fixed manner is that the actual historical circulation of ideology can have many different outcomes than the grounding of a mystification with its original, ‘real’ content. In that sense it is perfectly plausible for ideological forms to become empty husks (which is precisely what happened to aspects of Marxist theory inside the USSR) or for them to take on a different content. Thus money, stripped of its status as universal equivalent in the Soviet plan, became something akin to an accounting device, facilitating the circulation of dubious use-values. M-C-M becomes C-M-C. Simply put, that is the ‘real’ content behind the continued existence of the money form. To imply, as Aufheben crudely does, that just because forms commonly associated with capitalism persisted inside the USSR, then that is somehow an argument for a state capitalist analysis, is to prostitute oneself before formal logic. In reality it is Aufheben which fails to provide an ontological clarification of categories by its undialectical and scholastic reasoning.

These fundamental theoretical errors are carried over into Aufheben’s consideration of the wage form in the Soviet Union. The comrades argue that “for Marx the key to understanding the essential nature of the capitalist mode of production was the sale of the worker’s labour-power and the consequent expropriation of surplus-labour in the specific social form of surplus-value by the class of capitalists” (my emphasis ibid p35), going on to note that for Ticktin workers in the USSR did not sell their labour-power, in that the wage was not a sufficient or exclusive means of reproducing the working class.

Aufheben attacks Ticktin for failing to grasp “the full complexities of the wage-form as it exists within the capitalist mode of production” (ibid p39), pointing to a consistent tension between the actuality of the wage-form and its real content - the sale of labour-power - under capitalism, an example being situations where the state intervenes (particularly in conditions of working class offensive action) to ensure the reproduction of labour-power. Following on from this, the comrades reason that just because the Soviet working class was able to resist “the full subsumption of labour-power to the commodity form” and assert considerable negative control in the workplace, it did “not necessarily mean that they did not sell their labour-power” (ibid p40). Thus “the USSR only appears as an extreme example in which the needs of social capital have become paramount and completely subsume those of the individual capital” (ibid p40).

This convoluted argument reaches a pitch with the statement that the

“essence of capitalism is not the operation of the ‘law of value’ as such, but value as alienated labour and its consequent self-expansion as capital. In this case, it is the alienation of labour through the sale of labour-power that is essential. The operation of the ‘law of value’ through the sale of commodities on the market is then seen as merely a mode of appearance of the essential relations of value and capital” (ibid pp40-41).

As can clearly be seen, Aufheben is unable to account for the specific nature of capitalist production. The comrades prove unwilling to concede the qualitative shift away from capitalism in the USSR’s exploitative social relations: rather their lack of dialectical insight leads to an ever expanding (and quite vacuous) notion of what capitalist production is. Put another way, it is one thing to look at the manner in which class struggles constitute quantitative shifts in the extraction of surplus value under capitalism, but quite another to extend this to a scenario where money is stripped of its status as a universal equivalent and surplus value is not extracted on the basis of production for profit. Seen in this light, the wage form loses its function as a controller of working class subjectivity.

The ‘clincher’ for Aufheben is the essentialist standpoint which emphasises “value as alienated labour and its consequent self-expansion as capital”, as opposed to the secondary “mode of appearance” of the law of value. Therefore labour can be commodified in a capitalist sense without the intrusion of such value relations. This is but a short cut to a surface empiricism. Capitalism (or any other society) should be understood as a totality. Ripping this category apart from its mediating links actually changes its meaning. It becomes merely a tool for defining the USSR as ‘state capitalist’ in the most vacuous sense, blunting our specific appreciation of both capitalism and the productive dynamics of the Soviet Union. If we viewed the whole gamut of historical societies through the prism of a generalised “value as alienated labour” then we would undoubtedly find capitalism lurking in the most unlikely of places.

On the question of the Soviet Union, Aufheben appears to be letting itself get sucked into the formalist whirlpool that on occasion it itself appears ready to criticise. As with all state capitalist theories of the USSR, concepts are sliced into fragments and the ‘reality’ of Soviet existence becomes attenuated. Extending the boundaries of capitalism through an emphasis on ideological form actually ends up as an ahistorical ideology itself.

There is then a certain irony in the Aufheben collective’s critique of Ticktin, in that it accuses him of reproducing a reified political economy and not Marx’s Critique. Its own inability to puncture surface appearance in the USSR is perhaps an admission that it too might be the singer and not the song.

Phil Watson