Letters

State capitalism

I would like to make some comments on Gary Salisbury’s letter (‘No freak’ Weekly Worker 91) concerning the nature of the former USSR.

Gary claims that the Soviet economy was “workers’ state capitalism” after 1917, because it had emerged from the world capitalist economy.

The term ‘state capitalism’ derived from Lenin. The conditioning of this term depended on the fact that the fledgling USSR was a proletarian state, not a bourgeois one. Lenin used the term after the introduction of NEP in 1921 to describe those enterprises based upon the combination of state and private capital. He distinguished these “mixed” state capitalist enterprises from the ‘pure’ state trusts and enterprises which he described as “of a socialistic type”. It was Stalin who, after the abandonment of NEP, described the pure state trusts and enterprises as genuinely socialist.

Under Lenin’s description there was the implication that these pure trusts and enterprises will have the right to be called “socialist”, not by type but by genuine content, only after the contradiction between town and village had ended and where all men and women had learnt, for themselves, to satisfy fully all human needs. In short, a genuinely socialist society would arise only after the nationalisation of industry in alliance with the voluntarily collectivised rural economy. Lenin envisaged that this would take some three generations at least and would be intrinsically linked to the development of the international socialist revolution.

Stalin’s forced collectivisation programme after NEP shattered this voluntary alliance from which the Soviet economy never fully recovered. Stalin’s supporters would argue that he had little choice in the face of a real threat internally from the growing Kulak class of wealthy peasants under NEP and a real threat externally from the growing menace of capitalist crisis in Europe.

Gary’s assertion, then, that the USSR was “workers’ state capitalism” could only have been partially true during the NEP period (1921-29) and also during the period of perestroika under Gorbachev (1985-91), when the USSR again opened up partially to the capitalist world.

If Gary’s description of the entire Soviet era as “workers’ state capitalism” is correct, how would he describe the economies today of China and Vietnam?

Clive Carr
Letchworth

Past errors

Dennis Hobden of Brighton has just died aged 75. In 1964 Dennis stood as the Labour candidate for the Kemp Town division of Brighton. No one expected him to have a chance, but that was before our Party took a hand.

The Brighton branch of the CPGB saturated the working class districts with leafleting and door-to-door canvassing. Members of the local Labour Party were only too glad to accept our help (unofficially).

From eleven o’clock on we were sitting in the Brighton Dome as the results came in. After an hour or two it was announced that there was to be a recount. This was followed by another recount and then another. It went on all night. In the morning we heard that Dennis had won the seat with a majority of seven.

It was our Party policy then to support Labour when we were not contesting. In the seventies a new edition of the British Road to Socialism predicted a gradual and evolutionary advance towards socialism in Britain through increasingly leftwing Labour governments. That this was based on simple wish fulfilment rather than Marxism was soon made clear when 1979 ushered in a series of more and more rightwing Tory governments.

It appears that this may be followed by a rightwing Labour victory with the help and approval of the powers that be, who seem to be considering that the Blair version may be better able to con the workers into accepting continued robbery and exploitation. Subordinating our Party to Labour, and particularly the PLP, which has always been opposed to workers taking action, doesn’t seem to have got us anywhere. A genuine party of the working class combining theory and action is desperately needed. We should welcome the resurgence of the CPGB, cutting out the errors and revisionism of others, as experienced in the past.

Mary Carter
North Devon