3. FOR A STRATEGY OF TRANSITION

The Soviet Mode of Production

What is the present position of socialism? If we start from the principle that the socialist mode of production is not a commodity mode, that products and labor power are not commodities in this mode, then the Soviet mode cannot be considered as socialist.

paying (“Asiatic”) mode of production from Soviet writing. In that mode, production relations cannot be reduced to ownership relations, since there is no appropriation of the land, and we can only speak of control over the means of production, a collective control, that is, a class control exercised by the state. Can the Soviet mode of production be regarded, then, as a tribute-paying mode? Certainly not: the tribute-paying mode does not know the commodity form of the product and of labor power; the surplus is extracted in kind and according to laws unrelated to the market.

However, to describe the Soviet mode as state capitalism is also unsatisfactory. This epithet describes a variety of situations: advanced capitalism in which the centralization of capital leads to monopolies and to specific forms of interpenetration between the state and the monopolies; the forms, contrasting directly with nascent capitalism, in which the state plays a decisive role in setting up new enterprises of

a capitalist nature; those which are peculiar to some underdeveloped countries in which the state takes over from inadequate private enter­prise; and, lastly, those peculiar to the period of transition, as in Russia under the NEP (New Economic Policy).

I shall therefore, speak of the Soviet mode of production as a specific mode. Its characteristics are: (1) the main means of production — here, equipment produced by social labor — are owned by the state; (2) labor power is a commodity; (3) products for consumption are also commodities; and (4) capital goods are not commodities, at least at the beginning, though they soon tend to become so.

Over a long period of time, not yet in fact ended in Russia, the allocation of investments was controlled by the Plan, irrespective of the market and the equalization of profit that it presupposes. This enabled the rate of accumulation to be increased through priority allocation of resources for the production of capital goods intended for the production of other capital goods, and not to satisfy immediately the ultimate demand for consumer goods. This procedure removed the need to maintain a certain ratio between the two sections of social production, as required by the market; or, more precisely, made it possible to postpone the point in time when adjustment between them became necessary. The purpose of this procedure was clearly transitory.

Hence, as soon as the main objectives of accumulation had been attained, the system began to evolve toward the adoption of resource allocation rules that were closer to those of the capitalist mode. The completed model of this type of mode of production was formulated as early as 1908 by Barone: he considered that the task of the planning ministry of a socialist country was to take the place of the market by making an ex ante calculation that should lead to results similar to those achieved ex post in an economy of pure and perfect competition. The discussion in Soviet economic writings falls entirely within this framework. Two questions are raised: (1) Is the allocation of resources to Department I during a transition period an efficient means of speeding up accumulation, and how far should this deliberate distortion be pursued? (2) What is the most effective method for achieving an allocation of resources that conforms to the laws of the market (that is, to equal rewarding of capital): decentralization of management, or (on the contrary) complete centralization accompanied by strict adherence to the calculation regarding the pseudo-market made by the central, planning department?

However, neither the one nor the other of the two questions belongs to the problematic of socialism.

The Soviet mode of production implies the dominance of the ideological instance. In this respect, it signifies a break with the capitalist mode and a return to the type of articulation characteristic of the precapitalist modes. The control and appropriation of the surplus by a state-class are apparent as soon as one abandons the capitalist ideology according to which the objective rewarding of capital is associated with a social-class distribution of income. The system only works if the control over the surplus exercised by a state-class is accepted by society. The ideology then becomes the instrument for reproducing the conditions for the functioning of society, as in precapitalist modes. Its two necessary foundations are elitism and nationalism. Elitism ensures that control of the surplus by a minority class is accepted. It dictates social reproduction procedures based on esoteric respect for “knowledge,” “science,” and “technique.” At the same time, it fosters the myth of social mobility. The function of the elite that forms the state-class is to ensure the nation’s cohesion and strength. It is to the extent that it achieves this objective that it can be accepted by the proletariat, which sells its labor power. External successes are therefore almost vitally essential to the system.

In the capitalist mode, democracy derives from two internal requirements of the system: on the one hand, the competition between private capitalists, and, on the other, the dominance of the economic instance and the economistic nature of the ideology. The absence of democracy and freedom of debate in Russia is therefore not a reflection of “deviations" or “shortcomings," and still less "vestiges of the past.” On the contrary, it is a necessary condition for the functioning of a system that cannot survive if its elitist and nationalist ideology is questioned.

The essential law of the capitalist mode is the law of accumulation. The capitalist mode "internalizes” economic progress, which in the noncapitalist modes is not an internal requirement for reproduction. Competition is at the root of this peculiarity of the capitalist mode, which is solely concerned with expanded reproduction, in contrast from a lack of development of the productive forces, which confined them to simple reproduction, the socialist mode can opt for an expanded reproduction, which is nevertheless different from that of capitalism, in so far as it will be controlled.

The Soviet mode — at least so long as capital goods are not commodities — does not include-competition. The aim of accelerated maximum accumulation for the purpose of “catching up” with the advanced capitalist countries is the chief motive of economic progress, directly reflected at the ideological and political level. This dominance of the political instance actually makes possible accelerated accumulation by partially freeing the economic instance from the constraints of the market. At this stage, the principal law of the Soviet mode is accelerated accumulation. The main, specific contradiction of this mode does not lie within the economic instance but between it and the politico-ideological instance.

This contradiction has been gradually transcended by the decline of

the socialist elements and the increasingly strong imposition of “capitalism without capitalists.’’ This explains why the mode tends to evolve toward re-establishing the commodity nature of capital goods. This does not.necessarily imply competition. When the latter is actually re-established through the medium of a real market (as in Yugoslavia), the unity of the given society is broken and the groups of competing workers become alienated in an economistic commodity ideology; the socialist objective recedes from view, and economic progress, again internalized in the economic mechanism, leads society to lose control of itself. But when competition is not re-established, the Plan being substituted for the market according to Barone’s theses, economic progress remains independent of the economic mechanism and directly dependent on the political instance. But the ideology of this nonsocialist mode is also an ideology of economistic commodity alienation, prerequisite for the reproduction of a class society. This mode is governed by the law of uneven development of the sectors of activity: those of which the progress is essential for the strengthening of the dominant ideological instance will receive an allocation of resources that is systematically biased in their favor, at the expense of progress in the other sectors. This explains the impressive achievements in the military field (necessary for the success of nationalism) and in the sectors serving privileged consumption (necessary for the success of elitism), accompanied by a persistent inefficiency in the other sectors, in particular, those concerned with the production of goods, needed for the reproduction of the labor force, which is itself treated as a commodity.

The Soviet phenomenon is sometimes explained as a “degenera­tion” due to the backward state of Russia.

At the beginning of this century, Russia was not a peripheral country but one of a backward central capitalism. Its structures were different from those of underdevelopment, that is, from those of dependent capitalism. Thus the Revolution of 1917, though intended to be socialist by the Bolsheviks who carried it out, made it possible to speed up the process of accumulation without basically altering the capitalist model of accumulation. The abolition of private ownership of the means of production in favor of state ownership was the condition of this acceleration. History has shown that it was possible, under Russian conditions, to achieve the task of accumulation as it would have been possible under capitalism, but with different forms of ownership. This possibility is reflected in the Soviet theory of socialist revolution seen as a change in the forms of ownership that allows the adaptation of the latter to the level of development of the productive forces (the potential productive forces, that, is, corresponding to the industrialization target achieved). This theory leads to an economistic ideology of transition formulated in such terms as: priority of heavy industry over light industry and of industry over agriculture; copying of Western technologies and consumption patterns, etc., in order to “catch up’’ with the advanced countries.

Since England was where industrial capitalism began, all the ■ other countries that are now developed were to a certain degree and at one time “backward” in relation to it. But none of these countries was ever a periphery. After a certain time lag, Continental Europe and North America overtook (and then surpassed, in the case of the United States and Germany) Great Britain, in forms similar to those of the English model. Japan eventually finished up with a first-class model of complete capitalism; but already in this case the forms of the transition period presented some interesting peculiarities, in particular the central role played by the state. Russia carried out the most recent experiment with this model of accumulation, original only in that state ownership was not just a transitory form.

In all these models, the transition period was characterized by submission on the part of the masses, reduced to the passive role of a pool of labor gradually transferred to the modern sector being set up and later enlarged, up to the point when the whole society had been absorbed by it. The kolkhoz and administrative oppression fulfilled this role, which in the English model was performed by the Enclosure Acts and the PoorEaws.

The quest for maximum growth at all costs is mirrored in the slogan of the Stalin era: “Overtake and then surpass the United States in all fields of production.” Formulated in this way, both at the theoretical and practical levels, the target deliberately ignores the content of this measurable economic growth. But the aggregates measured in national accounting include only magnitudes with commodity values, i.e., those of interest to the capitalist mode of production. The mind that focuses on the gross domestic product forgets that the growth of this magnitude is obtainable, in the last resort, through the destruction of productive forces: man and natural resources. The latter are, in fact, only means in the capitalist mode of production, the sole end being profit maximiza­tion. In economic jargon, “the cost-benefit analysis of the firm internalizes the external economies”—those external economies that arise precisely from the destruction of human forces and natural resources. This explains why the capitalist mode of production has an inherent capacity for growth — in the economistic sense — larger not only than all previous modes of production, but also, no doubt, than that of socialism, if the latter places man above the quest for profits.

In precapitalist modes, man is still alienated in nature, but social relations are obvious; hence the dominance of the ideological instance. Poverty confines men to a model of simple reproduction, but ideology provides a justification for this model through its “eternalist” vision of the world. This is why men build pyramids and cathedrals. The capitalist mode internalizes technical progress in the economic instance, and this makes possible rapid accumulation, and hence frees man from alienation in nature. But, at the same time, alienation is transferred to the social plane. For the price of this accumulation is the submission of society to the law of profit. This submission is expressed in terms of the degradation of man to. mere labor power and disregard for the natural ecological environ­ment. Capitalism has stopped building cathedrals without, for all that, liberating man. For the short time-prospect that it offers from the start is the root of the social problems over which it has no control.

By turning the prerequisite of capitalist accumulation into an absolute, economism denies the world system, in which it sees only a juxtaposition of national systems, unevenly developed but not arranged on a hierarchical basis and integrated into one whole. So far as it is concerned, the periphery is condemned to degenerate 1 even if, by chance, a political authority with socialist aims were to take over there. The miracle of the socialist revolution can only come from the center. The mechanistic pre-eminence of the pro­ductive forces in these views comes remarkably close to the most bourgeois “philosophies of history.”

In fact, from the end of the nineteenth century, German social­democracy interpreted Marx in economistic terms. The linear mechanistic conception of a chain that, starting with technology, goes on to the productive forces, the production relations, and class consciousness, overcame the dialectical analyses made,by Marx when he considered the relations between the infrastructure and the superstructure. Kautsky popularized this mechanistic ideology, which found fertile soil not in backward regions of the capitalist world but in its most developed centers: in Germany under a Marxist disguise; in Britain with the Labour -Party, in an openly eclectic version; in the United States in forms that were even more alienated in the liberal ideology. The fact is that at the center the working class was steeped in bourgeois ideology; like the bour­geoisie, it accepted the Letishistic alienation of commodities and economism.

Kautsky’s ideas regarding the organization of the working class were not unrelated to this economistic ideology. The idea of a party that represents the external consciousness of the proletariat, an elite versed in social science and applying it, is the product of the superficial adherence of the European working class to “Marxism” after 1870. The workers’ alienation, henceforth accepted—whereas until 1870 the proletariat still clung to communist utopias — resulted in a separation, in the so-called Marxist parties, between theory and practice, in the liquidation of the philosophy of praxis in favor of economistic dogmatism. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks were to base themselves on those forms of organization because centralization — which in Germany reflected the elitist economistic ideology — was a vital practical necessity in oppressive Russia, where the working class was a minority and the intelligentsia was in opposition. Hence the “dialogue of the deaf’ between Lenin, who was surprised by Kautsky’s “treason” in 1914, and Rosa Luxemburg, who understood it better.

The Bolsheviks therefore set out, as from 1917, on the road that led to present-day Russia. It is true that circumstances, like the devastating civil war, the breakup of the proletariat, etc., provided them with the necessary incentives. It is equally true that Lenin became concerned about this; but neither Trotsky nor Stalin, representing the two sides of the same economistic coin, had this worry. The former awaited the miracle Ofliberation from the West, and the latter was convinced that one had to imitate, to "overtake” before surpassing. It was the Chinese Cultural Revolution that was is better suited to the advanced countries than to the backward ones. In Eastern Europe itself, the most convincing economic performances have occurred neither in backward Russia (in spite of centralization) nor in Yugoslavia, equally backward (in spite of decentralization), but in East Germany. The working class of the center, molded by decades of capitalist alienation, as reflected by its adherence to "economism,” was prepared to overcome the contradiction of the capitalist mode without liberating itself from this alienation. This is why it accepted fascism and why it accepts trade-union bureaucracy, and the elitist party as candidate to the succession to the bourgeoisie, which is capable of bringing centrali­zation to the level required to overcome the contradiction between the social character of production and the constricting forms of private ownership.

The Spontaneous Tendencies of the System

The historic experience of Soviet Russia reminds us that the spontaneous tendency of the capitalist system is not such as to give rise to socialism. In the absence of conscious action, the capitalist system overcomes the contradictions that are characteristic of it at a certain stage in its development, while at the same time it retains its essential determinant, that is, commodity alienation. We then move on to a new stage in capitalism, which is never "the highest”

but only higher, and in which the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode is expressed in new forms.

In the central capitalist system, awareness of belonging to a social group (the proletariat for example) does not by itself define class consciousness. The latter may be a “reformist consciousness.” At the periphery? however, a social awareness of this type is not possible since the objective functioning of the system does not integrate the masses. Consequently, awareness of the. situation must lead to a rejection of the system. The only question then is whether in a given country and at a given time the popular masses that are proletarianized, or on the way to becoming so, attribute their fate to the objective functioning of the system or whether they see in it the effect of aberrant or even supernatural social forces, in which case their political action is doomed to remain at the stage of revolts without a strategy.

At the center, a social-democratic consciousness alienated in “economism,” combined with the laws Ofincreasing concentration of economic power, speed up the movement toward a sort of state capitalism. Already in the course of its historical development, successive solutions to the fundamental contradiction of the mode of production have been found, in the form of the limited company, then the trust, the holding company, and the conglomerate. The combination between social-democrats and technocrats renders possible a “convergence” of the systems of Western liberal capitalist origin and of Soviet origin. Orwell’s 1984 and Marcuse’s One-Dimen­sional Man remind us that this prospect, far from being impossible, forms on the contrary a feature of spontaneous evolution.

At the periphery, the tendency is for adaptation of the higher forms of dependence. Can a spontaneous development of this type create the conditions for its own transcendence within the frame­work of the system, in which case it would appear as a necessary stage? One would doubt this: the model on which it is based is in fact a model of reproduction of its own conditions. This deepening of dependent peripheral development follows paths that in the future will constitute the main forms of advanced underdevelopment. Technological domination manifests itself through the priority given to the development of sectors that must be competitive at the international level, whether this involves exports or luxury goods, the promotion of which reflects the adoption of Western con­sumption patterns.

In the early stages of the formation of the peripheral economies, the technological gap being as yet narrow, the dominant central capital must, in order to ensure the functioning of the system in its favor, directly control the modern sectors it promotes. Political means of control are also necessary at this stage, whence colonization. At a more advanced stage of peripheral development, technological domination based on an ever-widening gap, linked with the existence of local social strata and classes integrated through their consump­tion pattern and its attendent ideology, ensures the conditions for reproducing the system without control investments and without direct political interference. Sucfi is the meaning of neocolonialism or neoimperialism. The investment burden can then be taken care of through local savings, private or (mostly) public. The development of a public sector, which can become very important and even dominant at the domestic level, therefore does not exclude the dependence of the system as a whole, including the public sector, vis-a-vis the developed world. This dependence is guaranteed through the interplay of local social forces, even if they are organized in a state capitalism that claims to be socialist. At a very advanced stage one can imagine the development of a heavy industry that serves as local backing for the overall dependent development while assuming the form of a public sector. A vehicle of the dependent local state capitalism, the ρetty-bourgeoisie becomes the trans­mission belt Ofimperialist domination, thus taking the place of the Iatifundiary comprador bourgeoisie that was the vehicle of the dependent private capitalism of the previous period.

Should the system be given a sufficiently long life, is there any chance that the countries of the periphery that are farthest advanced in this process may end by “freeing” themselves from dependence and !acquiring a completely central character? Must we exclude the prospect of an autocentric capitalist development in ⅜jre semi­industrialized countries, in particular Brazil, Mexico, and India, where size-effect operates? Cannot Mexico and Canada become fully developed provinces of the United States, in the sense that the marginality phenomena at present visible there would decrease until they finally disappear? Autocentric development would be ensured not by national capital but by that'of the United States, with which the country would be associated in a minor capacity. In that case the contradiction would shift from the economic to the cultural and political domains.

We must remember that we have defined three symptoms of underdevelopment: sectorial inequality of productivities, disarticu­lation, and domination. Disarticulation does not appear in the same way in Brazil as it does in Tropical Africa. In the case of the semi-industrialized countries of Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina), an integrated industrial complex already exists. This complex itself tends to become autocentric, in a special way: it is not, in fact, based on a large internal market embracing the entire population, as in the developed countries, but on a partial market made up of the rich, integrated fraction of the population. Industry therefore leaves out of the market a marginal population that forms the major part of the rural population as well as of its extension, the urban shanty-towns. Agriculture, developed at an earlier stage of integration into the world system, remains externally oriented and therefore suffers from a very low and stagnating wage level for its workers. The disarticulation, which does not manifest itself at the industrial level, occurs between agriculture and industry at the national level. As is seen in the case of Brazil, foreign trade acquires a special structure as a result of this phenomenon. The pattern of exports is typically that of a classical underdeveloped country (predominance of primary products, especially agricultural ones) while imports are like those of a developed country (pre­dominance of energy, semifinished goods, capital goods, and food products, and not manufactured consumer goods). We must ask ourselves, moreover, whether, in the event of a gradual disappearance of disarticulation through integration of the as yet marginalized sectors, underdevelopment will follow a course entirely different from its present one, as we generally know it.

The prospects in sight at the present time do not suggest a progressive narrowing of the center-periphery gap, within the context of capitalism. The transnational companies are actually taking advantage of this gap (and of its effect, the inequalities in the levels of remuneration of labor). In Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, we can already perceive the results of the installation there of large numbers of transnational companies. The massive transfer of labor-intensive industries, whose products are intended for export to the United States and Japan, speeds up the creation of a new division of labor, which remains unequal. In this new division, the periphery inherits industries that have a limited scope for expansion, while the center keeps back for itself those with the highest potential for progress.

It is true that the widening gap between the center and the periphery leads to increasing migration from the underdeveloped to the developed countries. The “brain drain” started off this trend after the Second World War, as regards those persons possessing high qualifications. As usual, labor is made available to capital wherever the latter requires it. But even if these migrations were to become important, capital could still exploit the national cultural differences that exist, as is clearly revealed by the present unequal status of immigrant workers in the developed world. In the worst case, this massive transfer of labor can lead to an “internal colonialism” such as we see in South Africa.

Moreover, the concentration of the new activities of the trans­national companies and the development of the public sector, in particular in the basic industries in some countries of the Third World, is already giving rise to a new type of hierarchic development inside the periphery. Some regions of the periphery “benefit” from the geographical concentration, within their territory, of luxury­goods or even capital-goods industries producing not only for their own national market but also for those of their neighbors, which are left mainly to serve as reserves of cheap labor. Such prospects are not only visible in a few big countries of the Third World (Brazil being the best example, but we must also examine in this light the role of this kind that India may acquire) but they also exist in smaller areas, in the Arab world or in Black Africa.

The Problematic of Transition

For the periphery the choice is in fact this: either dependent development, or autocentric development, necessarily original in form as opposed to that of present-day developed countries. Here the law of uneven development of civilizations reappears: the periphery cannot just overtake the capitalist model; it is obliged to surpass it.

In fact, it must radically revise the capitalist model of resource allocation and reject the rules of profitability. For choices made on the basis of profitability within the structure of relative prices prescribed by integration into the world system foster and reproduce the model of increasingly unequal distribution of income (and hence marginalization), restricting the country to the peripheral model of resource allocation. The action of righting the resource­allocation process must largely be undertaken independently of the rules of the market, by a direct assessment of needs: requirements in respect of food, housing, education and culture, etc.

It is not by accident that every serious attempt by the periphery to free itself from the political domination of the center has led to conflicts that suggest the need to consider a socialist way forward. It is true that, according to circumstances, realization of this prospect may be delayed or even distorted and reabsorbed. It remains no less a fact that Cuba started a socialist revolution without knowing it, that the Cuban peasantry accepted the collectiv­ization that was opposed by that of Russia, and that the chances of socialism are today greater in Cuba than in the United States or Europe. It is also not mere chance that it is in China that Marx has been rediscovered.

The transition, envisaged on a world scale, must start with the liberation of the periphery. The latter is compelled to have in mind, from the beginning, an initial local model of accumulation. Under the present conditions of inequality between the nations, a development that is not merely development of underdevelopment will therefore be both national, popular-democratic, and socialist, by virtue of the world project of which it forms part.

With capitalism having already assumed a planetary dimension and having organized production relations on this scale, socialism can only come into existence on a world scale. Therefore the transition will include a series of specific contradictions between the socialist objective, of a necessarily universal nature, and the transitional framework, which remains national. But it is only in so far'asTfie^-aim of maturing and developing socialist consciousness is not sacrificed at any stage to the aim of economic progress that a strategy can be described as a strategy of transition. Transition requires much more than the extension of public ownership, or the expansion of heavy industry. If it is not accompanied by a radical revision of economic choices, even if this means slowing down to some degree the maximum growth rate, such an extension contains the danger of perpetuating at the periphery the model of dependent development. The aim must be to combine the most modern installations with immediate improvements in the poor sector in which the bulk of the population is concentrated, to use modern techniques for immediate improvement in productivity and in the situation of the masses. This immediate improvement, and this alone, can free the productive forces and men’s initiative and really mobilize the whole of the people. This combination between modem techniques and immediate improvement of the situation of the masses calls for a radical change in the direction of scientific and technological research. Copying the technology of the developed world is not likely to answer the problems of the underdeveloped world of today. But this specific dialectic of transition does not, entitled to interpret in their own way certain aspects of Chinese policy, isolated from the conception’ of the future to which they belong.

The socialist aim is not to be defined in economistic terms, but it integrates the economic instance. Complete socialism will necessarily be based on a modem economy with high productivity. To think other­wise is to believe that “what is wrong is due to technology” and not to the social system that provides the present framework for this technology. In fact, it is the capitalist mode of production that is in conflict with modernization and is distorting its potentialities. A great deal has been written on the destructive effect of the frag­mentation and monotony of industrial work. This form of labor

will, in time to come, appear as characteristic of the capitalist 1 mode.bf production, which will have fulfilled a historical role, that of accumulation, and thus paved the way for its own disappearance. The contemporary technical revolution will replace the fragmented unskilled labor — which has been the main form of labor since the introduction of machine industry — by automation. It will both make Jnore leisure time available and introduce new types of work requiring very high skill.

How-does the present system react to this prospect? It sees in it not the dawn of mankind’s liberation, but the threat of mass unemployment, with increasing marginalization of part of mankind (in the Third World especially) in relation to a system that integrates only a minority. This is the propensity natural to calculations of profitability based on profit as an end in itself, of the economistic alienation that sees men only as "manpower.” In ridding society of the ideology that the capitalist mode of production imposes upon it, mankind will liberate its productive forces.

There can be no conflict between growth and the construction off a worldwide socialist civilization. I