Reflections

‘‘Rethinking Revolution’’
Paresh Chattopadhyay

The editorial in Autumn Number 2012 opines that "Marx's project has failed" without explaining what, if any, it was. Now, Marx's project envisages socialism as a (stateless) society of free and associated individuals—free in a double sense: free from personal dependence (as in various forms of slavery and serfdom including the caste type) and free from objective or material dependence (as in commodity production and capitalism). It goes without saying that in this sense there has been no socialism anywhere in the world. In fact there is even no evidence of any socialist revolution having taken place anywhere in the world which could usher in socialism. (Let it be emphasized that we are treating, following Marx, socialism as equivalent to communism).

By revolution Marx's project means social revolution which signifies total transformation of the social relations of production. No country (that is, the people concerned) so far has been ready for a socialist revolution, a revolution that would liberate them from capital (and wage slavery). In the countries calling themselves 'socialist'—all economically and culturally backward, to a considerable extent dominated by pre-capitalist social relations of production- material and subjective conditions prepared them only for bourgeois revolution against the pre-capitalist social order. This was the case even of the prototype of the twentieth century 'socialisms'- the most 'advanced'- Russia. Here, in 1913, even after decades of swift industrialization, mining and manufacturing employed only between two and five percent of the labouring population. Eighty percent derived their livelihood from agriculture.

Against all tenets of the materialist conception of history (inexactly called 'historical materialism') the leader of the Bolshevik Party declared in April, 1917 that the bourgeoisie has acceded to power in Russia after February, hence bourgeois revolution has been completed. The leader did not take into account the question of the social relations of production. If the bourgeois revolution had been completed, it would immediately imply that there had been a revolutionary transformation of the pre-capitalist social relations of production. But this was far from the case. The leader was perfectly aware that his position that a socialist revolution could start in a historically backward region was something new, something that Marx and Engels had not envisaged. In other words, this case showed the "failure" of "Marx's project", as the editorial holds. This would mean that contradicting Marx's project socialist revolution did occur in a historically backward region resulting in socialism.

Thus even some of the most informed and best minds of the last century—Carr, Deutscher, Sweezy—came to believe that it was Lenin and not Marx who proved right. The same history was repeated in the other backward regions of the world. But then what happened? Why these socialisms ultimately turned into capitalisms, as it is openly held by almost all the followers of Lenin! If this socialism meant that all power was in the hands of the labouring people, the immense majority of the society, as it was claimed by the spokespersons of these regimes and their uncritical international followers, then somebody (including the editorialist) should explain how the immense masses of labouring people, the supposed masters of society, could simply abandon this power to their class enemies without any serious resistance—something unprecedented in the human annals so far. It is remarkable that the ‘restoration of capitalism’ was made to depend on who was the party leader on the occasion—an explanation entirely in terms of particular individuals leading the party-state at the moment- Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev in Russia or Teng in China. This position amounts to admitting that the famous 'masses' had no power at any time. Whatever policy was adopted was by the decision of the highest party body —unelected and unrevocable by the labouring people at large. (In these regimes there have been really no free election. In Russia the election to the Constituent Assembly in 1918 was the last free election, and it was broken up by the Bolsheviks on self-contradictory and ridiculous arguments. Even after the end of the civil war no free election was ever held). The labouring people in whose name power was seized were totally alienated from the political process right from Lenin's days. So why should the labouring people bother about whoever is in power. They were totally indifferent. As a matter of fact there could be no 'restoration of capitalism' in these regimes, simply because the earlier regimes were pre-capitalist, and these regimes destroying the pre-capitalist relations had performed a bourgeois revolution as seen in the uninterrupted progress of commodity production and of wage labour under these regimes. In other words, capitalist relations of production prevailed there from the very start. Let us end this rather unstructured discourse by clarifying an important point.

The justification for calling these regimes was the supposed absence of private property in the means of production under these regimes, since such property was juridically abolished. Here private property means, according to Lenin, private property of separate persons (the term 'separate' in the Russian original was omitted in the English translation, for some unexplained reason). Now this meaning of private property is pre-Marxian. It was taken over from the bourgeois jurisprudence (which in its turn had taken it over from the Roman law). This primitive notion of private property suited the beginning stage of capitalism. But as Marx showed, with the progress of the accumulation of capital the rise of share capital changed the form into common capital of the "associated capitalists" where the property of private individuals / households is negated. However, this is not the most important thing about private property.

There is another—far more important aspect of private property which is totally unrecognized by the bourgeois jurisprudence. In this case if the means of production in a society remain in the hands of the minority and thereby separated from the majority, there exists private property in the form of "private property of a part of society", class private property. When the Communist Manifesto declares that the communists can sum up their theory in a single expression "abolition of private property", the latter is expressly used in the sense of "disappearance of class property". So it does not matter at all even if it is the state which owns the property in the means of production, as long as the majority is deprived of those means. The irrefutable demonstration is the existence of wage labour for the majority. The existence of wage / salaried earners representing the majority of the population is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of private property in the means of production. It does not require any specific historical research to prove that this was the lot of the majority in each and every 'socialist' regime. In other words these were all state capitalist regimes.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 22, Dec 9-15, 2012

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