Van der Linden's Western Marxism and the USSR

Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917, by Marcel van der Linden (Haymarket Books, 2009).

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The "Russian Question"--shorthand for the analysis of the class nature of the USSR--was a dividing line in the international Marxist movement no less important than that of attitudes toward the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. The question was at the root of a major split in U.S. Trotskyism in 1940, played an important role in attempts to give the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet split a theoretical content, and continues to have relevance more than a decade after the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in debates over the possibility of organizing society on a non-capitalist basis.

Marcel van der Linden of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, has made a major contribution to the study of Marxist analyses of the USSR in his book Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917, revised and enlarged from a 1992 German edition.

Van der Linden's book is an exhaustive review of critical analyses of the social and economic structure of the USSR, stretching from the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 to the final dissolution of the system in 1991. One of the great merits of the work is the presentation of a large number of non-English language arguments to an English-speaking audience, although the author excludes Asian and African theorists from his scope.

NEW PERSPECTIVE GAINED

Readers of the book will gain a new perspective on such major figures of international Marxism as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, as well as an introduction to arguments of obscure but important theorists such as Ryan Worrall, an Australian Trotskyist who published an analysis of the USSR as a capitalist state in V.F. Calverton's Modern Quarterly in 1939. Van der Linden also includes at least one important thinker not usually associated with the debate, the philosopher Simone Weil.

Van der Linden groups the arguments into four rough categories: theories of the USSR as a new type of society, theories of state capitalism, the degenerated workers' state theory, and other theories not as readily classifiable.

The theory of the USSR as a product of a new mode of production originated with a book published in French in 1939 by the Italian theorist Bruno Rizzi called The Bureaucratization of the World. The basic thrust of Rizzi's argument was that the USSR had become a society not foreseen by Marx, one that was neither capitalist nor socialist, but instead characterized by class domination despite the absence of private ownership of the means of production--a development he called bureaucratic collectivism. Trotsky, the chief proponent of the degenerated workers' state position, was harshly critical of Rizzi's theory, but it took on a life of its own among a section of U.S. Trotskyists and contributed to a 1940 split that gave birth to the Workers Party.

STATE-CAPITALIST THEORY IN CONTENTION

The American version (or versions, to be more precise) of the bureaucratic collectivism theory, championed by Max Shachtman and Joe Carter, were in turn fiercely criticized within the Workers Party by Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James, who had independently reached an analysis of the USSR as a society dominated by all the economic laws present in the private-property form of capitalism. Dunayevskaya pointed out that the adherents of bureaucratic collectivism were, like Trotsky, disoriented by their focus on the absence of private ownership of the means of production, rather than the relations prevailing at the point of production.

Unfortunately, Van der Linden devotes to neither Dunayevskaya nor James the space each deserves in his account of the theory of state capitalism. He instead defaults to the version of the theory put forth later by Tony Cliff and his followers. Van der Linden does however give Dunayevskaya credit for rooting her theory directly in Marx's critique of capitalism, most profoundly in her recognition that despite what Rizzi and other critics thought, Marx had indeed allowed for the theoretical possibility of what had taken place in the USSR. She noted that Marx wrote explicitly in volume I of Capital of the ultimate limit of the centralization of capital: "In a given society, this limit would be reached if all social capital were concentrated in the same hands whether those of an individual capitalist or those of a single capitalist society." Furthermore, what is most important for Marx in Dunayevskaya's view is that "this extreme development would in no way change the law of motion of that society."

DOES LAW OF VALUE OPERATE IN THE USSR?

Dunayevskaya's analysis differs sharply from that of Cliff, who held both that the law of value was not in effect in the USSR and that economic competition took place between the USSR and the rest of the capitalist world solely in the form of the arms race. Dunayevskaya maintained that the USSR was capitalist precisely because the law of value prevailed in the economy. Because this was so, the socially necessary labor time required to produce commodities was the same inside Russian factories as it was in U.S. ones. As she wrote in an analysis published in 1946, "The value of capital in the surrounding world is constantly depreciating which means that the value of capital inside the capitalist society [Russia] is constantly depreciating." This reality made the statified economy of the USSR every bit as unstable as the economies of the private capitalist world.

The treatment of the state capitalist theory in the book would have been greatly improved had the author taken up Dunayevskaya's criticism of a major statement of Stalinist economics, "Teaching of Economics in the Soviet Union," which was translated by her and published in the American Economic Review in 1944. The Russian piece explicitly details the identity of capitalism with socialism in Stalinist practice and attempts to obfuscate the relationship with a thoroughgoing distortion of Marx's concepts.

Van der Linden revisits Cliff and his co-thinkers throughout his book as the sole developers of the theory of state capitalism throughout the post-war years, ignoring Dunayevskaya's many contributions after her analyses of the 1940s. In this period, after what she considered to be her groundbreaking studies of the philosophical Absolutes of Hegel in 1953, Dunayevskaya came to believe that reaching a correct analysis of the Russian economy was inadequate without an accompanying development of the philosophic content of Marxism itself, rooted in the humanism of Marx and the mass revolts of the post-war period. Many of these relevant texts can be read in the 1991 collection The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism.

The importance of the Russian question persists because any serious discussion of it brings one to a direct confrontation with the categories of Marx's critique of political economy. Although the particular forms of appearance of capitalism in the USSR have long since dissipated, studying them can bring us to a better understanding of the essential reality behind them. Despite its drawbacks, Van der Linden's book is a welcome contribution to that effort.

--Kevin Michaels

The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism

This collection of seventeen writings by Raya Dunayevskaya, founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., contains a selection of her vast writings on the theory of state-capitalism, ranging from her original analysis of Russia as a state-capitalist society in the early 1940s to writings on the global phenomenon of state capitalism from the 1940s to the 1980s.

"Raya Dunayevskaya's essays on the nature of capitalist and Soviet societies are full of the kind of scholarly insights and political wisdom that no one interested in these topics can afford to ignore. A mind stretching exercise for those willing to risk it!"

--Bertell Ollman

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