Colonialist Canada

Reposted from Socialist Banner

Canada is now a superpower in the African mining sector. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources Canada , only the Republic of South Africa, with over 35% of assets and investments, is just ahead of Canada in the African mining industry. But with South Africa's assets concentrated on its own territory, Canada dominates the rest of the continent. In 2001, Canadian companies have operations in 35 countries. 91% of Canadian investments were concentrated in eight countries, with the order of countries' importance being the following: South Africa (25.6%), DR Congo (17.8%), Madagascar (13.8%), Zambia (9.9%), Tanzania (9.5%), Ghana (6.5%), Burkina Faso (4.7%) and Mauritania (3%). Africa represented 11% of Canada's US$25.8 billion in cumulative mining assets in 2001, a proportion which had risen to 17% of the total $85.9 billion in the same assets by 2007.

Canadian diplomacy is very much at the service of business interests . In this regard, the country at times pursues objectives seemingly at odds with its development agenda, some examples of which include:

-In 1996, the Canadian High Commissioner in Tanzania intervened on several occasions to influence revisions to mining legislation as a means of promoting Canadian business interests. And, specifically, in order to counter the legal claims of local miners questioning the legitimacy of the mining company Sutton and designs on Bulyanhulu deposits

- In June 2008, the staff of the very same High Commission energetically intervened in Tanzanian parliamentary affairs to ensure that the country's politicians rejected the conclusions of the Presidential Mining Sector Review Committee on revisions of the mining sector. The Committee had recommended a greater proportion of profits generated by higher prices be kept for the
country itself

- In 2004, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations had criticized a part of a report produced by the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DR Congo, in which nine Canadian companies were accused of violating OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) guidelines during the country's protracted war.

Canada's image as a moderate country and disinterested development partner in Africa is now thoroughly outdated.

Socialist Standard December 2008

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Future al Fresco, or the House of Cards that Jacque built

Anyone watching the online documentary film Zeitgeist (2007) would be advised to borrow Occam's razor for some editorial cutting. A well-made and interesting film, Zeitgeist nonetheless makes history more mysterious than it needs to be. You can explain what goes on in capitalism quite easily without making a giant secret conspiracy of it. So, when the sequel, Zeitgeist Addendum, came out in October of this year, socialists were expecting more conspiracy stuff and dodgy bank-credit economics.

Addendum turns out to be a surprise. To be sure, it does reiterate the dodgy economics, overlooking the fact that when banks do try to create money out of nothing, they crash and burn, as has been happening recently. But then the film gets really interesting, because it proposes, as an alternative to capitalism, a global resource-based society of common ownership, without governments, hierarchies, markets, trading or money. Were the makers explicitly to use the term 'world socialism' most socialists would scarcely blink.

Not that there's any such reference, or indication of Marxian antecedents. Clearly the intention is to avoid triggering any knee-jerk reflexes from audiences schooled in the evils of soviet 'socialism'. Instead, they're offered the sci-fi version, with supersonic mag-lev trains, floating intelligent cities, nanotechnology and megamachines. The future is bigger, better and brighter, even if it does look a bit like Thunderbirds Are Go. The point being drummed in is that it's steam-age capitalism that's holding back technology, as well as creating a social and environmental hell-hole. Without capitalism, we can reach for the stars.

This is the Venus Project, futuristic creation of Jacque Fresco, engineer, architect and designer, a man on a laudable mission to persuade the world to ditch capitalism and create a practical cooperative alternative. For socialists to come across such a well-worked model which accords so closely with their own is a rare thing, so it seems almost churlish to suggest that the technology may be a bit over-done. It's not only that this kind of chrome-plated futurism looks paradoxically dated, like rocket ship stories of the 1950's, or that it may be off-putting to those yearning for William Morris-like rural idylls. More troublesome is the heavy emphasis placed on science and technology as the source of progress, for instance, as here: "The application of scientific principles… accounts for every single advance that has improved people's lives" (Designing the Future, at www.venusproject.com). Trust a techie to say that. But what about the role of workers, in unions or campaign groups, to raise wages and working conditions, or reduce the working day, or demand civil rights? Did technology have anything to do with recognition of race or gender equality, or gay liberation, or legislation against slavery or child-labour? Instead of recognising that workers won those rights by organised force, Fresco seems to think all improvements in civil rights were 'privileges' which have been 'granted' by the ruling elite (p.4).

This gives a clue to Fresco's attitude to 'responsibility' and 'democracy'. Technology, he thinks, will obviate the need for these. Laws against drink-driving, for example, can be abolished if cars drive themselves. True enough. But can one find a technological fix for every situation requiring humans to have an awareness of their own social responsibility, and even if we could, would we want to? Responsibility is not a burden, after all, it is empowerment, it is personal growth. Make humans responsible, and they become mature adults. Instead, Fresco would let this human quality atrophy.

Similarly, Fresco seems wedded to the strange idea that humans don't want to make decisions. Thus he envisages a 'global neural network' that does our thinking for us, a marriage of automation and cybernetic intelligence called 'cybernation'. This column has recently referred to self-adjusting production systems (Sept 08), but running an entire social system that way is surely a leap too far. In answer to the question: Who makes the decisions in a resource-based economy? Fresco gives the bizarre response: No one does. Apparently the cybernation system will decide what we want to produce, as well as how to produce it, because we humans just aren't up to the job.

What emerges sounds less like a socialist society of responsible adults and more like a Tracey Island playground for hedonistic infants with no tough decisions to make and no responsibilities to shoulder. Socialists place participatory democracy at the very core of our social model, irrespective of the technology. For Fresco, it seems to be the other way round. In answer to the question, would there be a government? Fresco answers that there would be a transitional administration of expert technicians, before the process of 'cybernation' is complete. He adds that "They will not dictate the policies or have any more advantage than other people." But how does he know that? What mechanisms would prevent a technocracy maintaining power in perpetuity? Fresco is leaving the matter to trust. Worse still, in avoiding the whole issue of democratic organisation and class action, Fresco has no way to address the even more pressing question, how to overcome the certain opposition of the ruling class. So he dodges it by arguing that there will be no need to, since capitalism will collapse of its own accord. Leaving aside the extreme improbability of this, it begs the question: what should we do then, while we're waiting for that to happen? Spread the ideas perhaps, as socialists advocate? Apparently not! "True social change is not brought about by men and women of reason and good will on a personal level. The notion that one can sit and talk to individuals and alter their values is highly improbable" (www.venusproject. com/intro_main /essay.htm). Ever the technophile, Fresco has his eye on something more worthy of an engineer, the building of an experimental city in South America, in order to show his society in action. Thus, we have a future, non-market, non-money society with no human decision-making, existing as a sealed bubble inside capitalism, and on a continent famous for its CIA-backed counter-revolutionary guerrilla forces. Well, lots of luck, but this ain't a horse we would back.

Socialists rarely have anything good to say about post-modernism, but Fresco's starry-eyed fixation with technology reminds us what was wrong with modernity in the first place. It was enlightenment thinking gone light-headed, before the hangover set in and we realised that, actually, science can't save us from ourselves, in fact science and technology have got bugger all to do with it. Mass consciousness and democratic organisation are what it takes, not fantastical gadgets and optimistic faith in the imminent and obliging demise of capitalism. If you're wrong about that, you've got nothing. Without class action, there's no foundation, no plan, no clear road. It's a house of cards floating in the air.

Fresco and his friends deserve huge credit for the work they have done in setting out a vision of post-capitalist common ownership, and if nothing else, the Venus Project should remind us that such ideas are not unique to us. But visions born of conspiracy theories tend to preclude the idea of democratic mass action, and that is a weakness. For socialists, not only is mass action possible, it is essential. Capitalism will not collapse. It has to be pulled down. And machines won't do that for us.

The War Business

Why do capitalist states prepare for and wage war?

As we socialists never tire of pointing out, the primary function of military power in capitalism is to protect and expand control over resources, markets and transport routes on behalf of the capitalist class of the country concerned. However, the costs and risks that wars and armaments entail for the capitalists themselves often outweigh the benefits to them.

For example, while the U.S. did have real interests at stake in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, those interests were hardly commensurate with the enormous costs of the war it was waging there. Growing awareness of this fact within the capitalist class eventually led to withdrawal.

In other words, states have a tendency to act in ways that appear to be irrational even in terms of the capitalist interests that they are supposed to represent.

War – a capitalist enterprise

There are various reasons for this apparent irrationality. But the main reason is this. War is not only a service that the state provides to the national capitalist class as a whole. War is also – and increasingly – a massive capitalist enterprise in its own right, a "war business" that wields considerable political clout and has special interests of its own.

The core of the war business, of course, is the so-called military-industrial complex. Arms manufacturers, like other capitalist firms, seek to maximise their profits. It does not concern them whether the weapons they sell have a cogent strategic rationale.

The military-industrial complex has a direct interest not only in the build-up of armaments but in war itself. War is the only way of testing weaponry under battlefield conditions. It uses up and destroys old stocks that then have to be replaced – rearmament is now, for instance, the top priority of the Georgian government – and stimulates demand in general.

But nowadays arms firms are not the only large-scale "merchants of death." Companies like Blackwater sell combat capability directly as the labour of hired mercenaries. Other companies, such as Halliburton, sell logistics and other war support services.

Resource wars, "strategic" wars

The argument is not that all armed conflicts are irrational in terms of the costs and benefits accruing to national capital. Some undoubtedly make good sense in these terms, as when valuable resources can be acquired at moderate expense. One example might be the "cod wars" of the 1970s between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. Another, perhaps, is the ongoing conflict over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, whose oil and gas deposits are coveted by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.

At the other extreme, some wars have no discernible connection with the control of markets and resources. The recent war in Georgia was in this category (see October "Material World"). Although important oil and gas pipelines run through the south of the country, Russia did not contest control over them. Russia's rationale for war was "strategic" – that is, getting into a better position to fight future wars.

Again, Israel's wars are senseless from the point of view of the Israeli capitalist class as a whole, which has a clear interest in a peace settlement that will give it full access to the markets and cheap labour of the Middle East. This interest, however, seems unable to prevail against the political stranglehold of Israel's military-industrial complex.

The nature of the wars that the US and its allies are currently fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is less clear-cut. Control of resources, markets and transport routes is certainly an important factor, especially in Iraq, but the likely outcome is hardly such as to justify the enormous costs involved. While the ultimate motive for war may be to arrest the decline in the competitive position of the US in the world economy, the actual effect is to accelerate that decline (see May "Material World").

Capitalism and war: two models

So we end up with two contrasting models of the relationship between capitalism and war. In the first model, war appears as an instrument in the hands of the state, which acts as the "executive committee of the (national) capitalist class as a whole" (Marx). The second model, unlike the first, takes into account the fact that war is evolving from an instrument at the service of the national capitalist class as a whole into a capitalist enterprise in its own right — what we might call the war business. The war business has special capitalist interests of its own, so it cannot function simply as an instrument of more general capitalist interests.

Does the first model represent capitalism in its "normal" form, while the second model represents an "abnormal" ultra-militaristic mutation of the capitalist system? Is the first model rational, in capitalist if not in human terms, while the second model is irrational? At first sight that seems reasonable.

But is there in fact any good reason to regard one model as any more irrational than the other? Each model represents a possible variant of capitalism and a possible form of capitalist rationality. The difference is that the first model assumes the existence of such a thing as "national capital as a whole," while the second model envisions only separate capitalist enterprises. Some firms sell sausages, some sell computers – and some sell war.

STEFAN

The return of Karl Marx

From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx is again enjoying something of a revival. After his views on the globalising tendencies of capitalism, it is now his theory of crises that is attracting interest and being discussed in the media. Unfortunately not always accurately. For instance, in an article headlined “BANKING CRISIS GIVES ADDED CAPITAL TO MARX’S WRITINGS”, Roger Boyes, the Berlin correspondent of the (London) Times wrote (20 October):

“Marx’s new relevance relates mainly to his warning about the creation of an exploitative capitalism that ends up destroying itself: ‘An over-expansion of credit can enable the capitalist system to sell temporarily more goods than the sum of real incomes in created current production, plus past savings, could buy,’ said Ernest Mandel, the Marxist scholar, quoting his guru, ‘but in the long run, debts must be paid’. Since these debts cannot be automatically paid through expanded output and income, capitalism is destined for a ‘Krach’ - Marx’s word for a crash.”

If the suggestion is here, as it seems to be, that it was Marx’s view that capitalism will end up destroying itself in one big Krach, then it is wrong as Marx never argued that there was some flaw in the economic or financial mechanism of capitalism that would lead to it collapsing for purely economic reasons. In his view, as expressed in the last-but-one chapter of Capital on “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”, capitalism would come to an end by the working class becoming more and more organised and eventually expropriating the expropriators and ushering in a society based on “co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself”. In the meantime capitalism would continue being subjected to an ever-repeating cycle of boom and slump, with each boom ending in a Krach which would eventually create the conditions for a recovery of production and the next boom . . . and the next Krach.

The following day the (London) Times2 section of the paper had a full-page photo of Marx on its front page saying “He’s back. Does the financial crisis prove that Karl Marx was right all along?”. The main article, by a Philip Collins, was just silly, but some of those asked to comment did have something sensible to say, in particular Mick Hume (introduced as “The Times’s libertarian Marxist columnist, launched and edited Living Marxism magazine 20 years ago” who said on this issue:

“Marx was right to identify and analyse the tendency towards crises within capitalism, but he did not predict the system’s ‘inevitable’ collapse. Today too many people who have never read or understood Marx are trying to turn him into an anti-capitalist Nostradamus who supposedly predicted it all, a soothsayer rather than revolutionary social scientist. Marx always emphasised that the resolution of a crisis would ultimately depend on political factors: that man makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing.”

Hume has come a long way since, as the Trotskyist editor of what we used to call Dead Leninism, he advocated that workers should follow a vanguard party.

One of the others asked to comment was the Labour MP John McDonnell who proposed that “Das Kapital and Wages, Prices and Profit should be issued to all government ministers as the definitive guides to the causes of capitalism in crisis”. He also recommended a book by Ernest Mandel and another by David Miliband’s father who considered himself a Marxist. If he re-reads Wages, Prices and Profit himself he will see that Marx urges workers to adopt the revolutionary watchword “Abolition of the Wages System”, which is the last thing the party he represents in Parliament wants.

Mandel was in fact writing above only about credit crises, not economic crises. And he wasn’t quoting from his “guru”. The passage Boyes quotes is not from Marx but from Mandel (see http://isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article140). Mandel, who died in 1995 was another Trotskyist, the leader for many years of one of the many “Fourth Internationals”, did, despite this, have a grasp of Marxian economics (at least, as applied to the West since he mistakenly thought Russia wasn’t capitalist). Even so, it is not clear that Marx would have expressed himself in the same terms. For instance, credit - if it is genuinely credit and not just the issue of more paper currency by the central bank - can’t exceed “past savings” plus savings from “real incomes created in current production” since these are precisely the source of any credit, i.e. of the money that is loaned.

Of course debts do have to be repaid and if for some reason (such as overproduction in relation to the market for some key product) they can’t be, the banks and other financial institutions will be in trouble and a financial Krach or, as we say nowadays, a credit crunch will result. Marx wrote quite a bit about these and, to give Boyes his due, he recognises this even mentioning the articles Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in 1857 on “The Financial Crisis in Europe” of that year.

But then he goes on:

“In the manifesto, published in 1848, he lists the ten essential steps to communism. Step five was ‘Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state . . .”

It is true that one of the ten immediate measures, listed at the end of section two of the Communist Manifesto, that the Communist League of Germany advocated should be taken if political power in Germany was to fall into the hands of the working class in the course of the anti-feudal and anti-dynastic revolutions of 1848, did include

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly”.

But there was no chance of the working class gaining control of political power at that time, as Marx and Engels later came to realise. In their preface to the first reprint of the pamphlet in 1872 they wrote that “no special stress should be laid” on the ten proposed measures which had “in some details become antiquated”. So to describe them today, in 2008 over a 150 years later, as “the essential” “steps to communism” is absurd.

No doubt the working class, when it does come to win control of political power, will have to have drawn up a programme of immediate measures, but they won’t include setting up a single State Bank as, given the development of the forces of production, society can now move straight to socialism (or communism, the same thing) where there will be no need for banks as there will be no need for money. What the manifesto elsewhere called “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling” can now be achieved immediately.

Adam Buick

Why we need a theory

The world we live in is a world of contradictions. The environment is in a state of decline, yet industry continues to pump pollutants into the atmosphere whilst non-polluting technologies are neglected. Thousands starve, while food stocks remain unused. We can communicate with strangers from all around the globe, yet no-one knows their neighbour. Automation could free us from involuntary labour, yet we are chained to the machine. We live amongst vast material possibilities, yet poverty is the universal experience – not just in the narrow economic sense but also in terms of the quality of lived experience. "Never in history has there been such a glaring contrast between what could be and what actually exists" (Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution).

Central to all these contradictions and reshaping all previous antagonisms is the global commodity-capitalist system. A system characterised by the production of commodities, wage labour and the market economy. A commodity is what is produced by the worker under capitalist conditions, its purpose to reproduce and enlarge capital (stored surplus value). The pursuit of ever increasing profits is the driving force behind the whole process – the fulfilment of people's needs is a secondary and not always occurring result.

Commodities are only available in exchange for other commodities, money being the universal commodity and measure of all others. Since all goods have been turned into commodities and access to non-commodified materials restricted, those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have, their physical or mental labour-power. The logic of the market economy treats this labour like any other commodity; to be bought, sold and discarded as the market dictates. In effect the worker becomes a commodity. This transformation of living activity into an object creates an alienated or estranged world in which humankind does not recognize or fulfil itself, but is overpowered by the dead things and social relations of its own making.

Capitalist society is therefore split into two camps, the bourgeois or capitalist class (those who own and control the means of production – the land, equipment, machinery, buildings and raw materials necessary to create the things we need and use every day) and the proletariat (those with "nothing to lose but their chains"), broadly speaking the "modern working class" including the un-employed and unemployable. However the proletariat is not to be understood as a sociological category of people in such-and-such income group and such-and-such occupations, but as a social relation of capitalism. It is all those who have little or no means of support other than selling their physical and mental labour-power. The proletariat is the only class capable of ending class society, as it produces the material conditions of its own enchainment. However, both classes are subject to the laws of the market economy – our concern is with the social relation capital not the individual capitalist – the functionaries of capitalism are more and more disposable as individuals. While the rag-wearing classical proletariat of Marx's time has all but disappeared, at least in the developed countries, the fundamental division remains; power and wealth are becoming more rather than less concentrated under the control of a small minority. The modern proletariat is almost everyone; it is the working class which must destroy both alienated work and class.

The "official" history of the working class's struggle against capitalism is an inversion, what is presented as its greatest triumphs are in reality its most bitter defeats; Leninist "Communism" in the East and reformist "Socialism" in the West were both expressions of a general movement towards state-capitalism. The greatest tragedy of these times is that in the minds of the vast majority of workers the project for the dissolution of the commodity economy became associated with its exact opposite. "So the light darkened that had illuminated the world; the masses that had hailed it were left in blacker night… By usurping the name communism for its system of workers' exploitation and its policy of often cruel persecution of adversaries, it made this name, till then expression of lofty ideals, a byword, an object of aversion and hatred even among workers" (Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils).

Though the call for a new society was never thoroughly extinguished; small and often profoundly isolated groups and individuals arguing the case for a social reorganization to bring free access and control of the means of production into the hands of the whole of humanity. "From each according to ability, to each according too need!"

The creation of such a society has two preconditions; firstly that technological production techniques have been sufficiently developed to be able to fulfil the material needs of the whole of society and secondly, that the majority of the population have an understanding of what needs to be done and want to carry it through. Revolutionaries are painfully aware that the first requirement has long since been reached but that the second is still far from being realized.

If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past it will be necessary to develop a theory of revolutionary practice, a theory which seeks to "get to the root of all things" and improve them. It is not a matter of choosing from one of the pre-existing ideologies of the old workers movement and basing our world view around it, but a matter of finding the "moment of truth" in all the theories of the past and synthesising this with our experience of the present.

"Theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses" (Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

DARREN POYNTON (Socialist Party of Great Britain)

The Russian Revolution recalled

From the November Socialist Standard

Even 90 years after the Russian revolution there are still some who claim that the event shines as a beacon for socialism. We were able to say at the time that whatever was happening in Russia it was not a socialist revolution.

In August 1918 the Socialist Standard pointed out that, while there were industrial towns in Russia, the country was largely agricultural with about 80 per cent of the population still living on the land. The answer to the question whether "this huge mass of people" (about 160 million), which indeed included some industrial and agricultural wage slaves, was "convinced of the necessity and equipped with the knowledge requisite for the social ownership of the means of life?" was "No!"; beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claimed to be Marxian socialists there was no justification for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution.

Our analysis of the situation was based upon Marx's definition of capitalism as a relation of wage-labour and capital and on the conditions necessary for that relation to be ended and replaced by socialism. Before "the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production", as the Communist Manifesto put it, can happen, there must be a sufficient development of the productive forces, and the class which has to sell its labour power in order to live – the working class – must fully understand what is involved and be ready to take the necessary political action.

The conditions envisaged by Marx to be necessary for the ending of capitalism and establishing socialism did not exist in Russia in 1917, so why have the events been claimed as socialist?

Russia in 1917

The country had suffered huge losses during the war against the more heavily industrialised Germany, the economy was in a mess and there were food riots. The Tsar had been forced to abdicate in March 1917 – while both Lenin and Trotsky were out of the country – and the situation was confused. There was a provisional government which included capitalist and landowning representatives. In July Kerensky became leader with support from the Committee of the Duma (the Russian parliament) but with increasing support from the councils of Workers and Soldiers – the Soviets. However he continued with the war despite its unpopularity.

There was widespread discontent with soldiers, workers and peasants reacting against the adverse conditions, which the Bolsheviks were able to take advantage of the discontent. They gained control of the Soviets using slogans like "All power to the Soviets", and crucially "Peace! Bread! Land!" In other words, this was what the war-weary, hungry workers and peasants wanted – they were not after socialism. That there was not a majority ready for socialism would not have concerned Lenin. The situation fitted his vanguard theory that the working class by its own efforts is only able to develop trade union consciousness and needs to be led by professional revolutionaries. There were enormous difficulties including the backward state of the country and the civil war; also the expected uprisings in other European countries did not take place. The development of capitalism was all that could happen and the Bolsheviks as the new rulers would have no choice but to do their best to aid it.

That it was a minority revolution is illustrated by the way in which Lenin dealt with the political situation. The All-Russia Soviet Congress had met in November 1917 and had passed resolutions in favour of peace, ending landowners' rights to possession of the land, and the setting up of a 'workers and peasants' government, headed by Lenin and dominated by the Bolsheviks, pending the election of a democratic 'constituent assembly'.

However when the Constituent Assembly was elected the Bolsheviks did not have a majority and it was dissolved. Trotsky's excuses for this are instructive – the election had taken place too soon after "the October Revolution" and news of what had taken place spread only slowly. "The peasant masses in many places had little notion of what went on in Petrograd and Moscow. They voted for 'land and freedom'". Precisely, for that, not socialism. So, not only did the Bolshevik takeover not have majority support, majority support for socialism not present either.

By the middle of 1918 the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) had firmly established its dictatorship and freedom of the press and assembly were restricted. The All-Russia Soviet Congress had ostensibly taken all power to itself but this was a façade. The Congress elected the 200 members of the Central Executive Committee but the credentials of delegates to the Congress were verified by Communist Party officials. Lenin claimed that what he called "Soviet Socialist Democracy" was "in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of the class is at times best served by a dictator" and this was approved by the Central Executive Committee in 1918 (Martov The State and the Socialist Revolution, p.31).

Labour discipline

Raising the productivity of labour was a priority. In an address before the Soviets in April 1918 (The Soviets at Work) Lenin declared that not only was it necessary to halt 'the offensive against capitalism', they also had to employ capitalist methods which included strict discipline at work. They should immediately introduce piece work and measures which "combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and valuable attainments in determining correct methods of work." The previously stated aim of equal wages for all was abandoned and a "very high remuneration for the services of the biggest of the bourgeois specialists" was agreed. State control was seen as the "means to establish the control and order formerly achieved by the propertied classes" and he chided those who considered the "introduction of discipline into the ranks of the workers a backward step".

In January 1920 the Bolshevik government abolished the power of workers' control in factories and installed officials who were instructed by Moscow and given controlling influence. Democratic forms in the army had also been abolished.

The need to use capitalist methods to control and discipline workers in order to increase production, illustrates the absence of the absolute pre-requisite for socialism – the conscious participation of the majority of the working class.

State capitalism

In 1921 the Bolshevik government adopted a New Economic Policy. In proposing it Lenin argued that permitting some private industry and allowing peasants to keep surpluses were not dangerous for socialism. "On the contrary, the development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state (in other words 'state' capitalism of this peculiar kind) is advantageous and necessary in an extremely ruined and backward peasant smallholder country…in so far as it is capable of immediately improving the state of peasant agriculture."

Our criticism of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks is not that they did not achieve what was not possible at the time, i.e. socialism. It is rather that they adjusted theory to suit the circumstances: seeing the necessity for capitalist development they claimed that state-monopoly capitalism was socialism. In Can The Bolsheviks retain State Power? Lenin wrote about the "big banks" as the "state apparatus" needed to bring about socialism. "A single state bank…will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus".

It was also Lenin who said in The State and Revolution in August 1917 that the first phase of communism was usually called socialism, when Marx made no such distinction between the terms. (In the 1888 Preface Engels refers to the Communist Manifesto as the most international of all Socialist literature). In Marx's conception of the first phase of communism there was still common ownership, an end to buying and selling, and no money. (Marx mentions the possibility of labour time vouchers despite their obvious drawbacks). What happened in Russia did not qualify even as a "first phase of communism".

Contemporary Trotskyists still call their aim of state capitalism socialism. The former Militant Tendency (now called SPEW) think that nationalising 150 big corporations would express in today's language the demand in the Communist Manifesto for the "abolition of private property". They also support Lenin's vanguard theory that a revolutionary minority can by their leadership turn protest movements into a 'socialist' revolution. So it is hardly surprising that they claim the events in Russia in 1917 to have been a socialist revolution, blaming the backward state of the country, civil war and Stalin for what went wrong.

Both Lenin and Trotsky thought that democracy was not appropriate to their situation. Having taken power in a minority revolution they had to rule by force. This included the use of secret police – the Cheka. Trotskyists excuse Lenin's red terror on the grounds that it was the outcome of civil war necessity, likewise with the measures taken to deal with the problems of production. However, it was precisely the conditions and the absence of a majority for socialism that made capitalism the inevitable outcome.

The rule of Lenin supported by Trotsky paved the way for Stalin. The legacy of the Russian Revolution, of Lenin and Trotsky, is that socialism/communism has come to be identified with state capitalism. It was not a victory for the working class, but a tragedy since it brought socialism into disrepute and diverted attention away from the vital need to reject capitalism in whatever form.

PAT DEUTZ