The Russian Revolution полностью

Let us … take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows this example. It is Germany. Here we have the “last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist technology based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organization, which makes tens of millions of people strictly observe a unified standard in production and distribution of products.²²

What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into practice the accounting and control carried out by the capitalist classes. We have an example of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proven superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who has not taken leave of his senses and has not stuffed his head with bits and pieces of book learning would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.

I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would be easy, within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralized, calculated, controlled and socialized, and that is exactly what we lack.…²³

The economic program that Lenin favored was thus much more moderate than the one that the Bolsheviks would actually adopt. Had he had his way, the “capitalist” sector would have been left essentially intact and placed under state supervision. The resulting cooperation, which posited the inflow of foreign (mainly German and American) capital, was meant to bring the Bolshevik economy all the benefits of advanced “capitalism” without its political side effects. The proposal had many features in common with the New Economic Policy introduced three years later.

But this was not to be. Lenin and Trotsky ran into fanatical opposition from a number of groups, of which the Left Communists were the most vociferous. Led by Bukharin, and comprising an important segment of the party’s elite, the Left Communists had suffered a humiliating defeat over Brest-Litovsk, but they continued to operate as a faction within the Bolshevik Party and to argue their case in the pages of their organ, Kommunist. The group, which included Alexandra Kollontai, V. V. Kuibyshev, L. Kritsman, Valerian Obolenskii (N. Osinskii), E. A. Preobrazhenskii, G. Piatakov, and Karl Radek, saw itself as the “conscience of the Revolution.” It believed that, since October, Lenin and Trotsky were sliding toward opportunistic accommodation with “capitalism” and “imperialism.” Lenin treated the Left Communists as Utopians and fantasts, victims of a “childhood disease of socialism.” But the faction enjoyed powerful support among workers and intellectuals, especially in the Moscow party organization, who felt threatened by Lenin and Trotsky’s proposals to introduce “capitalist” methods. The proposed changes calling for the dismantling of Factory Committees and the abandonment of “workers’ control” in favor of a return to responsible individual management inevitably reduced the power and privilege of party officials. Lenin could ill afford to alienate these intellectuals and their supporters among the workers at a time when the Bolsheviks were under fire for Brest and had lost majorities in all the soviets. He could hardly insist on a course which commonsense recommended to him when he heard a metalworker say about the negotiations with Meshcherskii: “Comrade Lenin, you are a great opportunist, if you allow for a breathing spell also in this field.”*