PyramidHead
Contributor
There's a spectre haunting our political discourse, and it's the idea that anytime a government produces something or provides a service, it's an example of socialism. The more the government does or provides, the more socialist the country is. This misunderstanding of socialism is understandable in some sense, but it still ought to be corrected.
In the last century, every attempt at implementing society-wide socialism has followed the same basic model as the Soviet Union. After the revolution, Lenin envisioned a path to socialism that would pass through a phase that he called state capitalism.
So, the architect of this economic system was well aware that it was not socialism, not yet, but believed it to be a necessary stepping-stone from here to there. What did state capitalism under Lenin do? It changed the pre-revolutionary system in two major ways: it changed from private ownership to state ownership (in large industry, not in agriculture or small business, which was still the largest part of the Russian economy) and changed from market dominance to planning. There were still markets, but they played a much less prominent role than before.
(By the way, farms were privately owned for the first time in Russian history! This was a concession to get the mass of people behind the revolution itself--by convincing them that it had granted them their own land, free from the encroachment of a feudal lord. It remained this way for decades, until Stalin also began nationalizing agriculture.)
So, why did state capitalism take this form? Why did Lenin and the Bolsheviks (who were by no means the majority of Marxists in the world and had bitter rivalries with those on the left, who were anti-state) believe that this was how to achieve socialism in Russia? The answer is simple: they saw the state as an ally of bourgeois capitalism that needed to be overtaken, harnessed by the proletariat. A system where the state runs everything wasn't the goal of the revolution, nor the goal of socialism, it was just what everybody saw as the most direct way of gaining power where they had none before.
It was a very macro-level way of thinking. The reasoning went, if workers seize the state apparatus and install right-minded officials in positions of power, then instead of serving the interests of the ruling class, the state will serve the interests of the working class. In other words, the Russian revolution pretty much left all the structural elements of the previous economy intact--positions of authority, the relationship between workers and their product, and the dynamic between wages and expenses--they simply changed the personnel. Instead of private owners running the factories and taking charge of the means of production, party bureaucrats did. Workers still showed up at the factory, worked their shifts, and went home, leaving the fruits of their labor back at the factory to be taken by someone else. On farms, peasants worked their privately owned plots of land, producing food for themselves and their families for part of the time and selling the surplus to industrial workers in the cities.
Is it any wonder socialism never emerged in these conditions?
The class relationship between workers and non-workers was the central theme of Marx's analysis of capitalism. He endlessly examined the dimensions of worker struggle for e.g. a shorter workday and how relinquishing every bit of their productive output to non-workers the instant they produced it would lead to alienation and social unrest among workers. Yet, Lenin and his followers ignored this element almost completely, and focused all of their efforts on this idea of a party vanguard, an elite, incorruptible political body that perfectly mirrored the interests of workers. Between 1917 and 1989, the society that resulted from these policies achieved extraordinary advances in an absurdly short amount of time, amidst multiple wars and beset on all sides by rivals, until it finally collapsed.
Its history is an important lesson, but the lesson is not that socialism has been tried and has failed. Primarily, it's a lesson for socialists, an acknowledgement that changing the macro-level organization of a society by modifying its power structure will not yield durable improvements WITHOUT also altering the class relationships at the heart of the workplace. In the wake of the USSR, so far every fledgling experiment in socialism has followed the same path of nationalization and planning, with little attention paid to the position of workers relative to their productive output, which is arguably the major (some would say entire) substance of socialism.
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So no, the post office is not socialism, roads and bridges are not socialism, police and military are not socialism. Those are just state services, and in a society like the United States, they primarily exist to preserve the interests of capitalism. If a politician tries to say we can have socialism if the right people are in charge of the state, they are making the same mistake as the Bolsheviks did. At best, we can have something akin to social democracy, of the type often alluded to in Scandinavian countries, Portugal, and so on, but these are not permanent solutions to the problems socialism is trying to address; indeed, much of the social democratic reforms that were instituted in these places are being reversed as we speak. These are not "mixed economies" just because the state is leveraged as an agent of economic influence. You can certainly arrange nations along a spectrum based on how much power the government has over commodity production and exchange, but you will not be describing a spectrum between capitalism and socialism as long as there is no accompanying spectrum of how much democratic control workers have over the wealth they produce for society.
In the last century, every attempt at implementing society-wide socialism has followed the same basic model as the Soviet Union. After the revolution, Lenin envisioned a path to socialism that would pass through a phase that he called state capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin said:
So, the architect of this economic system was well aware that it was not socialism, not yet, but believed it to be a necessary stepping-stone from here to there. What did state capitalism under Lenin do? It changed the pre-revolutionary system in two major ways: it changed from private ownership to state ownership (in large industry, not in agriculture or small business, which was still the largest part of the Russian economy) and changed from market dominance to planning. There were still markets, but they played a much less prominent role than before.
(By the way, farms were privately owned for the first time in Russian history! This was a concession to get the mass of people behind the revolution itself--by convincing them that it had granted them their own land, free from the encroachment of a feudal lord. It remained this way for decades, until Stalin also began nationalizing agriculture.)
So, why did state capitalism take this form? Why did Lenin and the Bolsheviks (who were by no means the majority of Marxists in the world and had bitter rivalries with those on the left, who were anti-state) believe that this was how to achieve socialism in Russia? The answer is simple: they saw the state as an ally of bourgeois capitalism that needed to be overtaken, harnessed by the proletariat. A system where the state runs everything wasn't the goal of the revolution, nor the goal of socialism, it was just what everybody saw as the most direct way of gaining power where they had none before.
It was a very macro-level way of thinking. The reasoning went, if workers seize the state apparatus and install right-minded officials in positions of power, then instead of serving the interests of the ruling class, the state will serve the interests of the working class. In other words, the Russian revolution pretty much left all the structural elements of the previous economy intact--positions of authority, the relationship between workers and their product, and the dynamic between wages and expenses--they simply changed the personnel. Instead of private owners running the factories and taking charge of the means of production, party bureaucrats did. Workers still showed up at the factory, worked their shifts, and went home, leaving the fruits of their labor back at the factory to be taken by someone else. On farms, peasants worked their privately owned plots of land, producing food for themselves and their families for part of the time and selling the surplus to industrial workers in the cities.
Is it any wonder socialism never emerged in these conditions?
The class relationship between workers and non-workers was the central theme of Marx's analysis of capitalism. He endlessly examined the dimensions of worker struggle for e.g. a shorter workday and how relinquishing every bit of their productive output to non-workers the instant they produced it would lead to alienation and social unrest among workers. Yet, Lenin and his followers ignored this element almost completely, and focused all of their efforts on this idea of a party vanguard, an elite, incorruptible political body that perfectly mirrored the interests of workers. Between 1917 and 1989, the society that resulted from these policies achieved extraordinary advances in an absurdly short amount of time, amidst multiple wars and beset on all sides by rivals, until it finally collapsed.
Its history is an important lesson, but the lesson is not that socialism has been tried and has failed. Primarily, it's a lesson for socialists, an acknowledgement that changing the macro-level organization of a society by modifying its power structure will not yield durable improvements WITHOUT also altering the class relationships at the heart of the workplace. In the wake of the USSR, so far every fledgling experiment in socialism has followed the same path of nationalization and planning, with little attention paid to the position of workers relative to their productive output, which is arguably the major (some would say entire) substance of socialism.
---
So no, the post office is not socialism, roads and bridges are not socialism, police and military are not socialism. Those are just state services, and in a society like the United States, they primarily exist to preserve the interests of capitalism. If a politician tries to say we can have socialism if the right people are in charge of the state, they are making the same mistake as the Bolsheviks did. At best, we can have something akin to social democracy, of the type often alluded to in Scandinavian countries, Portugal, and so on, but these are not permanent solutions to the problems socialism is trying to address; indeed, much of the social democratic reforms that were instituted in these places are being reversed as we speak. These are not "mixed economies" just because the state is leveraged as an agent of economic influence. You can certainly arrange nations along a spectrum based on how much power the government has over commodity production and exchange, but you will not be describing a spectrum between capitalism and socialism as long as there is no accompanying spectrum of how much democratic control workers have over the wealth they produce for society.
