Even before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he made a visit to Britain where he met Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This visit could easily have been misunderstood as an isolated initiative, separate and apart from the historical perspective of the Soviet government in relation to British foreign and domestic policy.But Gorbachev's visit capped an effort by the Soviet leadership over more than 70 years to develop some sort of relationship with the leaders of the British government. It was an effort to detach Britain first from European imperialist influence and, as time went on, from the U.S.
From the point of view of Britain's domestic affairs, the role and influence of the Labor Party and its trade unions intrigued the Soviet leadership. This was most evident in 1945, when the British Labor Party won its historic election victory over Churchill and the Conservatives, ushering in a new government headed by Labor Prime Minister Clement Atlee.
But as early as 1926 the Soviet government had attempted to develop some form of collaboration with the British trade unions and the Labor Party leadership through forming the Anglo-Russian Committee. That effort collapsed, however, with the great British general strike. The collaboration between the Soviet leadership and the conservative leadership of the British trade unions actually undermined the revolutionary militancy of the great general strike.
Wartime collaboration with Allies
During the years of World War II, the Soviet leadership attempted in every way to collaborate with all its Western democratic imperialist allies, seeking out labor and liberal leaders wherever possible.
During the war the Communist parties led the anti-fascist resistance in France and Italy. They entered the post-war period armed and with great influence. It will be debated for a long, long time whether Stalin held them back from taking power or on their own they were unwilling or unable to make the kind of daring revolutionary assault on capitalism that would have toppled the bourgeoisie, as in China and Cuba.
The moderates in the Soviet Party leadership--yes, there were moderates under Stalin--viewed the French Communist Party in particular with wariness. This was distinguished from their attitude toward the more moderate bourgeois liberal allies, like the British Labor Party leaders and others.
The Cold War started in earnest in 1947 with the publication of a notorious article in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine signed only "X." The author of this article, which sounded the tocsin not merely for the Cold War but for U.S. military aggression, was George Kennan, who became U.S. Ambassador to the USSR in 1952.
The Soviet Union was invited to submit an article for the same issue. However, the article by E. Varga, the Soviet Union's chief economist, did not respond to the Kennan piece point by point. Instead, it was devoted exclusively to an appeal to Britain to break its alliance with the U.S., arguing that it was in Britain's own interest to line up with the forces of "peace and democracy."
Labor Party nationalizations
The British Labor Party government radiated a progressive aura with the dismantling of the British Empire. India got its independence, followed by Burma, Ceylon, Palestine and others. All of this added to the Labor Party's prestige and generated enormous interest on the part of progressives throughout the world. However, little has been written about the deep interest it elicited from the Soviet leadership.
Theoreticians and practical politicians in the leadership of the Soviet Union were particularly intrigued by the nationalizations, especially in steel, which took place in 1946. First the Labor Party nationalized the Bank of England, then the railroads, public utilities and heavy industry.
This must have evoked discussion among the Soviet leaders on what it all meant in terms of the Marxist concept of the struggle for power. Had the bourgeoisie been dislodged and expropriated of their properties--if not in law, at least de facto? Would these nationalizations last? Could socialism come peacefully?
Above all, it was necessary to forge some strong bonds with the Labor Party after the wartime collaboration with the Churchill regime.
During the war years, as a result of the collaboration with the imperialist allies, the theoretical level in the Soviet leadership and intelligentsia had considerably deteriorated. The ideological position of the political leaders and the intelligentsia, as seen in the arts and literature, began to have a distinctly pro-Western orientation.
This trend came to an abrupt halt in 1947 after a book entitled "A History of Western Thought" appeared. A review by none other than Andre Zdanov, a Politburo member regarded as second only to Stalin at the time, attacked the book in no uncertain terms as anti- Marxist and an ideological distortion favorable to the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The review ushered in a new leftist trend in the Soviet Union in response to the ideological and political offensive unleashed by the Truman administration. The Cold War was on.
This made it all the more necessary to try and reach some modus vivendi with the British leaders. The aim was to undermine the solid front U.S. imperialism was shaping through the Marshall Plan to reinforce the containment and military intimidation of the USSR.
The British Labor Party leadership, however, became increasingly hostile to the USSR, obediently following the U.S. The Truman administration was picking up the tab for Britain's "responsibility" in Greece and Turkey (and has kept it to this day).
After Stalin's death in 1953, there was a period of collective leadership in the USSR. A troika of General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Politburo members Nikolai Bulganin and Georgi Malenkov made a visit to Britain. They were very interested in Britain, not only its foreign policy but also the domestic situation.
They were rudely treated by the British capitalist press. The visit itself, at least on the surface, seemed to amount to little more than a futile gesture.
All this has to be seen in the historical perspective of the 70-year attempt to forge some kind of relationship with the British leadership, whether Conservative or Labor. It was meant, of course, to undermine U.S. imperialist predominance and at the same time win domestic allies. But it was also an effort to evaluate the British experience with nationalizations more carefully.
Gorbachev's meeting with Thatcher
Now let us return to Gorbachev's visit with Thatcher--a hard-line, reactionary, anti-labor leader of the bourgeoisie from the Conservative Party. What interested Gorbachev was her apparent success in restructuring British capitalism--especially her successful effort to restore private ownership of the industries that had been nationalized by the Labor Party.
This move to denationalize had met with little revolutionary resistance from the British working class, headed by a spineless Labor Party leadership.
Gorbachev's trip must be viewed in a different light from the earlier visit by Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin. While Gorbachev might have been motivated by a desire to convey a conciliatory message to the U.S., the more important aspect of his meeting with Thatcher was to evaluate the significance of the denationalizations. How was it possible to denationalize the industries? How was she able to break the resistance of the militant labor movement? What was there to learn from both the early nationalizations and the denationalizations that would be of interest to the new pragmatists in the USSR?
While Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin had been treated rudely on their trip, Gorbachev was treated with respect and even flattery.
Symbolism in the two visits should not be overlooked. The troika paid their respects at the grave of Marx, a customary act among Communists visiting Britain. Gorbachev studiously avoided it.
Thatcher told the media: "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together." But what concerned Gorbachev most were the nationalizations of the Atlee period and Thatcher's denationalization.
Bourgeois nationalization
Viewed in the light of Marxist criteria, what is the fundamental difference between the nationalizations and denationalizations that have taken place in Britain and those in the Soviet Union?
When the Labor Party took over the industries in Britain, it paid compensation to the individual capitalist or corporate owners. There was no expropriation of the capitalist class. It was in reality a boon for the bourgeoisie.
At the end of the war, Britain was in ruins both industrially and economically. Bourgeois nationalization helped improve productivity and thereby strengthened the British imperialist bourgeoisie in relation to the workers, who followed the Labor leadership.
When the Thatcher government returned the industries nationalized by previous Labor administrations to private ownership, it merely changed the form of capitalist property relations, not the essence. The bourgeoisie received their profits during the Labor administrations just as they did under the Thatcher regime.
True, the workers had won significant social advantages during the Labor Party period. Thatcher tried to abolish them and introduce onerous anti-working class measures. But private ownership of the means of production remained sacrosanct during both the Labor and Conservative administrations.
Nevertheless, as a Jan. 6 article in the New York Times pointed out, "Britain's large-scale privatization in the 1980s seemed trivial by comparison" with what is contemplated in the USSR. Britain took seven years to sell off 43 state-run companies. In the former Soviet republics, there is an attempt to sell off 45,000 state-owned factories to private owners.
"Every Eastern European country has failed, and failed significantly, to find new owners for state-run enterprises. Trying to sell off one enterprise at a time, as in Britain or Mexico, has proved `achingly slow and unrealistic,'" wrote the Times.
Of course, there were many illusions in the 1940s in Western Europe and in Britain about the significance of state takeover of principal industries. It was merely a transfer of the legal ownership from individuals or corporations to the capitalist state under a Labor Party administration. The Labor Party became the administrator of state capitalist property.
It did not change the status of exploiter to exploited. It was not a change from one social system to another. The ownership did not pass from one class to another, as happened during the October Revolution in Russia, when ownership of the means of production passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. In Britain, the same class enjoyed the same, perhaps even higher, profits under the new administrators of the capitalist state.
The legislation under which Britain's iron and steel industry was nationalized can be found in Keesing's Contemporary Archives (Nov. 6-13, 1948). It provided for the nationalization of "all major firms engaged in the basic process of the iron and steel industry and their subsidiary companies."
Here are some of the provisions:
"The issued capital of the firms to be transferred is about 105 million pounds, while the total amount of government stock required to be issued in compensation is estimated at 300 million.
"For such purposes, the government is to set up an Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain, to which it is to transfer 107 firms and their subsidiaries, which include all those producing 50,000 tons or more of iron ore or 20,000 tons or more of pig iron, steel ingots, or hot-rolled steel each year.
"The firms taken over are to continue as separate units, retaining their ... directors and management, but will be responsible to the Iron and Steel Corporation instead of to private shareholders. They are to continue to market their own products and will be free to compete with each other in price and quality, but will have to conform to the general plan of the corporation, which may appoint new directors to the boards of individual companies.
"The Iron and Steel Corporation will consist of a salaried chairman and members appointed by the Minister of Supply [from] persons ... of wide experience....
"Holders of securities vested in the corporation will be compensated by the issue of British Iron and Steel stock guaranteed by the Treasury of such value as in the opinion of the Treasury is equal to the value of the securities at or about the date of the transfer.
"The corporation will assume all the debts of the companies taken over."
Foreign companies operating in Britain, like Ford Motor Co., which had its own blast furnace, were exempt from nationalization.
So the British Labor government took over the iron and steel industry by purchasing the stock and indebtedness of the corporations. It conducted the operations within the framework of the capitalist system.
Where there had been more than 100 iron and steel companies, it amalgamated them into one corporation but allowed them to operate as separate units. Their operations were regulated in such a way as to make them profitable at the expense of the capitalist state.
Union contracts were negotiated with the Minister of Supply, who presumably was pro-Labor. This enabled the Iron and Steel Corporation to compete on the world market and to subsidize individual companies unable to compete on their own.
The government took what had been a devastated, inefficient multiplicity of steel companies and unified them for purposes of world and domestic competition, distributing the profits to the same stockholders who had controlled them before nationalization.
If there was an iota of socialism in this, we have yet to find it! It was clearly a state capitalist venture. The Labor government may not have had a single industrialist in the Cabinet but it acted, as Marx put it in the "Communist Manifesto," as the executive committee of the ruling class.
These are the roots of Gorbachev's experiment in pro- capitalist reforms in the USSR, which have today brought the country and all its republics to the very abyss.
On the continent of Europe, similar mergers such as the Schumann Plan were being developed. All of this was part and parcel of a plan to revive the capitalist system, which had been shattered by the destructive character of World War II and the emergence of the working class as the most formidable factor in the post-war resurgence.
None of these plans would have been possible had it not been for political and economic intervention by the U.S. with billions of dollars to subvert the revolutionary process in both France and Italy and to encircle and throttle Eastern Europe.
Denationalization in the USSR?
Could a seasoned bureaucrat like Gorbachev, who had risen to the top of the leadership, view nationalized property in the USSR as fundamentally different from that in Britain?
For Gorbachev, the victory of the proletariat in the struggle against the bourgeoisie was part of the distant past. The planned economy and centralized form of government in the USSR seemed second best compared to Britain, which had overcome its nationalizations and become competitive in the capitalist world.
The denationalization in Britain, however, was fundamentally different from what is going on in the USSR today. To transfer the means of production to the bourgeoisie is proving extremely difficult, even in the field of retail distribution, as even the Yeltsin administration is finding out.
An article in the Jan. 3 International Herald Tribune (reported in the Washington Post) showed how formidable the transition to a so-called free market in retail distribution is for the Yeltsin government.
"The Russian government's decision to liberalize prices, which came into effect Thursday [Jan. 2], was billed as part of a `big bang' approach to creating a free market. Mr. Yeltsin and his advisers conjured up the impression of a decisive break with 70 years of central planning.
"A tour of state retail establishments suggests a more prosaic reality. Russia is stumbling towards capitalism rather than embracing it overnight."
Marina Sabirzanova, a manager of a state food store in Moscow, was asked, "How do you set prices now that they have been `freed' by the Russian government?" She replied: "The same as before. I pick up the phone and make a call."
Sabirzanova speaks to Tatiana Kondratyeva, a bookkeeper for the state retail organization in that district of Moscow. She in turn gets instructions from "higher authorities" on how to carry out the "liberalization of prices" Yeltsin decreed.
They consult a 12-page booklet, which includes a long list of goods and how much their prices will be raised by the state.
What does this article in the Herald Tribune show? First, that state ownership of the means of production is still basically intact. No individual in the USSR can claim ownership of a steel mill, a mine, a textile plant or a chain of stores.
Second, prices are not "free" yet but are regulated by the state governing group, meaning the current reactionary officialdom. The purpose of raising prices is to collect a large amount of money from the masses. It will go into the governing group's coffers in order to reduce the deficit incurred by Gorbachev and his successors.
So far, what Yeltsin has done is regulate prices upward. This is an altogether different matter from decontrolling prices altogether and having the so-called free capitalist market. For that you first have to privatize, to change the basic foundation of the social system from public or state property to private property. That would amount to a social counterrevolution, not merely a political counterrevolution from the top.
The Herald Tribune article concluded, "The classic free market mechanism of supply and demand was destroyed by the Communists in favor of an artificial distribution system and cannot be recreated overnight."
The planned economy can't be dismantled overnight.
"Under capitalism, entrepreneurs would respond to higher prices by raising their production. As soon as a glut appeared on the market, prices would automatically fall. But the `magic wand' of capitalism doesn't work when practically the entire retail system, 98 percent of the agricultural land and all large factories are owned and run by the state."
We learn several things from this quote. Some 98 percent of agricultural land is still in the hands of the state, as are practically the entire retail system and all large factories. So what we have at the initial stage of the privatization drive by Yeltsin, at least in the retail sector, is merely the regulation upward of prices by the new administrators of the state.
A capitalist free market is wholly dependent on private ownership. The attempt to create free prices is on a collision course with state ownership.
The bourgeoisie is showing its disappointment with the progress toward capitalist restoration. It has "sold" the free market to the bourgeois intelligentsia, the merchants and small entrepreneurs in the USSR. But this is inadequate, as long as the state continues to own and control the means of production and distribution.
So despite six years of capitalist reforms that have ravaged the economy, the bourgeois leaders have been unable to definitively crack the basis of the Soviet social system- -state ownership of the means of production and distribution.
Character of the state
The problem is to distinguish the reactionary and corrupt officialdom from the social and class character of the economic foundations of the state. The nationalizations in the USSR arose from a proletarian revolution. Over a period of 70 years, a complex of social, political and economic institutions has been developed. Despite all the deformations and vandalism the ruling group inflicted on them, these institutions remain in essence the skeleton of a new, more progressive social system.
At the same time, a nouveau riche--a new bourgeoisie--has been cultivated over the years, existing in "the crevices of the social system," as Marx said about the bourgeoisie under feudalism.
Should a new working-class revolution take place to topple the reactionary leadership on the top, it would have to start with these existing institutions as a foundation for the further construction of socialism. What was built up earlier merely has to be renovated, but in a more democratized and efficient way. Privatization would disintegrate these institutions, making the task all the more difficult.
Therefore, the workers' state, in spite of the Yeltsin counterrevolutionary leadership, still exists. It would be a grave mistake to throw up one's hands and say, "All is lost, we have to start from the beginning."
What is needed is a consistent, relentless struggle against the new ruling group to prevent it from further vandalizing the property of the workers, to halt the process of dismantling the workers' property--while at the same time raising new demands that are consistent with the struggle against political reaction and for the advancement of socialism.
To those who ask, Where is the proletariat? and throw up their hands, we must answer as Marx did: "The question is not what this or that proletarian or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is and what, consequent on that being, it would be compelled to do."
Being determines consciousness
Marxism regards the class struggle as the motive force of social evolution. Marx said many times that he did not discover the class struggle, but rather the relationship between the class struggle and the material interests of the contending classes.
All previous historians and philosophers who recognized the class struggle regarded it as the product of ideological, philosophical, or religious ideas. Their view was that consciousness preceded and developed the class struggle.
Marx showed that the class struggle is the product of antagonisms over property interests. A political superstructure with ideological, philosophical and religious aspects arises to defend those interests.
It is being that determines consciousness, and not the other way around.
The definition of a class is of the greatest importance in Marxism. How is a class to be defined?
A class is first of all defined by its relation to the means of production. The developments in the USSR are of supreme importance in analyzing the relationship of the workers to the means of production.
The state is obviously in transition from one that maintained, supported and developed--however inefficiently and repressively--the public ownership of the means of production, to one where the superstructure, the political leadership, is dedicated to eliminating the very foundation of the state-owned means of production.
However, despite the bourgeois takeover of the political system, it is not a ruling class. It is a narrow stratum and, like it or not, must act as caretaker of the publicly owned economic system. Every day the bourgeoisie proves unable to overturn state property.
The basic contradiction in Soviet society is between the working class on the one hand and the new bourgeoisie on the other. The political leadership will continue to straddle the fence. Even as they attempt to destroy the system, they will have to fall back on it to save their own skins.
Let us not forget that after the radical period of the French revolution, the Jacobin dictatorship and the Commune, there followed years of reaction. Napoleon was declared Emperor and cast aside his revolutionary garments. Eventually the Bourbons actually returned to power in France. Yet with all that, feudalism was not re-established.
We must continue to observe the daily developments in the USSR diligently, dispassionately and fearlessly to see where the process of development set by Gorbachev and contributed to by earlier figures leads.
The global arena dominated by imperialist finance capital is in one of its deepest crises ever. This can only help dispel the illusions of the bourgeois intelligentsia and the political officialdom in the Soviet Union and bring revolutionary optimism to the vanguard communist elements.