You can read the original Russian version here.
Contents:
Editor’s Introduction
The following essay was written in 2025 for the online Communist journal ‘Marxist Science.’ Since the beginning of his career, countless tonnes of slander have been dumped on the name of Joseph Stalin, from the bourgeois historians and the leftists alike. But what makes this work so important, and why we have decided to translate it into English, is that it is a genuine Communist criticism that accurately describes Stalin’s falsifications without any trace of idealism, moralising, utopian whining, or sugar-coating the facts. Another reason it is important is that, as the author states in the original introduction, these errors were inherited by all influential revolutionaries who followed in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks and their parties as a whole. In fact, even the Trotskyists inherited these errors. These errors thus also infect the vast majority of the international Communist movement today, in every country. Considering how these errors affected revolutionary practice, and the fact that they were also inherited and worsened by the Khruschevites and Maoists, we cannot deny the influence these errors had on the bourgeois coup and subsequent counter-revolution in Soviet Union, along with all other bourgeois counter-revolutions throughout history. As the title implies, this particular work only deals with Stalin’s falsifications in the theoretical field, and not his practical errors, which have already been covered by many authors.
Thus, considering that the vast majority of the international Communist movement today either identifies with “Marxism-Leninism” but is incapable of criticising Stalin, or is a leftist who takes an idealist stance on the Soviet Union, chances are the following text will help you immensely.
There is, however, one thing that the author missed, and it is another error that was inherited by the vast majority of the international Communist movement. Although in most cases it is simply an issue of semantics and the person saying it is simply referring to the Communist revolution as a whole, it is quite misleading to paint Communism as something to be “built,” as Stalin and the author do, and this actually influenced practical errors, even though Stalin and the author themselves show a great understanding of Communist revolution.
The word “Communism” is used to refer to either of two things:
- The real movement which abolishes the present state of things;
- A social formation where production is organised on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers carrying on social business on a common and rational plan.
It is obvious why the first is not something to be “built”; it is the movement of the revolutionary proletariat, which is compelled toward this movement due to its very place in society as the proletariat. But why isn’t the Communist social formation something to be “built”? To reach Communism as a social formation requires a long, revolutionary period of transition, which involves the constant ‘training’ and conscious activity of the masses of the proletariat to destroy the state, destroy capital, destroy class, destroy the bourgeois family, destroy religion, destroy nationality, etc. In short, the task is not to “build communism”; it is to end class society, even if there must be a period of state capitalism and development of national cultures on the path to this end. The goal of the proletarian class is, of course, its own abolition.
This is why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1850 that:
While the democratic petit-bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most [further capitalist development and superficial improvements in quality of life], it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far — not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world — that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one. (K. H. Marx & F. Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, 1850)
Note that they don’t call their task “building Communism,” but rather, “making the revolution permanent.” But the main fallacy with the phrase “building Communism” is that all that’s being “built” is capitalism; all Communist revolutions throughout history up to the present have had to go through a long period of proletarian state-monopoly capitalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat, because:
- Communism requires highly developed productive forces, and in many cases of the proletariat’s conquest of power, the country it occurred in had extremely underdeveloped productive forces and relations of production to begin with (often coming out of semi-feudalism);
- The proletarian masses must be “trained” through the dictatorship of the proletariat, the cultural revolution and Communist education in order to cultivate a Communist worldview and discipline, and learn to govern their own state, defend themselves, and develop their capabilities to the fullest before they are ready for socialism;
- The state must take the means of production so that once the old representative state machinery is destroyed and the state is completely in the hands of the proletariat, these means of production are in the hands of the entire proletariat, which “withers away” as a class along with the state, since it was only still the proletariat insofar as it also acted as its own bourgeoisie through the state. Democracy and the state are thus sublated into the “free and equal association of the producers carrying on social business on a common and rational plan.”
In addition to having to having to develop productive forces historically, this state capitalist period will have to continue until the revolution is truly international, as capitalist trade and the state cannot “wither away” while surrounded by global capitalism. Having to rebuild from the Second World War set the Soviet Union back even more. This is why Stalin and his contemporaries spoke so much about socialist “construction”; for them, it really did feel like they were “building” Communism. Since they still have so much influence over the Communist movement today (and for good reason), people read Bolshevik writings and see it that way as well.
This view of Communist revolution caused many Bolsheviks to focus solely on state capitalist economic development. Stalin actually acknowledged this happening, writing extensively about it in 1937:
The fact is that our Party comrades, carried away by economic campaigns and by enormous successes on the front of economic construction, simply forgot some very important facts which Bolsheviks have no right to forget. They forgot one fundamental fact from the sphere of the international position of the USSR and did not notice two very important facts which apply directly to the present wreckers, spies, diversionists and murderers sheltering behind the Party card and disguised as Bolsheviks… The matter is that our Party comrades have been totally absorbed in economic work in recent years, have been engrossed to the limit in economic successes, and being engrossed in all these things forgot about all else, threw everything else aside. The matter is that, being carried away by economic successes, they began to regard this as the beginning and end of everything, and simply gave up paying attention to the finer details, such as the international position of the Soviet Union, capitalist encirclement, strengthening of the political work of the Party, struggle against wrecking, etc., supposing all these questions to be second-rate and even third-rate matters. (I. V. Stalin, Mastering Bolshevism, 1937)
And in 1950, he wrote:
Further, the superstructure is a product of the base, but this by no means implies that it merely reflects the base, that it is passive, neutral, indifferent to the fate of its base, to the fate of the classes, to the character of the system. On the contrary, having come into being, it becomes an exceedingly active force, actively assisting its base to take shape and consolidate itself, and doing its utmost to help the new system to finish off and eliminate the old base and the old classes. (I. V. Stalin, Marxism & the Problem of Linguistics, 1950)
That is, capital will not magically destroy itself due to a high level of development of the productive forces. The subjective activity of the proletariat, including the destruction of the bourgeois state-apparatus inherited from class society, plays a decisive role. To deny the role of subjective activity is to deny the materiality of the ideal by denying its interaction with the material world.
Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks failed to see the bigger picture; the issue of viewing Communism as something to be “built” in the first place. The transition from capitalism to Communism is a period of revolution, not a construction project. The Second World War made the situation even worse, as the they had cast all their attention on reconstruction from the devastation of the war. The issue was guaranteed to never be addressed when, just eight years after the war ended, a bourgeois counter-revolution took place in the USSR and wider Eastern Bloc beginning in 1953. Viewing Communist as something to be “built” also provides the perceived justification for petit-bourgeois trends today such as Dengism, which are a serious threat to the Communist movement.
However, the leftists’ hypothesis of “Stalinist state-industrialism” is wrong, since history shows that the Bolsheviks were fully committed to Communist revolution in every field, despite being forced by their situation to focus mainly on state capitalist development. Along with the quotes above, this is evidenced by, among many other things, the multiple attempts by the Bolsheviks to establish full-fledged soviet power, — such as in 1936 and 1952 — developments in Communist pedagogy such as at the Gorky Colony and Dzerzhinsky Commune, and purges of reactionary elements. Only the commodity form could not effectively be attacked due to constant material setbacks and isolation forcing the Soviet Union to preserve capitalist relations.
There is another thing that should be mentioned when we speak about Stalin’s errors, particularly his claim that socialism had been “built” in one country. Although he was undeniably wrong in declaring socialism to have been “built” in a single country, we have to understand his idea within the context that he saw the proletarian state-monopoly capitalism in the Soviet Union as already being socialism. For Stalin, a centrally-planned economy and a dictatorship of the proletariat is socialism. If we consider that what Stalin meant by “socialism in one country” was merely proletarian state-monopoly capitalism in one country, he actually made a great discovery. In 1846, Marx and Engels wrote:
Empirically, Communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with Communism. (K. H. Marx & F. Engels, The German Ideology, 1846)
They wrote this because at that time, under pre-monopoly, pre-imperialist capitalism, they expected that what we now call the “periphery” would develop capitalism independently, or at least it wouldn’t be forcefully “thrust upon them” from without. Thus, they didn’t predict the differing conditions between “core” and “periphery” countries that would majorly affect the course of global revolution; instead, they expected that revolution would simply break out first where capitalism had developed first.
But after the development of imperialism, we saw that the bourgeoisie of the already-developed capitalist states began exporting capital to the “undeveloped” world and enforcing the further development of capitalism through their economic and cultural domination of these nations. Stalin simply explained that, under the present conditions, revolution breaks out first not where capitalism is most developed, but where the chains of imperialism are the weakest. Due to the law of uneven development, the worse conditions of the proletariat and the weak, unstable bourgeois states in the “periphery,” revolution was likely to break out in this very “periphery” before the West, and since a revolutionary situation is less common in the “imperial core,” state capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat would likely have to continue in isolation for a long time in these “periphery” states where the proletariat has been victorious, and thus they were at a higher risk of counter-revolution. The working-class had a better quality of life in the developed capitalist —now imperialist — countries, and this also curbed their revolutionary consciousness. In 1879, still before the development of imperialism, Marx changed his original views slightly, correctly predicting that the revolution would begin in Russia first due to the conditions of the Russian proletariat and the unstable state, but expected that revolution would immediately spread West:
According to my conviction revolution in the explosive form will start this time not from the West, but from the East — from Russia. It will react first on the two other grave despotisms [illegible], Austria and Germany, where a violent upheaval has become a historical necessity. [This did happen, but German Revolution was crushed.] It is of the utmost importance that at the moment of this general crisis Europe should find the French proletariat already constituted as a workers’ party and ready to play its part. As for England, the material elements of its social transformation are overabundant, but what is lacking is the driving spirit. It will only be formed under the explosion of continental events. We must never forget that however miserable the lot of the bulk of the English working-class may be, it nevertheless participates, to some extent, in England’s empire on the world market or, which is even worse, imagines itself participating in it. (K. H. Marx, Letter to Jules Guesde in London, 1879)
But that didn’t quite happen. The history of imperialism revolutions and counter-revolutions throughout the world has proven Stalin correct on this topic. Stalin lived through a time Marx did not. The 1918 German Revolution was crushed and instead, Communist revolution spread to Mongolia after the Soviet Union, and today the dictatorship of the proletariat can only be found in Korea. Today, though it has spread across many nations, the Communist revolution is still yet to reach the West. Given this context, it is easy to see the great value in his original thesis:
Formerly, the victory of the revolution in one country was considered impossible, on the assumption that it would require the combined action of the proletarians of all or at least of a majority of the advanced countries to achieve victory over the bourgeoisie. Now this point of view no longer fits in with the facts. Now we must proceed from the possibility of such a victory, for the uneven and spasmodic character of the development of the various capitalist countries under the conditions of imperialism, the development within imperialism of catastrophic contradictions leading to inevitable wars, the growth of the revolutionary movement in all countries of the world–all this leads, not only to the possibility, but also to the necessity of the victory of the proletariat in individual countries. The history of the revolution in Russia is direct proof of this. At the same time, however, it must be borne in mind, that the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be successfully accomplished only when certain absolutely necessary conditions exist, in the absence of which there can be even no question of the proletariat taking power… But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured. After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society. But does this mean that it will thereby achieve the complete and final victory of socialism, i.e., does it mean that with the forces of only one country it can finally consolidate socialism and fully guarantee that country against intervention and, consequently, also against restoration? No, it does not. For this the victory of the revolution in at least several countries is needed. Therefore, the development and support of the revolution in other countries is an essential task of the victorious revolution. Therefore, the revolution which has been victorious in one country must regard itself not as a self-sufficient entity, but as an aid, as a means for hastening the victory of the proletariat in other countries. (I. V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924)
Introduction
Joseph Stalin was one of the outstanding leaders of the working-class, Vladimir Lenin’s closest associate and the direct successor to his cause. He was undoubtedly a brilliant politician, economist and psychologist (in fact, the entire 20th century knows no more outstanding theorists and practitioners in these fields than Lenin and Stalin). The modern theory of Marxism and Communism is, without a doubt, Stalin’s theory. Understanding and emphasising this, we as Communists are obliged to understand and expose Stalin’s mistakes in theory and practice, if they are discovered (the same applies to Marx, Engels and Lenin). Those who like to ask, “Are you better than Stalin, smarter than Stalin, that you dare to criticise him?” must admit one of two things: either Stalin is God, who never made mistakes and who cannot be criticised at all; or Stalin is a human being who, like all human beings, made mistakes and who must be criticised for his mistakes. They admit the second, but in fact they follow the first. That is why you will find no criticism of Stalin on matters of theory and practice among most of these citizens.
When it comes to Stalin’s mistakes, two points must be understood:
- These mistakes were made not only by Stalin, but by his entire team, all the Bolsheviks and his disciples (Enver Hoxha, Kim Il-Sung, etc.);
- Since Stalin was the personification of the interests of the proletariat, these mistakes reflected the experience of the entire proletariat as a class and the conditions in which this class lived and struggled.
1: Stalin’s Misunderstanding of Socialism
In his work ‘Left-Wing Childishness’ from May 1918, Vladimir Lenin first characterised all the economic systems that existed in Soviet Russia. He counted five of them, namely:
- Patriarchal economy;
- Small-scale production;
- Private enterprise capitalism;
- State capitalism;
- Socialism.
In the same work, he criticised “left-wing Communists” for opposing state capitalism and socialism, arguing that state capitalism is the bridge that leads from petit-bourgeois capitalism to socialism. Socialism and state capitalism are not opposed to each other, but together they oppose the petit-bourgeoisie and private capitalism.
Moreover, this idea was developed by Lenin in many of his works: the path to socialism lies only through state capitalism.
We expected — or perhaps it would be truer to say that we presumed without having given it adequate consideration — to be able to organise the state production and the state distribution of products on communist lines in a small-peasant country directly as ordered by the proletarian state. Experience has proved that we were wrong. It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary — state capitalism and socialism — in order to prepare — to prepare by many years of effort — for the transition to communism. (V. I. Lenin, Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1921)
At the same time, Lenin contrasted Soviet, proletarian state capitalism with bourgeois state capitalism:
State capitalism in a society where power belongs to capital, and state capitalism in a proletarian state, are two different concepts. (V. I. Lenin, Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921)
In other words, the proletarian state had to first develop proletarian state capitalism in order to lay the foundations for proletarian socialism and only then move towards Communism. This was Lenin’s plan for building Communism.
Furthermore, Lenin distinguished two aspects of proletarian state capitalism. The first, which could be called the “external” aspect, consists of those measures taken by the proletarian state that are related to the regulation of private capitalist phenomena. According to Lenin, the main form of state capitalism in this regard was concessions — the transfer of state means of production to private capitalists on lease. Other forms of state capitalism included regulation of trade, development of small-scale commodity cooperation, attraction of commission agents, etc.
The second, “internal” aspect of proletarian state capitalism is the transition of state-owned enterprises to a capitalist basis, i.e., to economic calculation, the development of material interests among civil servants and workers.
The transfer of state enterprises to the so-called profit basis is inevitably and inseparably connected with the New Economic Policy; in the near future this is bound to become the predominant, if not the sole, form of state enterprise. In actual fact, this means that with the free market now permitted and developing the state enterprises will to a large extent be put on a commercial basis. (V. I. Lenin, Role and Functions of the Trade Unions Under the New Economic Policy, 1921)
And, of course, this state capitalism in state-owned enterprises was linked to “external” state capitalism, but not to concessions, but to the development of trade and money circulation. It is impossible to run state-owned enterprises in a non-capitalist way if money circulation still exists.
Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great revolution, and on the basis of personal interest, personal incentive and business principles, we must first set to work in this small peasant country to build solid gangways to socialism by way of state capitalism. Otherwise we shall never get to communism, we shall never bring scores of millions of people to communism. That is what experience, the objective course of the development of the revolution, has taught us. (V. I. Lenin, Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1921)
And already in 1929, self-financing was extended to all state enterprises without exception. All “external” forms of state capitalism, with the exception of state regulation of trade, were gradually eliminated.
Stalin himself understood that trade and monetary circulation were preserved because, in addition to the state sector of the economy, there was also a collective farm and cooperative sector. He wrote about this in ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’:
At present the collective farms will not recognise any other economic relation with the town except the commodity relation — exchange through purchase and sale. Because of this, commodity production and trade are as much a necessity with us today as they were, say, thirty years ago, when Lenin spoke of the necessity of developing trade to the utmost.
At the same time, he also understood that this “external” circumstance leads to the preservation of the “internal”:
Consumer goods, which are needed to compensate the labour-power expended in the process of production, are produced and realised in our country as commodities coming under the operation of the law of value. It is precisely here that the law of value exercises its influence on production. In this connection, such things as cost accounting and profitableness, production costs, prices, etc., are of actual importance in our enterprises. (I. V. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, 1951)
In a number of his works, Lenin equates state regulation of trade with state capitalism, and self-financing (determined by the existence of this trade) also equates to state capitalism. For Stalin, however, the fact that enterprises are state-owned automatically makes them socialist in nature, rather than capitalist. In other words, the political power of the proletariat, according to Stalin, automatically makes the nature of the economy in its state-owned enterprises socialist. In this conclusion, Stalin drew on Lenin’s work ‘On Cooperation,’ in which Lenin consistently defines socialist enterprises as those in which:
…the means of production, the land on which the enterprises are situated, and the enterprises as a whole belong… to the state.
In the same work, Lenin says that cooperative enterprises:
…do not differ from socialist enterprises if the land on which they are situated and means of production belong to the state, i.e., the working-class. (V. I. Lenin, On Cooperation, 1923)
Hence the conclusion that Stalin made later (in the 1930s): since all sectors except the state and cooperative sectors have been destroyed, since they have all been absorbed by these two sectors, then socialism in our country has been basically built. Does this mean that one of Lenin’s last works (‘On Cooperation’) cancels out all his previous works and conclusions? We don’t think so. The point is that Lenin particularly wanted to emphasise the role of cooperation, which was underestimated at the time, and in doing so he overdid it and went too far. He went too far in much the same way as in his assertion that it was impossible to fully understand Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ without Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic.’
This Leninist overreach led to a whole series of Stalinist mistakes, which Stalin further reinforced and internalised in his struggle against the Decists and Zinovievites, who took a position that particularly emphasised the capitalist elements of state ownership. Stalin later deepened his mistake by declaring that:
I think that we must also discard certain other concepts taken from Marx’s ‘Capital’ — where Marx was concerned with an analysis of capitalism — and artificially applied to our socialist relations. I am referring to such concepts, among others, as “necessary” and “surplus” labour, “necessary” and “surplus” product, “necessary” and “surplus” time. Marx analysed capitalism in order to elucidate the source of exploitation of the working-class — surplus-value — and to arm the working-class, which was bereft of means of production, with an intellectual weapon for the overthrow of capitalism. It is natural that Marx used concepts (categories) which fully corresponded to capitalist relations. But it is strange, to say the least, to use these concepts now, when the working-class is not only not bereft of power and means of production, but, on the contrary, is in possession of the power and controls the means of production. Talk of labour-power being a commodity, and of “hiring” of workers sounds rather absurd now, under our system: as though the working-class, which possesses means of production, hires itself and sells its labour-power to itself. It is just as strange to speak now of “necessary” and “surplus” labour: as though, under our conditions, the labour contributed by the workers to society for the extension of production, the promotion of education and public health, the organisation of defence, etc., is not just as necessary to the working-class, now in power, as the labour expended to supply the personal needs of the worker and his family. (I. V. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, 1951)
But in deepening his mistake, against this backdrop of equating the state with socialism, Stalin “forgot” a number of propositions from Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ (even though Stalin knew this work perfectly well). First, he “forgot” that, according to Marx:
Surplus-labour in general, as labour performed over and above the given requirements, must always remain.
Secondly, he “forgot” what surplus-labour amounts to under Communism:
Of course, if wages are reduced to their general basis, namely, to that portion of the product of the producer’s own labour which passes over into the individual consumption of the labourer; if we relieve this portion of its capitalist limitations and extend it to that volume of consumption which is permitted, on the one hand, by the existing productivity of society (that is, the social productivity of his own individual labour as actually social), and which, on the other hand, the full development of the individuality requires; if, furthermore, we reduce the surplus-labour and surplus-product to that measure which is required under prevailing conditions of production of society, on the one side to create an insurance and reserve fund, and on the other to constantly expand reproduction to the extent dictated by social needs; finally, if we include in No. 1 the necessary labour, and in No. 2 the surplus-labour, the quantity of labour which must always be performed by the able-bodied in behalf of the immature or incapacitated members of society, i.e., if we strip both wages and surplus-value, both necessary and surplus-labour, of their specifically capitalist character, then certainly there remain not these forms, but merely their rudiments, which are common to all social modes of production. (K. H. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 1894)
Stalin simply decided to rename necessary labour and surplus-labour:
In a socialist economy we should be making the distinctions in approximately the following manner: Labour for ones own self and labour for society. That which in relation to a socialist economy was earlier termed as necessary labour coincides with labour for oneself, and that which earlier was called surplus-labour is labour for society. (I. V. Stalin, Discussion on the Issues of Political Economy, 1952)
But the fact that necessary labour is called labour for oneself and surplus-labour is called labour for society does not change the essence of the matter. In his 1920 work ‘The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period,’ Nikolai Bukhrain wrote essentially the same thing as Stalin did in 1952:
Under… capitalism, the production process is that of the production of surplus-value, which falls into the hands of the capitalist class, for the purpose of transforming this value into surplus-product. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the production process is a means for the planned satisfaction of social needs. (N. I. Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, 1920)
Lenin correctly noted in his marginal comments:
It didn’t work out. Profit also satisfies social needs. It should have said: “where surplus-product goes not to the class of owners, but to all workers, and only to them.” (V. I. Lenin, Notes on the Articles by Nikolai Bukharin on the State, 1929)
Stalin did not deny the existence of the law of value, the preservation of commodity production, trade, and monetary circulation in Soviet society. However, if one were to recognise the existence of necessary and surplus-product in the USSR, then recognition of the law of value would inevitably lead to the conclusion that labour-power and surplus-product are of a value nature, i.e. to the recognition of the hiring of workers and the appropriation of their surplus-value. It is precisely from this that Stalin’s “forgetfulness” stems. He did not forget, but was consistent in his logic (he removed what did not fit into this logic).
But if we follow Marx and are consistent in his logic of understanding socialism, we will arrive at the following conclusion. Speaking about the workers’ own cooperative factories, Marx gave them the following description:
The antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within [the cooperative factories], if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. (K. H. Marx, Capital: Volume 3, 1894)
State production under the dictatorship of the proletariat is also one large cooperative factory. Accordingly, what we say about an individual cooperative factory can also be said about this type of production: the workers as an association, as a state, are capitalists in relation to themselves. Therefore, both the hiring and exploitation of workers are preserved here: no individual worker is an owner, each individual is deprived of property; only as an association, only taken together, are the workers the owners, the capitalists. Each individual worker is hired by this capitalist and produces surplus-value for him. Does this apply only to proletarian state capitalism? No, it also applies to proletarian socialism. The only difference is that in the former, in addition to the workers’ cooperative factory in the form of the state, there are other production sectors (such as the collective farm). Hence such state capitalist phenomena as trade, self-financing and everything that follows from them. In the latter, the whole of society is covered by a single cooperative factory. That is why Marx said in his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ that here the producers do not exchange products with each other. But here, too, the workers act as their own capitalists on behalf of the state, which is why the exchange of labour for individual consumer goods is preserved. This is a commodity exchange, but it is a direct exchange, without the mediation of money. There is no longer any self-financing or trade, but there is bourgeois law, bourgeois distribution according to labour, which is expressed in the nature of the exchange described above. That is why Lenin was quite right when, in his work ‘The State and Revolution,’ he characterised the proletarian state as a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”. This is precisely the dialectic of the entire transitional period (both state capitalism and socialism), which is described in greater depth in the works ‘Karl Marx’s Proletarian Socialism’ and ‘The State and Counter-Revolution.’
What Stalin called socialism was not yet socialism, but proletarian state capitalism. And what Stalin called Communism, when all property becomes state-owned, was in fact socialism. Therefore, the programme outlined by Stalin in ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’ and presented by him as a programme for a gradual transition from socialism to Communism was, in essence, a programme for a transition from proletarian state capitalism to socialism.
Due to his misunderstanding of the dialectics of the transition period (workers as their own capitalists), Stalin concluded (in 1936) that the working-class of the USSR was no longer the proletariat:
Take, for example, the working-class of the USSR. By force of habit, it is often called the proletariat. But what is the proletariat? The proletariat is a class bereft of the instruments and means of production, under an economic system in which the means and instruments of production belong to the capitalists and in which the capitalist class exploits the proletariat. The proletariat is a class exploited by the capitalists. But in our country, as you know, the capitalist class has already been eliminated, and the instruments and means of production have been taken from the capitalists and transferred to the state, of which the leading force is the working-class. Consequently, our working-class, far from being bereft of the instruments and means of production, on the contrary, possess them jointly with the whole people. And since it possesses them, and the capitalist class has been eliminated, all possibility of the working-class being exploited is precluded. This being the case, can our working-class be called the proletariat? Clearly, it cannot. (I. V. Stalin, On the Draft Constitution of the USSR, 1936)
For this reason, Stalin began to refer to the dictatorship of the proletariat as the dictatorship of the working-class. But if we take into account the dialectics of the transitional period, accept the logic of the development of Communism from capitalism, if we understand that not only during the construction of socialism, but also under socialism, bourgeois law exists (and “law can never be higher than the economic system”), then we will understand why the proletariat is preserved, why the dictatorship of the proletariat exists. We will understand that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the dictatorship of hired and exploited workers, fully reflects the real phenomenon of the transitional period and does not need to be replaced by other concepts.
Joseph Stalin also considered state property in the USSR to be public, communal property. In reality, state property under the dictatorship of the proletariat, whether at the stage of proletarian state capitalism or at the stage of proletarian socialism, is not public property, because it belongs to the state and the ruling class, which do not encompass the whole of society, but are part of society. It is the collective property of a class, i.e. part of society, i.e. collective private property. Only when the proletariat encompasses the whole of society, when all members of society become proletarians, only then does society rise above the state, the state withers away, and the transition from proletarian state property to public (classless) property takes place.
The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. (F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877)
Stalin’s identification of state ownership with public ownership, if this position is followed consistently, leads to the conclusion of a public state. This conclusion had already been reached by the revisionists under Khrushchev. In this regard, Lenin’s position was the most correct and accurate in scientific terms:
The class that took political power did so in the knowledge that it was doing so alone. That is intrinsic to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It has meaning only when one class knows that it is taking political power alone, and does not deceive others or itself with talk about “popular government by popular consent through universal suffrage.” (V. I. Lenin, Speech Delivered at the All-Russia Congress of Transport Workers, 1921)
The same applies to state property.
All of the issues covered here follow the same logic and have the same methodological basis (based on Lenin’s work ‘On Cooperation’). If we talk about the material reasons for this methodology, it is rooted in the level of development of production and culture in general at the time Lenin wrote this work. The current state of affairs, the level of global productive forces and the resulting access to a vast array of sources enable us to expose these methodological errors and correctly resolve the issues of the transitional economy. Therefore, our ability to criticise Marx, Lenin and Stalin is based precisely on this, and not on the fact that we are supposedly smarter than them (a view often attributed to us).
2: Stalin’s Errors in Communist Political Theory
Stalin’s errors in Marxist political theory relating to the transition period can be divided into several points:
1) The first and most important of these points is the identification of representative democracy and the system with socialist democracy. The Bolsheviks, having seized state power, proclaimed the destruction of bourgeois parliamentarism and the separation of powers. In reality, however, they did not succeed in abolishing the separation of powers, and the entire experience of Soviet construction shows that the Soviets existed as legislative and representative bodies, and the executive committees of the Soviets existed as executive bodies. The Soviets did not work on a permanent basis, but with interruptions, during which all power was vested in their executive committees. In order to truly destroy the separation of powers, it is necessary, firstly, to make the Soviets permanent bodies, without any executive committees. Secondly, the deputies of these councils must be permanently replaceable, so that all workers, without exception and in turn, become deputies. Only then will the Soviets become not parliamentary, but working corporations, issuing laws and simultaneously enforcing them. Therefore, all disputes about where the ballot box should be located, in the factory or in the territorial district, are scholastic disputes, for they are detached from this main problem. The separation of powers existed in 1918 and in 1924, and remained after 1936, despite its formal abolition.
What, in essence, does the separation of powers mean? In economic terms, the separation of powers reflects the separation of the function of managing capital from owning it. In political terms, it involves the division of labour between representatives who draft laws and do theoretical work, and bureaucrats who implement these laws and do practical work. If there is a representative system, there is also a bureaucratic system — this is the ABC of Marxism. Those who do not understand this in the modern world are still captive to bourgeois democracy and have not been able to rise to the conscious level of Communists.
So, neither in 1918, nor in 1924, nor even in 1936 were there any material conditions that would have allowed a transition from bourgeois democracy with its separation of powers to proletarian democracy. At that time, there could be no democracy other than bourgeois democracy, albeit one placed at the service of the proletariat and cleansed of many of the vices of bourgeois dictatorship. And the material conditions of socialism, where a) the proletariat constitutes the majority of the population; b) the exchange of goods is carried out without money; c) the working day is reduced to a minimum of four hours — naturally imply the absence of separation of powers and the direct, rotational management of the workers by their state. Vladimir Lenin understood this perfectly well:
Under socialism much of “primitive” democracy will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in the history of civilized society the mass of population will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing. (V. I. Lenin, The State & Revolution, 1917)
And in the transition to socialism, since the material conditions mentioned above do not exist, the dictatorship of the proletariat is exercised not by the proletariat as a whole, but only by its conscious part. Lenin also understood this perfectly well:
In the transition to socialism the dictatorship of the proletariat is inevitable, but it is not exercised by an organisation which takes in all industrial workers… What happens is that the Party, shall we say, absorbs the vanguard of the proletariat, and this vanguard exercises the dictatorship of the proletariat. (V. I. Lenin, The Trade Unions, the Present Situation & Trotsky’s Mistakes, 1920)
Did Stalin understand these Leninist principles? He understood that the dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition to socialism was exercised by the party. But he failed to understand the need to transition from representative (i.e., essentially bourgeois) democracy to direct (proletarian) democracy. In 1936, one representative democracy (multi-stage and with open voting) was replaced by another representative democracy (without stages and with secret voting). Of course, this reform made representative democracy more flexible, more subordinate to the working-class, and eliminated all the shortcomings of the previous one. But that did not mean it ceased to be representative. And Stalin regarded it as socialist democracy, as the highest type of democracy. But if we consider that representative democracy is socialist, proletarian, solely on the basis that it is subordinate to the proletariat, then we are setting ourselves a trap, then we cannot go beyond this, understand and penetrate the essence of further development. Stalin knew Lenin’s positions that the bureaucratic apparatus must be broken up, that all workers must be taught to participate independently in the management of the state. But Stalin did not say a single word about this, about further steps on the way to this. Since this was not formalised theoretically, Stalin did not provide any programme for transforming representative democracy into direct democracy.
What is the reason for this identification of one with the other? What is the reason that, theoretically, Stalin did not raise these questions, especially after 1936? After all, the working-class must be armed by its leaders with a precise, scientific understanding of the steps that must be taken to create something new. And political steps are more important than all others in this regard. The reason for this is that, according to Stalin, socialism had been built in the USSR economically. Since the Bolsheviks could not objectively create a political system other than the one that was created in 1936 (i.e., with the “victory of socialism”), this led to the identification of representation with socialism and the “forgetting” of Lenin’s words about sequential democracy.
2) Back in 1937, i.e. a year after Stalin’s declaration on the elimination of the exploitative classes in the USSR, he also declared an intensification of the class struggle in the USSR:
We must smash and cast aside the rotten theory that with every advance we make the class struggle here must subside, the more successes we achieve the tamer will the class enemy become. This is not only a rotten theory but a dangerous one, for it lulls our people, leads them into a trap, and enables the class enemy to recuperate for the struggle against the Soviet government. On the contrary, the further forward we advance, the greater the successes we achieve, the greater will be the fury of the remnants of the defeated exploiting classes, the more ready will they be to resort to sharper forms of struggle, the more will they seek to harm the Soviet state, and the more will they clutch at the most desperate means of struggle as the last resort of the doomed. (I. V. Stalin, Report & Speech in Reply to Debate at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1937)
The rotten theory was discarded. But already in 1939, at the Eighteenth Party Congress, Stalin declared that in the political sphere:
…we must regard the most important achievement of the period under review to be the fact that the remnants of the exploiting classes have been completely eliminated.
Once the remnants of the exploitative classes had been eliminated and “political unity” had been achieved in Soviet society, there was no need to talk about class struggle or the suppression of class enemies. Stalin says of the socialist state that:
The function of military suppression inside the country ceased, died away; for exploitation had been abolished, there were no more exploiters left, and so there was no one to suppress. In place of this function of suppression the state acquired the function of protecting Socialist property from thieves and pilferers of the people’s property. (I. V. Stalin, Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU(B), 1939)
From that point on, the class “agenda” disappeared. The main focus was on the struggle in the international arena and on defending the national interests of the USSR. A national, supra-class “agenda” began to develop.
The spiritual sphere began to cultivate outstanding figures of the Russian people, not only from the Soviet period, but also from the pre-Soviet era: Kuzma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov, and many other great personalities of the feudal era. Soviet patriotism transformed from class patriotism into supra-class patriotism. And in this supra-class patriotism, the role of the Russian people was particularly emphasised. In his toast in honour of the reception of army commanders on the 24th of May, 1945, Stalin said:
I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people, and in the first place, the Russian people. I drink in the first place to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union. I propose a toast to the health of the Russian people because it has won in this war universal recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. (I. V. Stalin, Toast to the Russian People at a Reception in Honour of Red Army Commanders Given by the Soviet Government in the Kremlin, 1945)
There is no need to cite other data here; anyone can check and see for themselves that the spiritual products of the USSR from the late 1930s and especially from 1943 onwards are full of supra-class Russian patriotism.
Marxism does not deny national pride in the outstanding figures of all eras of a given people, or in all of the cultural achievements of that people. Marxism does not deny the outstanding role of the Russian nation in the history of the USSR and of all humanity. Lenin himself correctly pointed out in his article ‘On the National Pride of the Great-Russians’:
Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression and the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the Tsar’s butchers, the nobles and the capitalists… We are full of national pride because the Great-Russian nation, too, has created a revolutionary class, because it, too, has proved capable of providing mankind with great models of the struggle for freedom and socialism, and not only with great pogroms, rows of gallows, dungeons, great famines and great servility to priests, Tsars, landowners and capitalists. We are full of a sense of national pride, and for that very reason we particularly hate our slavish past… and our slavish present. (V. I. Lenin, On the National Pride of the Great-Russians, 1914)
Note that all of Lenin’s national pride is imbued with class content. This pride and patriotism are national in form and proletarian in content. In Stalin’s case, however, the content became supra-class. And what does supra-class mean? It means petit-bourgeois. And the roots of this petit-bourgeoisie grow out of the material living conditions of the main mass of the population of the USSR — the collective farmers. After all, a kolkhoz is a collective petit-bourgeois (i.e., based on personal labour and producing for sale) enterprise. But in addition to this, kolkhoz workers are also yesterday’s individual farmers, most of whom are middle peasants. Patriarchal remnants and habits are ingrained in their consciousness to one degree or another.
So, petit-bourgeois collectivism plus the patriarchal remnants of the bulk of the USSR population influenced and could not fail to influence the working-class. In turn, the working-class could not fail to restructure its “agenda” from a predominantly class-based one to a predominantly supra-class, “popular” one. In order to win the war and rally the broad masses of workers behind it, the proletariat agreed to this. But in doing so, it completely relinquished the sword of class consciousness. And without a class “agenda,” the consciousness of the proletariat becomes blurred, dulled, and petit-bourgeois. If, during the war, this armament with supra-class collectivism (“the political unity of Soviet society”) and supra-class patriotism was forgivable and justified for the proletariat, after the war it was absolutely unforgivable and unacceptable. But Stalin did not abandon this “agenda”; it continued to develop after the war.
If the first and main reason for these changes was the living conditions and the remnants of the Soviet Union’s population, the second reason was the pre-war isolation of the Soviet Union from the outside world, the loss of prospects for revolutions in other countries, and pressure from capitalist countries on the Soviet Union. Back in 1925, Stalin was asked: “What dangers are there of our Party degenerating as a result of the stabilisation of capitalism, if this stabilisation lasts for a long time?” Stalin replied that the dangers of party degeneration exist regardless of stabilisation and pointed out three main dangers in his opinion. The first was “the danger of losing the international revolutionary perspective, and the danger of nationalism connected with it.” [This is actually the second danger he lists, at least in the English version. – Ed.] Stalin identified the characteristic features of this danger as:
…lack of confidence in the international proletarian revolution; lack of confidence in its victory; a sceptical attitude towards the national liberation movement in the colonies and dependent countries; failure to understand that without the support of the revolutionary movement in other countries our country would not be able to hold out against world imperialism; failure to understand that the victory of socialism in one country alone cannot be final because it has no guarantee against intervention until the revolution is victorious in at least a number of countries; failure to understand the elementary demand of internationalism, by virtue of which the victory of socialism in one country is not an end in itself, but a means of developing and supporting the revolution in other countries.
The thing is, Stalin and the Bolsheviks did not lack faith or understanding. The thing is that after the fascists came to power in Germany and as the USSR’s war with Germany drew nearer, no revolutions took place in other countries. Fascist reaction flourished everywhere, throughout the world. The objective reality turned out to be such that the international proletarian revolution was greatly delayed. Stalin considered the source of the danger of nationalism to be:
…the growth of bourgeois influence on the Party in the sphere of foreign policy, in the sphere of the struggle that the capitalist states are waging against the state of the proletarian dictatorship. There can scarcely be any doubt that the pressure of the capitalist states on our state is enormous, that the people who are handling our foreign policy do not always succeed in resisting this pressure, that the danger of complications often gives rise to the temptation to take the path of least resistance, the path of nationalism. (I. V. Stalin, Questions & Answers, 1925)
Only in the USSR did this pressure result in the development of supra-class (petit-bourgeois) patriotism rather than nationalism.
So, all the phrases about “the entire people,” about “the political unity of Soviet society,” about “the most outstanding of all nations,” about “the withering away of the function of repression,” etc. had two main sources: external, in the form of pressure from capitalist states on the USSR, and internal, in the form of pressure from the petit-bourgeoisie on the working-class. But the mistake of the working-class, and above all of Stalin, was that after the victory of the world revolution on half the globe, after the Soviet people had moved on to peaceful construction, petit-bourgeois ideology was not curtailed in any way. It was taken for granted and became an integral part of the general worldview and spiritual production of the USSR. The mistake was that what was forced was again presented as something that was taken for granted, something necessary.
On the other hand, the proletariat was still the dominant class in the USSR, and this dominant position had to be expressed in spiritual relations in one way or another. Given these conditions, this dominant position, the class struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie after the war, was expressed as a struggle against cosmopolitanism.
3) At the same Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, Stalin expressed the idea that the state would remain in the USSR under Communism:
We are going ahead, towards Communism. Will our state remain in the period of Communism also? Yes, it will, unless the capitalist encirclement is liquidated, and unless the danger of foreign military attack has disappeared. Naturally, of course, the forms of our state will again change in conformity with the change in the situation at home and abroad. No, it will not remain and will atrophy if the capitalist encirclement is liquidated and a Socialist encirclement takes its place. (I. V. Stalin, Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU(B), 1939)
In other words, Stalin believed that it was possible to build Communism in a single country. It was based on this logic that the revisionists later announced that Communism would be built in the USSR by 1980. Contemporary revisionists, hiding behind Stalin’s name, justify this thesis by saying that society had reached the phase of socialism and that further movement towards Communism was unstoppable. Even if we assume that Soviet society had built socialism by that point, the movement towards Communism in a capitalist environment is fundamentally impossible. For as long as this environment persists, bourgeois elements will continue to be reproduced within society, and as long as this reproduction exists, the need for suppression will remain just as strong. Communism is the conscious, self-directed management of society by all members of society. As long as there is a capitalist environment, there will also be internal agents of that environment. This means that not all members of society can govern; it means that part of society is suppressed in one way or another. If there are two parts of society, one of which is bourgeois and the other Communist, then the suppression of one part by the other is necessary, and the state is necessary. In other words, the existence of class and political struggle within society necessitates the preservation of the instrument of this struggle, the state. Therefore, Communism is possible only on a planetary scale, when there is no reproduction of bourgeois elements, when all members of society become conscious masters of society.
Here we see that ultimately, the economy plays a decisive role, and indeed on a global scale.
Lenin was correct in his assertion that national and state differences:
…will continue to exist for a very long time to come, even after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established on a world-wide scale. (V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, 1920)
In other words, even the dictatorship of the proletariat would exist for a considerable period of time on a global scale. It should be noted that Stalin was aware of Lenin’s position, shared it, and even developed it further in his own time (1929), identifying as many as three stages in the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a global scale! Admittedly, Stalin was referring to the global dictatorship of the proletariat in the context of the national question, but this does not change the essence of the matter:
It would be a mistake to think that the first stage of the period of the world dictatorship of the proletariat will mark the beginning of the dying away of nations and national languages, the beginning of the formation of one common language. On the contrary, the first stage, during which national oppression will be completely abolished, will be a stage marked by the growth and flourishing of the formerly oppressed nations and national languages, the consolidation of equality among nations, the elimination of mutual national distrust, and the establishment and strengthening of international ties among nations. Only in the second stage of the period of the world dictatorship of the proletariat, to the extent that a single world socialist economy is built up in place of the world capitalist economy — only in that stage will something in the nature of a common language begin to take shape; for only in that stage will the nations feel the need to have, in addition to their own national languages, a common international language — for convenience of intercourse and of economic, cultural and political cooperation. Consequently, in this stage, national languages and a common international language will exist side by side. It is possible that, at first, not one world economic centre will be formed, common to all nations and with one common language, but several zonal economic centres for separate groups of nations, with a separate common language for each group of nations, and that only later will these centres combine into one common world socialist economic centre, with one language common to all the nations. In the next stage of the period of world dictatorship of the proletariat — when the world socialist system of economy becomes sufficiently consolidated and socialism becomes part and parcel of the life of the peoples, and when practice convinces the nations of the advantages of a common language over national languages — national differences and languages will begin to die away and make room for a world language, common to all nations. (I. V. Stalin, The National Question & Leninsm, 1929)
This argument by Stalin, incidentally, has been forgotten by the Stalinists themselves.
So why did Stalin believe in 1929 that the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., the transitional period) would exist on a global scale, would have three phases on this scale, that only in the third phase would the global socialist economy become strong, and exactly 10 years later, in 1939, he began to talk about the possibility of building Communism in a single country? The reason is the same two factors mentioned above: external, in the form of isolation, the loss of prospects for a world revolution, and pressure from capitalist countries; internal, in the form of the collective petit-bourgeoisie of the majority of the population and their patriarchal remnants. In 1929, the prospects for a world proletarian revolution had not yet been lost, and there was no worldwide advance of fascism and its pressure on the USSR.
3: Stalin’s Misunderstanding of the Dialectical Method
Before discussing these errors, we consider it necessary to point out Marx and Engels’ understanding of this problem and their most important thoughts on the matter:
- All philosophy is necessary where and when there is a lack of knowledge, gaps in knowledge about phenomena and their connections. These gaps lead to the connection between phenomena being invented. That is, philosophy is concerned with replacing the actual connections between phenomena that are unknown to it with fantastical connections, and the missing facts with fabrications. The place of the actual connection, which should be discovered in events, was taken by a connection invented by philosophers;
- Materialist dialectics are not a philosophy, but simply a worldview. Materialist dialectics find their confirmation and manifest themselves not in some special science of sciences, not in philosophy, but in the positive sciences themselves. It has absorbed only the positive content of philosophy, discarding the very form of philosophy;
- Every positive science has its place in the general system of knowledge, its place in the study of the universal connection (universal laws) of things. Because of this, a special science about this universal connection, a science of sciences — philosophy — becomes superfluous;
- The awareness of the existence of universal connections and laws that encompass the world prompts every positive science to seek this connection everywhere — both in particulars and in general. However, it is impossible to construct a unified system that exhaustively reflects universal connections and universal laws in scientific terms. If such a system of universal laws of nature, society, and thought were constructed, the realm of human knowledge would be complete. It would all boil down to the fact that all new facts and phenomena would be adapted to this universal system;
- The dialectical method, as a method for finding new results, for moving from the known to the unknown, breaking through the narrow horizon of formal logic, contains within itself the seeds of a broader worldview, i.e., materialist dialectics;
- In positive science (whether natural or social), a dialectical understanding of the objects and phenomena of the world can be achieved both spontaneously (under the pressure and influence of the dialectical nature of these objects themselves) and consciously (through the deliberate utilisation of the dialectical method).
From all these statements by Marx and Engels, the relationship between the dialectical method, positive science and materialist dialectics becomes clear. The starting point here is the dialectical method. Its use in the study of various phenomena and objects of the material world gives us a dialectical understanding of them, positive science. But positive science is a dialectical understanding of specific areas of the material world. The totality of positive sciences (or rather, their generalisation) gives us a general dialectical understanding or view of the world — materialist dialectics. The latter does not stand above other sciences, it is not a science of sciences, but finds its manifestation in the whole set of positive sciences. Materialist dialectics represent those common features, aspects, and moments that are present in every science. This is the final result.
Friedrich Engels illustrated this in ‘Anti-Dühring’ using the example of the universal law of the negation of the negation. As is well known, Herr Eugen Dühring accused Marx of deducing the inevitability of Communism by applying the universal law of the negation of the negation to the study of society. Criticising Dühring, Engels remarks:
Marx merely shows from history, and here states in a summarised form, that just as formerly petty industry by its very development necessarily created the conditions of its own annihilation, i.e., of the expropriation of the small proprietors, so now the capitalist mode of production has likewise itself created the material conditions from which it must perish. The process is a historical one, and if it is at the same time a dialectical process, this is not Marx’s fault, however annoying it may be to Herr Dühring. (F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877)
Only now, after Marx has finished his historical-economic proof, does he continue:
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. (K. H. Marx, Capital: Volume 1, 1867)
So, when Marx calls this process the negation of negation, he is not thinking at all about proving the historical necessity of the process. On the contrary, after he has historically proven that this process has already been partially accomplished and must still be partially accomplished, only then does he characterise it as a process that occurs according to a known dialectical law.
In general, all the tenets of materialist dialectics are summaries, final results. They cannot be considered as a starting point, i.e., turned into a dialectical method. The relationship between scientific method, theory and worldview, in which method is the starting point and worldview is the end result, warns us against confusing worldview and method. At the same time, however, worldview and method are not separated by a Chinese wall. In his work ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism,’ Stalin ended up precisely with a confusion of worldview and method, since for him historical materialism (i.e., the science of society) is the result of extending the provisions of materialist dialectics to the study of society. Stalin presents the final point, the summary, the generalisation of all sciences as the starting point. In reality, the extension of the principles of materialist dialectics to the phenomena of nature and society does not and cannot give us positive knowledge and science. Otherwise, anyone familiar with the provisions, principles, and laws of materialist dialectics would be able to easily extend these provisions to the fields of nature and society and thereby make discoveries and gain new knowledge. But history does not know of a single example of such an extension yielding any new knowledge in the particular sciences, including historical materialism. Because of this, all supporters of the “philosophy of Marxism,” all those who turned materialist dialectics from a scientific worldview into a philosophical one, were simply engaged in the same thing — “extrapolating” the provisions of materialist dialectics to phenomena that had not yet been studied. Having found a concrete transition from quantity to quality in reality, we declare this transition to be an example of the universal law of the transition from quantity to quality. Have we learned anything new? No.
Firstly, identifying worldview and method leads to specific techniques, laws, and instruments of the dialectical method of research being simply ignored. Secondly, it provides scope for replacing real connections between phenomena with fictitious ones, replacing facts with conjecture: without knowing anything specific, we can talk about everything in abstract terms. After all, the method allows us to dissect specific facts and their connections with our minds, telling us what needs to be considered first in these connections, and what next, and so on. So, Stalin equated method with worldview, which inevitably led Soviet philosophers to the two results mentioned above.
While cautioning against confusing method and worldview, it is necessary to understand correctly the connection between them. The connection through positive science, leading from method to worldview, is clear. But does worldview have a reverse connection with method, or what significance does it have for method? If the propositions of dialectics correspond to the data of dialectical research on a subject, then they play a regulatory role in the construction of a theory about that subject (an example of this is given in the above quotation from Engels). In Engels’ words, these propositions are not brought in from outside the study of the subject, but are derived from it. In a particular view of the world, i.e. in positive science, the general laws of that particular science play the same regulatory role. For example, Marxism has long since discovered the law of the correspondence of the relations of production to the level and nature of the development of the productive forces. By studying historical facts in a specific period of time, we can discover that this law is manifested in these facts. This discovery allows us to correctly systematise the facts and thus construct a theory. That is, we do not initially attempt to introduce a particular law into the specific study of facts; we can only discover it in the course of this study.
The same applies to the universal laws and principles of materialist dialectics. Only here the scale is broader. Studying history, we discover a number of general laws of the historical process. The same applies to biology, geology, chemistry, etc. Once we have discovered a number of general laws in all these specific areas, we can find manifestations of universal laws and principles throughout this series. This discovery allows us to systematise what is common to all laws of nature and society, and we call this systematisation “materialist dialectics.”
In general, all the provisions and principles of dialectics are general substantive statements, the use of which excludes any a priori assumptions. It is based entirely on the study of actual relationships and connections between objects. The greatest mistake is to reduce the whole of dialectics to the three universal laws discovered by Hegel. Although Stalin identified worldview and method, he managed to formulate the provisions of dialectics much better than anyone before him. Here are the principles of dialectics, which he mistakenly considered to be features of the dialectical method:
- The principle of organic connection, interdependence and interconditionality of objects;
- The principle of continuous motion, change, and development of objects;
- The principle of quantitative changes turning into qualitative ones;
- The principle of internal contradiction in objects and phenomena of nature.
These principles do not apply to the study of society, physics, chemistry, etc., but rather are derived from this study and are found in the factual relationships that we study.
Stalin’s identification of worldview and method is, again, linked to the legacy of Vladimir Lenin. Lenin first wrote about their relationship in ‘The Three Sources & Three Component Parts of Marxism’:
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. (V. I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, 1913)
We have stated that the principles of dialectics play a regulatory role in constructing theory, in linking various theories and, in general, the positive sciences with each other, since these principles are found in all of them. But the connection between worldview and method is not limited to this. The principles of dialectics are also of direct importance for the instruments and techniques of the dialectical method themselves. For example, let us take two techniques of the dialectical method: the consideration of an object in its pure form and concrete consideration. In ‘Capital,’ Marx considers a commodity in its pure form, identifies its law of value, and then brings in all the remaining circumstances from which he had distracted himself. This examination reveals that commodities are sold not at their value, but at their production prices, which have their own law. But this law would be impossible to understand without studying the law of value, since it is a modified form of the latter. These two techniques — pure and concrete examination — were used even before Marx, but they were separated from each other. As a result, some economists based their definition of the value of a commodity on production costs, while others based it on the relationship between supply and demand.
Some absolutised pure consideration, disregarded the interrelationships between multiple phenomena, and inevitably arrived at metaphysics. Others absolutised concrete consideration, were unable to penetrate the essence of things, and also fell into metaphysics. But since Marx had a materialist, dialectical worldview, the above-mentioned principles of this worldview allowed him to correctly use these two methods (and indeed all of these methods), to understand their unity. In general, every method is used by a person with a certain worldview, and it is this worldview that determines which method will be used and how. That is why, in contrasting his method with Hegel’s, Marx pointed to its worldview basis:
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (K. H. Marx, Capital: Volume 1, 1867)
But again, this is just the basis of the method, not the method itself. If Marx had simply applied the principles of dialectics about changeability, contradiction, transitions from quantity to quality, etc., he would not have been able to write Capital. Without knowledge of the techniques and tools of the method, these principles are useless.
As a result, we have a connection between worldview and method in the following areas:
- The regulatory role of materialist, dialectical principles (and private principles too) in the construction of any scientific theory — we do not apply them to the study of something, but rather identify them in the course of study;
- The regulatory role of materialist, dialectical principles in methodology development — without them, it is impossible to systematise and correctly use techniques and methods.
Essentially, the second point is a special case of the first, since methodology is part of the science of thinking.
It must be said that theory (positive science) plays a decisive role for every Communist in all three of these areas (method, theory, worldview). By acquiring and mastering positive knowledge about the world, a Communist deepens and strengthens their worldview. The principles of materialist dialectics become not abstract formulas for them, but take on concrete content. At the same time, positive knowledge and its worldview generalisation lead to the mastery of Marx’s method.
Stalin repeated Lenin’s mistake, but at the same time took a big step forward compared to Lenin in his understanding of philosophy and its role. Not Stalin directly, but thanks to his closest associate, Andrei Zhdanov. During a discussion of Georgi Alexandrov’s book in 1947, he expressed the following idea: “The peculiarity of the development of philosophy lies in the fact that, as scientific knowledge about nature and society developed, the positive sciences branched off from it one after another. Consequently, the field of philosophy has been continuously shrinking due to the development of the positive sciences (I would note, incidentally, that this process is still ongoing), and this liberation of the natural and social sciences from the aegis of philosophy has been a progressive process both for the natural and social sciences and for philosophy itself.” This process is still ongoing. The task of modern Marxists is to complete this process, and this will only happen when the last area remaining within the realm of philosophy, the science of thinking, completely leaves this realm and becomes a positive science. After Marx and Engels and up to Zhdanov, practically no one expressed this idea about philosophy, or if they did, they misrepresented it. Therefore, when pointing out Stalin’s mistake, one cannot fail to mention this achievement.
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