The capitalists point to every shortage, mistake and abuse in Soviet history and say, “That was socialism.” Then they point to the destruction of the Soviet Union and say, “Socialism failed.”
Marxists begin with the class question. Who owned the factories, banks, mines and railroads? Which class held state power? What social system was being built — and under what conditions?
Soviet socialism grew out of the October Revolution of 1917. The workers, led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrew the capitalist government. The revolution took the banks and large-scale industry out of capitalist hands, abolished landlord ownership of the land and began organizing production through public ownership and economic planning.
That was the class foundation of the Soviet Union. It did not mean that every capitalist relation, old habit or inequality disappeared overnight. Socialism is a transition between capitalism and a fully communist society. It begins with the conditions inherited from capitalism and must struggle to transform them.
Utopian and scientific socialism
Long before the October Revolution, working people dreamed of a society based on cooperation instead of exploitation.
In the early 1800s, Robert Owen used his own fortune to establish cooperative communities, including New Harmony in Indiana. Owen introduced shorter working hours, schools, libraries and equal treatment for different kinds of labor. He believed that the superiority of cooperation could be demonstrated by example and that reasonable members of the capitalist class could be persuaded to support it.
The experiment failed. New Harmony remained an island surrounded by capitalism. It depended on the capitalist market to buy what it needed and sell what it produced. It could not escape capitalist competition and economic crisis.
Owen’s socialism was utopian because it tried to build a new society without overthrowing the class that owned the old one.
Marx and Engels placed socialism on a scientific foundation. They showed that capitalism had divided society into irreconcilable classes. The capitalists could not be educated or persuaded out of exploiting the workers. Socialism could come only through the class struggle and the conquest of political power by the working class itself.
The Bolsheviks did not appeal to the good nature of the capitalists. They overthrew them.
A revolution under siege
The October Revolution did not take place under conditions chosen by the revolutionaries.
Russia was economically backward. The working class was highly organized and revolutionary, but it was a minority of the population. Most people lived in the countryside as small farmers. The new workers’ state could survive only through an alliance between the workers and this much larger rural population.
The First World War had already wrecked the economy. Then came civil war, famine, sabotage and military intervention by the imperialist powers. The revolutionary working class was decimated in the fighting. Factories stood idle and transportation broke down.
The Bolsheviks also inherited the old czarist state apparatus. They had to employ former officials, technicians and military officers because the new workers’ state did not yet have enough trained people of its own. Communist organizers were assigned to supervise them, but the old habits of command, privilege and submission did not disappear.
During the civil war, the government adopted what became known as War Communism. Food was rationed, grain was requisitioned and most buying and selling was prohibited. These emergency measures helped save the revolution, but they could not provide a lasting basis for socialist construction.
When the fighting ended, the Bolsheviks temporarily restored a limited market under the New Economic Policy. This retreat allowed production to recover and helped rebuild the working class.
Scientific socialism did not mean following a fixed blueprint. It meant examining real conditions, recognizing mistakes and changing course when necessary.
Socialism in a capitalist world
The Bolsheviks never believed that the Soviet Union could peacefully withdraw from the world class struggle.
Lenin warned that the workers’ republic and the imperialist states could not exist side by side indefinitely. The Soviet revolution was one contingent of an international struggle. Its future depended on the workers of other countries and on the liberation movements of the oppressed nations.
But the revolutions expected in the advanced capitalist countries were defeated. The Soviet Union remained surrounded by a capitalist world that was wealthier, more industrialized and determined to destroy it.
The Soviet people nevertheless built a vast planned economy without a capitalist class. Production was no longer governed principally by competing owners hunting private profit. The state could direct labor and resources according to an overall plan.
The planned economy transformed a largely rural and underdeveloped country into a major industrial and scientific power. The launching of Sputnik in 1957 demonstrated how rapidly a planned economy could concentrate resources and advance science.
But the arms race imposed by imperialism also consumed tremendous resources. Labor and materials that could have raised living standards had to be diverted into defense. The pressure distorted economic planning and strengthened the influence of military, technical and administrative officials over the working class.
The growth of bureaucracy
Socialist ownership did not automatically guarantee workers’ control.
Scarcity, imperialist encirclement, the destruction of much of the revolutionary working class and dependence on the old administrative apparatus all helped a privileged official layer grow inside the Soviet state.
Bureaucratism weakened the participation of the workers. Political discussion was suppressed. Revolutionary communists on both the left and right were subjected to repression. Careerists learned to speak the language of socialism while using positions in the party and government to gain privilege.
These were grave deformations of the workers’ state. They weakened the political power and revolutionary consciousness of the working class and created openings for capitalist forces.
But bureaucratic privilege was not the same as capitalist ownership. Soviet officials did not individually own the factories, mines and banks. They could not openly sell them, buy competing enterprises or pass them to their children as private capital.
To become capitalists, they had to destroy socialized property and divide it among themselves.
Capitalist restoration
Sam Marcy described Mikhail Gorbachev’s program as a reactionary form of utopianism.
Gorbachev preached “universal human values” and cooperation with the capitalist powers. He acted as though imperialism could be persuaded to end its war against socialism. But the imperialist ruling classes had already spent decades surrounding, threatening and economically blockading the Soviet Union.
The policy of perestroika opened the economy and the state to capitalist penetration. Pro-capitalist forces grew stronger within the Communist Party and government. Under Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and their allies, a section of the bureaucracy moved to turn its administrative power into private ownership.
The Soviet workers were never presented with a clear vote between socialism and capitalism. Capitalist restoration was packaged as reform, democracy and an easy road to abundance.
The Soviet Union was broken apart. The International Monetary Fund moved in to dictate economic policy. Price controls and social protections were torn down. Public enterprises built by generations of workers were handed over to a new class of capitalist owners.
The counterrevolution did not show that the Soviet Union had never been socialist. The capitalists’ need to break up socialized property showed exactly what its class character had been.
What Soviet socialism proved
Soviet socialism was never a perfect society drawn on a clean sheet of paper. It was the product of a real revolution made under conditions inherited from czarism, war, poverty and capitalist encirclement.
Its history cannot be understood by adding up its virtues and defects. The decisive questions are the class character of the state, the ownership of production and the direction in which society was moving.
The Soviet experience proved that the working class can overthrow the capitalists, take the great means of production into public ownership and plan an economy without a class of private owners.
It also showed that socialist property cannot defend itself. A workers’ state needs the active political participation of the workers themselves, a relentless struggle against privilege and bureaucracy, and the extension of the socialist revolution internationally.
The Red Flag was hauled down over the Soviet Union. But the class struggle that raised it did not disappear.
Additional reading
Soviet Socialism: Utopian or Scientific — by Sam Marcy (1992). Examines the difference between utopian and scientific socialism and places the achievements, contradictions and destruction of the Soviet Union in the conditions of the worldwide class struggle.
Perestroika: A Marxist Critique — by Sam Marcy. Marcy’s analysis of the Gorbachev reforms, capitalist penetration and the danger of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union.
China: Building Socialism in an Imperialist World — by Gary Wilson. A report on socialist construction in China from the 1949 Revolution through the present: land reform, collectivization, industrialization, the Cultural Revolution, the growth of market forces after 1978, and the continuing struggle to strengthen state ownership and planning inside a world dominated by imperialism.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific — by Frederick Engels. How socialism developed from plans for ideal communities into a scientific theory based on capitalist development and class struggle.
The State and Revolution — by V.I. Lenin (1917). Why the working class cannot simply take over the capitalist state but must establish a state of its own.
The Tax in Kind — by V.I. Lenin (1921). Explains the retreat from War Communism and the use of limited market relations under the New Economic Policy.