Thierry Simonelli: Professor Wolff, you published a book together with
Professor Stephen A. Resnick entitled Class Theory and History.
This is a highly original historical analysis of the economy of the Soviet
Union. The new point of view you elaborate in your book is based on a shift
in the classical concept of surplus value and class theory. Before we get
to the main issue, I would like to briefly discuss those two shifts.
With Marx, the concept of surplus value derives from
the more general concept of value: value is conceived of as abstract, reified
work. Thus, Marx could disclose the capitalist acquisition of surplus value
as acquisition of surplus labor and, finally, as exploitation. Your concept
of surplus value privileges the aspect of “social organization”.
Why this change of perspective?
Richard Wolff: Marx developed a labor theory of
value and introduced it in the opening chapters of Capital because
prices, commodities, and markets were then thought to be the essential core
issues in economics. Marx did not agree. But to get readers interested in
the economic aspects of capitalism, his book began with prices and commodities
and markets. But his goal was to move elsewhere quickly. He took his readers
into the capitalist production process to show them how workers generated
a surplus there. He explained how that surplus was taken from the workers
who produced by others (capitalist exploitation). He traced what capitalists
did with the surplus to show how this organization of the production, appropriation,
and distribution of the surplus shaped capitalist society, in particular its
enduring inequality, injustice, and inefficiency.
My point is that the labor theory of value and the theory
of the surplus were useful entry points into and thus components of the critical
social analysis Marx championed. The overwhelming bulk of Marx’s chief
work, Capital, focuses on the surplus and how its capitalist
organization sustains the problems of capitalist society that its critics
have yet to overcome.
However, non-Marxist economists remained obsessed by
prices, commodities, and market (as in the currently dominant neoclassical
economics which says nothing about the surplus). Thus, many Marxist economists
have felt obliged likewise to stress the labor theory of value as the distinctively
Marxist approach to commodity exchange. The resulting vast Marxist literature
on value is interesting, but it downplays or ignores the larger socio-economic
analysis to which the labor theory of value was an introductory pathway. Our
approach aims to correct this imbalance. Our focus returns to the social analysis
of Marx’s larger project by foregrounding the way capitalist societies
organize the production, appropriation, and distribution of the surplus. Matters
of value theory and surplus value theory resume their original place as introductory
frameworks within which to pursue the main tasks.
TS: Your analysis of the Soviet Union is also
based on what you call a “nondeterministic” class conception that
throws a new light on communism. How do communism and class structure hold
together?
RW: The word “communism” has usually
referred to an entire society or social system. However, Marx’s analysis
focused on something significantly narrower, namely the class structure of
production: the who and how of surplus production, appropriation and distribution.
I don’t read Marx as a determinist, as asserting that the class structure
of production determines everything else about society. That would a crude
and mechanical sort of base/ superstructure approach.
Instead, the non-deterministic analysis separates the
communist nature of a class structure from the larger society within which
it may occur. Thus, for example, a society can (and usually does) include
multiple, different class structures. A nondeterministic Marxian analysis
always asks the following question about any society chosen for analysis:
what are the different class structures existing within it, how do they interact,
and how does their interaction influence the larger society (its economic,
political, and cultural processes). As societies, the USSR and China exhibit
multiple class structures with distinctive contradictions within them in within
their inter-relationships. Our new book on the USSR focuses precisely on where
and why capitalist class structures survived and grew across the history of
Soviet industry. It also examines the multiple class structures (including
the communist) that variously coexisted across the history of Soviet agriculture.
The book rejects any determinism that reduces these societies’ social
complexity to one class structure by labels like “socialism” or
“communism.”
Another way to specify what a nondeterministic approach
entails is this: any class structure of production is as much determined by
the non-class aspects of society as vice-versa. Indeed, one uniqueness of
the Marxian approach is to stress this interaction in which every effect is
a cause and vice-versa (dialectics). Class structures, whatever their particular
nature, always depend on their economic, political, and cultural context while
they also shape that context. Endless change and mutual transformation characterize
the relationship. This open-ended dialectic dissolves if a deterministic linkage
is presumed or asserted between class structures on the one hand and all the
non-class aspects of a social totality on the other.
TS: Your book gives a quite detailed analysis
of the economical organization and class structure of the U.S.S.R. from the
twenties to the end of the eighties. If you had to sum up the most important
discoveries you made with the help of your surplus and class concepts, what
would they be?
RW : Our book’s unique discoveries about
Soviet history emerge from our understanding and use of the term class
to analyze that history. Others have analyzed the USSR (and socialism and
communism generally) in terms of property and power (that is how they define
class), not in terms of surplus, as we do. The distribution of property and
power did change as result of the 1917 revolution in the USSR (and similar
revolutions elsewhere since), but the social organization of the industrial
surplus did not.
After 1917, Soviet state officials replaced private individuals
in appropriating the surplus (profits) generated by industrial workers, and
the Communist Party took political power away from the czar, nobility, Russian
Orthodox Church and wealthy capitalists who had dominated Russian politics
before. The USSR thus differed from pre-1917 Russia precisely in terms of
altered distributions of industrial property and political power. However,
the Marxist tradition, as we read and use it, focuses on something other than
property and power; it focuses on the social organization of the surplus.
Our book thus asks and answers these parallel questions: how did the Soviet
revolution of 1917 change the organization of the surplus? And how did Soviet
socialism/communism differ from capitalism?
Our research argues that the 1917 revolution replaced
a private capitalism with a state capitalism and a pre-revolutionary Czarist
power structure with a Soviet Communist Party power structure. These were
historically significant changes, but they were NOT changes in the social
organization of the industrial surplus. That is, before and after 1917 the
class structure of industry remained capitalist. Before and after, the workers
produced a surplus (the excess of the value added by their labor over the
wages paid to them) that others appropriated. Before 1917 those
others were a private board of directors, while after 1917 they were commissars
or industrial ministers. State capitalism replaced private capitalism. Communism,
as Marx made clear, refers to a different organization of the surplus where
the workers who collectively produce the surplus are identical to the
collective that appropriates and distributes this surplus. This communist
organization of the surplus was never established in Soviet industry. It remained
state capitalist to the end of the USSR.
The 1917 revolution may have aimed at communism, but
it never progressed beyond state capitalism. Lenin recognized this and made
several speeches and comments about “Soviet state capitalism.”
He hoped that the workers’ political power over the Soviet state would
guarantee that state capitalism would pass into communism as the organization
of each industrial enterprise’s surplus was transformed. However, that
never happened. While state capitalism remained in Soviet industry, Stalin
stopped calling it state capitalism. Instead, he simply insisted that what
existed in Soviet industry was socialism-in-transition-to-communism. Stalin
renamed state capitalism as socialism/communism. Industry owned by the state
(rather than private persons), state central planning rather than markets,
and dominant political power over the state by the workers’ vanguard
party became the definitions of communism. Defenders of the USSR celebrated
its “communism” in these terms. Ironically, critics of the USSR,
Stalin, Stalinism, socialism, and communism mostly also adopted Stalin’s
definition (without knowing or admitting it): they praised capitalism as a
system defined by private ownership of industry, markets, parliamentary politics,
and so on.
Our book concludes that the great confrontation of the
twentieth century was between private and state capitalism, not between capitalism
and communism. When either kind of capitalism encountered a crisis of the
sort that regularly occur (the capitalist business cycle), it was often necessary
to pass over into the other kind. The Russian crisis of 1917 provoked a change
to state capitalism from private capitalism. When Soviet state capitalism
hit a comparable crisis in the 1980s, the result was a shift back to a private
capitalism. Likewise when the Great Depression plunged many private capitalisms
(US European, etc.) into grave crises, they shifted to state capitalism (or
heavily state regulated private capitalism) depending on local conditions.
In the last twenty years, as state-capitalisms and state-regulated capitalisms
encountered their capitalist crises, the shift has been back to more private
capitalism (the movement often called “neo-liberalism”).
A final summary conclusion follows: what collapsed in
the USSR in 1989 was not communism because that had never been established
in Soviet industry. All that happened was yet another oscillation between
state and private capitalism (similar to many oscillations in both directions
that characterize all capitalisms). Thus, the communist alternative to capitalism
remains to be tried. It will likely return to the agenda of revolutionary
movements once they recognize that switching between private and state capitalisms
has never yet overcome the inequality and injustice that haunt and destabilize
both kinds of capitalism.
