Left communists love to slander the USSR, Stalin, and Marxism by claiming we haven’t read enough theory to know that commodity production cannot exist in socialism. This work is dedicated to showing that left communism is what happens when you don’t read carefully enough.
- Marx explains what necessitates capital
- Engels explaining he sees the cooperatives as a viable transition
- Engels explains neither him nor Marx ever doubted use of cooperatives in societal transformation
- Lenin’s equation of capitalist Agriculture
- Lenin intended for cooperatives to exist all along
- Lenin even calls it socialism (not transitory phase, but socialism)
- Lenin calls for exchange of commodities
- Stalin’s Justifications
- Conclusions
Marx explains what necessitates capital:
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.2 ' Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, "Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river".3 ' Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River! For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks:
We know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital, only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer.
But this capitalist soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material substance, that he christens them capital Under all circumstances, even when they are its exact opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law. "If," says Wakefield, "all the members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital ... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire." ''
So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself— and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production— capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible.
The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then, in old Europe, was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions of labour, i.e., the co-existence of capital and wage labour, brought about? By a social contract of a quite original kind. "Mankind have adopted a ... simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital," which, of course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination as the sole and final end of their existence: "they have divided themselves into owners of capital and owners of labour. ... This division was the result of concert and combination." 2; In one word: the mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the "accumulation of capital".
Marx: Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 35, Page 753-754
Engels explaining he sees the cooperatives as a viable transition:
... I can reply only briefly and in general terms to your inquiries [A], for as concerns the first question I should otherwise have to write a treatise.
Ad. 1. To my mind, the so-called “socialist society” is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change.
Its crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible.
That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they're not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies. I cannot see how you can speak of the ignorance of the masses in Germany after the brilliant evidence of political maturity shown by the workers in their victorious struggle against the Anti-Socialist Law. The patronizing and errant lecturing of our so-called intellectuals seems to me a far greater impediment. We are still in need of technicians, agronomists, engineers, chemists, architects, etc., it is true, but if the worst comes to the worst we can always buy them just as well as the capitalists buy them, and if a severe example is made of a few of the traders among them — for traders there are sure to be — they will find it to their own advantage to deal fairly with us. But apart from the specialists, among whom I also include schoolteachers, we can get along perfectly well without the other “intellectuals.” The present influx of literati and students into the party, for example, may be quite damaging if these gentlemen are not properly kept in check.
The Junker latifundia east of the Elbe could be easily leased under the due technical management to the present day-laborers and other retinue, who work the estates jointly. If any disturbances occur, the Junkers, who have brutalized people by flouting all the existing school legislation, will alone be to blame.
The biggest obstacles are the small peasants and the importunate super-clever intellectuals who always think they know everything so much the better, the less they understand it.
Engels, Letter to Otto Von Boenigk
Engels explains neither him nor Marx ever doubted use of cooperatives in societal transformation
Nor have Marx and I ever doubted that, in the course of transition to a wholly communist economy, widespread use would have to be made of cooperative management as an intermediate stage. Only it will mean so organising things that society, i. e. initially the State, retains ownership of the means of production and thus prevents the particular interests of the cooperatives from taking precedence over those of society as a whole. The fact that the Empire is not a land-owner is neither here nor there; you will find some formula, just as you did in the Polish debate, for here again the expulsions were no immediate concern of the Empire’s.
Lenin’s equation of capitalist Agriculture
Capitalist agriculture = commodity production + wage labour.
Lenin: Collected Works, Volume 40, Page 44
Lenin intended for cooperatives to exist all along
The abolition of private ownership of the means of production, their conversion into public property and the replacement of the capitalist production of commodities by the socialist organisation of the production of commodities by society as a whole, with the object of ensuring full well-being and free all-round development for all its members.
Lenin: Material for Working Out the R.S.D.L.P. Programme
Lenin even calls it socialism (not transitory phase, but socialism)
If the whole of the peasantry had been organized in cooperatives, we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism.
Lenin calls for exchange of commodities
At present, this question ranks first in importance and urgency. First, the state cannot carry on any economic development unless the army and the urban workers have regular and adequate supplies of food; the exchange of commodities must become the principal means of collecting foodstuffs. Secondly, commodity exchange is a test of the relationship between industry and agriculture and the foundation of all our work to create a fairly well regulated monetary system. All economic councils and all economic bodies must now concentrate on commodity exchange (which also includes the exchange of manufactured goods, for the manufactured goods made by socialist factories and exchanged for the foodstuffs produced by the peasants are not commodities in the politico-economic sense of the word; at any rate, they are not only commodities, they are no longer commodities, they are ceasing to be commodities).
Lenin, Instructions of the Council of Labour and Defence To Local Soviet Bodies
Stalin’s Justifications
It is said that commodity production must lead, is bound to lead, to capitalism all the same, under all conditions. That is not true. Not always and not under all conditions! Commodity production must not be identified with capitalist production. They are two different things. Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private ownership of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity. Without this there is no such thing as capitalist production. Well, and what is to be done if the conditions for the conversion of commodity production into capitalist production do not exist, if the means of production are no longer private but socialist property, if the system of wage labour no longer exists and labour power is no longer a commodity, and if the system of exploitation has long been abolished — can it be considered then that commodity production will lead to capitalism all the same? No, it cannot. Yet ours is precisely such a society, a society where private ownership of the means of production, the system of wage labour, and the system of exploitation have long ceased to exist. Commodity production must not be regarded as something sufficient unto itself, something independent of the surrounding economic conditions.
Stalin: The Economic Problems of the USSR, Page 13-14
… our commodity production is not of the ordinary type, but is a special kind of commodity production, commodity production without capitalists, which is concerned mainly with the goods of associated socialist producers (the state, the collective farms, the cooperatives), the sphere of action of which is confined to items of personal consumption, which obviously cannot possibly develop into capitalist production, and which, together with its “money economy,” is designed to serve the development and consolidation of socialist production. Absolutely mistaken, therefore, are those comrades who allege that, since socialist society has not abolished commodity forms of production, we are bound to have the reappearance of all the economic categories characteristic of capitalism: labour power as a commodity, surplus value, capital, capitalist profit, the average rate of profit, etc. These comrades confuse commodity production with capitalist production, and believe that once there is commodity production there must also be capitalist production. They do not realize that our commodity production radically differs from commodity production under capitalism.
Stalin: The Economic Problems of the USSR, Page 16-17
Comrades Sanina’s and Venzher’s basic error lies in the fact that they do not understand the role and significance of commodity circulation under socialism; that they do not understand that commodity circulation is incompatible with the prospective transition from socialism to communism. They evidently think that the transition from socialism to communism is possible even with commodity circulation, that commodity circulation can be no obstacle to this. That is a profound error, arising from an inadequate grasp of Marxism.
Criticizing Duhring's "economic commune," which functions in the conditions of commodity circulation, Engels, in his Anti-Dühring, convincingly shows that the existence of commodity circulation was inevitably bound to lead Duhring's so-called "economic communes" to the regeneration of capitalism. Comrades Sanina and Venzher evidently do not agree with this. All the worse for them. But we, Marxists, adhere to the Marxist view that the transition from socialism to communism and the communist principle of distribution of products according to needs preclude all commodity exchange, and, hence, preclude the conversion of products into commodities, and, with it, their conversion into value. So much for the proposal and arguments of Comrades Sanina and Venzher.
But what, then, should be done to elevate collective-farm property to the level of public property? [...]
In order to raise collective-farm property to the level of public property, the surplus collective-farm output must be excluded from the system of commodity circulation and included in the system of products-exchange between state industry and the collective farms. That is the point.
But what, then, should be done to elevate collective-farm property to the level of public property? The collective farm is an unusual kind of enterprise. It operates on land, and cultivates land which has long been public, and not collective-farm property. Consequently, the collective farm is not the owner of the land it cultivates. Further, the collective farm operates with basic implements of production which are public, not collective-farm property. Consequently, the collective farm is not the owner of its basic implements of production. Further, the collective farm is a cooperative enterprise: it utilizes the labour of its members, and it distributes its income among its members on the basis of workday units; it owns its seed, which is renewed every year and goes into production. What, then, does the collective farm own? Where is the collective-farm property which it disposes of quite freely, at its own discretion? This property of the collective farm is its product, the product of collective farming: grain, meat, butter, vegetables, cotton, sugar beet, flax, etc., not counting the buildings and the personal husbandry of the collective farmers on their household plots. The fact is that a considerable part of this product, the surplus collective-farm output, goes into the market and is thus included in the system of commodity circulation. It is precisely this circumstance which now prevents the elevation of collective-farm property to the level of public property. It is therefore precisely from this end that the work of elevating collectivefarm property to the level of public property must be tackled. In order to raise collective-farm property to the level of public property, the surplus collective-farm output must be excluded from the system of commodity circulation and in- 98 cluded in the system of products-exchange between state industry and the collective farms. That is the point.
Stalin: The Economic Problems of the USSR, Page 97
