Communism and Development (Routledge Revivals)

Robert Bideleux

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317703051
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

First published in 1985, this book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of the diverse Communist development strategies that shaped the twentieth century. Robert Bideleux emphasises the appalling human and economic costs of the most widely adopted 'Stalinist' strategies of forced industrialisation and rural collectivisation. He also reconsiders the powerful arguments in favour of the most feasible and cost-effective alternatives to Stalinism, including 'village communisms' and 'market socialisms'. A highly readable and challenging study, this reissue will be of particular value to students with research interests in Development Studies, East European History and Politics.

1 Russia and the fate of peasant societies: Marx versus Engels

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Avowedly Marxist movements have won power and influence mainly in peasant societies whose industrialization has barely begun and where peasant needs and aspirations should be prime considerations. Yet Marx and Engels were not renowned for respectful solicitude towards peasantries. Their Communist Manifesto (1848) envisaged an ineluctable progression through capitalist industrialization towards a proletarianized society in which ‘a considerable part of the population’ would be ‘rescued’ from ‘the idiocy of rural life’. Thus the proletariat could ‘win the battle of democracy’ and ‘wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie’ and ‘centralize all means of production in the hands of the State, i.e. the proletariat organized as the ruling class’. It fiercely criticized ‘petit bourgeois socialism’, which feared ‘the inevitable ruin of the petit bourgeois and the peasant’ and aspired ‘either to restore the old means of production and exchange, and hence the old property relations and the old society, or to cramp modern means of production within the framework of the old property relations, which have been inevitably exploded by those means’.

Marx on peasant societies: France, India and Russia

Marx’s most damning characterization of peasants as a social class occurs in his conclusion to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

Peasant smallholders form a vast mass, whose constituents live in almost identical conditions, yet scarcely enter into mutual relations. Their mode of production isolates them from one another.… Their smallholdings practically preclude division of labour, application of science … diversification.… Thus the great mass of the French nation is made up of homologous entities, much as potatoes in a sack make up a sack of potatoes. Inasmuch as millions of families live in economic conditions which distinguish their way of life, interests and culture from those of other classes, rendering them antagonistic to the latter, they constitute a class. But inasmuch as their connections are merely local and their identity of interests hasn’t found expression in a community, a national association or a political organization, they don’t constitute a class. So they are unable to assert their class interests in their own name.… They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their representative must appear as their master, lording it over them, wielding unlimited governmental power, protecting them against other classes. … So the political influence of smallholders ultimately finds expression in the executive subordinating society.… By its very nature, smallholder property forms a suitable basis for an omnipotent, innumerable bureaucracy. It fosters uniformity, facilitating uniform action from the centre upon every part of this homogeneous mass.… But in the nineteenth century feudal extortion has been replaced by urban usury, feudal obligations by mortgages, and aristocratic landlordism by bourgeois capital. The peasant’s smallholding is now only the pretext enabling capitalists to draw profits, interest and rent from the land.… Hence the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeois order.… With the progressive undermining of smallholder property, the State structure erected thereon collapses.

However, it can be argued that France’s Third Republic (1870–1940) defended peasant interests by promoting a remarkably durable and peasant-oriented parliamentary democracy, universal education, cheap transport and agricultural protectionism. Perversely, it has often received a bad press precisely because it did protect peasant and petit-bourgeois interests — those of the majority. In 1852 Marx evidently underestimated how far industrialization was already expanding opportunities for intensive, small-scale livestock-rearing, dairying, horticulture, viticulture, etc., granting a new lease of life to independent smallholder agriculture (see Hohenburg, 1972); and how far mortgage debt is an index of credit rating rather than impoverishment. Generally big mortgages are obtained by successful farmers, whereas the poor have little to mortgage.

Nevertheless, with substantial assistance from Engels, Marx advanced a similarly dismal caricature of ‘Oriental’ peasant societies in his major prospectus for India (1853):

There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of government: that of Finance, or plunder of the interior; that of War, or plunder of the exterior; and … the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions … constituted artificial irrigation … the basis of Oriental agriculture.… This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water … necessitated, in the Orient where civilization was too low and territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing power of Government.… These two circumstances … brought about … the so-called village system.… These small stereotype forms of social organism are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family- communities were based on … that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hand- spinning and hand-tilling agriculture, which gave them self-supporting power. English interference … dissolved these … communities by blowing up their economical basis.… Now, sickening as it must be … to witness those myriads of industrious, patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved … we must not forget that … these idyllic village communities … had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.… We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life … evoked … aimless, unbounded forces of destruction … that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man.…

England has to fustructive, the other regenerating — the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the foundations of Western society in Asia.… The political unity of India … imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self- emancipation.… The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society … is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The zemindari [intermediaries transformed into landlords by the British in Bengal] and ryotwari [peasants established on heritable smallholdings by the British in southern India], abominable as they are, involve two distinct forms of private property in land — the great desideratum of Asiatic society. From the natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government.… Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe … and has revindicated it from the isolated position which was the prime law of its stagnation.… The millocracy [British industrialists] have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them and, to that end, it is necessary above all to endow her with means of irrigation and internal communication.… You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, out of which there must grow the application of machinery to branches of industry not immediately connected with railways.… All that the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. (New York Daily Tribune, 25 June and 8 August 1853)

Note that Marx obviously took great pains over this incisive prospectus and that, unlike more simplistic and/or xenophobic writings on ‘imperialism’ and ‘dependency’, it rightly emphasized that the overall results of British rule and economic penetration were bound to be positive (cf. the provocative theses advanced by Morris, 1963, 1968). The really objectionable feature was Marx’s very one-sided, negative characterization of India’s village institutions and customs (cf. Capital, vol. I, 1976T, 477–9).

Moreover, in his first ‘Preface’ to Capital (1867), Marx postulated that large-scale capitalist industrialization was the only way forward: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows the less developed country the image of its future’; and ‘when a society has got on the right track … it can neither leap over nor legislate away the hurdles posed by the successive phases of its normal development, although it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs’.

However, if it was indeed necessary to undergo capitalist industrialization and proletarianization en route to socialism, then this posed an agonizing dilemma for Marx’s disciples in peasant societies. They would have to welcome and support these processes as ‘necessary’ advances towards socialism, despite (1) all the attendant exploitation, expropriation, degradation, social disruption, concentration into squalid overcrowded cities, destitution and debilitating work regimes, so vividly publicized by Engels and Marx, among others; (2) Marx’s warning, in his first ‘Preface’ to Capital, that the capitalist road would be even more arduous for later- industrializing countries than it had been for the pioneer; (3) the consequent conflict between their humanitarian pretensions and their economic prescriptions; and (4) the danger that such a dismal prospectus would attract little popular support, especially from the intended victims. In 1877 the dilemma was posed most poignantly by a leading Russian socialist, Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842–1904):

All this ‘maiming of women and adolescents’ still lies before us. Yet, from the standpoint of Marx’s historical theory, we should not only not protest, as that would mean acting to our own detriment; we should even welcome it as a steep, but necessary step towards the temple of happiness. Such a contradiction, which in certain situations would rend the soul of a Russian disciple of Marx, must be hard to bear. His role is that of an onlooker, dispassionately … chronicling a double-edged progress in which he cannot participate. He cannot further the abhorrent side of the process, yet any activity conforming to his moral imperatives would only serve to prolong the agony. His ideal, if he’s a disciple of Marx, includes a conjunction of labour and property, with cultivators possessing the means of cultivation. But, if he shares Marx’s historico-philosophical views, he must welcome the separation of labour and property, the separation of producers from the means of production, as the first phase of an inevitable and ultimately benign process; i.e. he must welcome the subversion of his own ideal. (Translated from Mikhailovsky, 1897, 172)

In Mikhailovsky’s view no bona fide socialist could honestly welcome or acquiesce in the prospective proletarianization of the peasantry. As he wrote in 1872,

In Europe the labour question is a revolutionary one, since it demands a transfer of the means of work to the workers, expropriating the current owners. In Russia the labour question is a conservative one, merely entailing a retention of the means of work in labour’s possession.… Even around Petersburg, a most Anglicized area, dotted with factories, foundries and manors, villagers live on their own land, burn their own timber, eat home-made bread, wear clothes made by their own labour from their own sheep. Guarantee them their property and Russia’s labour question is solved. … It will be said we cannot forever make do with wooden ploughs, the three-field system or antediluvian methods of making clothes. True. But there are alternative ways out of this difficulty. One, favoured by expediency, is simply to raise tariffs, break up the village communes and let industry spring up like mushrooms, English-style. But this would … expropriate labour. The alternative is obviously more difficult, but the simpler solution isn’t always the right one. The alternative is to develop the existing, albeit primitive and crude, relations between labour and property. This cannot be achieved without broad State support, beginning with legislative consolidation of communal landowner ship. (Mikhailovsky, 1888, 102–3)

In reply, Marx wrote a swingeing disavowal of attempts ‘to metamorphose my outline of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of la marche générale, fatally incumbent on all peoples, whatever their historical circumstances’:

By studying each evolution separately and then making comparisons, one can easily find the key to such phenomena, but one won’t get there using the passe-partout of a historico-philosophical theory whose only virtue consists in being supra-historical. … To be able to make informed judgements on Russian economic development I have learned Russian and for years I have studied official and other publications on this subject. This is my conclusion: if Russia continues down the path pursued since 1861 [when formal dissolution of serfdom was begun], she will miss the finest opportunity history has ever offered a people and undergo all the vicissitudes of the capitalist regime. (Reprinted in Danielson, 1902T, 507–9)

Encouraged by the emergence of a Russian socialist movement which deferentially and attentively went along with his critique of Western capitalism, Marx undertook ‘to write specially for Russia a brochure on the development potential of the village commune — a question of burning interest to Russian socialists’ (Riazanov, 1924, 265). Indeed Engels, as Marx’s main financial backer, was increasingly annoyed that the fascinating development problems of a peasant society (albeit one comprising nearly half Europe’s peasants) were distracting Marx from the tiresome task of completing the later volumes of Capital (see Maenchen-Helfen and Nicolaievsky, 1976T, 395). Unfortunately Marx never completed his projected brochure. But when his daughter, Laura Lafargue, committed suicide in 1911, the Marxist scholar David Riazanov discovered she had been sitting on three very significant drafts: Marx’s last and least-acknowledged major writings (early 1881), constituting his most considered and informed prospectus for a peasant society.

From Draft I:

Viewed historically, the only serious argument advanced as proof of the Russian peasant commune’s decomposition is this: far back in history we encounter throughout Western Europe communal landowner ship of a more or less archaic type; with society’s progress, it disappeared. Why should it escape such a fate only in Russia? I reply: because in Russia, thanks to a peculiar conjunction of circumstances, the village commune still exists nationwide and can shake off its primitive traits and directly develop as an element of collective production on a national scale. Russia is neither secluded from the modern world nor prey to a foreign conqueror.… Precisely because it coexists with capitalist production, it can assimilate its positive achievements without undergoing its terrible vicissitudes. … If the village communes had been placed in normal conditions of development when serfdom was abolished, and if the huge public debt incurred largely at peasant expense and the vast sums furnished via the state to the emerging, capitalistic ‘new pillars of society’ had been used to further develop the village commune, today nobody would contemplate the ‘historical inevitability’ of the commune’s annihilation: everybody would see it as an element of the regeneration of Russian society and of superiority over countries enthralled by capitalism.…

There is yet to be written a history of the decomposition of the primitive communes. … So far we’ve had only the bare outlines. But research on this subject has advanced enough to let us affirm that the primitive communes were far more durable than Semitic, Roman and other societies, especially modern capitalist societies; and their disintegration was caused by … circumstances quite unlike those of the modern Russian commune. Histories of the primitive communes by bourgeois authors must be read guardedly: e.g. Sir Henry Maine, once a zealous adviser to the English government in its forcible demolition of India’s communes, hypocritically tells us that all the government’s benign efforts to support these communes were thwarted by the peaceful force of economic laws! Either way, this commune perished amid incessant internal and external warfare. It also perished by force when Germanic tribes conquered Italy, Spain, Gaul, etc.…

Russia is the only European country where the ‘agricultural commune’ has been preserved nationwide.… Communal landowner ship empowers it to directly and gradually transform individualistic, parcellized agriculture into collective agriculture, which Russian peasants already practise on unpartitioned meadows. The physical configuration of Russian farmland favours mechanization on a broad scale. The peasant’s familiarity with co-operative setups will facilitate his transition from parcellized to communal farming. … If spokesmen for ‘the new pillars of society’ deny the possibility of such an evolution of the contemporary village commune, they should be asked whether Russia, like the West, has had to undergo a protracted incubation of mechanical production to arrive at machinery, steamers, railways, etc., and how they managed to introduce straight off all the exchange mechanisms (banks, joint-stock companies, etc.) whose development took centuries in the West.

One characteristic of Russia’s ‘agricultural commune’ is a source of weakness, inauspicious for all its relationships: its isolation, the lack of connectio...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Russia and the fate of peasant societies: Marx versus Engels
• 2 The case for village communism: from Herzen and Bakunin to Chayanov and Gandhi
• 3 The quicksands of Leninism: Vladimir Ulyanov
• 4 The momentous industrialization debate: an introduction
• 5 Creeping socialism: Bukharin versus Lenin
• 6 'Least-cost' industrialization strategies: from Bazarov and Krasin to Kondratiev and Trotsky
• 7 Socialist forced industrialization strategies: Preobrazhensky, Feldman and Stalin
• 8 The Chinese road to Stalinism
• 9 Further lessons from forced industrialization: Russia, China and Eastern Europe
• 10 The Cuba syndrome
• 11 Yugoslavia, Hungary and the vicissitudes of market socialism
• 12 The results of rural collectivization
• Statistical appendix (tables)
• References and further reading (with list of abbreviations)
• Index