Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labor and Leninist Militant Reformism
The points we have explained above sufficiently expose Lenin’s version of socialism to the eyes of the informed and curious workers. But there are more issues, some of which it would not be useless to mention. In December 1917, under conditions when the plan of workers’ control in the factories was still considered to be valid, the decision to establish a state institution called the “Supreme Economic Council” was approved by the Party and the government. This organization had the mission of being a centralized system of control and planning of the entire economy of the country and was established to extinguish forever the life of all factory committees, workers’ control councils and the last glimmers of the influence of the councils in the canters of work and production. At the very beginning, Vensenkha formed committees under the name of “Gulaki”. These committees merged the remaining institutions of the tsarist regime, called in specialists and technicians from the previous regime, placed them at the head of all economic institutions and entrusted them with the planning of production and other tasks. The Supreme Economic Council and its subordinate committees set about the complete capitalist reconstruction of the war-torn Russian economy and resorted to all means and policies to further intensify the exploitation of the working masses.
The forced spread of “piecework” and “Taylorism” in the canters of production was one of these terrible methods. Forms of the terrible pressure of exploitation of labour, which were once condemned by Lenin, but now, under the conditions of “proletarian rule”, were praised and sanctified by him as effective ways of advancing towards socialism. “What should be put on the agenda, put into practice and tested is the payment of wages for work and the application of much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system, as well as the adjustment of the amount of wages to the total output, or to the results of the exploitation of transport on railways and waterways, etc….” (Selected Works)
Lenin, a little later, at the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party, also emphasized the importance of implementing these methods with much greater emphasis. At the same meeting, he also clarified the task of critics of these policies and, in response to those who did not see the existence of the “Vensenkha” (soviethistory.msu.edu › origin-of-vesenkha) and its solutions in line with the socialist orientation of the economy and workers’ rule, declared: “In what is class supremacy now manifested? The supremacy of the proletariat is manifested in the fact that the property of capitalists and landlords has been abolished. The main text and content of all previous constitutions, even the most republican and democratic of them, was exclusively property. Our constitution has the right and has acquired the right to historical existence for itself because it was not just written on paper and property was abolished in it. The victorious proletariat abolished property and completely annihilated it. Class supremacy consists in the fact that this supremacy manifests itself first of all in the question of property. When the question of property has been practically solved, class supremacy has been secured by this act” (Selected Works).
An important point in all these discussions is that Lenin considers everything that is non-socialist, including the process of the decline of the soviets, the denial of the possibility of individual workers’ intervention in the management of social affairs, the increasing concentration of power in state organs, individual management, the implementation of the Taylor system, the replacement of workers’ councils with the vensenkha, and the like, as mechanisms for the realization of socialism, and he describes them from this perspective. But the point at issue here is Lenin’s view of the supremacy of the proletariat, and in particular the abolition of capitalist ownership!! The meaning of this abolition of ownership is nothing other than the transfer of a number of large industrial units from the individual ownership of individual capitalists to the state ownership of the Supreme Economic Council. It was said elsewhere in this article that Lenin, if not in the school formulations, then wherever it comes to determining policy and approach, explains capitalism with the anarchy of production, the lack of planning, and the individual or private ownership of the means of production and exchange. Accordingly, when talking about socialism, he has no choice but to consider the expropriation of individual ownership of the means of labour as synonymous with the supremacy of the proletariat and socialism. Here, too, his point is that the victorious proletariat abolished property and completely annihilated it!! But he does not say that the state ownership of capital has nothing to do with socialism. He also completely forgets that what he and the Russian Communist Party have done is not the abolition of capitalist ownership but the abolition of the ownership of capitalist individuals over a part of the social capital of the country. Elsewhere, he writes in the same connection, “To abolish classes, it is necessary first to overthrow the landlords and capitalists. We have accomplished this part of the task. But this is only part of the task, and it is not the most difficult of all. Secondly, to abolish classes, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between peasant and worker and to turn everyone into workers” (Economy and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat)
It can be seen that erasing classes is synonymous with dispossession of landowners and factory owners!! Let us remember again that when Lenin talks about the overthrow of the capitalists, he undoubtedly stands by what he says. He knows very well that in all the canters of work and production confiscated from the hands of this group, wage labour remains in the same form as before. The relationship of buying and selling labour has not undergone any changes. If the exploitation of workers has not become more severe, it has not become milder. Based on this, his insistence on erasing classes is done only by referring to the expropriation of individual capitals or changing the formal form of ownership. In other words, he sees the capitalist but forgets the capital. It discards the personified capital but not only preserves the capital itself in its place, which covers this preservation and perpetuation in the garb of socialism. Lenin continues: “But this cannot be done immediately. This is a much more difficult and necessarily long-term task. This is a problem that cannot be solved by overthrowing the class, no matter what class it is. It can only be solved by changing the entire social economy and moving from a small, individual, and isolated commodity economy to a large social economy. Such a transition will necessarily be very long…” (Ibid.) Here Lenin speaks of “changing the entire social economy” and naturally makes the reader expect what this change means. If this reader is a person familiar with the Marxist version of socialism and does not know much about Lenin’s views, he may promise himself that by this phrase and putting forward the change of the entire social economy, Lenin has in mind the abolition of the relationship of buying and selling labour power or wage labour. But unfortunately, this is not the case at all. It may be surprising that Lenin interprets the phrase “changing the entire social economy” in this way:
“To carry out the second part of this task, which is the most difficult, the proletariat, which has overcome the bourgeoisie, must consistently follow the basic line underlying its policy towards the peasantry. The proletariat must separate the toiling peasant from the landlord peasant, the working peasant from the merchant peasant, the toiling peasant from the monopolist peasant, and draw a boundary between them. The whole point of socialism lies in this boundary”!! (Ibid.) Lenin then explains that the toiling peasant is the ally of the workers and places the fruits of his labour at the disposal of the proletarian state without hoarding or profiteering. The two layers of peasants who are separated here are in fact the poor peasants and the rural bourgeoisie, and Lenin’s insistence on drawing a boundary between them is certainly a very correct and good thing, but how this boundary solves the most central and knotty part of the socialist transformation of the economy!! is a complex issue that Lenin’s explanations do not help to unravel. Let us suppose that the ownership of this entire stratum of peasants, or the rural bourgeoisie, was abolished along with the ownership of the big capitalists. Would this imply the establishment of socialism and the abolition of capitalism?!! The answer to the question is definitely negative, but from Lenin’s point of view it is unfortunately positive. He everywhere states that replacing the ownership of individual capitalists with the ownership of the state, the same state whose entire decisions are made by the 19 members of the Politburo of the Party, which Lenin calls the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the same socialism!!
Lenin forgets that capital is not a sum of money or a handful of things, but a social relationship. Capital is the relationship of buying and selling labour power and the exploitation of wage labour. When the worker sells his labour power, when he bears the maximum pressure of capital exploitation. When the state owners of capital, in order to force him to produce the greatest surplus value, undermine the conditions of his work and exploitation with the Taylor system and the piecework, when this is the situation, what does it mean to talk about class supremacy and the abolition of property or the construction of socialism, except for contradictions and distortions. The intentions are certainly good. There is no doubt about that. But the road to hell is also paved with good intentions. Was Lenin aware of the contradictions in his words about property, socialism, and the mechanisms for building a socialist society or not? This is a topic that can be discussed in its own right, and I will mention it very briefly below, but for the time being let us explore his view of socialism a little more. In 1918, one year after the October Revolution, Lenin, emphasizing the current state of Russian society as a society in transition from capitalism to socialism, described the structural characteristics of the country’s economy as follows:
“But what is the meaning of the word transition? Does not the meaning of this word, if we apply it to economics, mean that in the existing system there are elements, parts and fragments of both capitalism and socialism? Everyone admits that this is so, but while acknowledging this, people do not think about what the elements of the various socio-economic forms that exist in Russia are. Whereas this is the whole point of the matter. We will mention these elements. 1- Patriarchal economy, that is, an economy that is largely natural and peasant in nature. 2- Small commodity production (the majority of the peasants who sell grain belong to this group). 3- Private capitalism. 4- State capitalism. 5- Socialism” (on the commodity tax)
By state capitalism, Lenin does not mean the confiscated economic institutions and enterprises under direct state ownership in the days following the revolution. This term has a completely different meaning in the literature of Bolshevism and Lenin than in our modern version. Lenin believed that the October Revolution established the political power of the working class or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Accordingly, any part of the economy that is directly owned by the state is socialist. And the parts that are not, that is, all production and commercial units that have private owners but nevertheless obey the laws and regulations of the proletarian state, are state capitalism. The fifth part of the economic formation of Russian society, which Lenin refers to here as the socialist part of the economy, included all factories and production or commercial institutions that were taken from their private owners in the days of the revolution and placed under the direct ownership of state organs, headed by the “Vensenkha”. Thus, as was stated above, from Lenin’s perspective, the abolition of wage labour was not the true indicator of the socialist nature of the economy. The mere establishment of state ownership of this or that part of social capital was considered a sufficient guarantee of the transformation of the basis of production relations and the replacement of capitalism by socialism. He did not explore the anatomy of civil society in political economy and the anatomy of the political superstructure of socialism in the abolition of wage labour. The result of his words was that Bolshevism represents the proletariat. The Bolshevik state is the supreme symbol of the class dictatorship of the proletariat, and the ownership of this state over the country’s economy also implies the socialization of the economy!! The fact that the working masses in this so-called socialist economy are still wage slaves of capital and are exploited as before did not occupy much space in this discourse!! The problem, however, was not only in this approach. His other approach was equally full of contradictions and distortions. Lenin was faced with this very fundamental question: which is this political power of the workers, whose entire mission is to replace private ownership of capital with ownership of state institutions? Why should such a government consider itself the political power of the working class?!! Why should it declare its ownership of the economy as evidence of the absence of capitalism and the establishment of socialism?!! Neither can the state above the workers and responsible for planning the wage labour system be a container of working-class power, nor can we speak of any amount of socialism with the existence of the relationship of buying and selling labour. But Lenin did not think so in the period we are discussing. He considers the power of the 19-member Central Committee of the party to be the established power of the entire Russian working class, considers state planning of labour and production to be socialism, and recognizes state capitalism with the definition given above, that is, private capitalist enterprises subject to the laws of the state and the Ministry of Economy, as the threshold of the establishment of socialism. Lenin says: “In order to explain this issue further, first of all, we will mention a very specific example of state capitalism. Everyone knows what this example is. It is Germany. In this country we are faced with the latest in contemporary big capitalist technique and with a well-organized organization subordinate to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Throw away the words on which they are relied upon and in place of the bourgeois-junker-imperialist military state, substitute another state, but a state of a different social order and with a different class content, the Soviet or proletarian state, and you have the whole set of conditions that create socialism” (ibid.).
Lenin has stated many times and in different places that socialism is nothing but an advanced technique and the dictatorship of the proletariat!! Abolition of wage labour and the organization of an informed council based on the abolition of wage labour does not have any special place in his view. What Lenin thinks of socialism is what Karl Kautsky thought. The difference is that the former emphasizes the necessity of revolution or breaking the state machine of the day of capital and replacing it with the political power of the party, but the latter seeks to achieve the goal in a simpler way, through parliamentarism. Something that is not in the target from either perspective. The establishment of a kind of work and production planning or work organization corresponds to the abolition of wage labour and the elimination of the relationship of buying and selling labour. About this work organization or this way of planning work and production, little should be explained.
Socialism cannot be realized without the organization of a nationwide council to abolish the wage labour of members of the working masses. In order for the worker not to be a wage slave and a seller of labour power, he must, first of all, be able to play a role freely, autonomously, consciously, and competently in the process of planning his work, production, and social life. He must be able to decide consciously, freely, effectively, equally, and in a council manner about what will be produced, what will not be produced, what will be done, what will not be done, the definition of work, the fate of work and production, and all issues related to his social life. Without the working masses truly achieving such a position, there can be no talk of establishing socialism or eliminating capitalist exploitation. The emergence of labour organization that implies this level of council and conscious intervention of the workers requires the existence of a movement that has prepared the working masses to play such a role in advance, in the depths of capitalist hell, by gradually lining up against the exploitation, injustices, and crimes of this system. By organizing in capitalist unions and hanging on to a party above him, no worker will achieve such conditions and the ability to play such a role. The path of socialism, the abolition of wage labour, can only be taken by the working class that organizes its ongoing movement in all stages and phases, and in all areas of social life, in a soviet and anti-wage labour manner. The working class, which, from within these councils, fights against the basis of capitalist exploitation, against all forms of capitalist expression, against the state, law, order, rights, culture, politics, ideas, civilization, tradition and everything else that is part of the system of slavery and makes the method of this fight the class consciousness and consciousness of its class. The socialist transformation of the economy requires the abolition of wage labour, and wage labour is abolished only when the planning of all work, production and social life of people is carried out neither by the state above them, nor in the congresses and party assemblies beyond them, but with the conscious, free, equal, creative and influential presence of their masses. The organization of work for this transformation or the socialist organization of work is carried out by workers who have already made their anti-wage labour councils a school of Marxian understanding of the objectivity of capitalism, the result of this understanding a weapon in the ongoing war against capital in all fields of social life, and this understanding a platform for seeing the prospect of abolishing wage labour and the formation of councils a stronghold for the anti-capitalist struggle. The working mass, tied to the party and dissolved in popular democracy or syndicalist reformism, will never, under any circumstances, be ready to create a socialist organization of labour and establish socialism with the abolition of wage labour.
The Russian working class, behind Bolshevism and above all Lenin himself, advanced to the victory of the October Revolution. But what it learned from Lenin and the Bolshevik Party was to overthrow the Tsar, pave the way for the development of European-style capitalism, to listen to what the party elites say, to crush the state machine of the bourgeoisie, to bring the party to power. To consider the power of the party as the dictatorship of its class, to replace the ownership of the capitalists with the ownership of the state machine under the control of the party. To call the right to own capital socialism here and there, to rush to the canters of work and production as soon as possible, to sell its labour power at a bargain price, and after all this to shout throughout the world that it has destroyed capitalism and established socialism. Lenin led the Russian labour movement in this way, and this path was definitely not the path to destroy capitalism and establish socialism, but only the path to replace one form of capitalist planning of work and production with another. Lenin threw himself into any water and fire for the victory of the revolution. The revolution was victorious, but it is worth pondering that even on the day after the victory of the revolution, in the same days when he filled the earth and time with speeches about the establishment of the power of the working class and the elimination of the ownership of the capitalists, Lenin was still constantly complaining about the lack of development of capitalism in the country!! And he also explored the greatest problem of the revolution and socialism here!!!