Preface: The Soviet economy is socialist or...? (Ivan Potapenkov)

Preface: The Soviet economy is socialist or...?
Author	Ivan Potapenkov
Translated by	Anastasia S.
Original language	Russian
First published	July 13, 2023
Type	Essay
Source	https://telegra.ph/Ivan-Potapenkov-Preface-The-Soviet-economy-is-socialist-or-06-30

This publication launches the translation of a series of essays on the Soviet economy written by Ivan Mikhailovich Potapenkov, a political economist who has been researching the subject for more than 20 years.

The originals of these essays were published in Russian, yet their theoretical significance for the entire international Communist movement is determined by the fact that they show for the first time the general laws of motion of the Soviet commodity-planned mode of production.

These essays reveal the objective contradictions of the Soviet economy, providing a materialist explanation of all its crises and paradoxes, and showing the basis that led to Perestroika and the restoration of capitalism.

Many books have been written about the Soviet past, and the reasons for the demise of Soviet society still preoccupy people's minds, for the very demise of this society was unexpected even for Western Sovietologists.

When searching for the causes of the downfall of the Soviet Union, most people focus on finding the answer to the question of under which General Secretary there was a departure from Marxism. This approach is facilitated by the fact that the initial activities of each General Secretary began with new reforms. With each new General Secretary, a new "socialism" was built. Therefore, the entire Soviet history has turned into the history of the General Secretaries.

But as for me, I couldn't care less who was the General Secretary in any particular historical period, although I do mention their names in my writings. I'm not interested in who said and did what. I am only interested in WHY exactly a particular representative said and did it.

My research on the Soviet economy has led me to the following conclusions. As is well known, communist relations of production cannot arise in the depths of capitalism, for their formation requires a systematic organization of production on a society-wide scale, which is hindered by private property. Therefore, the formation of the communist mode of production begins with the conquest of political domination by the proletariat in order to use the power of the state to eliminate private property and unite all the means of production into a single state-owned property.

Having eliminated private property, society will proceed to the conscious formation of communist relations of production, which implies an increasing role of the subjective factor. It is quite clear that history is made by people, but that does not mean they make it based on their whims and fantasies. On the one hand, people create history, but on the other hand, they have to create history in certain historical conditions inherited from previous generations and their own previous activities. What kind of relations of production will be formed has to be determined not by what people want to achieve, but rather by the existing level of development of the productive forces and the structure of classes at the time of their formation.

The insufficient level of development of the productive forces was the reason for the unfavorable structure of classes, which lead to the need to preserve certain forms from the preceding bourgeois mode of production. In such a case, the proletariat, under the leadership of its vanguard, the Party, on the basis of the general laws of social development, began to form communist relations of production, for which the conditions were not yet fully formed. The creation of new relations of production in the communist mode of production also creates the forms through which they are put into practice. But due to the fact that the forms inherent in the old relations of production still remained, the newly emerging forms were affected by them. As a result, there was a form that combined both the new and the old. Such a form in itself possessed opposites, which later turned into contradictions.

The relations of production that emerged gave rise to a new social structure of society in which different classes played different roles in social production. The new classes were united in their desire to build a socialist society. But since the form (in which the relations between the classes are manifested) possessed opposites, these opposites found their expression in the contradiction of the interests of the different classes under a false external unity. It was inevitable, then, that there would emerge a class that was interested in preserving the established relations of production and the form of their manifestation.

Eventually, these contradictions escalated into conflict. The participants of social production realized that it was impossible to develop further in this direction, and that the existing relations of production were hindering the development of the productive forces of society.

Life itself demands the comprehension of the existing contradictions and objective laws of the development of social production. And thus, in the early 1980s, after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, the fact that we do not know the society in which we live in was openly admitted. And without understanding the cause-and-effect relationships inherent in the Soviet economy, it is impossible to predict what direction to move forward in. In this scenario, the search for the resolution of contradictions was based on the way they were resolved in the bourgeois world. The attempt to resolve the existing contradictions using market methods led to the restoration of capitalism.

The Soviet Union is dead, yet supporters of socialism nowadays prefer to stick to the old saying: "Of the dead nothing but good is to be said." However, for the sake of future generations, who will face the challenge of becoming the new builders of communist society, the Soviet past must be dissected in the most ruthless manner, all the boils of the Soviet economy must be opened, and such things are usually unflattering. For if we are Communists, we have only one right - we must tell the truth, no matter how harsh it may be; there is no point in being afraid of what the liberal milieu will think of us. Let them say whatever they please, we will simply follow our own path.

The proposed essays do not portray the Soviet economy through rose-colored glasses. I therefore wish to avoid some misunderstandings beforehand. I have nothing against any particular Soviet leader, whether he was a member of the Central Committee of the Party or the Politburo, or a minister, or a representative of the State Planning Committee, or a simple factory director. For me, they are just faces in which economic categories are personified. In my view, the development of Soviet society is a natural-historical process, so no individual person can be held responsible for everything that took place in Soviet society. People acted upon whatever conditions dictated to them.

After giving lectures on the Soviet economy, people ask a lot of questions, but among them the most common are:

1) How, under such a flawed economic system, were we able to accomplish so much, transforming backward Russia into an industrially developed Soviet Union?

2) Were the economic problems due to sabotage?

The answer to the first question is simple. No one diminishes the achievements of the Soviet Union, and I am proud to have lived and worked in that country. Despite all the flaws, we have really achieved a lot, but, as an aircraft designer and economist Oleg Antonov rightly noted back in the 60s, how many more peaks we could conquer, if it were not for the existing shortcomings in economic practice. Today we can add to this: not only would we have reached new heights, we would not find ourselves today at a broken trough, trying to solve the problem of how to start building socialism again.

The answer to the second question is not so simple; each class of Soviet society had its own logic and if you start accusing someone of being a pest, you will have to accuse everyone. In the essays I have tried to show by virtue of what objective circumstances certain deeds of people were done. At the same time, I ask you to take into account in advance that the Soviet economy is full of absurdities and paradoxes, which sometimes seem irrational and contrary to common sense.

In our society, we are all looking for an answer to Herzen's question, "who is to blame?". It is not necessary to look for who is an apostate from Marxism, and there is no need to look for what has departed from Marx's theory in the cause of building socialism. The question, "who and what is to blame?" is rhetorical. The whole course of Soviet history is in accordance with the laws of Marx's theory. Marxism is the theory of the general laws of the development of society. But it also includes a specific theory of the development of capitalist society and the creation of a future society as a way of resolving the contradictions of capitalism. Everything that was done in Soviet history was done in accordance with the general theory of the development of society. And what was not done regarding the theory of the objective laws of communist society development, there were simply no conditions for that. At first, everything was determined by the level of development of productive forces, then by the established relations of production. Liberals of all sorts claim that the demise of Soviet society proved the utopianism of Marxism. In fact, on the contrary, Soviet history has proven Marxism to be right.

Back in the discussions of the 50s and 60s, Evald Ilyenkov wrote a letter to economists in which he expressed an interesting thought. He argued that many economists knew Marx's "Das Kapital" almost by heart, but none of them had been able to study the Soviet economy itself on the basis of their knowledge of "Das Kapital". The whole misfortune of Soviet science was that economists sought to apply "Das Kapital" by simply quoting individual fragments of the text. Typically, quotations were and still are used to prove a certain point of view. Some prove their opinion by relying on some quotes, their opponents use other quotes to refute the former and prove a different view of the issue. All of them are swinging quotes from the classics around as if they were sabers. To conclude Soviet reality from Marx's quotations without a real awareness of Soviet practice is simply a rejection of a materialist understanding of historical processes.

I have attempted to use the following method given in "Das Kapital". Initially, the simplest form of the plan is derived, which, like a commodity for the capitalist economy, is a cell of the Soviet economy. The simplest formula for a plan is expressed by the following equation:

X rubles = Y commodity A

(X being the amount of rubles and Y the real quantity of commodity of a certain quality A).

This is a comparison of the planned target in monetary terms with the created value of the produced commodity. In this very cell lay all the contradictions of the Soviet economy. The further narration shows the progression of the contradictions embedded in the plan. Quotation is also used, though not as an argument for proof, but rather as an illustration of what is being said.

This research aims to provide a different, distinct vision of the causes for the failure of socialism in the USSR, based on the internal contradictions of Soviet planning. The paper will take the form of short essays set out in a certain logical sequence. The essays will be posted as they are written. And one more quick note. In these abstracts posted online I do not footnote the literature used. But these essays will be the basis for the printed edition, in which all necessary references and sources will be made.