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Published by EH.NET (January 2003) 
 
Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, _Class Theory and History: 
Capitalism and Communism in the USSR_. New York and London: Routledge, 
2002. xix + 353 pp. $85 (hardback), ISBN: 0-415-93317-X; $24.95 
(paperback), ISBN: 0-415-93318-8. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Mark Harrison, Department of Economics, University 
of Warwick. <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
This book has twin objectives. Parts I and II ("Communism" and "State 
Capitalism") lay out the authors' theory of political economy and social 
relations. Part III, which is more than half the book in length, then 
applies the framework to "The Rise and Fall of the USSR." 
 
The book offers three main outcomes. First, at the core of Resnick and 
Wolff's understanding of what drives any society are the mechanisms and 
channels by which it appropriates and distributes the surplus product. 
This, they argue, follows the Marxian tradition. From here, they criticize 
a number of alternative existing approaches, some that claim to be Marxian 
and some that do not. The alternatives, they believe, place too much 
emphasis on the distribution of power and not enough on the distribution of 
resources. The problem that they find with starting from the distribution 
of power is that you can't pin it down empirically; when you look closely 
at the facts power turns out always to be diffused through society. 
Instead, they prefer to try to pin down how the surplus product is 
appropriated and distributed. 
 
Second, Resnick and Wolff categorize various mechanisms for appropriating 
and distributing the surplus product; most important from the point of view 
of the book are "ancient," feudal, capitalist, socialist, and communist 
mechanisms. They use this framework to classify various kinds of 
institutions that existed in Russia and the Soviet Union before 1917, 
during the 1920s, the 1930s, the postwar period, and after the Soviet 
collapse. 
 
Third, while properly impressed by the sheer variety and intermingling of 
institutions of different kinds in all their phases of development, the 
authors conclude that the dominant mode of production in Russia and the 
Soviet Union throughout the twentieth century was capitalist: plain 
capitalist before 1917 and after 1991, and state-capitalist in between. 
Thus while political power certainly changed hands during the Bolshevik 
Revolution and when the Soviet  
Union fell, one way and then another, the basic mode of production did not 
change and so less changed in an underlying sense than might appear at 
first sight. 
 
Does Soviet history truly bear out the authors' theory? I must say yes, but 
in a sense for which they may not thank me: in my view the theory is 
trivial. The authors correctly wish to avoid the traps of determinism, and 
specifically those of the economic kind. Many Marxists of earlier 
generations based deterministic predictions on economic trends of one kind 
or another that eventually came to nought. Instead of determinism Resnick 
and Wolff offer the  
Althusserian concept of "overdetermination": "all aspects of society 
condition and shape one another" (p. 9). The result is that anything can 
lead to anything, or not, as the case may be (p. 78). Consequently no 
predictions are possible since anything or nothing can happen. A theory 
that is consistent with anything happening clearly cannot be refuted from 
history; in Resnick and Wolff's hands the purpose of historical analysis is 
only to illustrate the theory, not to subject it to any potentially 
damaging test. 
 
Thus the book contains many statements that look substantial at first sight 
and then seem to dissolve into word play. For example the authors state 
that the "history of Russia was shaped, in part, by the specific and 
ever-changing class positions occupied and negotiated by its people" (p. 
146). Does "in part" mean a lot or a little? Why doesn't history shape 
class as well as class shaping history? Is the influence of class on 
history greater than the influence of history on class? How can we tell, 
and what difference does it make? 
 
The authors' criticism of power-based analysis seems to me to be somewhat 
lazy. They view political power as a quicksilver that is always everywhere 
at once in society, and therefore nowhere in particular. On Russia before 
the revolution they write approvingly (p. 162) of the idea that "the 
czarist state was less controlling than controlled by Russian society." On 
the 1930s (p. 119) they criticize the idea that Stalin held a "monopoly on 
power" or brought about a "revolution from above"; here they refer to the 
recent "revisionist" historical literature that shows how there was also a 
"revolution 'from below' in the precise sense of all sorts of powers 
wielded by diverse groups of workers, intellectuals, planners, managers, 
and others -- powers with which Stalin had to contend and compromise." In a 
trivial sense this must be true: political power is never unlimited. But in 
a narrower sense it is simply false. While Stalin generally took decisions 
rationally, that is to say, taking into account the opinions and 
information provided by others, the research of R.W. Davies, Oleg 
Khlevniuk, and others has shown clearly that from 1932 onwards Stalin 
ceased to have to persuade or compromise with others to reach a decision 
and his decisions, once issued, were never challenged. While the political 
power of Stalin's successors was less untrammeled, general secretaries 
after Stalin continued to retain extraordinary personal prerogatives, for 
example, over the allocation of resources to the "military-industrial 
complex." 
 
Perhaps Resnick and Wolff have a fair point in the following sense: some 
kinds of power matter more than others, and what they would like us to 
focus on is the power to appropriate and distribute resources. The Soviet 
surplus product was produced in state enterprises, but where exactly was it 
appropriated and distributed? Their answer (p. 166) is that this happened 
in Vesenkha, the "Supreme Council of National Economy," established in 1923 
to administer state industry and "soon reorganised as the Council of 
Ministers." Its leaders were the "first receivers and distributors of the 
surpluses produced by industrial laborers" and "functioned similarly to a 
centralized board of directors of a private capitalist industrial combine." 
There is a factual error: Vesenkha was a ministry and its successor 
organization was not the Council of People's Commissars (from 1946 
Ministers) which had existed from the first days of the October Revolution, 
but separate ministries of heavy and light industry and logging established 
in 1932. Setting that aside, the authors are still wrong: the most 
important decisions about the Soviet surplus product, those that fixed the 
annual budgets for investment and defense, were always taken at the very 
vertex of the system by the general secretary in the Politburo with no more 
than a handful of senior Politburo. Moreover this was no "board of 
directors" that, in the worst run of capitalist enterprises, must 
ultimately account for its decisions to the shareholders, the markets, or 
the courts. 
 
The evidence base of the work is remarkable for its breadth, yet still 
deficient. I will give two examples. First, Resnick and Wolff claim that 
the burdens of taxation on "the desperately poor mass of individuals" had 
Tsarist society on the edge of revolt, and this resulted in a growing 
reliance on deficit finance in the "last decades" (pp. 160-61). I know of 
no serious historical support for the former claim and the latter is plain 
wrong. From the 1880s onwards, if we exclude the years of the war with 
Japan, which was financed by borrowing on orthodox tax-smoothing grounds, 
the reliance of the state budget on loans declined steadily. Similarly in 
relation to the 1920s Resnick and Wolff suggest that adverse terms of trade 
on the rural-urban market deprived farmers of "sufficient revenues to 
secure their conditions of existence," an absurd exaggeration and 
misunderstanding of the true state of affairs. 
 
Second, Resnick and Wolff devote major efforts to trying to track changes 
in the "appropriation and distribution" of the Soviet surplus product that 
resulted from Soviet price policies in the 1920s and collectivization in 
the 1930s, but they are apparently ignorant of the monograph on this topic 
published by A.A. Barsov in 1966, which led to a major controversy among 
western economists and historians, notably James R. Millar, Michael Ellman, 
and Alec Nove. 
 
As a reader, despite being reasonably familiar with the historical 
literature about the Russian and Soviet economies and also with the 
concepts of classical Marxian political economy, I found this book very 
heavy going. On its own this cannot be a criticism: when my first year 
students complain that they have to work hard to learn new concepts I just 
tell them that's why they're at university. In the present case the book 
would benefit from more of the attributes of a good textbook such as 
definitions that are highlighted and cross-referenced. My patience was 
especially taxed by the attempts to mathematize various kinds of budget 
constraints, given in the form of equations yet "the word 'equation' does 
not signal any necessity that ... revenues equal expenditures (p. 179n); 
the symbolization features many weird acronyms and subscripts that have no 
obvious intrinsic meaning and are not indexed anywhere. These are things 
that a good editor should have rooted out. 
 
In summary this is a well-intentioned, complex work that is hard to do 
justice in a short review, but even summary justice must make an attempt at 
balance. The plaudits on the book's back cover describe it as "path 
breaking" ... "Whether one agrees or disagrees ... no future work ... will 
be able to ignore the sheer creative verve and intellectual rigor with 
which [the authors] lay out their arguments." While this reviewer is 
impressed by the efforts put in by the writers and required of the reader, 
the path that has been opened seems to lead nowhere; the rigor is 
superficial and the verve is not enough. 
 
 
Mark Harrison is professor of economics at the University of Warwick and 
honorary senior research fellow of the Centre for Russian and East European 
Studies, University of Birmingham. He is the author of a number of books 
and articles on Soviet economic history including most recently "Coercion, 
Compliance, and the Collapse of the Soviet Command Economy," _Economic 
History Review_, 55(3), 2002, pp. 397-433. 
 
 
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