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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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