What Was the USSR? Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value Under State Capitalism

by Aufheben Collective

The Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the USSR as a 'workers' state' has dominated political thinking for more than three generations.

In the past, it seemed enough for communist revolutionaries to define their radical separation with much of the 'left' by denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist.

This is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. To transform society, we not only have to understand what it is, we have to understand how past attempts to transform it failed.

In What Was the USSR?, the Aufheben Collective explores the inadequacies of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state and the various versions of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Russia, Soviet Union

200 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2013

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of four essays (compiled into e-book form by Libcom.org) is a useful and insightful analysis of the political economy of the Soviet Union. Aufheben begin by breaking down notable anti-Stalinist theories, including Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state,” and later Trotskyist theories such as those of Tony Cliff and Hillel Ticktin. They then backtrack and summarize the varied left communist and council communist responses to the Bolshevik program (specifically those of the German-Dutch, Russian, and Italian lefts, all of whom identified the Soviet Union as state capitalist in some way). In each case, they clearly detail the strengths and weaknesses of each theory and contextualize them in relation to the needs and interests of the theorists and parties who developed them. Finally, in part four they advance their own theory of the Soviet Union as a society in transition to capitalism and attempting to bypass the capitalist currents that would otherwise have left Russia a peripheral site of underdevelopment and resource extraction.
The value of these essays is twofold. Firstly, as they argue repeatedly, even today an understanding of what the USSR actually was is of great importance, given the immense impact it had on left-wing and liberation struggles throughout all of the short 20th century. By developing a theory that accounts for both the ways that Soviet society resembled capitalism and the many ways that it did not, Aufheben’s work can help future struggles avoid the pitfalls that befell the USSR and led to its eventual demise.
Of equal importance is the way these essays can serve as a model of a materialist analysis of a historical mode of production. Though dealing with highly abstract concepts and subtle distinctions, Aufheben are consistently clear and concise. Moreover, the process of using Marxist principles to critique a society that claimed to be based on Marxist principles demands rigor and subtlety, both of which Aufheben have in abundance. Their investigation leads them to critically interrogate Marxist commonplaces like the commodity form, use and exchange value, the notion of labor as a commodity, and much more. In most cases they find that the deficiencies in prior theories of the USSR resulted from taking at least one of these concepts at face value and then drawing conclusions based on its presence or lack thereof in the Soviet Union – Aufheben, on the other hand, show that the various forms through which capital is expressed can be alternately highlighted or suppressed without necessarily altering the fundamental cycle of capital’s growth and reinvestment. In the case of the USSR, money and commodities, the means of capital’s circulation, are suppressed in order to facilitate the rapid expansion of a circuit based around the expansion of the actual means of production.
Ultimately, I suspect I will return to these essays many times in the future, both as a useful analysis of the USSR and an instructive example of rigorous theory.

[Charlie Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting left-communist perspective on the USSR. I completely disagree that the USSR was capitalist, but the collective was suprisingly knowledgeable and honest in their depictions of other tendencies. The idea that the USSR was state capitalist is nonsense (as the book argues), but the collective then decided that the way to square that circle was to argue that state capitalism was a transitional form on the road to capitalism. The argument they present is that the endemic waste of the USSR from 1960s-collapse makes it untenable as a form of state capitalism seen as a higher stage of capitalism than free market capitalism, and it also makes it untenable that the USSR was a degenerated workers state (the trotskyist position). But their solution is that it was state capitalist, but not as a higher stage but as a transitional stage on the road to capitalism (the mode of production that the USSR would be emerging from is glossed over). Yet by their own standards this critique doesn’t make any sense: if the endemic waste and inefficiencies of the USSR make it impossible to be a degenerated workers state or state capitalist (both ostensibly higher stages of development than capitalism), how can Russia’s capitalist GDP, which in the immediate post-Soviet era was 1/2 of what it was before the collapse, indicate a higher stage of development? The fall in living standards, wages, even height, all indicate a clear counter revolution and a fall to a lower stage of production, yet this book contends that it was a move toward a higher stage. Definitely worth the read because it’s critiques are informative and worth engaging with but the conclusions reached don’t make any sense.

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

So basically, the gist is that money was closer to food stamps than cash. This also implies that socialism leads to capitalism & that we're still going to be crashing the car into the wall if we follow USSR as a model.