[Marxism] [ Marxism] Inflation Delivers a Blow to Vietnamâ?Ts Spirits

[Shane Mage]

On Aug 27, 2008, at 9:25 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Shane Mage wrote:
>> NEP was a "retreat" only from the siege economy called "war  
>> communism"
>> and from the illusions grasped at by many Bolsheviks (Bukharin and
>> Preobrazhensky foremost among them) that this siege economy
>> represented the beginning of a communist society.
>
> It is more accurate to say that both War Communism and the NEP were
> *forced* on the infant USSR.
The "forcing" was very different in the two cases.  War Communism was  
forced on the besieged infant Soviet Republic (USSR had not yet been  
formed) by the immediate contingencies of counterrevolution and  
foreign invasion.  NEP was "forced" by the absolute impossibility of  
continuing a siege economy under peacetime conditions.

> The first policy was dictated by the need
> to enforce a draconian production system during a civil war.
It would be better to say that War Communism was dictated by  
bankruptcy and the consequent need to confiscate grain from the  
peasants in order to feed the cities and the army.  But the  
Bolsheviks' delusion, the doctrine promulgated in "The ABCs of  
Communism," was that it provided a primitive basis on which a  
socialist society could be built (with, of course, the indispensable  
and impossible unilateral transfers of wealth from their fantasy-list  
of new socialist regimes in war-devastated Europe).

> The second  policy was dictated by the need to recover after the  
> immense human and  infrastructure losses from that war...
Actually, NEP was "dictated" by the realities of peasant Russia--which  
is why it was the program originally envisaged by the first Soviet  
government.  The victory of socialist revolutions in Europe would not  
have obviated the need for it in the least  as long as Russia remained  
a backward peasant society.  The Lenin/Trotsky conception of socialist  
construction in the USSR was premised on the continuation of NEP  
(market economy with the "commanding heights" constituted as state- 
capitalist "trusts" controlled by the proletarian Soviet Republic) for  
the entire epoch *following* recovery (which in fact was complete by  
1925) from the devastation of the imperialist and civil wars.  The  
program of the Opposition (except maybe Zinoviev and his acolytes) was  
not against NEP at any time--recognizing that NEP could evolve toward  
socialism or toward capitalism, the Left Opposition advanced the  
socialist direction and the Stalinist apparatus the capitalist  
direction until Stalin triumphed and sent NEP (together with the "old  
bolsheviks") "to the devil."


Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to  
be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos