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On Bureaucratic Collectivism
Barry Finger
[from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 23, Summer 1997]
Barry Finger is a member of the New Politics editorial
board. His last article on this subject, "Was Russia a
Workers' State?" appeared in Volume V, No. 2, Winter 1995.
THE WHOLESALE EXTINCTION OF STALINISM FROM THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT
and its dramatic organizational transformation elsewhere has lent
impetus to the resurrection of long dormant anti-statist themes in
the capitalist West. Rather than having the salutary effect of
clearing a path to the Marxian idea of remaking society from below
-- of dispensing with the need for modernizing elites, of
educational dictatorships from on high, and of permanent
dependence on self-perpetuating bureaucracies -- the demise of
Stalinism has had the corrosive consequence of thoroughly
discrediting both revolutionary change and socialist aspiration
itself. That this is so testifies to just how tightly identified
Stalinism has been in the popular mind with revolutionary
socialism, and how socialism itself has been seen as having
maintained a diluted Western expression in the social-democratic
welfare state. However unwelcome, this consequence can not be said
to have been unanticipated. For whatever else so murderously
separated capitalism from Stalinism, they remained unified both in
their overarching fear of the revolutionary, democratic ideals
which gave birth to the Russian revolution and to a working class
whose latent power, once awakened, threatens the continuation of
minority class rule, no matter the form. The opprobrium with which
socialism is now so deeply stained is the unsavory dividend of
decades of Stalinist ideological collaboration with the
housebroken legions of the western intelligentsia -- both of the
right and "left-wing" variety -- ever eager to adorn the latest
Stalinist outrage with the patina of socialism.
In Neither Capitalism nor Socialism,* a volume painstakingly put
together from obscure journals and bulletins now virtually
unattainable, Ernest Haberkern and Arthur Lipow introduce and
place into political context the emergence of a unique and
dissident political and intellectual current from the Trotskyist
movement which, from its inception, wrestled with the issues that
shaped and defined the past 60 years of world history. The book is
divided into four sections which roughly correspond to the
political chronology of "bureaucratic collectivism" from its
embryonic beginnings. It ranges from the rejoinders to Leon
Trotsky by James Burnham and French Trotskyist Yves Craipeau,
through the conquest of new political and theoretical departures
against the backdrop of the Hitler-Stalin Pact World War II and
the post-war extension of Stalinism throughout Eastern Europe and
China. Written from a revolutionary socialist perspective, it
contains contributions from Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Dwight
Macdonald, Joseph Carter and Jack Brad. In their introduction,
Haberkern and Lipow assess the significance of bureaucratic
collectivism -- a third form society, neither capitalist nor
socialist -- not only in historical perspective, that is, in its
Stalinist form, but as a continuing challenge for socialism in the
emerging post-Cold War world.
The Yugoslav revolutionary Ante Ciliga expressed the problem in
its full profundity.
The enigma of the Russian revolution that humanity and
the international workers' movement must solve is
exactly this: how has it come about that all that
constitutes the October revolution has been entirely
abolished, while its outward forms have been retained;
that the exploitation of workers and peasants have been
brought back to life without reviving private
capitalists and landowners; that a revolution, begun in
order to abolish the exploitation of man by man, has
ended by installing a new type of exploitation.
Others, including Ciliga offered explanations and some in the
narrowest and most formal sense approached political conclusions
arrived at by the Workers Party-Independent Socialist League
(WP-ISL), from whose pages or under whose inspiration, this book
is largely culled. Trotsky himself came to the precipice,
conceding that the trajectory of revolutionary degeneration might
well hurl society back beyond capitalism to a new form of class
slavery. The question of whether the burgeoning Soviet bureaucracy
was best understood as "class" or "caste" was ultimately fended
off by Trotsky who anticipated a revolutionary upsurge at the end
of World War II which would reduce the issue to one of historic
curiosity without practical significance.
This was a dodge which could not be sustained by the end of the
war. A sober response to Ciliga's question required transcending
the type of analysis by platitude which satisfied itself by
characterizing Stalinism as merely a form of "totalitarianism" and
that explained its genesis by the outcome of "crimes and
excesses," or "mistaken policies" that were the inevitable result
of immutable historic phenomena. The theory of bureaucratic
collectivism argued, to the contrary, that the tendencies which
give rise to this new form of class society, once understood,
could only be combated and eradicated by a self-organized and
politically conscious working class; that socialism, in other
words, cannot be achieved without the full and active
participation of the working class in building its new social
order. And this is what distinguishes the precursors of the theory
such as Bruno Rizzi or James Burnham -- who insisted with a dogged
determination reinforced by their own rich but nonetheless
one-dimensional insights into the phenomenon, that the historic
moment for socialism had passed -- from the independent socialist
tendency of the WP-ISL for whom bureaucratic collectivism became
the anteroom to a reorientation of socialist theory. In the hands
of the latter, bureaucratic collectivism facilitated the cleansing
or jettisoning of the most mistaken views of revolutionary
socialism and became a vehicle for the forceful reassertion and
amplification of that cardinal principle of Marxism, namely, the
fundamental inseparability of socialism and democracy, and for the
repositioning of that understanding at the very heart of the
revolutionary socialist program.1
It is moreover to the lasting credit of the WP-ISL that they drew
an understanding from this premise that the production relations
of a state collectivism without democratic feedback from below,
that is of totalitarian collectivism, would eventually engender
insurmountable impediments to the continued viability of the
system itself. That they were at first overzealous in this regard,
believing that Stalinism was nationally confined, does not detract
from the essential breakthrough provided by the theory. It does
place them light-years ahead of that long list of learned folk who
saw, for good or ill, humanity's future tied to one variant or
another of bureaucratic collectivism.
Other tendencies and political currents on the left, such as
social democracy and "orthodox" Trotskyism, also profess hatred of
Stalinism, but lack even the most rudimentary understanding of it.
They have remained, at best, non-Stalinist, powerless to
contribute -- much less enrich -- a broader anti-Stalinist
current. It is precisely in their lack of understanding of
bureaucratic collectivism that they remain, for all their
otherwise demonstrably robust distinctions, symmetrical political
entities. It is not merely that both have historically "defended"
socialism by acting as ideological agents of reconciliation
between the Western working classes and the ruling classes of one
of the two contending imperialist forces. That they also did so,
despite urging the working classes to remain politically
independent of the Stalinist parties and movements, where this was
still possible, was equally an imperative of organizational
self-justification as it was a symptom of anti-Stalinist insight
and therefore no more laudable for that pretext alone.
THE LARGER ROOT OF THE NON-STALINIST LEFT'S ideological confusion,
however, lies rather in the differing weight assigned by it and
the independent socialist tendency to the connection of socialism
and democracy. Irresolution at this fundamental level has time and
again rendered the non-Stalinist left ideologically susceptible to
a weakened contagion of the same strain of bureaucratic
collectivism which it opposes in its most virulent form. This
manifests itself in the continuing "discovery" of some purported
underlying socialistic dynamic to existing class societies as
justification for their respective political capitulations: social
democracy identified this momentum in the growth of public
enterprises under capitalism, as well as in the state management
of demand and the broad administrative regulation of corporate
behavior; Trotskyism 2 (and the Stalinoid wing of social
democracy, for that matter) in the enlargement of nationalized
industry and state planning under Stalinism. Either way, socialism
is found to have emerged through bureaucratic labyrinths, behind
the backs and without the active stewardship of the working class
-- indeed regardless of whether the working class, however large
its social weight, plays any active political role whatsoever in
society or is even, for that matter, the beneficiary of the most
elementary of political rights.
The collapse of state collectivization in the East and its
parallel shrinkage in the West is of comparatively recent
circumstance. As a social tendency, however, the rise of the
bureaucracy as a third social force in contemporary society had
its roots in the mounting inability of inter- and post-war
capitalist accumulation to maintain social cohesiveness. In the
Stalinist social system, bureaucratic collectivism emerged full
blown from the defeat of the Russian working class and the
annihilation of the Bolshevik party. It was historically rooted in
the very backwardness of Russian capitalism, yet had as its
precondition the successful revolutionary destruction of
capitalist power. But where a doddering capitalism was limping
along -- still profitable perhaps, but plainly incapable of
maintaining social coherence on its own accord -- reliance on
bureaucratic crutches was a painful yet unavoidable concession to
reality.
This social tendency forced its way through different channels
than those experienced in Russia. Clearly bureaucratic intrusions
especially in post-war European society, but paralleled by the
burgeoning permanent arms economy and nascent welfare statism of
America, were historic innovations signifying something other than
the mere bolstering of capitalism. These departures inoculated
capitalism with the germ-cells of a unique and unprecedented set
of social relations. Personnel from the disintegrating managerial
and administrative strata of capitalism -- enlisted both to
oversee the state sector and to reassure and thereby fracture the
resistance of capital to it -- merged with breakaway sections of
the labor bureaucracy. Superimposed and crowding against the
dynamic of capital self-expansion, there was now an ever-expanding
state bureaucracy, drawing its strength increasingly at the
expense of the two contending classes and against the social
alternatives which they represented.
This project assumed a variety of national experience, from overt
statist planning in France, to the functional merger of the state
with leading cartels in Japan. National peculiarities aside, the
mixed economies found their common attribute in the permanently
sustained increase of the proportionate size of government
expenditure. This gave the state a propulsive role not only in
determining the volume, but in shaping the composition of overall
demand. Demand management at the state level fundamentally altered
certain characteristics of the business cycle and, moreover,
suggested a back door by which it could begin to supplant the
capital market as the primary allocative mechanism of investment.
This was a tendency not only foreseen, but welcomed by Keynes as
foreshadowing the "euthanasia of the rentier."
Haberkern and Lipow unfortunately locate the bureaucratic
collectivist inroads to capitalism elsewhere -- not in the rise of
an ever more autonomous state bureaucracy, but in the corporate
form itself. This is a relapse into Burnham's theory in the
Managerial Revolution and a retreat from the analysis that stems
directly from Marx. For the latter, the modern joint stock company
is notable precisely because shareholders collectivize risk and
profit and thereby, by degrees, negate the anarchy of the
marketplace. This expresses the self-collectivizing tendencies
within a healthy and dynamic capitalism. It is a step further in
organizational modification well beyond the earlier transformation
of the capitalist pricing system into a redistributive mechanism
allocating surplus-value in accordance with average profit rates.
By these means, capitalism, in its corporate form, is able to
vastly augment its ability to accumulate, to rationalize its
existing production facilities and to avail itself of
technological advances which, together, marked capitalist
production as truly synonymous with mass production. The corporate
bureaucracy, moreover, fails to evolve in the direction of class
autonomy, because as soon as it acquires capital it is reabsorbed
into the preexisting network of social relations and is subject to
the same social parameters as the organizational property form
which gave birth to it.
THOSE COLLECTIVIZING MEASURES, ON THE OTHER HAND, WHICH AROSE from
the need to hold a disintegrating capitalism together -- which
were not, in other words, an organic outgrowth of capitalist
accumulation itself, but of its mounting difficulties --
represented an internal adaptation and concession to a rising
third social force operating on a world scale. The very permanence
of supplementary state interventions signified a tacit
acknowledgement of the immanence of crisis conditions simmering
below the surface of post-war prosperity. But because the state
sector is so completely entangled with the modern market economy,
it is impossible, as a practical matter, to anticipate what
adjustments a shrinkage in the state sector could generate in any
concrete situation to offset the slack in demand. Nevertheless,
the continued recourse of capitalism to the adjunct of a mixed
economy signifies a continued process of internal decay, of a
capitalism unable to utilize the very economic resources that it,
itself, generates. Even in the midst of relative affluence,
American capitalism has proven chronically incapable of solving
the economic question for millions of workers, above all for black
and minority communities which continue to exist in a Lazarus-like
economic twilight.
The problem is that although state production detracts from
capital accumulation, it is also possible that economic activity
would be even more depressed in the absence of state-induced
production. This is because when the state borrows idle capital it
mobilizes assets which would not be otherwise used and absorbs
them into its own sphere. Markets are thereby cleared, but without
system-wide accumulation and, moreover, without the imperative
improvement in overall profitability previously required for
self-resolution in the classical form of capitalist crises. The
state simply places into circulation a chain of inputs from
intermediary suppliers that can now be individually realized as
profits through the issuance of state contracts. State activity,
under such circumstances, extends economic activity beyond the
point where it is capitalistically justifiable. Any future
deterioration in the level of state demand can then only be offset
by an invigorated accumulation process if the conditions of
profitability have already been reestablished; if the previously
existing idle capital could now, in other words, be
capitalistically employed. Should real accumulation actually
resume this would be attributable not to the actions of the state,
either in priming the pump or in relinquishing its control over
economic resources, but because excess capital values have
previously been purged and an overall improvement in the
extraction of surplus value has already been attained -- in short,
because a massive restructuring of the system has improved the
prospects for self-expansion on the part of the surviving capital
values.
THE state bureaucracy in modern capitalism, as opposed to the
corporate bureaucracy, has built into it an autonomizing dynamic.
This is entirely distinct from Bonapartism, to which the
capitalist class occasionally seeks recourse in periods of
revolutionary turmoil and which may, in its extremes, attain
political independence. This independence does not tend to class
autonomy insofar as the Bonapartist bureaucracy does not struggle
to define a separate economic role for itself in society. Its
functions are confined to reinforcing and enhancing the repressive
functions of the capitalist state -- functions which may require
the curtailment of political rights even for bourgeois parties,
but not the abridgement of bourgeois property rights, beyond the
costs of repression itself. This engorged bureaucracy is an ad hoc
inconvenience for capitalism to be dispensed with when its
services are no longer required, as illustrated most recently by
the grisly Chilean experience.
The modern administrative state bureaucracy, on the other hand, is
a permanent feature of capitalism, grounded in the fundamental
economic deficiencies of capitalism rather than in any acute
political crisis. This state bureaucracy, even if marketing no
values of its own, has no means of exchange other than what it
expropriates from the private sector through its taxing or
borrowing powers. (And, insofar as loans are payment through
installment, debt retirement presupposes additional future taxes
on capital.) For what appears to be accumulation on the part of
capitalists operating under state contracts is in fact realized
through the withdrawal of surplus value from the system as a
whole, that is by deductions from the accumulation fund which
would otherwise be available to expand the two major departments
of capitalist production. The fundamental distinction between
capitalist production and economic activity per se is thereby
effaced. The difference between outright nationalization which,
under some circumstances, can be clearly seen as anti-capitalist,
and the massive state interventionism undertaken by the
bureaucracy is therefore, too, an artificial one. Although clouded
by the formal change in property relations, the fact remains that
state-induced economic activity is fundamentally anti-capitalist
in scope -- even if it provides a measure of economic
stabilization -- without being socialist in content. The mixed
economy may have been conceived, and is still touted, solely as a
full-employment program realized through state intervention to
enhance the private enterprise system. But the price paid for this
temporary stability is an entrenched state apparatus which secures
and expands its control over economic resources bureaucratically
and wields that control both without opportunity for direct,
private ownership and without relinquishing that control to
democratic participation from below.
As long as capital is accumulating, the state can expand
proportionally and, in tandem with the private sector, lift the
economy to levels approaching full capacity employment. In such
periods of relative prosperity, the tendency of the state sector
to encroach beyond the established baseline level of economic
involvement remains latent. So too, the revolving door that exists
between the upper tier of state bureaucracy and ever more
lucrative positions in the corporate bureaucracy acts as a
retardant to the evolution of a solidified, institutional class
consciousness on the part of state administrators. This is
reinforced by the political control exercised by the bourgeois
parties over large swaths of discretionary fiscal policy.
Nevertheless, "welfare statism," as such, certainly became the
expression, if not the ideology, around which this new
class-in-the-making began to coopt and dominate mass movements for
change, promising identification with labor and reformist
aspirations without actually strengthening the forces of
opposition. Their support was reconfigured, not as active
participants for social progress, but solely as the objects of
bureaucratic action. Welfare statism offered the prospect of
countering, as if class consciously, the weight of big business
and big labor in the "public" interest, an interest which it so
fortuitously claimed to embody. On this basis it continually
expanded its mass base by uniting a cross section of class and
community interest groups into unified patronage constituencies,
whose continued prosperity was dependent on a corresponding growth
of bureaucratic influence and power. Yet its mental horizons
remained remarkably limited, as evidenced by its glaring inability
to definitively advance the national integration of administrative
structures.
With the end of post-war prosperity, a prosperity limited in
capitalist terms both by relatively low profit rates and
dependency on comparatively large doses of state-induced activity,
the incipient tendency of the state to expand its consumption at
the expense of capital accumulation became manifest. Yet because
the inherent tendency of profit to fall under capitalism must be
contravened by ever more feverish rates of accumulation, the
expansion of the state sector in times of crisis threatens to
intensify the breakdown of the system. The system, therefore,
began to come face to face with a new social dilemma: not only was
there a crisis of capitalism, but there was a crisis of the mixed
economy itself -- of the interpenetration of two competing and, at
length, contradictory economic dynamics at work in modern society.
For state activity can at length stave off the cumulative momentum
of economic contraction solely by imposing a barrier against the
very massacre of values, including the value of labor-power,
otherwise needed to restore profitability. But circumventing the
purgative process that such a deep economic contraction would
entail requires a relentless diversion of excess, non-profitable
capital to the state sector, a diversion so massive as to threaten
an overturn of the established social equilibrium. The elements of
the predicament began to unravel in unmistakable terms: either the
ever-evolving submission of the existing economy to bureaucratic
direction under the auspices of the state or the decisive
reassertion of the value-profit relationships of the market sector
over a drastically reduced and hence manageable "public" sphere.
To arrest the decay of the private enterprise system would require
nothing less than the total overhaul and reversal of the general
developmental trend of post-war capitalism. To be sure, there was
always a latent tendency residing in the mass base of capitalism
to halt and revoke the reliance on stabilizing social forces from
without its ranks for a return to traditional forms of repression
and market discipline. This sentiment was usually confined to the
margins of capitalist parties or beyond. The "Republican
revolution," which actually has its roots in the Reagan
Administration and its counterpart in the Thatcher regime, is the
crowning achievement of a massive, corporately financed
ideological retrenchment. Business sponsored think-tanks now
offered the hat-in-hand intellectual set, the reserve army of
academia, the very security so seldom available through
traditional academic pursuits. It is through this conduit that
capitalist reaction was sanitized and lifted from relative
obscurity to new-found prominence. The taxpaying host, or some
equally potent yet empty abstraction, which the bureaucracy
supposedly "exploited" finally became the rallying point of
reactionary resentment. The aims of this burgeoning "revolution"
were quite simply to replicate through internalization the very
dynamic purportedly at work internationally. Yet, this lusty
second childhood that capitalism has now apparently lit upon
remains recklessly oblivious to the sobering paradox that the
collapse of bureaucratic collectivism in the formerly Stalinist
nations has yet to offer the West any tangible commercial momentum
to displace its own state sector through the export of surplus
capital abroad.
Despite the right's scapegoating of the usual litany of social
culprits for the hated rise of the welfare state -- in a campaign
of demonization which, in its vehemence, has brought to the fore
every atavistic and retrograde prejudice and paranoid delusion in
the American psyche -- the fact remains that the rise of the state
bureaucracy finds its reason, above all, in the malfunction of
private capital production. As a form of collectivization conjured
up against a disintegrating capitalist society, the mixed economy
has provided the system with a degree of social cohesion purchased
on the cheap. For the welfare state dissipated and diffused the
oppositional tendencies of the exploited and oppressed, tendencies
already long weakened and disoriented by the pall cast by
Stalinism over insurgent movements for change, and did so without
actual redress of the fundamental social problems which it, too,
proved at length powerless to overcome. For this reason alone, the
existence of bureaucratic collectivism, although perhaps not in
its Stalinist form, will forever be tethered to the continued
existence of capitalism in decline. What we are witnessing today
is merely the forced renegotiation of the terms of engagement.
BUREAUCRATIC COLLECTIVISM IS SOCIALISM'S DOPPLEGÄNGER. It is
a distorted reflection of the fact that real social advance
requires some form of collectivization. Where the working class
cannot organize its forces to overthrow capitalism and establish
the free rule of labor, bureaucracy invariably arises as an
independent, substitute social force. The state bureaucracies,
Stalinist or otherwise, can address the unengaged historic tasks
of labor, but only with reactionary, anti-socialist consequences.
The 20th century has verified, in horrific detail, the fundamental
truth of that proposition by the manifest failure of these forces,
either alone or in combination, to resolve the most pressing needs
of humanity. The studies assembled by Haberkern and Lipow which
anticipated this conclusion stemmed from an examination of the
"Russian question." The tragic failure of a workers' revolution
demanded clarification of the fundamental propositions and
purposes of revolutionary socialism with a sweep and urgency that
few other issues could claim. Rare were those in the broad
revolutionary movement able to rise to the challenge. This
contribution from those who did constitutes a unique and enduring
addition to the arsenal of socialism.
NOTES
* Ernest E. Haberkern and Arthur Lipow, editors, Neither
Capitalism nor Socialism, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands,
1996. return
1. In a lamentable subtext to this volume the editors seek to
separate Max Shachtman, the leading personality of the
WP-ISL, from the independent socialist heritage. It is true
that Shachtman did not initially develop the most far-seeing
or consistent version of the bureaucratic collectivist
theory. That was done by Joseph Carter, a brilliant
theoretician in the early Trotskyist movement. But it must
also be noted that the "bowdlerization" of Shachtman's
article, "Is Russia a Workers' State?", that the editors make
so much of, cannot simply be attributed to his later
political collapse. The essay first appeared in that form,
cleansed of its semi-Trotskyist conclusions, in the
January-February 1952 issue of The New International. It was
modified openly, and with an editor's introduction to avert
any confusion as to what the movement stood for. Where
Shachtman's strengths lay and remain overlooked by the
editors' unease with his final, ambiguous legacy was in his
development, amplification and application of the theory. It
is not merely that he defended the heritage of the Russian
revolution and "debunked the claims of several apologists for
Stalinism such as Isaac Deutscher," but that he did so while
trailblazing an independent socialist or third camp
formulation of that defense. That is also what the essays
assembled in the Bureaucratic Revolution reflect, and what
the Struggle for the New Course is all about. Third camp
socialism, moreover, provided the context for his remarkable
articles on the colonial and national liberation problems
which, in turn, became the springboard for his spirited
opposition to the competing imperialist camps during World
War II and to the post-war division of Europe. The theory of
bureaucratic collectivism alone made possible the view best
articulated by Shachtman that the Communist political parties
were in but not of the labor movement. And it was this
insight that alerted him to other, social democratic roads to
bureaucratic collectivism. While the editors provide some
worthwhile insights, they should be augmented with "The Two
Deaths of Max Shachtman" by Julius Jacobson which appeared in
the Winter 1973 issue of this journal and Peter Drucker's Max
Shachtman and His Left. return
2. It is also of note that all the weaknesses of Trotsky's
theory are augmented in the state-capitalist theory
identified with Tony Cliff, leading theoretician of the
British Trotskyist movement. Here the Stalinist bureaucracy
is assigned the task of completing the historic mission of
the bourgeoisie, because the state ownership of the means of
production purportedly gives a "tremendous lever" to the
development of the productive forces. This preserves
Trotsky's earliest theory that the bureaucracy represented a
centrist, i.e., pro-capitalist wing and splices it to the
later interpretations dominant in Trotskyist circles which
invented the "transitional" character of Stalinist society as
a bridge between capitalism and socialism. Thus, far from
casting society back to a new form of barbarism, the
Cliffites held Stalinism as tracking the highest pinnacle of
capitalist development. It followed that the Stalinist
parties were viewed merely as a version of social democracy,
or labor reformism and a more left-wing version of the
species at that. This melange has been offered as a
corrective to the "supra-historical" theory of bureaucratic
collectivism. Needless to say, history has been less than
kind to this theory on every account. (See "The Theory of
Bureaucratic Collectivism: A Critique," reprinted in Neither
Washington nor Moscow, Bookmarks, 1982.)
It would take this essay far afield from the theme under
consideration to deal comprehensively with the theory of
state capitalism, one of the most perennially stultifying and
disorienting explanations of Stalinism. Marxism is an
instrument for interpreting living reality and as such its
propositions are provisional, meaning that they must be
tested, modified and improved as required by evolving
circumstances. State capitalism instead reduces Marxism to
dogma whereby the material means of production under
Stalinism, a form of society unanticipated by Marx, are
treated as capital. They acquire this attribute not because
they express a definite social relation between specific
classes expressed through the instrumentality of things --
this after all being the method of Capital and presupposes,
reasonably enough, private ownership, i.e. the existence of
capitalists -- but because the accumulation of the means of
production are a precondition of expanded reproduction, and
capitalism was seen by Marx as that form of expanded
reproduction that prepares society for socialism. QED
Stalinism equals capitalism. Any other conclusion would,
according to the Cliff church, render "Marxism as a method,
as a guide for the proletariat as the subject of historical
change (...) superfluous, meaningless." return
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