In August 1843, having stepped down as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung and withdrawn to Kreuznach for a few months, Marx settled his accounts once and for all with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It is therefore 122 years since Marx demonstrated how, for Hegel, the family and civil society, from producers of the State, became products of the State or rather of the idea of the State.

‘[T]he conditions are established as the conditioned, the determining as the determined, the producing as the product of its product’. (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).

Contra Hegel, Marx demonstrated in 1843 that ‘family and civil society make themselves into the state’, whereas in 1821 Hegel had defined the relations between State and society in the following way:

‘In contrast with the spheres of private rights and private welfare (the family and civil society), the state is from one point of view an external necessity and their higher authority; its nature is such that their laws and interests are subordinate to it and dependent on it. On the other hand, however, it is the end immanent within them, and its strength lies in the unity of its own universal end and aim with the particular interest of individuals, in the fact that individuals have duties to the state in proportion as they have rights against it’.

Marx begins his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ with an examination of this paragraph; he explains that the State cannot be both an external necessity and an immanent end at the same time. By demonstrating that civil society is the foundation from which the State, an external necessity, arises, he proves that the latter could not develop and separate itself from civil society in order to dominate and oppress it were it not for the fact that civil society is torn apart by class antagonisms; he also proves that the modern State is the apparatus of domination of the class that constitutes the essence of civil society: the bourgeoisie; and within civil society there emerges ‘a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society’.

Marx thus raises the question of the formation of this class, the proletariat:

‘Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation? Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat’ (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction).

Thus Marx demonstrated, in 1844, that the rule of the proletariat would entail the dissolution of the State and civil society, and would give birth to a classless, stateless society.

In 1943, one hundred years after Marx’s definitive refutation of Hegel’s philosophy of right, a collective article by Russian economists was published in the U.S.S.R. entitled: ‘Economic Thought and the Teaching of Political Economy in the U.S.S.R.’ (Cahiers de l’économie soviétique, 1946, No. 4).

In it the Russian economists categorically assert what would become Stalinist dogma: 1) a socialist economy is being built in the U.S.S.R.; 2) under a socialist economy the law of value persists; yet ‘the law of value in a socialist economy is no longer a force that dominates social production, but social production operates according to a plan’.

The law of value is the supreme law of the class that constitutes the very essence of civil society: the bourgeoisie. If the worker reading this finds this hard to believe, let him consider the meticulousness of his employer in cutting his wages or throwing him out onto the street, in order to increase or salvage his profits; let him reflect on the conscientiousness with which his landlord evicts him if he fails to pay his rent, or on the care with which the shopkeeper carries out his daily swindling; well then, this world of trafficking, commerce, and legal fraud is the world in which the law of value reigns.

Marx devoted his magnum opus, Capital, to unravelling the essence of this inverted world in which the law of value reigns. He did not show how values are exchanged, a phenomenon of the utmost interest to the bourgeoisie, for whom this constitutes their principal activity; but he did show how value is produced, and this is of the utmost interest to the workers, for it is precisely their labour that produces all value. In Capital, Marx demonstrates: – that wherever values are exchanged, value valorises itself through the exploitation and growing misery of the workers; – that the extraction of surplus value from the workers, the principle of civil society and the law of value, is protected, perpetuated, and made possible by the force of the bourgeois State. From all this, Marx drew the revolutionary conclusion that the proletariat must first overthrow the bourgeois State by force and replace it with its own State: that it must therefore establish itself as the ruling class. Marx goes on to demonstrate that the proletariat can only establish itself as the ruling class in order to put an end to the extraction of surplus value and, consequently, to the exchange of values, to the law of value. Once this function has been fulfilled, the proletarian State will dissolve, and so too will civil society, torn apart by class antagonisms. In its place, a classless and stateless society will develop, in which the human species, for the first time in its history, will dominate external nature and its own nature, will humanise nature and render man natural.

Marx, by overturning the Hegelian philosophy of right, thus brought the analysis of civil society to its ultimate conclusion; and now, a hundred years later, Russian economists are ‘discovering’ that in the U.S.S.R. a ‘socialist’ economy is being built in which the law of value persists, and that, moreover, ‘the law of value... is no longer a force that dominates social production; but social production operates according to a plan’.

To the question: ‘what force dictates the plan, which in turn dominates the law of value?’, the Russian economists replied in 1943 with a single word: the State. In fact, ‘under a socialist system, objective necessity, well known to the leaders of society, the Soviet state, expresses itself through the consciousness and will of man’.

Thus, in 1943, Stalin’s state presented itself as Hegel’s perfect rational State, capable of dominating and utilising the essential law of civil society: the law of value.

In 1821, old Hegel had already defined the illusions of Russian social-nationalism, of Stalinist State socialism:

‘But the specific characteristics pertaining to private property may have to be subordinated to a higher sphere of right (e.g. to a society or the state) (...) Still, such exceptions to private property cannot be grounded in chance, in private caprice, or private advantage, but only in the rational organism of the state’.

The avowed bourgeois, the so-called pro-Russian communists, and indeed everyone, frame the Russian question as follows: Marx had predicted that the crisis of capitalist society would drive the proletariat to give itself an ever more homogeneous political organisation and to destroy the bourgeois State in order to establish its own dictatorship. In October 1917, all this came to pass in Russia. But Marx had predicted that the proletarian State would wither away, giving birth to a classless and stateless society, to a non-capitalist economy, that is to say, non-wage, non-market, non-money. Yet none of this came to pass in Russia. In Russia, the State persists, as do wages, money, the market, commodities, capital, profit, interest, rent; therefore, contemporary Russian society does not correspond to the predictions set out by Marxism. Everyone, avowed friends or enemies of the U.S.S.R. alike, says so and acknowledges it; except us.

There is absolutely no point in citing what the enemies keep harping on about: the workers hear it from morning till night; but here is what the U.S.S.R.’s closest friends, its own economists, write:

‘Comrade Stalin’s proposals introduce many new ideas that neither Marx nor Lenin could have foreseen’ (p. 18, op. cit.).

‘In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx starts from the assumption that, in the first phase of communism, there would be neither trade nor money, and that the producer would receive a labour voucher from society: “He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost”. This prediction has not been realised (...) Stalin demonstrated that trade and money cannot be transcended at the stage of socialism’ (K. Ostrovitianov, ‘The Communist Manifesto and the Construction of Communism in the U.S.S.R.’, in Voprosy Ekonomiki, No. 4, April 1948).

So, everyone acknowledges that today’s Russian society bears no resemblance to the socialism envisaged by Marx. What, then, is Russia? What originality distinguishes it from other countries where the old, familiar, banal capitalism of everyday life prevails? Even in their answer to this question, avowed friends and enemies of the U.S.S.R. find common ground and see eye to eye; for, as they all reply, in Russia the factories belong to the State. And the State, to a certain extent, therefore does as it pleases: the State plans production.

This is what was asserted, in 1943, by the U.S.S.R.’s closest friends, its own economists:

‘The law of value in a socialist economy is no longer a force that dominates social production, but social production operates according to a plan’, since, in ‘a socialist system, objective necessity, well known to the leaders of society, the Soviet state, expresses itself through the consciousness and will of men’.

This is what was also asserted in 1940, by the avowed enemies of the U.S.S.R., the Social Democrats, through their official theorist, Rudolf Hilferding:

‘Once the state becomes the exclusive owner of all means of production, the functioning of a capitalist economy is rendered impossible by destruction of the mechanism which keeps the life-blood of such a system circulating’ (R. Hilferding, ‘State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy’, in Socialist Courier, a Russian-language anti-Soviet journal; May 1940).

In short, avowed friends and enemies are agreed in acknowledging that, in Russia, the State conditions, determines, and produces civil society.

Having reached this point, the enemies of the U.S.S.R. declare that this is bad and call for freedom and democracy; the friends of the U.S.S.R. assert that this is good. But we would point out that this is nothing other than the old Hegelian dogma destroyed by Marx in 1843: the conditioning is taken for the conditioned, the determining for the determined, the producer for the product of its own product.

Contra Hegel, Marx demonstrated that civil society conditions, determines, and produces the State. We, revolutionary Marxists, have defended and continue to defend this thesis, which, were it false, would bring about the collapse of Marxist theory and ruin any revolutionary prospect for the proletariat.

But then, once again, what is Russia? Years ago, we categorically denied that Stalin’s state could determine civil society: that is to say, that the Russian planning state could make use of the law of value; we denied that the absence of private property titles meant the absence of private profit. On the contrary, years ago, we stated quite categorically that civil society produced Stalin’s state, that is to say, that the law of value imposed its force on the Russian planning state; we asserted that, in Russia, the ‘State-employer’ did not diminish but considerably increased the private appropriation of profit.

We have therefore maintained, years ago, and we maintain still, that Russian society bears no resemblance to the socialism envisaged by Marx, an obvious fact, recognised and accepted by everyone: furthermore, we maintain that Russian society is capitalist, that the Russian economy is capitalist, that the Russian state is capitalist, and that Russian capitalism differs in no way qualitatively from the old, familiar, and banal everyday capitalism found in every country.

And today, in 1965, more than twenty years after the Russian state presented itself to the world as the perfect rational State, its representatives, without realising or intending to, confess that the foundation of the Russian state is the anarchy of civil society; they also confess that for more than twenty years the Russian ‘leaders of society’ have been fighting amongst themselves to seize the reins of the state.

Today, that great whited sepulchre that was Stalin’s rational state is nothing more than a desecrated sepulchre. Over the corpses of the ‘guides of society’ march the Mikoyans, the Brezhnevs, the Kosygins, instruments of Russian capitalism.

Here is a case reported by ‘Pravda’: a sewing-machine factory in Podolsk is experiencing production difficulties. 1,200,000 machines, having left the factory, remain unsold, and the commercial organisations, quite logically, no longer wish to have anything to do with buying this type of machine... But it gets worse... The commercial organisations have advised the factory to manufacture only 750,000 machines this year, even though it is capable of producing 3 million. However, the planning ministry has set the figure at one million.

The Podolsk enterprise is the largest sewing-machine factory in the U.S.S.R.: more than two-thirds of its output cannot be absorbed by the market.

And yet, the Podolsk factory is state-owned. However, the planning State cannot prevent crises of overproduction.

‘Pravda’ of 23 December 1964 wrote: ‘It would be easy to convert part of the production; but it is in the sovnarkhoz’s interest to maintain the level of production set by previous calculations, and to fill the warehouses with useless sewing machines that nobody wants to buy’. How do the sovnarkhoz bureaucrats manage to maintain production figures? Let us expose the planners’ tricks: the sewing machine costs the factory 16 roubles (about 91 francs); the wooden case costs 50 roubles: so 66 roubles in all. The production costs as calculated by the sovnarkhoz are very different: to the 66 r. set by the factory, there are added, on paper, the joiner’s 50 r. for the case; total 116 r. ‘Pravda’ continues: ‘It seems paradoxical, but even unsold machines are good business for everyone: for the factories, the sovnarkhoz, and the banks financing the investments’. In this way, everyone succeeds in proving that the plan has been fulfilled. For everyone, the important thing is to pay the State the 25 roubles stipulated in the plan for each machine. As for the factories, the tricks used to meet the plan can vary. ‘Pravda’s’ investigation established that, for 1965, the joiner will halve his production whilst increasing his turnover from 8 to 11 million roubles: cases will be made of expensive wood, for which there is no consumer demand.

In the U.S.S.R., factories are state-owned. But ‘Pravda’ acknowledges that in the U.S.S.R., the production of sewing machines, for example, ‘is good business for everyone’ except for the State, which is legally the employer. The only difference between Russian capitalism and Western capitalism lies in the fact that, in the U.S.S.R., this happens even if the machines are not sold.

And in fact, the factory calculates the cost of the machine: 16 r., the joiner that of the case: 50 r., and the sovnarkhoz adds another 50 roubles. In total: 116 roubles. For each machine, the state receives 25 r. This leaves 91 r., which are taken, captured, by the banking and enterprise sectors. The state sells the sewing machines for 116 r. It realises the surplus value contained in the commodities on the market and redistributes it within the banking and enterprise sectors, through the complicated process we have seen at work.

And yet, the State is the boss; the bank belongs to the State, the factory and the sovnarkhoz belong to the State. Formally, that is. But what is the State’s actual function? We have seen it, we have heard it confessed by ‘Pravda’: the State accumulates the money which it distributes to enterprises; the State intervenes in the economy to guarantee the private appropriation of surplus value.

Now everything has gone wrong. ‘Pravda’, echoed by the international bourgeois press, claims that Stalinist planning is outdated. It denounces the scandal surrounding the U.S.S.R.’s largest sewing-machine factory, whose productive capacity is three million while 2,250,000 remain unsold.

So what is the solution to prevent such incidents?

In early December, Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, stated that, from now on, companies would have to take account of market conditions and changes in demand.

So how will the new Russian factory operate?

In a feature on the ‘Bolshevichka’ textile works in Moscow, the Italian daily ‘Il Giorno’ wrote on 9 December 1964:

‘This is an enterprise from which the general manager, Pyotr K. Noskov, will seek to derive profit and whose production plans he will personally draw up... Noskov bases himself, in his new management approach, on the orders and commissions received from the department stores where the merchandise is stocked... Pyotr K. Noskov highlighted the various aspects of his new role as head of an enterprise, noting that he must personally set wages, determine prices, and decide where to source raw materials...’

This establishment will not remain an isolated case. ‘L’Unità’, the Italian C.P.’s daily newspaper, notes on 24 December:

‘A second measure, confirmed by Kosygin, is the extension to hundreds of other enterprises of light industry of the experiment carried out by the two factories in Moscow and Gorky; in 1965, these factories will therefore have to organise their production in line with demand from shops and commercial organisations’.

That is not all. This same issue of ‘Unità’ dated 24 December tells us that there are

‘shops opened in the capital by a number of sovkhozes to sell directly the agricultural surpluses not absorbed by State stocks’.

And the 15 December edition of ‘Pravda’:

‘A vast field of action opens up to the creative initiative of the kolkhozniks, to whom the Party and the Government have granted the right to plan their own production. Who knows better than the peasant which crop ought to be planned?’

What is happening in the U.S.S.R. can only be explained in one way: Russian capitalist industry has definitively entered the world market. This fact has confronted Russian capitalism with the problems of competition that prevail in this world market. It became apparent that the Stalinist system of centralised planning was increasing, compared with European and American capitalism, the private and parasitic appropriation of profit. The recent reforms, which enshrine the autonomy of the enterprise, therefore represent an attempt to compel the parasitic Russian bourgeoisie to reinvest the profit.

Marx, once and for all, defined the problem that preoccupies the Russian and global bourgeoisie in these terms:

‘And as soon as formation of capital were to fall into the hands of a few established big capitals, for which the mass of profit compensates for the falling rate of profit, the vital flame of production would be altogether extinguished. It would die out. The rate of profit is the motive power of capitalist production. Things are produced only so long as they can be produced with a profit. Hence the concern of the English economists over the decline of the rate of profit’ (Capital, Book III, Part III).

Hence the concern of the Russian and Western economists at the decline in industrial production growth rates, both in Russia and globally. The aim, therefore, is to revitalise and reignite the accumulation of capital, and thus investment: but for this to happen, for surplus value not to be parasitically squandered but rather accumulated, reinvested, the supreme principle of capital must be sanctioned: ‘Things are produced only so long as they can be produced with a profit’.

This is the supreme principle that Khrushchev’s heirs proclaimed from Moscow in 1965. But in doing so, they have not merely confessed what we, as revolutionary Marxists, have always maintained: the Russian economy is capitalist. In their efforts to stimulate the accumulation of capital, they have also announced to the world that a catastrophic crisis of global capitalism is looming. All in all, they have become sorcerer’s apprentices, incapable of either controlling or understanding the forces they have unleashed.

The international bourgeois press has hailed the recent reforms in Russian industry with cries of joy, and claimed that they mark the failure of socialism.

This is a shameless lie! Neither the Stalinist economy nor the Khrushchevite economy was ever socialist.

In the face of the lies spread by the bourgeoisie and their opportunist lackeys, turn to Lenin’s The State and Revolution, in which he describes how a socialist economy functions:

‘The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labour which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it’.

That, and that alone, is socialism. But it can only be achieved on an international scale, provided that all the workers of the world unite in a single international political organisation and destroy the power of the bourgeoisie in every country.

Lenin was well aware of this, just as he knew and maintained that the Russian proletariat would never achieve socialism in an isolated Russia unless the international proletariat came to its aid. And to that end, in order to hasten the proletarian revolution in the rest of the world, he founded the Communist International in Moscow in March 1919.

The Communist International, founded by Lenin, was destroyed by Stalin and the Stalinists under the pretext of ‘building socialism in one country’. It is clear today that in Russia socialism was never built, but indeed capitalism.

The socialism of Lenin and Marx, the goal which the proletariat must pursue in order to achieve its own emancipation, remains, therefore, even today, the only goal worth fighting for. It remains, even today, the true and only programme that characterises the emancipation of wage slaves, the programme that the International Communist Party has always defended and continues to defend.

This is the programme for which the struggle must begin anew!