The real problem with the USSR
By: Alex Cypher
Tags: Communism, Decentralization, Anarchism, Politics, Soviet Union

Many times I hear anarchists and left-communists attack the USSR as not having been communist, or even simply socialist. While I decidedly have my own problems with the USSR (chiefly stemming from the perspective of civil liberties for much of its history and in particular the Stalin era), it seems to me that the anarchist and leftcom problem stems from the fact that it did not embody the higher phase of communism as identified by Karl Marx, and was rather a dictatorship of the proletariat, which they consider to not be socialist. The basis for this argument is that, per their reasoning, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not meet the qualifications of socialism or communism, which is to entail a classless, stateless, moneyless society, with of course absolutely no commodity productions. That at least is my experience of the arguments put forward anyway.

Rather than actively seek to refute this argument, as I think Pierre Tru-Dank already did successfully in his video on the subject, I think it is instead worth addressing the more “abstract”, for lack of a better way of putting it, implications of the general leftcom/anarkiddie approach to dealing with the Soviet one, one that touches on a very specific theme: the dichotomy of centralization versus decentralization, which is a major part of the distinction between anarchists (and many libertarian socialists) and most Marxists (myself included).

As a quick summation, anarchists and most libertarian socialists are very much wedded to decentralization as a point of principle, and will at least ostensibly not support any mode of socialism that bases its praxis on central state power (although for some reason many of these same people will gladly support liberal social democracy as a bulwark against capitalist reaction, even if it means blatant class collaborationism), whereas many Marxists are quite willing to invoke the method of central state power as a means by which to achieve the goal of realizing a communist society, and indeed we take it as the most historically effective means of doing so.

For all of the problems of the USSR’s centralized state model, you really can’t understand the centralization of the USSR without considering the conditions of Russia around the time of the October Revolution. Whereas much of Europe consisted of bourgeois democracies (as it still does today) that have slowly industrialized over a lengthy period of time, pre-revolutionary Russia was a backwards country that still operated under what was basically a feudal system. In order to compete with the capitalist powers on a large scale, there was no getting around the fact that Russia needed to industrialize. Indeed, Marx himself made quite clear that socialism can only naturally follow from industrial capitalism and can’t properly emerge from feudalism (that is, if you want to be consistent with historical materialism and don’t want to push through some idealist nonsense that can only result in some sort of degenerate barracks fascism). Given this, the only way for Russia to achieve its goal of standing head to head against the capitalist powers and advance socialism on a large scale was for it to industrialize at a much faster rate than the Western nations. However you slice it, this cannot be and could not have been done without a centralized state, and at that one capable of commanding economic and infrastructural development at the rate necessary for turning a previously feudal country into an industrial one. The only problem, of course, is that this period of condensed industrial development also came with a massive human cost — remember, this was the Soviet answer to the industrial revolutions of Western countries, and those industrial revolutions did not come without great loss of life. At the same time, however, I find that the anarkiddies/leftcoms suffer from embodying that old adage of “it is always easier to criticize than to create”, judging by how every time I engage with anarchists (and I include ancaps here) on the subject of how to deal with increasingly complex and large scale infrastructure in the 21st century, they seem not to have any adequate answer for how decentralization über alles is going to solve that issue on the practical level.

And that really is the heart of it for me: the USSR, and similar large scale socialist states of the 20th century, actually had the power to do large scale transformation of the economic and political structure, which they were capable of doing with the vanguard and the method of the central state. And that’s important because, besides the Paris Commune, the only alternative we have to state socialism in a modern context is anarchism, and the record for anarchism is really quite unreliable. Most of the anarchist societies that have come into existence following the consolidation of modern anarchist political thought have been destroyed from the outside by much stronger powers. Now, to be fair, in some cases that was the fault of Marxist states (for example, in the case of Ukraine, the demise of the Makhnovites can be blamed on Soviet Russia), and I maintain that it is not possible to accurately assess how far many of these societies have gotten due to their short lifespan and the fact that they were crushed by outside forces rather than having collapsed on their own, but at the same time it is difficult to imagine a completely decentralized model working on as large a scale as large powers such as Russia, China or the US, or even just smaller countries like Poland, Britain, Finland or Japan. In order to have large scale civilizations, you need to be able to manage the sort of complex social hierarchies and material infrastructures that come with large scale civilizations, and that will only get more complicated as the 21st century progresses. I am not convinced that amethod consisting of decentralization as the prime goal and resistance to the central state has a track record sufficient to allow me to determine that it is at all salient for this task.

Although I said that it’s technically impossible to determine how far the old anarchist societies would have gotten, we do have a few examples of anarchism in a modern context that just might allow us to make some kind of logical determination or inferrence. The Zapatistas are widely praised by anarchists today, but they are a weak force, backed by 3,000 members of the milita, albeit with apparently numerous civilian supporters, and the territory they control from what I’ve heard is actually poorer than Mexico proper. It seems evident that the main reason they survive today is because the Mexican government hasn’t wiped them out yet, presumably due to being pre-occupied with other issues, such as the more sophisticatedly-armed drug cartels (or because the Zapatistas aren’t a credible threat to the Mexican government yet, I’ll let you decide). Incidentally, I’d like to see how a fight between the Zapatistas and the cartels might turn out, just for curiosity’s sake. Rojava comes close in that it’s billed as a libertarian socialist project, but it can barely sustain itself, has fuck all resources (at least of its own), and is, even by the admission of Rojava supporters, completely dependent on US support, and not to mention its anti-hierarchical credentials are fundamentally undermined by the fact that Abdullah Ocalan seems to have simply told his followers from the top down to embrace his ideology of democratic confederalism.

You might notice I have no examples of the left-communist model being put in place. Well, that’s because left-communism has nothing to offer historically other than a bunch of Italian communists who resisted any sort of activism, because it didn’t sit too well with their emphasis on armchair intellectualism. There’s nothing much to say about the leftcoms really. All they ever did was whine about 20th century socialism for not being the higher phase of communism.

So again, we arrive at the real issue of many of the people who whine about the USSR, whether they realize it or not: the USSR in its dictatorship of the proletariat phase (again, assuming the arguments I’m told are true) was in the best possible position to develop socialism and was capable of making the transition to socialism, even in spite numerous deviations in economic policy (at least the NEP only lasted 8 years as opposed to the Dengist project in China which is still ongoing). And it didn’t end with Stalin or Lenin either. The push towards communism continued throughout the life of the USSR, with Khrushchev and his reforms ultimately aimed at acheiving communism within 20 years (hence the name, Communism In 20 Years), with things only really moving away to capitalism when Gorbhachev showed up (or, arguably, Brezhnev, considering what I’ve heard about his reforms re-emphasizing the profit motive). When we consider this fact, combined with the inability of the decentralists to have any sort of track record that even begins to resemble the gains made by 20th century state socialism, it all seems to come down to the resentment of the central state, whether for valid reasons or otherwise, or simply just the fact that the central state can actually be pointed to as an example of what can be done on a large scale and a continuous period. The only reason they can get away with ignoring this is because the socialist axis lost the Cold War.

That’s the real problem with the USSR. Not from my perspective, of course, but from the perspective of those who seek to discredit it while calling themselves communists.