Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 01:13:59 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Marot, JEMAROT@aol.com
Reply to Critics
I. Revisionist and Totalitarian: "Meaningless Labels?"
Josh Sanborn and Nathaniel Knight jointly insist that "totalitarian" and "revisionist" have become "meaningless labels;" chide me for using these ostensibly outdated antitheses to categorize Kotkin and Fitzpatrick's work; and urge me and others to move on to a superior synthesis. This is all well and good. The problem is that Stephen Kotkin does not at all share the forget-the-old-debate-and-move-along position espoused by Sanborn and Knight.
Far from considering the totalitarian position devoid of meaning, Kotkin expends considerable effort in his book attacking that very meaning. Kotkin may well be the last of the revisionist Mohicans. Who knows? But what do Sanborn and Knight have to say about what must be, in their eyes, Kotkin's quixotic effort to beat a dead horse? They say nothing. I, on the other hand, owed a duty to inform H-Russia list members about Kotkin's extended polemic with the totalitarians, and to offer my assessment of it.
True, Fitzpatrick, unlike Kotkin, does not explicitly polemicize with the totalitarians. Why should she? Her book, like Kotkin's, empirically just doesn't offer an alternative to the totalitarian school. On the contrary, it splendidly complements and bolsters the totalitarian school 'from below'. Her book should be read in conjunction with Fainsod's 1958 classic where Fainsod acknowledged and explored 'resistance from below' -- albeit with justified circumspection owing to source limitations.
By not coming to terms with the totalitarian paradigm in any overt way Fitzpatrick minimized her exposure to the contradiction between her ostensibly revisionist analytical framework and the totalitarian empirical results of her research. She ignored the "old debate" perhaps because she recognized that the totalitarians had won it and not because the debate was stale and unproductive as Sanborn asserts (are stale and unproductive debates only those that revisionists lose?). In any event, Fitzpatrick may have thought that analytical discretion was the better part of valor. I just don't know. I couldn't read her mind, only her book.
Having read Fitzpatrick's book, however, I suggested that she had nonetheless implicitly made space for the revisionist paradigm by identifying the mir with the kolkhoz or using these terms intrerchangeably. Indeed, along parallel lines and much more generally, both Kotkin and Fitzpatrick seem to think of the Stalinist state as some sort of extremely authoritarian "welfare state."
I said nothing about the "welfare state" analogy in my Review Essay but do want to point out now, briefly, how disastrously misconceived it is to place the Stalinist state at one, authoritarian end of "welfare state" spectrum. Here is the reason: powerful organized mass labor struggles in the West (prototypically German Social Democracy in Wilhelmine Germany) imposed reforms on the capitalist state. These reforms benefited working people -- social security, unemployment compensation, minimum wages and so forth. In late Imperial Russia, as well, the workers' movement wrested concessions from the Tsarist state. In sharp contrast, no massive politically organized working class movements developed in Stalin's Russia to impose similar reforms on the Stalinist state, or to place meaningful restraints on its arbitrary power.
To pursue this matter a little further, if by a welfare state Fitzpatrick and Kotkin simply mean that the exploited Russian workers and peasants got back some of the wealth that had been forcibly expropriated from them by an exploiting class then just about any state in any exploitative system counts as a welfare state. Thus, (and in case anyone misses the point), American slaveowners could legitimately and self-servingly argue that their state was looking after the welfare of the slaves by providing them with "free" food and "free" housing. The Stalinists asserted much the same thing -- and destroyed anyone who had the audacity to lay bare their disingenuousness (and even those who didn't lay it bare).
By the way, if some people, Kotkin and Fitzpatrick included, appear to think the welfare state is some kind of terminal point in the evolution of 'modern society,' they haven't heard the bad news: "The era of Big Government is over" President Clinton proudly announced to the American Congress not so long ago. All governments in the capitalist world -- social democratic, liberal, conservative, socialist, labor -- have been and are systematically dismantling the welfare state in a mad scramble to make their respective nation states as investment-attractive as possible to international capital.
II. Mir=Kolkoz? Knight does not simply equate the kolkhoz with the mir or obshchina (Knight pettily emphasizes the purely terminological difference by his studied use of obshchina instead of mir throughout his comment). Following Boris Chicherin, he further asserts that the mir was an "organ" of the Tsarist State, its creation, more so even than the zemstvo.
Well now, if the Tsarist state created the mir, then the mir should have vanished along with the disappearance of its creator. But what do we see in 1917? The Tsarist state goes, the mir stays. What more proof does Knight want that the mir, by surviving the Tsarist state, enjoyed an existence independent of the latter? Knight couldn't possibly have meant what he wrote -- but I couldn't figure out any other meaning.
For the purposes of this discussion the relevant function (there were others) both mir and kolkhoz carried out under the Tsarist and Stalinist states respectively was that both provided, Knight rightly says, a "mechanism for the state to extract resources it required from peasants households." Hence the "important and meaningful parallels to be drawn between mir and kolkhoz" Knight concludes. There is nothing wrong with this insofar as it goes. What is wrong is that Knight does not go far enough.
Fundamentally at issue is the nature of the driving force of the kolkhoz and mir "mechanism." Most directly to this point: Was this mechanism set into motion by peasants acting freely, in their self-interest? This question is central to me not because I am politically committed to democracy, majority rule and taxation with representation, but because one can't make sense of the Russian Revolution, and the regime that ultimately came out of the Russian Revolution's destruction, without inquiring into the question of peasant self-determination.
Knight bends over backwards to prove that the zemstva had no "genuine authority" over the peasantry except, he says, in the matter of levying taxes. The exception is precisely what I emphasized in my Review Essay: The Tsarist state coerced the mir into turning resources over to the zemstva. Indeed, the peasants had no genuine authority over the zemstva with respect to fiscal policies, or any other zemstva matter.
In 1917 the working class destroyed the Tsarist state, together with that state's coercive, tax-levying power. Unable to levy taxes to finance any other function, the zemstva vanished. The zemstvo's tax-levying function was therefore its critical, life-preserving function.
Having gained their freedom from taxation without representation, the peasantry used this new-found and hard-fought freedom to full advantage after 1917. How?
Very broadly speaking, in the last decade of its existence the Tsarist state had forcibly levied from the peasantry an annual tribute of roughly 10 million tons of grain. This was exported and re-imported in the form of luxury goods for the landed gentry and capital goods to expand the armaments industry and enhance the Tsarist state's politico/military competitive standing. Next to nothing was returned to the peasants in the shape of additional consumer goods and/or agricultural machinery.
After the Tsarist state collapsed in 1917, grain exports also collapsed and never recovered. Under NEP, the peasants kept the extra 10 million tons of grain. They used some of it to cultivate more fodder crops. This allowed them to eat a little more meat, a few more potatoes and a little less bread. The peasants set up reserves with the balance in view of the vagaries of nature (flood, drought, frost etc.) and their potential to wreak enormous havoc with food supplies -- a potential realized in 1927 and again in 1928.
No state sponsored scheme of market-price manipulation under NEP could induce the peasants to part with those 10 million tons of grain. This is because the peasant economy did not operate through the market and was therefore not susceptible to resource allocation via price movements on the market. Instead, the peasant-run mir planned, via non-market mechanisms, the distribution of resources (land and labor) within the peasant community, in the interests of that community.
The emergent Stalinist state repeatedly tried to use the mir for purposes the mir would not consent to -- state appropriation of grain above all. The Stalinist state ultimately failed to realize this overarching purpose through the mechanism of the mir. To get peasants to part with the fruit of their labor meant destroying their freedom to dispose of it as they saw fit. This meant destroying the mir. The urban-based Stalinist state did destroy it. The kolkhoz supplanted the mir.
The kolkoz was indeed the mechanism through which the Stalinist state ripped off the peasants, just as the Tsarist state used the zemstva (and other organs) for the same purpose. Here, though, is the crucial difference between zemstvo and kolkhoz, on the one hand, and mir on the other: The kolkhozniki did not run the kolkhoz, and the peasants did not run zemstva -- but the peasants did run the mir. The mir was the institution of peasant "self-government," Knight rightly says, and when the peasants ran this institution freely, they just would not freely consent to being sucked dry by a vampire state, whether Tsarist or Stalinist.
A minor, concluding note: There was nothing intrinsically "Trotskyist" in my Review Essay, as Jeffrey Hornstein alleges. If the bald recognition of an antagonism of interests between the Stalinist state, on the one hand, and peasants and workers on the other is Trotskyism, then that makes just about everyone -- except the revisionists -- a Trotskyist.
I thank Sanborn, Knight, Hornstein and John Wilson for their comments. I also thank Hugh Ragsdale for his appreciative note.
John Eric Marot
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