What Was the USSR?: Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value Under State Capitalism

The Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the USSR as a "workers' state" has dominated political thinking for more than three generations. In the past, it seemed enough for communist revolutionaries to define their radical separation with much of the 'left' by denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist. This is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. To transform society, we not only have to understand what it is, we have to understand how past attempts to transform it failed. In What Was the USSR?, the Aufheben collective explores the inadequacies of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state and the various versions of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism. Part I: Trotsky and state capitalism Introduction The question of Russia once more Outline Trotsky’s theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state Introduction I The Russian Revolution II The 1930s and World War II III The 1950s Leon Trotsky Trotsky and the Orthodox Marxism of the Second International Trotsky and the theory of permanent revolution Trotsky and the perils of transition The NEP and the Left Opposition Preobrazhensky’s theory of primitive accumulation The rise of Stalin Trotsky and the Leninist conception of party, class and the state The degeneration of the revolution Bureaucracy and class Trotsky and the question of transition The theory of the USSR as a form of state capitalism within Trotskyism Introduction The theory of state capitalism and the second crisis in Trotskyism Cliff and the neo-Trotskyist theory of the USSR as state capitalist The flaws in Cliff’s theory of state capitalism Part II: Russia as a Non-mode of Production Introduction The origins of Ticktin’s theory of the USSR Introduction Ticktin and the reconstruction of Trotskyism Ticktin and Trotsky’s theory of the transitional epoch Ticktin and the failure of Trotsky Ticktin and the political economy of the USSR A Question of Method? Class Laws Waste The question of commodity fetishism and ideology in the USSR Problems of Ticktin’s ‘political economy of the USSR’ The Wage-Form Labour-Power as a Commodity The Question of the Transitional Epoch Part III: Left Communism and the Russian Revolution Introduction Who was this communist left? The Russian Left Communists Organic Reconstruction: Back to Orthodoxy Lenin’s Arguments for State Capitalism Versus the Left Communists ‘War Communism’ New Economic Policy: New Opposition The German/Dutch Communist Left The German Revolution: Breaking from Social Democracy The German Left and the Comintern The spectre of Menshevism: October, a bourgeois revolution? Back to Luxemburg? Theses on Bolshevism Mattick: Its capitalism, Jim, but not as we know it The Italian Left Origins Bordiga’s theory Conclusion Part IV: Towards a theory of the deformation of value Introduction The capitalist essence of the USSR The Trotskyist approach Capitalist crisis and the collapse of the USSR The historical significance of state capitalism Germany and the conditions of late industrialisation Russia and late Development Underdevelopment Mercantile and Industrial capitalism Russia and the problem of underdevelopment The deformation of Value The problem of the nature of the USSR restated The circuits of industrial capital To what extent did the Commodity-form exist in the USSR? To what extent did commodity-production exist in the USSR? To what extent did commodity exchange exist in the USSR? To what extent did Money exist in the USSR? The sale of labour-power Contradictions in the USSR: the production of defective use-values Conclusion