MARXISM AND TOTALITARIANISM: RUDOLF HILFERDING AND THE MENSHEVIKS
Liebich, André
In April 1940 the Paris-based Russian Menshevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (SV), published an article by the famous Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding entitled "State Capitalism or...
...It was more troubled, however, by the prospects of a counterrevolutionary reversal of this regime...
...In spite of such brave rejoinders, the Mensheviks were badly shaken by the apparent successes of Stalin's policies...
...It represents the domination of a national-imperialist clique which has fallen to the level of Hitlerism...
...Totalitarian" thus edged its way into the political vocabulary, even among socialists...
...As the Russian landscape changed under the twin blows of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological and political landscape of the Mensheviks changed as well...
...Within the Labor and Socialist International too the exiled Mensheviks were considered authoritative spokesmen on all matters related to the "Russian Question...
...Moreover, could anyone really believe that a socialist economy would be able to do without accumulation...
...Initially, the origins of the term as a self-interpretation of fascism limited its broader applicability...
...In the conditions of the 1950s, however, the circumstances which had given rise to the theory of totalitarianism and to the debates concerning this theory no longer existed...
...Second, what was the position of workers within the state-capitalist system...
...This evolution undermined the postulates of Marxism not merely because Marx had not foreseen such an evolution but, more fundamentally, because such an evolution put into question the Marxist understanding of historical necessity itself...
...Dan's relegation of political democracy to some future final phase of development, like Bauer's willingness to postpone the question of freedom indefinitely, showed that Dan, Bauer, and their ilk attached insufficient importance to values which they claimed to espouse...
...Simplifying considerably, one might say that the peculiar characteristic of the socialist view of fascism was that the socialists accepted the communist thesis according to which fascism was a direct outgrowth of capitalism, but they expressed so many reservations or qualifications that they tended to put the thesis itself into question...
...In a final paragraph, where the term "totalitarian" appears five times, Rossi added: "it is essential to define socialism in its principal opposition to totalitarianism as a doctrine which can have nothing in common with totalitarian statism and which can only be brought alive by way of an ideological straightening-out of the working class...
...Aparticular point in the Menshevik economic analysis of the NEP is of interest here because it was to become an important issue in the 1930s...
...Among others, "it can become the 'totalitarian' dictatorship of a proletarian party, the dictatorship of a coercive party state and economic apparatus...
...Moreover, at the crucial moment of confrontation with their enemies, Fascist or Bolshevik, both socialist parties had failed to muster the political will necessary to prevail...
...With Hitler's seizure of power the Mensheviks were forced to choose a new exile, this time in Paris, where they reestablished their party center and resumed publication of Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik...
...This comparison acquired a popularity and momentum of its own in America, perhaps because of the prevailing liberal outlook there as well as because of the distance from which European events were observed...
...THE POLITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE MENSHEVIKS was broadly defined by what was known as the "Martov line...
...It was advanced by certain traditionalists appalled by the mass nature of these movements and it was promoted as well by liberals for whom bolshevism and fascism were equally distant from the rule of law...
...But there were no such classes in Russia...
...He criticized the "Marxist sectarian" who, "like the faithful [believing] only in heaven or hell," sees only capitalism or socialism, bourgeoisie and proletariat...
...Heavy industry, still state-owned, had shrunk to such an extent that it was an insignificant part of the economy...
...Although Dan asserted that "the role of the dictatorship as a bearer of progress, even in its most barbarian and twisted forms, was exhausted," he criticized any unilateral denunciations of the Soviet Union or departures from Marxist orthodoxy...
...Stalin had thus "broken the last threads tying him to proletarian socialism and, whatever his further zigzags, he had shut himself off from all roads of return onto the terrain of the working class movement...
...During a period in 1936 when Nikolaevskii was under police surveillance Hilferding proved to be the most frequent visitor to Nikolaevskii's lodgings...
...Unlike Otto Bauer, Hilferding was not an expert on the Soviet Union, familiar with the Russian language, or possessed of firsthand knowledge of Soviet Russia...
...In exile from 1933 on, first in Zurich and then in Paris, Hilferding continued to serve his party and to contribute (under the pseudonym Richard Kern) to its publications...
...The Menshevik Revision WITH STALIN'S "GREAT TURN" OR "GENERAL line" at the end of the 1920s, the Mensheviks found their carefully elaborated interpretation of Bolshevik Russia under severe strain...
...According to pre-1914 socialist theory, the socialization of production was supposed to give a tremendous boost to productive forces...
...Finally, Trotsky was also 231 writing about a "regime [which] had become `totalitarian' in character several years before this word arrived from Germany...
...Moreover, the term appeared invariably as an adjective rather than as a noun...
...One wonders how many of these delegates realized that Hilferding's right-hand man on Die Gesellschaft, Denicke, and its brilliant young contributor, Schifrin, were Russians, as was another contributor and prominent member of the Berlin SPD organization, G.O...
...As evidence of Bolshevik success mounted, however, the Mensheviks proved reluctant to draw such radical conclusions immediately...
...Under the Weimar Republic Hilferding remained a towering figure in German social democracy...
...The Germans turned to the Mensheviks for advice on clandestine publishing and smuggling of party literature...
...In fact, the term was almost always accompanied by inverted commas which, at the very least, could be interpreted as an expression of hesitation as to its appropriateness...
...Socialists objected to the kolkhozes because they could not succeed, because they represented a new utopian venture, as well as a particularly cruel one (although Abramovitch stressed that their cruelty was a secondary consideration...
...This formulation emerged from Hilferding's own interpretation of the German experience but was decisively influenced by the Russian socialist (Menshevik) analysis of Soviet development...
...Even independently of Russian conditions, "the concept of 'state capitalism' can hardly pass the test of economic analysis...
...The overriding historical significance of the process undergone by Soviet Russia (and experienced also in the countries where fascism and national socialism had taken power) was that the economy had lost the primacy it had enjoyed in bourgeois society...
...Not surprisingly, Novyi Mir and Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik immediately saw themselves, and were seen, as rivals...
...Indeed it was destroying such incipient elements of a new possessing class as the NEPmen (just as collectivization was destroying the kulaks...
...The term did have the advantage of expressing the novelty of the processes they were witnessing...
...To take the example of the kolkhozes, or collective farms, socialists could not call them counterrevolutionary because, if they succeeded, socialists would welcome them...
...If the Soviet regime continued to deny the democratic rights acknowledged in its own constitution, if the Russian working class failed to win its own class independence and initiative, not only would the retreat to capitalism fail to raise productivity (because of the continuing climate of insecurity) but "Bonapartism" in the sense of a post-revolutionary dictatorship would result...
...Even though private property of the means of production had been abolished, the process of capital accumulation was proceeding apace...
...Hilferding thus relied on a small group of intimate associates to satisfy his need for information, to keep abreast of the theoretical debates concerning Russia, and to test his own views on contemporary trends against the lessons to be drawn from the Russian experience...
...However, Hilferding's first, and indeed only, concrete analysis of this process in relation to Marxist theory is to be found in the article he had published earlier in 1940 in the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik on the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state economy...
...As accumulation does not prove the existence of a capitalist economy, the fact that management of the economy is entrusted to bureaucrats does not make the bureaucracy into a capitalist ruling class...
...In the course of the 1930s this argument was to gather increasing weight...
...This faction was troubled by the persistence of the dictatorship...
...The "moving spirit" behind the Modern Review was none other than Rafael Abramovitch...
...The concept of Bonapartism meant an antidemocratic liquidation of the Revolution by forces produced by the Revolution and in favor of newly formed owning classes...
...Initially, the Mensheviks were heartened by the fact that their prognosis concerning the internal contradictions of the NEP were finding confirmation...
...Novyi Mir put out only four issues before the fall of France sent all the Mensheviks into a third exile...
...There is no "profit" in such an economy because profit 238 means the individual appropriation of surplus products...
...It was not a "proletarian state with bureaucratic distortions," as Lenin had claimed and as Bauer now seemed to believe...
...Shortly there appeared an article by Hilferding, "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy...
...In the final analysis, however, the Mensheviks could not bring themselves to "break faith" with the Revolution...
...Nikolaevskii thus found it intolerable that anyone should find positive aspects to the crime being perpetrated against the peasants...
...The Stalinist bureaucracy may not resemble a capitalist bureaucracy in structure but it was similar in function...
...As Rafael Abramovitch put it, "we, admitting our Marxist incorrigibility, prefer the very worst revolution to the very best counterrevolution...
...Either one had to overlook the terrorist dictatorship and bestow approval on the Soviet regime, as Communists and their fellow travelers did, or one had to judge the Soviet system as a whole according to the criteria of democracy and freedom...
...As long as socialists had seen the principal contradiction of the day as one between bourgeois and proletarian forces, their choice had been clear...
...German socialists presented Germany as monopoly capitalist...
...Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik explained fascist strength in Germany in terms of the crisis of those middle strata that had formerly been the backbone of the Republic...
...Such use of the term "totalitarian" has given rise to the mistaken impression that by the middle of the 1930s the concept of totalitarianism was current in Marxist literature, even with respect to the Soviet Union...
...The very "blindness" of this process imposed limits on the possibility of knowing the laws of history so that "we cannot speak of 'necessity' in Marx's sense but only of 'chance' in Max Weber's sense...
...Not surprisingly, the pioneers of socialist theories on fascism came from yet another exile group, the Italian socialists, who had fled abroad, mostly to Paris, as the first victims of fascism...
...240...
...Of course, the extra-party right Mensheviks had always identified Lenin and Mussolini as identical pillars of European reaction whose regimes were born of the same mood of social revolt...
...He qualified the implied identification of Russia and Germany by concluding that the historical mission of fascism was that of strengthening capitalism on a new basis...
...Abramovitch tried to pin Kautsky down on the question of whether the Bolshevik Revolution was a counterrevolution or simply the wrong revolution...
...In Russia both the bourgeois state apparatus and the capitalist economy had been destroyed...
...Moreover, the Weimar Republic was providing a political framework through which the working class could ever more emphatically assert control over the economy...
...Although socialism was a logical result of processes now occurring, another alternative could be envisaged...
...He continued to attack opportunistic tendencies within socialism which would have socialists adapt their strategy to existing capitalist conditions, to reform capitalism rather than to replace it...
...For the most part, however, German socialists approached fascism as a political rather than a theoretical challenge...
...In preparing the final version of the SPD's Prague Manifesto in 1934, Hilferding changed the positive term Verstaatlichung found in the earlier drafts to Vergesellschaftung...
...Both countries were now subjected to a dictatorial regime, a single-party system and an all-powerful leader...
...Among socialists such comparisons between fascism and bolshevism were handled gingerly...
...Industrialization and collectivization in particular were achievements that no future democratic regime in Russia should attempt to undo...
...Novyi Mir, like Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, spoke of the confrontation between civilization and freedom and totalitarian barbarism and force...
...Totalitarian" thus described the nature of the leadership or of state policies...
...In these new circumstances the traditionally close ties between the two parties were strengthened by a common fate...
...This lack of will, combined with a disregard of spontaneous mass forces, of those "shattered [social] elements" that carried Lenin and Hitler to power, had sealed the fate of both Russian and German social democracy...
...The second challenge to Menshevik thinking was far more formidable since it came not from the right wing of the Socialist International— whose critique of the Soviet Union, voiced by Kautsky and others, was familiar—but rather from the Socialist International's left wing, which had shared the Mensheviks' outlook...
...In the following years, the Mensheviks, now 239 publishing Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik in their third exile, New York, returned to the theme of Hilferding's article...
...Even if the emergence of the totalitarian state could be attributed to exceptional circumstances, this development warranted a rethinking of the correlation between economics and politics assumed by classical Marxism...
...My thesis here is that Hilferding's article was the culmination of a prolonged debate within Italian, German, and Russian émigré socialist circles concerning the applicability of Marxist categories to the historical processes they were witnessing...
...Rossi concluded by stating that "we must unveil the most dangerous illusion according to which National Socialist, Fascist, and Stalinist regimes have some 'socialist' traits which in fact they never did...
...Obviously, socialist thinking on the nature of fascism predated Hitler's seizure of power...
...Moreover, the failure to introduce political democratization negated not only Menshevik hopes but, in their view, created insurmountable new contradictions...
...Nikolaevskii denounced what he saw as a strong vein of "peasantophobia" among the Mensheviks in general and in Dan particularly, a phobia which Nikolaevskii was not afraid to link to Marxism itself...
...In the same year, Hilferding's article was also published in French in the Revue socialiste with an extended commentary by Boris Nikolaevskii...
...An enlarged and annotated version of this essay is to be published as a Kennan Institute Occasional Paper, available from the Woodrow Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C...
...The most urgent question for the Socialist International was whether socialists should give support to those capitalist countries that were prepared to go to war against Germany...
...This was not of course the first reference to totalitarianism, even among socialists...
...The introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) confirmed these forecasts, although their satisfaction was mitigated by the political repression against their party that accompanied the NEP as well as by the nature of this new capitalism...
...With the Soviet invasion of Finland, the revolt of the new party majority against Dan reached an unprecedented pitch...
...In a state-run economy, prices and wages continue to exist but instead of determining what is produced they become the state's means of distributing the production of society...
...First, notwithstanding his disillusionment with the evolution of capitalism in the West, Hilferding adopted what was known in 235 the SPD as a "Western orientation...
...The Bolsheviks' initial attempts to realize communism in a backward land with the help of terror and bureaucratic regimentation created not an economic system but only "paper dams" against the elementary working of economic laws...
...In the course of the 1950s, the surviving Mensheviks made the theory of totalitarianism the linchpin of their interpretation of the Soviet Union, even reading the germs of totalitarianism back into the events of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903 out of which bolshevism and menshevism had emerged...
...Here, Mensheviks sat as formal equals with Western socialist leaders, including heads of government...
...After 1933 such revision became both more imperative and more difficult...
...In the 1940s, anti-Stalinist dissidents from official Trotskyism developed a theory of "bureaucratic collectivism" which, whether by coincidence or by inspiration, echoed Hilferding's reasoning...
...Before 1914 Hilferding had been a founder of the Austro-Marxist School and its principal economist...
...In 1915 Hilferding developed the concept of "organized capitalism" to describe a possible outcome of finance capitalism...
...As it happens, the four individuals on whom he relied most heavily were all active Mensheviks: Iurii Denicke (pseudonym: Georg Decker), Alexander Schifrin (pseudonym: Max Werner), Grigorii Bienstock, and Boris Nikolaevskii...
...In sectors such as foreign trade the state monopoly was a sham since foreign merchants were coming into Russia in droves...
...For the moment, the very contradictory nature of developments in the Soviet Union was itself proof that the Revolution was not yet completed...
...By the end of the 1930s Nikolaevskii could find no positive quality in the Bolshevik order, and the terms used to describe this order—state capitalist, Bonapartist, Thermidorian, even Fascist— failed to satisfy him...
...They were now joined in exile by the once proud and powerful German Social Democratic party (SPD), deeply traumatized by the defeat it had suffered...
...This early explanation was adopted and developed by Filippo Turati, the grand old man of Italian socialism, who also pointed to the novelty of an alliance between plutocracy and déclassé elements...
...By 1936 the term "totalitarian" was being used with reference to the Soviet dictatorship even by left-wing socialists widely considered uncritical of the Soviet Union, such as Fyodor Dan and Otto Bauer, as well as Leon Trotsky...
...It represents a totalitarian state economy, i.e...
...On the other hand, "organized capitalism" was itself giving up the principle of free competition in favor of the socialist principle of planned production...
...Within a few weeks (during which Germany and Russia invaded Poland) the Menshevik Foreign Delegation put out a unanimous resolution couched in the strongest terms: "Stalinist despotism has torn from itself the revolutionary garb in which it long paraded...
...the Menshevik party, Dan evolved leftward...
...Objectively speaking, this phase represented real progress vis-à-vis the earlier primitive forms of capitalism...
...Ciliga was also wrong in seeing a new type of social system, neither capitalist nor socialist, emerging in the Soviet Union...
...At the same time, Dan's opponents were justified in pointing out that one could not separate questions relating to the economic base from those relating to the political superstructure...
...Instead of economics ruling politics, politics governed economics, and politics acquired such autonomy that the totalitarian state could only be compared, if to anything at all, to the Praetorian regime of the late Roman empire...
...Headed initially by Iulii Martov and then by Fyodor Dan, the Menshevik party abroad followed a policy of limiting its membership only to those individuals who could claim to have been party members in Russia...
...Bauer admitted that he had considered the Plan utopian but now he realized that it had greatly strengthened Russian industry...
...While himself speaking of the "totalitarian-dictatorial regime" in Russia, Dan berated Ciliga for failing to see the positive role of the Soviet Union in the international arena and for writing as if the true place of the Soviet Union were alongside Germany, Italy, and Japan...
...The principal activities of the party abroad consisted of publishing a biweekly journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, as well as a number of other publications in various languages, and of representing Russian social democracy within the revived Second International...
...At the same time, however, there were two elements in Hilferding's new outlook that provided an element of continuity with his earlier views...
...The second faction emerged more grad228 ually out of the malaise felt by some Mensheviks in the face of the growing rift between socioeconomic achievement and political-democratic failure in Soviet Russia...
...The only prospects for the Soviet Union lay in gradual democratization...
...The Menshevik party organization may also have received a subsidy from the SPD, through indirect channels, and several Mensheviks were employed at SPD or trade union headquarters...
...An examination of the arguments and issues involved in the crystallization of Hilferding's position and of the Menshevik contribution to this process may not only cast light on what, I would suggest, is a continuing impasse in Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union but may illuminate the foundations of the theory of totalitarianism as well...
...At the same time, he could not resist the pressure of his peers any further...
...Initially, some Mensheviks on the margin of the Foreign Delegation emphasized the increasing danger of counterrevolution created by the adventurism of the General Line...
...Nor is the process of accumulation similar in a state-run economy and in a capitalist economy...
...The Mensheviks tended to take refuge in the theory that "fascism [was] a superstructure for working out the economic problems of capitalism...
...Among the Mensheviks Fyodor Dan continued to defend the traditional part pris in favor of the Soviet Union...
...He twice held the post of minister of finance (1923 and 1928-29), edited the main organ of socialist theory, Die Gesellschaft, and participated in the elaboration of all party programs...
...In correspondence with Kautsky and in exchanges with friends, Hilferding continued ever more strongly to express doubts about the course of historical development and to voice his disappointment at the failure of the Marxist historical subject, the proletariat, to accomplish the task of liberation to which it had been called...
...In the course of the 1930s such a framework began to emerge with the increasing prominence of the newly coined term, "totalitarian...
...The same attitude found expression in Menshevik work abroad on behalf of recognition of Soviet Russia and in their categorical condemnation of any movements, conspiratorial, insurrectionary or other, aimed at overthrowing the Bolshevik regime...
...Later Marxist theories developed by Bukharin, Lenin, and others, which saw imperialism, the growth of state power, and the separation of ownership from management of the means of production as characteristic of late capitalism, used Finance Capital as their point of departure even when they took issue with many of the work's formulations and conclusions...
...Indeed, German scholarly literature on the period barely seems aware of the Russian ties of these individuals...
...Indeed, there were fewer than one-and-ahalf million industrial workers, out of a population of 130,000,000, who were still employed in the state sector of the economy, and this sector was the most deficit-ridden part of the Russian economy...
...BAUER'S "CONVERSION" SHOCKED the Mensheviks profoundly...
...In fact, fascism was not just an antiproletarian, capitalist dominated movement...
...All in all, it saw the new phase of the Bolshevik regime as progress vis-àvis the past and as a source of hope for the future...
...On the other hand the theory of totalitarianism was now dominant in academic circles, even within the American foreign-policy establishment, and it no longer needed the authority of Hilferding to justify itself...
...Hilferding did not shy away from drawing out the implications for Marxist theory of this historical development...
...On the one hand democratic socialists were no longer agonizing over the attitude to adopt towards the Soviet Union...
...The apparent omnipotence of the bureaucracy only camouflages the real situation: rule by a few individuals who seized state power, eliminated democracy and transformed the state apparatus to their own ends...
...Bolshevism shared the forms and methods of Bonapartism but lacked the social basis of Bonapartism because there were no classes that could indefinitely enjoy the fruits of the Revolution and no stable social equilibrium could be established under the conditions existing in Russia...
...Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik acquired a reputation as an authoritative source of information about Soviet Russia...
...Among many reactions, Abramovitch's reply in Die Gesellschaft summarized the majority Menshevik position...
...In this article R.L...
...Indeed, it is the autonomy of the market rather than the existence of private property that constitutes the specificity of capitalism...
...Why should the Russian masses long for freedom and what sort of arguments could the defenders of freedom use to call for the elimination of a successful dictatorship...
...Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 gave a powerful push to the comparison between what was happening in Germany and what had happened in Russia...
...At the same time, the Mensheviks described the Bolshevik order as founded on terror and excoriated the Bolsheviks relentlessly for their incoherence, their incompetence, their corruption, their selfdeception, and their deception of the masses...
...In Denicke's view, however, underlying these mistakes was a faulty theoretical stance...
...How could one possibly describe the outcome of this double process of destruction as a form of state capitalism...
...In a sense, Bauer was even giving support to the Stalinist view that socialism in one country is possible...
...Whether in Germany, Italy, or Russia, economic laws were replaced by subjective and irrational factors in decision-making...
...Obviously, this comparison was vigorously rejected by both Fascists and Communists...
...This challenge to Menshevik thinking was still relatively easy to rebut...
...As such, Hilferding's article marks a milestone both in Marxist theory and in the theory of totalitarianism...
...Already in his polemic with Bauer, Abramovitch had asked a pointed question: If the Russian masses attained material welfare, a higher cultural level, social justice, and a powerful position vis-a-vis the outside world through a regime of "welfare absolutism" without a trace of freedom, what was the historical function of freedom and why was it necessary at all...
...The second element of continuity in Hilferding's views appeared in his position within the ongoing debate concerning "freedom" versus "socialism," a debate which we have traced among the Mensheviks as well, and a debate in which Hilferding eventually was to come out in favor of the primacy of freedom...
...Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the "German Catastrophe" moved Hilferding to undertake a long-term reassessment of Marxism itself...
...All the Mensheviks were in agreement that the only choice for the Soviet regime lay between democratization and a Bonapartist denouement to the Revolu225 tion...
...It destroyed not only all political institutions and organizations, as had earlier absolutist systems, but also all economic and cultural associations, which became coercive organizations and immediate components of state power...
...This attitude developed out of the Mensheviks' perception of the need to struggle on two fronts: against all reactionary efforts to roll back the achievements of the Revolution...
...Mensheviks interceded on behalf of German comrades with French socialists...
...It is neither...
...For example, Hilf [erding] would be glad to write in our journal and the theme begs itself: a theoretical piece about state capitalism in connection with contemporary debates about fascio-Bolshevism...
...However, in spite of the vigorous urging of Nikolaevskii and other friends, Hilferding chose to wait for a strictly legal (and unobtainable) French exit visa and remained in France, whether out of lassitude, fatalism, or a false sense of security...
...Even at the present time, i.e., in 1933-34, as some German socialists were trying to make a "new beginning" by seeking out "true Marxism," they were in danger of repeating the same errors...
...Given such an outlook one can understand why the "German Catastrophe" traumatized Hilferding even more profoundly than many of his party comrades...
...German emigres after 1933 were divided between their reluctance to apply an Italian term of reference to Hitler's regime and thus minimize the horror of Nazism by assimilating it to a less brutal regime, and their wish to underscore the universal, i.e., not strictly German, character of the new order in their homeland...
...Or, were the Bolsheviks merely Bonapartists who by assuming dictatorial power had put an end to a revolutionary or republican regime and had established a dictatorship not of a class but over classes...
...Just as the rightwing Mensheviks had maintained that there was a positive and a negative type of state capitalism, the former exemplified in Roosevelt's "New Deal" and the latter in Stalin's "General Line," so now Dan argued that dictatorship too was a variable concept...
...Meanwhile, the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik group was also drawing on foreign authorities...
...A capitalist economy is a producers' economy, whereas a state-run economy is a consumers' economy...
...Hilferding's intimates recount that he had long resisted all urgings to revise his Finance Capital, claiming that conditions were not yet ripe...
...Dan himself wrote that Stalin incarnated the Bonapartist-Nazi tendencies long carried by the autocracy...
...Other analyses of the late 1920s, among both German and Italian socialists, also brought out the differences rather than the similarities between bolshevism and fascism by stressing differences in goals and belief systems...
...The theory of state capitalism was based on such ill-considered and harmful fantasies...
...According to Turati, the identification of fascism and 229 capitalism rested on the application of a single abstract criterion, the defense of private property...
...Among the Italian émigrés, the first works to examine the two movements in a common framework saw them both as responses to certain national tasks, as different although not opposed moments of the development of capitalism into socialism...
...The nation was depoliticized and atomized into an unconnected mass of subjects subordinated to the state...
...With the growing insistence on the cleavage between democracy and dictatorship, the question of attitude and policy towards the Soviet Union became increasingly problematic...
...It may be an indication of a certain paralysis in Menshevik thinking induced by the unexpected turn of events in Russia that it was foreign socialists who were the first to draw theoretical conclusions from the Stalinist Revolution...
...Postwar capitalism appeared to have entered a new period of stabilization...
...As the totalitarian state realized its essential nature by subjecting the economy to its own aims, the economy was stripped of its own laws...
...The increasingly tense international situation, however, rekindled earlier theoretical debates in a new form...
...Finally, by virtue of personal ties going back to prerevolutionary days and of their new reputation as "Sovietologists," members of the exiled Menshevik group found a vocation as formal or informal counselors to Western socialist parties...
...They had adopted an overly abstract and dogmatic attitude to Marxism and they had failed to take account of mass sentiment...
...In writing of the "German catastrophe" Dan himself devoted considerable energy to refuting the leader of the extra-party right-wing Mensheviks, Alexander Potresov, who had recently equated fascism with bolshevism...
...The same Menshevik even argued that it was not socialism that was his goal but the moment of freedom which socialism would make possible...
...Rafael Abramovitch picked up the challenge with brio on behalf of the Mensheviks in an article published in 1930 in the leading German socialist journal, Die Gesellschaft...
...I will then try to show why and under what circumstances the concept of totalitarianism came to be seen as a common theoretical solution to the dilemmas posed by two very different historical developments...
...Analyzing fascism in terms of a crisis of democracy and parliamentarianism, Turati underlined those elements in fascism that were incompatible with capitalism, such as its rejection of class divisions in favor of racial divisions...
...Hilferding's formulation of a theory of totalitarianism offered a solution to the problem posed by the inability of Marxist analysis to account for the nature of the Soviet Union...
...Dan described the period of the "General Line" as a third phase of the Bolshevik Revolution during which the dictatorship became ever more "totalitarian...
...One spoke of "totalitarian" state power but not of "totalitarianism," and even the adjective frequently figured as a sort of emphatic adverb, as in "totalitarian Bonapartist dictatorship...
...To speak of true Bonapartism in Russia, the terrorist dictatorship would have to be filled with a capitalist content...
...Over the next few months, thanks to the intervention of the AFL-CIO, some of these refugees, including most of the Mensheviks, set sail for America...
...David Dallin pointed out that denationalization had reached such proportions that now local organs could undertake the decision to denationalize...
...Nevertheless, the argument developed by Hilferding has not lost its relevance over the years...
...Capitalists accumulate value derived from ever-expanding, profit-oriented economic activity...
...Consequently, the extra-party right wing continued to castigate the "Martov Line" as a half-struggle against, half-recognition of the Bolshevik regime and it persisted in judging the Soviet Union by the yardstick of freedom and democracy...
...The first revisionist tendency, elaborated by the Menshevik left wing under Fyodor Dan, sought to salvage the earlier Menshevik analysis...
...The choice he saw at this historical moment was between fascism and workers' power...
...Hilferding was arrested by the Gestapo early in 1941 and taken to prison in Paris where he disappeared...
...Within several weeks of the article's publication, Paris had fallen to the Germans, and Hilferding and the Mensheviks had joined the flood of refugees flowing into the unoccupied part of France...
...A regime that was "proletarian only in ideology, petty proprietory in nature," and that sought to establish capitalist conditions but refused to relinquish its absolute power and its terrorist policies, represented such a self-contradictory 224 hybrid that it could not long survive...
...For far too long, German (and Russian) Marxists had been too abstract, too mechanistic and too smug in their conception of Marxism...
...In his Kampf article, Bauer had urged the Mensheviks to accept the Bolshevik dictatorship not only as a historical necessity but as a factor actually favoring socialism...
...It was in these circumstances that Nikolaevskii turned to Hilferding for an attempt at a theoretical analysis of the new social formation emerging in the Soviet Union...
...Admittedly, the Mensheviks had underestimated the extent to which an absolutist regime could utilize human material bereft of all force of opposition...
...The task of this generation, according to Hilferding, was to bring the economy under the aegis of the democratic state through conscious social regulation...
...According to Hilferding, a capitalist economy is governed by the autonomous laws of the market...
...Even the "commanding heights" of the economy were being surrendered to private enterprise...
...They failed to acknowledge the fact that social and historical processes were frequently selfcontradictory, containing both progressive and regressive potential...
...A merciless critique of Stalin's policy since August 23, 1939, is necessary but this critique can only be effective if it shows ways out of the crisis...
...Nor was this the first assertion, even from Hilferding himself, of an underlying similarity between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Bolshevik Russia...
...After Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik published extracts from the sensational revelations of an ex-Communist, Anton Ciliga, Dan took Ciliga to task for an insufficiently dialectical understanding of the Soviet Union...
...Moreover, the prominence of these three Russians in the German party increased after 1933, perhaps because they proved less disoriented by the experience of exile, a second exile for them, than were the Germans...
...Moreover, right up to 1939, when writing about the "total" state Hilferding avoided using the Soviet Union as an example of the phenomenon he was describing...
...In effect, Bauer was siding with Mikhailovsky, Tkachev, and Bakunin against Herzen, Plekhanov, and Engels...
...Although he had used the latter term earlier, it now reflected a new wariness in regard to the state, not only to the fascist state...
...At the historic Halle Congress of the USPD in 1920 Hilferding had shared the stage with Martov as they both debated against Zinoviev in an attempt to stem socialist defections into the Communist camp...
...In this competition both journals sought contributions from the acknowledged leaders of international socialism to legitimize their own position...
...A participant in one of the Socialist International's congresses in the 1920s recalls that when Hilferding entered the Congress Hall with Denicke and Schifrin some delegates commented, with a wry reference to Hilferding's journal: "Das ist die Gesellschaft...
...Rather, they began to revise their basic views in two different directions, and out of this revision emerged two distinct factions whose separation was to be consummated some ten years later...
...Such a critique cannot be undertaken by those who believe that the policy of August 23 was inevitable...
...it was the first, for instance, to publish parts of Lenin's "Testament...
...Rumor had it that when the SPD was in a position to do so it used the German diplomatic pouch to transmit correspondence and copies of the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik from Berlin to Russia...
...In this perspective, political democracy emerged as the road to socialism...
...Potresov might well consider the Bolsheviks to be adventurists like the Hitlerites who had seized power by methods of force and deception and were wielding power in the interests of their own clique...
...the Menshevik majority spoke of Soviet Russia tending toward a form of state capitalism with political structures also tending toward Bonapartism...
...A Menshevik "Foreign Delegation," with its center first in Berlin and, after 1933, in Paris, continued to speak on behalf of the party...
...As Hilferding put it, "[T]he mere fact that the Russian state economy accumulates does not make it a capitalist economy, for it is not capital that is being accumulated...
...To be sure, Hilferding's career too had been affected by Russian events...
...He had considered collectivization to be a formula for total disorganization but, in fact, the harvest was improving...
...From the point of view of the socialists, in both cases the existing situation had been caused by a bourgeoisie that had defaulted in its historical tasks...
...The earliest practical implication of this attitude was Menshevik support for the Soviet state during the Civil War, even to the extent of calling upon party members to enlist in the Red Army...
...The term itself referred to the "total" nature of state power...
...By the early 1930s some Mensheviks of the party majority were speaking loosely of "fascism in a revolutionary disguise" in the Soviet Union...
...When Hilferding moved from Zurich to Paris in 1938 these relations intensified...
...However, the extent to which Russian socialists like Denicke, Schifrin, and Bienstock could be completely integrated into the German party does not seem to be sufficiently appreciated...
...The editorial position of Novyi Mir was clear: Stalin is one thing, the Soviet Union is another...
...Obviously, this Menshevik tendency perceived nothing positive in the Bolshevik regime from the very outset and saw no reason to change its views—quite the contrary!— because of the experience of the General Line...
...But Dan would not revise his position...
...As thoroughly imbued with the example of the French Revolution as many other Marxists, Bolsheviks included, the Mensheviks early debated whether the Bolsheviks could be classified as Jacobins, i.e., as an extreme or maximalist wing of the revolutionary movement, which in its own way and for its own purposes was nevertheless advancing the cause of the Revolution...
...IN THE COURSE OF THE 1930s the formerly cohesive Menshevik group around the Foreign Delegation and the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik thus began to dissolve into two factions...
...Hilferding's Theory AT THE TIME HE WROTE HIS ARTICLE for Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, Rudolf Hilferding, a naturalized German citizen, was the outstanding Marxist theorist alive...
...In the latter case one would find the Soviet regime irremediably blemished —but also indescribable in Marxist categories...
...In March 1940 he resigned from the chairmanship of the Foreign Delegation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party and from the collective editorship of Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik to found a new journal, Novyi Mir, which became the rallying point of a small group of young socialists...
...Unlike the "total" Fascist dictatorship, the Bolshevik dictatorship "remained in its nature the revolutionary utopian dictatorship of a party tied to a definite part of the working class...
...The shrill tone of Abramovitch's critique was dictated by Bauer's further conclusions and their implications for Russian social democracy...
...He spent the last months of his life doing research on ancient civilizations in the municipal library of Arles and writing "Das historische Problem...
...In a private letter to a party comrade, Nikolaevskii complained that "we do not know anything at all about American [socialist] literature, which brings us into the orbit of polemics about state capitalism...
...As it became clear that Stalinist policies represented a terrifying new wave of Bolshevik adventurism and utopianism, Menshevik hopes turned to disappointment and eventually to dismay...
...After some groping and hesitation, and notwithstanding the earlier Menshevik critique 227 of the notion of state capitalism, these Mensheviks now argued that the Soviet Union could perhaps be seen as having entered a necessarily transitory phase of state-capitalist development...
...This essay is based primarily on the periodical press of the Russian and German social democratic emigration and on archival sources located at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and at the Hoover Institution, Stanford...
...This total state was characterized by the absolutization and the vast extension of state power...
...However, the tragic fate of the Russian peasantry in the process of collectivization galvanized Nikolaevskii into reconsidering his political stance...
...Worrall had argued that the Soviet Union was a capitalist rather than a proletarian state...
...Instead of concentrating on class analysis and constructing their image of man out of their analyses of classes, Marxists should work in the opposite direction and put the analysis of man into the foreground...
...Hilferding now turned his attention to "the 'total state' as fascists and national socialists call their dictatorship...
...As such it could be applied without any profound theoretical implications both to Russia and to Germany...
...As one such Menshevik, Stepan Ivanovitch (Portugeis), put it in an aphorism: "Between two socialists one of whom is for dictatorship, there is a far greater contradiction than between two democrats one of whom is for socialism...
...Thanks to their political skills the Mensheviks obtained entry into the highest councils of the International...
...In explaining Mussolini's successes these Italian exiles pointed to Italy's backwardness as a factor contributing to the triumph of fascism...
...By the end of the decade the traditional Menshevik understanding of the Soviet Union no longer commanded a consensus, although no theoretically coherent alternative interpretation had yet emerged...
...s a member of the Menshevik Foreign Delegation, Nikolaevskii was privy to all party debates, and among the German socialists with whom Nikolaevskii was in closest contact after 1933 stood Rudolf Hilferding...
...At the same time, the Italian socialists emphasized the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the social groups supporting fascism...
...This second faction found itself drawn towards the position of the extra-party right wing for whom democracy and freedom were preeminent values...
...The war raging in the Soviet Union was not between proletarians and peasants but between the dictatorship and the masses, peasant as well as proletarian...
...Now Dvinov asked whether the events of August 23 (the Hitler-Stalin pact), September 17 (the Soviet invasion of Poland), and November 30 (the Soviet invasion of Finland) had not given an unambiguous historical verdict on the Menshevik wager...
...Abramovitch accused Bauer of resuscitating the populist heresy that Russia could jump over the capitalist phase of development...
...In trying to fit a new and original phenomenon such as the Soviet Union into the neat and mutually exclusive categories of "capitalist" or "proletarian," these scholastics were deforming the very categories they were using...
...The first faction, under Dan, continued to interpret Soviet developments in classical Marxist categories...
...For Hilferding the proponents of such views were nothing but Marxist "scholastics...
...The only struggle against such a total state could be total revolution...
...Rather, it was a bureaucratic despotism with proletarian phraseology...
...On the international level too, the transformation of Russia marked an advance for the working class inasmuch as it encouraged and strengthened the proletariat in the world-wide confrontation with capitalism and fascism...
...Boris Sapir, in the S V article of 1933 already mentioned, spoke of the characteristics of the "total" state as "the use of force, the katisation of all areas of life, the destruction of all opposition...
...February to October 1917 in the case of Russia...
...On the political level too, the Mensheviks put forth an integrated theory that revolved around the concept of "Bonapartism...
...It was an order based on the glorification of a caste system and on a permanent state of war...
...An article entitled "Fashistskaia Italia i Sovietskaia Rossiia" by the ex-Communist A. Rossi spoke of Mussolini's sympathy for Communists (even though "he marches under an anti-Bolshevik banner") and stressed the affinities between the regimes...
...Against Potresov's position, Dan put forward the prevailing social democratic view that German fascism was capitalism's choice instrument of struggle for the self-defense of an "overripe" capitalist society...
...In the light of the experiences of the first three years of the Five Year Plan, Bauer declared: "[W] e must recognize that the Russian Revolution has not only extirpated the remains of feudalism but it has constructed the essential elements of a socialist order...
...Moreover, Dan continued, the Menshevik party had always believed that because of the correlation of forces in Russia, slogans calling for an immediate democratic republic against the existing terrorist dictatorship would only serve as a cover for the forces of counterrevolution...
...The rest of the article was censored (by French wartime censorship) but one may well assume that it differentiated Soviet Russia from Nazi Germany and called for the Soviet Union to recover its true or natural position against fascism...
...Those who would have the West declare war against the Soviet Union are dangerously wrong...
...Oda Olberg, the German Social Democratic party's correspondent in Rome, wrote that fascism seemed to be a bourgeois class movement without actually being one and that fascism's victory was not a victory of the bourgeoisie although it was a defeat of the proletariat...
...From 1933 on, Hilferding lobbied the Labor and Socialist International in favor of a policy of Western rearmament and military opposition to the Hitler regime...
...Ciliga saw only the existing "Stalinist 232 lies" and not the "democratic-socialist truth" being born of the Revolution...
...According to Kautsky, the Bolshevik regime had now bared its purely despotic nature, revealing that it had no redeeming political or social features, and thus any foreseeable overthrow of the Stalinist regime should be welcomed rather than feared...
...In these circumstances the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 represented a veritable bombshell...
...Above all, the Mensheviks and the German Social Democrats were drawn together by a common reflection on the nature of the dictatorial regimes, whether Bolshevik or Fascist, now established in their homelands...
...These Mensheviks, first in the journal Zaria and then in the Zapiski Sotsialdemokrata, both based in Paris and inspired by Alexander Potresov, insisted on the absolute primacy of democratic tasks in the Russian Revolution...
...State functionaries in a state-run economy accumulate consumers' goods, "products that the central power wants in order to satisfy consumers' need...
...Bienstock...
...According to 237 Denicke, instead of emphasizing material and economic conditions they should concentrate on the "un-Marxist question" of the spiritual values that make up reality...
...Pronouncing himself strongly against defeatism or neutralism, "Austriacus" reiterated the early socialist position that the Hitlerite system was not the enemy of capitalism but capitalism's strongest support...
...At the same time, Worrall affirmed that even though there had been a violent counterrevolution in Russia since Lenin's death, the Russian version of state capitalism constituted a transitional stage to socialism...
...As for the future, Novyi Mir expressed the passionate conviction that the only choice before humanity lay between socialism and barbarism...
...opened with a lament on the sorry state of contemporary Marxism...
...Hilferding's article "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy...
...After the party had been driven underground in 1921, the focus of its activity shifted abroad...
...IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1930s the Menshevik synthesis originally based on the "Martov Line" and on later attempts to interpret the Soviet Union in Marxist terms began to unravel...
...Stalin himself was seen by the Mensheviks (and by many Bolsheviks, including Trotsky) as the representative of a "centrist" faction...
...Just as Nikolaevslcii's encounter with the cruelty of the White armies towards the peasantry in the course of the Civil War had moved him "leftward," so now the brutality of Stalin's war against the peasantry pushed Nikolaevskii in the opposite direction...
...In the exile period, as his party comrades discussed the merits of a common front with the Communists, Hilferding expressed impatience that disagreement over the future order in Germany should take precedence over the immediate need for joint action...
...To be sure, German Social Democratic activists were eager to put a sign of equivalence between their "red" and "black" opponents...
...Even if this were the case (and, according to Dan, it was not), it should be evident to Potresov that these Bolshevik adventurists were not wagering on the liquidation of revolutionary processes unleashed by the war...
...The Mensheviks, on the other hand, did not believe the successes of current Bolshevik policies to be great or lasting enough to justify a revision in their basic point of view...
...For Novyi Mir, however, the Soviet Union, if not in its actual Stalinist form then in its essential nature and its potential, belonged clearly to the camp of freedom and not to the camp of totalitarianism...
...This implied that the natural allies of the German socialists in their struggle against Hitler were to be found in the socialist parties of the Western countries and even in nonsocialist Western forces opposed to Hitler, rather than in an alliance with the Soviet Union and the Communist movement...
...Finally, an examination of Hilferding's own evolution towards adoption of a theory of totalitarianism will attempt to bring into sharper focus the theoretical assumptions underlying the concept of totalitarianism and the historical conditions of its emergence...
...Many of the Mensheviks' foreign-language publications were actually written for the benefit of Western socialist parties...
...The insistence on democracy as the key criterion of judgment thus acquired even wider currency...
...To say that Soviet Russia was progressive as some sort of state capitalist system but regressive as a political dictatorship was an unsatisfactory solution...
...Seeing the defeat of the SPD as analogous to the defeat of Russian social democracy in 1917, Denicke was among those who identified the mistake of German socialists as that of having failed to complete the Revolution at the opportune moment (1918-1919 in the case of Germany...
...Unlike Karl Kautsky, Hilferding did not have the sort of long-standing interest in the Russian Question that had led Kautsky to make frequent pronouncements on Russian matters...
...Published in 1910, the purpose of Finance Capital was to bring 234 Marx's Capital up to date by describing the existing new trends in capitalist economy...
...By 1924, HOWEVER, HILFERDING SEEMED TO have come around to the position that "organized capitalism" could itself represent a transitional stage towards socialism...
...The focus on the "total" state affected Hilferding's view of the state in general...
...Then as later, however, 236 although Hilferding occasionally expressed his distaste for Soviet bolshevism, his direct comments on Soviet Russia were rare, and even his attitude to Communists was pragmatic rather than theoretically founded...
...At that time, and even in the early postwar years, Hilferding still remained convinced that given a choice between socialism and "organized capitalism" the working masses would opt in favor of socialism...
...In 1947, this version of the article appeared in English in the Modern Review, an ambitious journal that sought to revive socialist theory in the aftermath of the World War...
...Above all, the term, especially when applied to the Soviet Union, consistently referred only to the political superstructure and not to the system as a whole...
...Above all, Hilferding was acclaimed as the author of Finance Capital...
...Its application did not penetrate to the roots of the system, to that economic base which, for a Marxist, represents the defining characteristic of any social formation...
...In a period when information about Soviet Russia was rare, Western chancelleries read Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik carefully...
...In April 1940 the Paris-based Russian Menshevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (SV), published an article by the famous Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding entitled "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy...
...The editors of Modern Review were Travers Clement and Lewis Coser, as well as Hilferding's closest Menshevik associate, Georg Denicke...
...Even as Lenin was promising no more concessions, Krupp was establishing itself in Russia...
...This contrasted with still-existing trends in the Socialist International in favor of "equal rights for Germany" and even with the official international socialist position, which consisted of calls for general disarmament and a strategy of general strike in case of war...
...He added that, "Abramovitch wants to find support [for our position] in the authority of an Austrian...
...According to these Italian socialists, fascism expressed simultaneously the clearly conscious reaction of the great bourgeoisie, the revolt of a resentful petty bourgeoisie, and the violent revolution of a déclassé soldiery in the face of an unreal but nevertheless terrifying menace of social revolution in a backward land deeply shattered by the World War...
...If Stalin's Constitution once again raised hopes of a positive evolution of the Soviet regime, the purges of the late 1930s destroyed these hopes...
...In 1931, the leading theoretician of Austromarxism, Otto Bauer, whose personal and ideo226 logical ties with several leading Mensheviks, in particular Fyodor Dan, were intimate, declared in Der Kampf that he was revising his earlier Menshevik-like views on Russia...
...the controversy as to whether the economic system of the Soviet Union is "capitalist" or "socialist" seems to me rather pointless...
...There was no third way...
...For a Marxist, however, to determine the nature of a social formation on the basis of such purely political and formal criteria was inadmissible...
...The Soviet Question RATHER THAN ELABORATING some sort of "totalitarian model," socialist theoreticians throughout the 1930s were thus using the term "totalitarian" loosely and falling back on familiar Marxist categories for analysis...
...Ciliga did not realize that state capitalism, like fascism on the ideological level, was only a transitional form...
...It is interesting to note that the 233 term "totalitarian" appears frequently in its pages but invariably with respect only to the Fascist countries...
...The fact that there were close relations between Russian and German socialists and that the SPD willingly helped the exiled Mensheviks was well known...
...a system to which the economies of Germany and Italy are drawing closer and closer...
...Initially, socialists used the term "totalitarian" in what might be called a relatively unselfconscious way...
...Whereas in the programmatic article already cited Hilferding avoided a clear-cut choice between these values by leaving it up to the "dynamic" of historical processes and specific conditions to determine their relative importance, by the following year Hilferding was insisting that one cannot suspend the goal of freedom in order to realize the means, i.e., socialism...
...In short, the Soviet Union represented capitalism in a state capitalist form...
...Fascism was seen as specifically grounded in peculiar Italian conditions, and thus as inapplicable to Germany (although perhaps relevant to Russia...
...Hilferding argued that the Soviet Union should be understood as the harbinger of a new type of social formation—totalitarianismand that the emergence of such a formation posed a major challenge to Marxist theory...
...As the title of one of his articles put it, "total state" meant "total bankruptcy" and the notion of the democratic state as a lever by which the working class could promote its demands gave way to a consciousness of the state as an instrument of nihilism...
...Indeed, the underlying problem for the Menshevik right lay in the fact that the Soviet regime was unclassifiable in Marxist terms and, for the moment, the Menshevik right found itself at a loss to describe the regime in alternative theoretical terms...
...Notwithstanding such views, most socialist theoreticians were not inclined to pursue the comparison between bolshevism and fascism to its ultimate conclusion...
...On the theoretical level, Lenin's description of "the first socialist republic in the world" as a state-capitalist system seemed to rest on the dubious proposition that if the government called itself communist then the economy must be state capitalist...
...Within the Menshevik circle an early SV article on fascism spoke of the similarity of impulses which gave rise to communism and fascism and of the common utopianism of these movements...
...If the dictatorship of the bureaucracy maintained itself indefinitely, the result would be not the creation of some "third system" but the outright restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union...
...When the SPD was driven into exile in 1933, Denicke was among the first in the German socialist milieu to initiate a fundamental rethinking of German socialist strategy and doctrine...
...In this article, Hilferding traced the process of ever-growing power of the state and the state's increasing domination over society and economy...
...In 1979, the American journal Telos published an article by a member of the German New Left describing the Soviet Union as a "totalitarian state capitalist" regime and regretting the fact that the left had neglected the theory of totalitarianism because of the theory's Cold War connotations...
...I will first trace the Russian socialists' attempts to interpret the Soviet experience in Marxist terms as well as efforts, by Russian and other socialists, to relate the development of bolshevism and fascism to already existing categories...
...The first such challenge to the Menshevik vision of Bolshevik Russia came from the socialist patriarch Karl Kautsky...
...THE ORIGINS OF THE TERM "TOTALITARIAN" are to be found in Italian Fascist doctrine itself...
...Similarly, the Five Year Plan was not counterrevolutionary because it was not creating new possessing classes...
...On the contrary, the Bolsheviks were counting on igniting these processes to the level of a worldwide conflagration...
...In 1931, Abramovitch had put the question squarely: "What would happen if the [Bolshevik] experiment succeeds...
...For Dan's Menshevik critics the idea that state capitalism could somehow be topped off with democracy to produce socialism was symptomatic of a deep misunderstanding of certain fundamental issues...
...The objections formulated by the anti-Dan wing of the Menshevik Foreign Delegation echoed ever more strongly the long-held position of the extra-party Menshevik right wing...
...From the Menshevik point of view, Bolshevik surrender to a powerful private peasantry, legalization of private traders, and concessions to foreign capitalists were carried out in such an irrational manner that they undermined the positive achievements of 1917...
...The term appeared in English in 1928 to describe the Fascist regime and in 1929 was first used to describe both the Fascist and the Bolshevik regimes...
...These individuals—Lenin, Trotsky, and later Stalin—created the "first totalitarian state—even before the name was invented...
...An important factor preventing socialists from pushing comparisons between fascism and bolshevism to the point of establishing an identity between the two movements, was the absence of a common theoretical framework into which both these movements could be inserted...
...VIRTUALLY FROM THE VERY BEGINNING Of all discussion of fascism a recurrent theme in this discussion was the comparison between fascism and bolshevism...
...About the same time, Otto Bauer was reflecting on the various forms that the dictatorship of the proletariat can take...
...This lament was prompted by an article that had originally appeared in English in December 1939 and had been summarized in the previous issue of Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik...
...Dan's former allies within the Foreign Delegation such as Nikolaevskii and Abramovitch moved towards the Menshevik right wing...
...As for the specific question that had prompted his piece, Hilferding concluded his article...
...The Menshevik economic analysis affirmed that the October Revolution had not fundamentally changed relations of production...
...From the very beginning the Mensheviks prophesied that such defiance of economic laws would end in abject failure and that the Bolsheviks would be forced to retreat to capitalism...
...Before 1933, German and Russian socialists observed the fascist phenomenon attentively but were at a loss in elaborating an independent theoretical interpretation...
...According to Sapir, fascism was creating a new feudalism that was replacing liberal ideology but maintaining the instruments of production in the hands of the magnates of capitalism...
...At that time he had answered quite categorically: "This would mean that we should burn not only the [Sotsialisticheskii] Vestnik and [party] platform, but also all the Marxist books we have [ever] studied...
...Nikolaevskii wrote several pieces on Hilferding himself, and the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik reprinted Hilferding's article in 1946, although without the opening lament on the fate of Marxism and without some of Hilferding's introductory comments...
...Although Dan had used the term "state capitalism" frequently, he now rejected Ciliga's use of the term...
...However, the fact remained that Bolshevik Orogress was being carried out by means of a severe policy of underconsumption, which had been depressing living standards continuously since the introduction of the "General Line," that is, the policy of forced collectivization and industrialization, and it rested on the absurd premise that a peasantry numbering one hundred million people could be quickly destroyed...
...In both these areas the exiled Mensheviks scored successes despite the very limited means at their disposition...
...The initial reaction of many left-wing socialists, including Fyodor Dan, was that socialists should not abet one group of capitalists against another...
...According to them, the only road to overthrowing the fascist regime in Germany lay in promoting European revolution...
...In fact, Hilferding went much further in this line of reasoning than many of his party comrades were prepared to go, at least initially...
...AT THE SAME TIME, in the circumstances of the period Hilferding could not remain any more indifferent than other socialists to the course of events in the Soviet Union and to their theoretical implications for the Marxist idea...
...Fascism, Bolshevism and Totalitarianism As THE MENSHEVIKS WERE DEBATING these issues, momentous events were taking place in Germany which pushed even the all-important Russian Question into the background...
...against Bolshevik efforts to rule without any concessions to democracy...
...Lenin's (and, indirectly, Kautsky's) references to state capitalism evoked Menshevik criticism both as a description of conditions in Russia and as a theoretical concept...
...As against this position, an increasing number of socialists advocated recognition of the fact that the new alignment of forces was between democracy, even bourgeois democracy, and dictatorship...
...From a Marxist point of view Dan's faction was certainly correct in decrying its opponents for having put abstract values such as democracy at the center of their analysis...
...The term itself had already been employed by the Russian Bolshevik leader Bukharin to describe a tendency in advanced countries towards centralization and regulation of all economic activity under the aegis of the state as well as by Kautsky as a critical description of Soviet Russia...
...The citizen was transformed into a slave of the state...
...Others maintained that the General Line was creating an embryonic bourgeois society in Russia and that it was futile to pin one's hopes on a Russian working class corrupted by Bolshevik practices and reduced to the status of state serfs...
...Thus, in its last issue Novyi Mir proudly published an article entitled "Some Illusions" by one "Austriacus," in fact the prominent Austrian socialist Oscar Pollack...
...The bureaucracy is not a unified group, its material benefits do not constitute an important portion of the social product, and it does not possess any independent basis of power...
...As the Mensheviks saw it, the point was whether the regime would cede to democratic pressure or to the forces of counterrevolution...
...The metamorphosis of "organized capitalism" into the "total state" made the hypothetical possibility of a negative evolution evoked by Hilferding twenty years earlier into a tragic reality...
...Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik was first published on the presses of the SPD's Yorweirts...
...Above all, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik was appreciated by Western socialists for its impeccably orthodox Marxist analyses...
...According to Dan, there now were Bolsheviks who admitted the development of capitalism in Russia but were hiding behind the murky fantasy of capitalist production without private ownership of the means of production, or behind dreams of replacing a bourgeoisie by some sort of organizational intelligentsia at the service of the Bolshevik party...
...There was an ever-growing danger of such a development but the process had certainly not been completed...
...More specifically, however, considerable responsibility lay with socialists themselves since the SPD was seen as having committed some of the same errors as the Russian Mensheviks: both parties had failed to complete their respective revolution...
...Even Hitler's seizure of power, however, could not overcome the apparently natural reluctance of socialist theoreticians to identify fascism and bolshevism, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia...
...As long as the dictatorship persisted, the unavoidable process of degeneration of revolutionary utopianism into some sort of state capitalist Bonapartism would continue...
...Menshevik demands for democratization should be moderated or even suspended until some future moment when democratization could be introduced as the final stage in the process of transformation already undertaken by the Bolshevik regime...
...For a long time Nikolaevskii seemed more interested in his scholarly pursuits than in politicking, contenting himself with following Dan and the "Martov Line...
...Within this overall outlook, the Mensheviks elaborated a detailed interpretation of the economic and political nature of Bolshevik Russia...
...Dan should recognize that Thermidor had already occurred in the Soviet Union although now was not the time to speculate on when it had taken place...
...Indeed, by formulating the issue in these terms Hilferding was suggesting that a basic dividing line lay not only between socialist and nonsocialist regimes but between those states that valued freedom and those that did not...
...The second revisionist tendency within the Menshevik camp emerged out of this disagreement with Dan but it formulated its position more slowly...
...After having been a leader of the radical USPD, or "Independent" German socialists, during World War I, Hilferding in 1922 was instrumental in effecting a reunification of a rump of the USPD with the SPD...
...Although his writings in the later part of his life were, for the most part, occasional pieces, his prestige as a thinker remained undiminished...
...The implication of Lenin's statement, Dallin suggested, was that if one changed the government one would have only ordinary capitalism...
...More directly, Abramovitch questioned Kautsky's application of the concept of Bonapartism to the current situation in Russia...
...But what would be the effect of a socialization, such as that occurring in Russia, which was being carried out at the cost of productivity...
...A number of individual Mensheviks continued to work in the ranks of the German party...
...It saw the Soviet Union as having passed into a phase that might be described, for want of a better term, as state capitalism under a pseudo-proletarian dictatorship...
...As one Menshevik put it, for some Mensheviks life did not seem worth living after hearing the news...
...This was the question of "state capitalism" as a theoretical description of the economic order in Russia...
...It was the first time, however, that a major Marxist theorist posed in such clear-cut terms the problem of the relation between Marxism and totalitarianism and sought to resolve this problem by integrating two modes of analysis which had been, and were to remain, mutually hostile...
...Used by Mussolini in a speech in 1924, it was soon formalized by the Italian ideologue, Giovanni Gentile...
...For the Mensheviks the Bolshevik dictatorship was a form of utopian revolution which in proletarian-socialist guise was realizing the national tasks of a bourgeois-peasant revolution...
...The problem with the Five Year Plan was that it was destroying the economy as well and thus opening the door to a possible counterrevolution...
...STILL SEARCHING FOR FOREIGN SUPPORT, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik now turned to an even more authoritative spokesman...
...Dan's arguments failed to convince even some of his close collaborators, such as Nikolaevskii and Abramovitch...
...Not only would the working class suffer but the very idea of socialism would be dealt a serious blow...
...At the same time, Hilferding admitted that "we," i.e., Marxists and democratic socialists, had never imagined that "the political form of that 'managed economy' which was to replace capitalist production for a free market could be unrestricted absolutism...
...The German working class had proven unwilling or incapable of carrying the Revolution of 1918-19 through to a socialist conclusion...
...In the last months of his life, in late 1940, Hilferding was to write a posthumously published article where he affirmed that blind force was the decisive factor in history...
...Clearly, at least part of the New Left remains unaware of Hilferding's argument concerning the relation between totalitarianism and capitalism or of the Menshevik debates underlying Hilferding's insights...
...In writing about experiments in "organized capitalism," such as those being undertaken in New Deal America, Hilferding now expressed a highly critical attitude instead of seeing these experiments, as he might have seen them a few years previously, in terms of promising steps towards a socialist transformation...
...In spite of the restrictive, indeed suicidal, implications of this policy, the party was able to draw on the unstinting services of a number of figures familiar to anyone acquainted with the history of the Russian Revolution or with the 223 historiography of the Soviet regime: Fyodor Dan, Rafael Abramovitch, Boris Nikolaevskii, David Dallin, Solomon Schwarz, and others...
...Soon, Nikolaevskii's criticism had evolved into a general condemnation of the Martov Line's indulgence in regard to the Soviet regime...
...The Mensheviks Abroad THE MENSHEVIK ANALYSIS Of Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s was the work of a uniquely dedicated and talented group of party members...
...A formerly left-wing Menshevik, B.L...
...Moreover, Dallin added, a socialist's attitude toward state capitalism as a positive or negative phenomenon had to be conditioned by two considerations: first, what were the economic effects of this system...
...The Mensheviks were fighting not only against the illusions of "integral socialism" in the Soviet Union, a concept developed by Otto Bauer, but also against the illusions of "integral democratization...
...Comparing this phase to the era of Peter the Great, Dan stated that "it was precisely its [the dictatorship's] totalitarian character which allowed it to carry out the historically indispensable task of economic reconstruction on such a grand scale and at so quick a pace...
...It represented a threat not only to the proletariat but to civilization itself...
...Russian Connections THE FACT THAT HILFERDING SHOULD MAKE AN important theoretical statement concerning the Soviet Union itself requires explanation...
...When a young Menshevik, Boris Sapir, wrote an article in June 1933 distinguishing "enemies from outside the proletar230 iat," i.e., reactionary forces, and "enemies from within the proletariat," i.e., fascism and bolshevism, he was severely taken to task both by the chief left-wing Russian socialist, Fyodor Dan, and by the principal theoretician of rightwing German socialism, Karl Kautsky...
...Above all, Hilferding saw a tendency towards concentration of capital leading ultimately towards a sort of universal cartel which would govern all economic processes in a planned and unified way...
...However, historical events intervened...
...In Abramovitch's view, Bauer's recommendations rested on a faulty analysis of the nature of the Soviet regime and on fallacious reasoning...
...In a book published in 1930, Kautsky affirmed that under Stalin there could now be no doubt that Bolshevism had become Bonapartism...
...Some sectors, such as transport, had already been publicly owned in tsarist times...
...This is confirmed not only by Nikolaevskii's own reminiscences but also by the files of the Paris police...
...It was revived by Lenin to describe the NEP system in Russia where overtures to private industry were combined with the maintenance of state control over the commanding heights of the economy...
...This reorientation in Hilferding's thinking can be seen either as a realistic assessment of a new situation or as a capitulation to reformism...
...Dvinov, reminded Dan that ten years ago, in polemicizing against Kautsky, Dan had written that only the course of events would tell whether the Menshevik position of advocating reform rather than overthrow of the Soviet system was justified...
...Even bourgeois journalists in Moscow were reporting that life was becoming easier...
...The Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik published Hilferding's article with an editorial note stating that the Vestnik would return to the questions raised here in a later issue...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
