For a Concrete Theory of Transition: The Political Practice of the Bolsheviks in Power

Abstract

Robert Linhart’s translated 1966 text provides a framework for examining the Soviet transition as an overdetermined development, drawing a balance sheet of the strategy and tactics of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Reading Lenin’s shifting practical analyses of the situation from 1918–23, Linhart takes a thorough inventory of the principle (between the proletariat and the peasantry) and secondary class struggles—a “complex system of alliances”—and discerns the “thresholds” beyond which changes in the conjuncture imposed strategic turns and alternatives. Informed by a conception of a complex social formation in transition as unevenly articulated and marked by intense contradictions, Linhart analyzes the NEP as a revolutionary strategy that responded to and reconstituted the “disrupted equilibria” of social forces, operating (subjectively) against objective limitations. This necessitated not only the political transformation of state apparatuses but also, for Linhart, crucially emphasized a necessary Cultural Revolution to socialize the productive forces (popular control and accounting of production, circulation, and distribution).

Key Words:

• New Economic Policy
• Soviet Transition
• Class Struggle/Alliance
• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
• Social Formation
• Political Strategy

Notes

1 It is worth specifying that this fall concerned grain, on which speculation was focused, and not industrial crops.

2 We might note that this penetration of the lower organs of the state apparatus by kulaks and rich peasants would have consequences for the impact of the great turn of 1929: the collectivization policy would entail a violent offensive against certain spheres of the state apparatus—an offensive whose more or less deformed echo we can find in the part of the Moscow Trials dealing with sabotage in the administration.

3 It seems that Kritsman strove to analyze clandestine social relations in the countryside under the NEP. It would be interesting to know if Bukharin, who so finely analyzed parallel economies during war communism, also theorized the noncorrespondences within the NEP.

4 It is interesting to note that the “ideal NEP” was not given at the start but gradually formed by integrating some of the difficulties of the real NEP; the fact that it remained ideal may be attributed to the irreducibility of some of these real difficulties—in particular, the aggressive strategy of the well-to-do sections of the peasantry.

5 “By extremely clear, simple, and practical standards” (Lenin [1918] 2002).

6 Meaning the economic domination of the capitalist mode of production under the NEP—not necessarily as a quantitative preponderance but as a qualitative primacy. State industry and state commerce operated according to capitalist criteria, and the economic structure as a whole was capitalist in type.