The Bitter Years

Extract

In the original doctrine of Marx, the proletarian Socialist revolution was to be the climax of the process of industrialisation through private capitalist enterprise and was therefore to be expected to begin in the most highly industrialised region of the world. It would occur when capitalist relations of production were no longer adequate to contain the forces of production which they had developed, when the ownership of the means of production had been concentrated in the hands of a small minority and when the great majority of the population had been transformed into propertyless wage earners. That the Socialist revolution should take place first in predominantly agrarian societies and that it should be, not the effect of a fully achieved industrialisation, but the means of bringing it about, was not a possibility contemplated by the early Marxists. But so it has happened, and in Asia and Africa today Communism makes its appeal less as a creed of social justice and welfare than as a system providing a short cut to industrialisation—and its corollary, national power—for weak and underdeveloped countries. The main task of the revolution is no longer to carry out a redistribution of surplus value from an economy already highly productive, but to promote a rapid growth of productivity from low, and largely pre-industrial, economic levels. The Soviet Union, after more than four decades of Communist Party rule, presents itself to the world not as a land where people have equal incomes—which Bernard Shaw regarded is the essence of Socialism, but which are as remote from actuality in Russia as in any bourgeois society—but as a country which by intensive efforts of planned production has overcome an initial economic backwardness and emerged as an industrial and military power of the first rank. In its ten years of history, Communist China has been striving to follow the same path, but the effort required has been even greater jecause of the very small margin available at the outset for capital armation from the national income and the vast leeway to be made up fot “overtaking and outstripping” the most highly industrialised lations of the world.