The world's long NEP
A thought experiment
Recently, Milanovic and others argued that China since Deng is essentially executing a long-term version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP is a curious and extremely interesting episode of the early history of the Soviet Union. After the times of war communism, Lenin decided to implement market mechanisms and a state-controlled form of capitalism to rebuild the soviet economy. The impetus behind making the analogy to Deng’s reforms in China following the rule of Mao should be clear enough. The key difference being that Lenin’s nascent Soviet Union was isolated at the time of the NEP, and therefore didn’t have access to the international markets that China did.
It is not that hard, perhaps, to imagine a world where Soviet Russia, less isolated by blockade and civil war, does not degenerate so quickly into a totalitarian administration, and could carry on with Lenin’s intentions to conserve the possibility for politics, and the ‘bourgeois right’ of workers.
But if we accept this, other unnerving ideas suggest themselves. The failure of the German Revolution in 1919 is often cited as a turning point, a major defeat in the history of the Marxist Left, and the start of the degeneration into Stalinism. But let us now consider the counterfactual, with the ‘sober senses’ afforded to us by history since then: what would have happened in a Europe and a world swept by Spartacist and Bolshevik-led revolution, by Luxemburg and Lenin?
‘Actually existing socialism’ in the form of Stalinism and its offshoots did untold damage to civil society in the countries in which they took hold, replacing them with sprawling bureaucracies. This makes it at times difficult to appreciate that total, centralised control of society was never the aim of revolutionaries of the time—indeed, with a 19th century mindset it is uncertain whether such an arrangement could have even been envisioned. The original hopes for the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world would have been saving civil society from its crisis in ‘imperialism,’ and sublating it into a higher form. This original idea was consistent with ‘civil liberties’, or ‘bourgeois right.’ It is the awful continuation from world war to civil war to Stalinism that led to degradation into totalitarianism and the total dissolution of civil society, justified by the need to build ‘socialism in one country.’ This being the case, with much of society left to its own devices (no surveillance state envisioned yet!), the resulting societies would not have been irrecognisably different from ours. The dictatorship of the proletariat is talked about on surprisingly techno-political terms by Engels and by Lenin, and is seen as the real-political goal of communist politics—the further steps towards communism to emerge out of this last, transitionary stage of capitalism.
If the dictatorship of the proletariat has lost its down-to-earth concreteness in popular imagination is because of Stalinist ideology about socialism in one country—the idea that the USSR embodied the “lower stage of communism” identified in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. But this was manifestly untrue as very quickly recognised by everyone from Lenin through Trotsky, to Adorno and Poulantzas. The USSR was state capitalism, and was a totalitarian “administered society”. If it was different from the West it was because civil society and its liberties were degraded even more under wars (world and civil) and Stalinism. Western vilification, reification and orientalist mystification of life behind the iron curtain (as eternally gray and rigid) did not help.
But let us then consider the counterfactual! Had the German revolution been successful, alongside Lenin, what would capitalism under the DOTP look like? And the answer is, it would have faced the problem Lenin faced: the state is perfectly capable of planning production for known ends, but it is awful at knowing the ends. Later anarchist “discoveries” about the sight of the state, and the socialist calculation debate of the interwar Viennese coffee house were but a semi-conscious elaboration of the problem encountered—and for a moment solved!—by Lenin: capitalism had to be allowed for the time being, with state intervention, and with political power and redistribution to the propertyless population.
Having made this same conceptual innovation—which was not a Stalinist one, but one born out of the authentic moment of revolution—what would a hypothetical Soviet-Germany have done? It would itself have instituted the NEP, and would have conserved civil liberties and civil society, emancipating workers into it. Once the dust had settled, we would have had what we’d recognise as a liberal social-democratic welfare state, except perhaps with a higher degree of historical consciousness in its leadership.
Contrary to mystic beliefs of socialists and their enemies, the proletariat would not have suddenly acquired magic powers to organise society, nor was it destined to autocratic totalitarian rule. The counterfactual reality is something much more sobering and boring: successful worker states, for decades at least, would have become welfare states with civil liberties, ones that are quite recognisable to us.
Marxists often nurture the sentiment that the “timeline” where Germany went red is awfully distant from the one we live in. Actually, it isn’t. ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’—the electrification is all the same. The reality is, in the absence of the political victory of the proletariat (allied with its petty bourgeois intellectual leaders), the bourgeoisie (or rather, the Bonapartist state) was forced to institute the NEP for themselves—it was new for them, too (FDR, the New Deal, Fordism, with the interjection of fascism).
Of course, the bourgeoisie then went on to rebel against the NEP in the form of “neoliberalism”. But it is no accident that Hayek and Mises and the other early new-liberals saw the welfare state as the road to Soviet socialism—in a way, it was its mirror image! And relatedly, Rostow’s stages of development were both the Bonapartist pastiche of the Stalinist vulgarisation of Marx’s theory of history, and an attempt at bourgeois internationalism. Early-20th century Marxism lost once politically, and lost again when its immediate political goals were instituted by the State.
How is this world different, yet? It is different in its incapacity to comprehend itself. It has no theory of history, it has no way of resolving geopolitical tension, it is incapable of rationally regulating its metabolism with nature, or control the existential technological threats unleashed by the development of its productive forces —it is still governed by the “mute compulsion” of capital. All of these issues do stem from the failure and defeat of Marxism in the 20th century. But its resurgence, if I’m right, is no longer that impossible to imagine—our world is not infinitely far from the one we missed. Our real goals are not in contradiction with the liberty we desire or the ‘nature’ of our souls. We all live in the long NEP. The question is who administers the NEP and who can find the conditions within it that will lead to the withering of the state.
The articulation of a politics on this basis is our new task.