Class Struggles in the USSR 2nd Period: 1923-1930

by Charles Bettelheim

Book by Bettelheim, Charles

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Soviet Union, Russia, Sociology, Soviet History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Economist and historian, founder of the Center for the Study of Modes of Industrialization (CEMI : Centre pour l'Étude des Modes d'Industrialisation) at the Sorbonne), economic advisor to the governments of several developing countries during the period of decolonization. He was very influential in France's New Left, and considered one of "the most visible Marxists in the capitalist world" (Le Monde, April 4, 1972), in France as well as in Spain, Italy, Latin America, and India.

Reviews

[Narek Yeranyan]

This book is part of a four-volume series, and this is a review of all four.

Books 1 and 2 seem to be written by someone very sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. The devastating effects of the First World War, foreign military intervention, the Civil War, hostile encirclement, the country's backwardness, etc. are all treated as essential context for understanding the decisions of the Bolshevik leadership. Common criticisms, such as the suppression of free speech and the hasty trials and executions carried out by the Cheka, are discussed together with the historical circumstances in which they occurred ... or, as the author would put it, in terms of contradictions, classes, and their struggles.

Bettelheim really likes Lenin. He also thinks the NEP was the reasonable and sustainable path forward, and that if Lenin had lived long enough, the Bolsheviks would not have abandoned it—the policy they wrongly came to regard as merely temporary. At which point you start to wonder: why didn't the author pick Team Menshevik, or any of the other people who wanted capitalism to develop first? Why justify repressive measures against all the “bourgeois” opposition?

Anyway, aside from his view of the NEP, I agreed with a lot of what he was saying, but I was annoyed by how he was saying it.

It seemed—how else to put it?—too Marxist.

With the words “class,” “struggle,” and “contradiction” inserted at the beginning and end of every sentence, it reads like Mao had to reach a specific word count for a university assignment. Like someone performing or imitating Marxism.

Nothing unforgivable, really. Just irritating.

But then I started Volume 3... and apparently all the classes have gone on holiday.

Instead of those classes, Books 3 and 4 contain a lot of quotation marks. Just an “average” book about how the “worker” state wasn't really “democratic” and the “planned” “socialist” “economy” wasn't really intended to “improve” the lives of workers and peasants. All that “sophisticated analysis” from the first two books was apparently unnecessary. The Soviet Union can simply be explained as capitalism with Stalinist characteristics.

Now, people can change their minds. They can study something extensively, reach conclusions they sincerely believe are well-founded, and later change those conclusions after further research. They can even end up believing the exact opposite of what they once believed. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

In fact, I agree with many of the criticisms in Volumes 3 and 4 too. But I disagree with the framing and the conclusions they want the reader to draw.

For example, I can believe that the Soviet Union was the best thing that ever happened to this planet and still think there was an enormous amount wrong with it. I could criticize it for another hundred books.

You can tell me something terrible about a kolkhoz while genuinely wanting collective agriculture to succeed. You can also tell me the same thing to prove that the kolkhoz, everything around it, and the system that produced it were inherently worthless and should never have been attempted. The question is where you stand and what your criticism is for.

These books managed to irritate me both when defending the Soviet Union and when attacking it. They went from explaining Soviet history with far too many Marxist words to explaining it with far too few.

P.S. Maybe the first two books felt fake even when I agreed with them because a good NKVDshnik can smell a traitor before his future crimes :)

[Julio The Fox]

When Charles Bettleheim published this first volume on the Russian Revolution his beloved Maoist China, like Mao himself, lay at death's door. What had gone wrong? Why had every attempt to build socialism thus far ended in failure? Bettleheim decided to plow into the past and pry open the decisive years in the making of the USSR. Rejecting both Stalinist orthodoxy, the claim that the Soviet Union had ever been socialist, along with Trotsky's verdict on the USSR as "a degenerated workers' state", Bettleheim sees Soviet Russia sowing the seeds of its own destruction from the 1920s onward, by adopting a "mechanistic model" of building socialism that put 5-year plans and quotas first and class struggle last. Of this, Stalin and Trotsky were equally guilty, and Lenin comes in for his fair share of criticism. The absence of clear, Marxist, political leadership poisoned both the economy and proletarian consciousness. Food for thought on building an alternative to capitalism today.

[Bernardo Candal]

Poderia ser 4,5 por dois defeitos: uma constante repetição de temas de modo não cronológico, o que indica que devem ter sido reaproveitados de artigos ou outras obras, mas que engessam um pouco a leitura num livro tão denso; e certa romantização da experiência maoísta na China, sempre como exemplo positivo de forma exagerada. Mas tem que ser 5 pela profundidade da análise, pela ideia central de resgatar a evolução do pensamento de Lênin de forma dialética em oposição aos erros do partido, tanto das alas de Stalin quanto de Trotski. A ver se o segundo volume mantém o altíssimo nível do primeiro.

[Thomas]

here's a book for you if you'd like to read some 'epic' 70s maoist materialist analysis of the early soviet union and what lenin had to say about various developments in it.

[Alfie Hancox]

Bettelheim rehabilitates Lenin' revolutionary dialectics, as against Trotsky and Stalin, through an epic study of the USSR. A masterclass in historical materialism.