Trotsky, the Market Socialist.

Excerpt from H. Brar: Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism

Although Trotsky’s political diatribes against the Soviet regime are well-known, his contribution to economic thought has by and large remained unacknowledged — particularly by the milliard of Trotskyite outfits the world over. And this for a very sound reason, namely, that in the only pamphlet that Trotsky ever wrote on this subject, he comes out clearly and unequivocally as an advocate of ’market socialism’. We have in mind Trotsky’s pamphlet Soviet Economy in Danger, which he published in 1933 and in which he denounces, in terms most violent, every revolutionary step taken by the Soviet government in the direction of socialist construction, and he parrots bourgeois economic ideas a la Von Mises and Brutzkus, which made him the darling of the imperialist enemies of socialism.

In 1929, having put an end to the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Soviet government embarked on its second assault on capitalism through socialist industrialisation and collectivisation — both measures of world revolutionary historic significance. Trotsky, however, came out in opposition to these measures, declaring that the “correct and economically sound collectivisation, at a given stage, should not lead to the elimination of the NEP but to the gradual reorganisation of its methods.” (p. 32).

In other words, no attempt should be made to eliminate capitalism in general, and capitalism in the countryside in particular.

Pretending to stand for some sort of control of the market, Trotsky’s method of controlling the market is to leave it to the market to control itself! “The regulation of the market itself must depend upon the tendencies that are brought out through its medium.” (p. 30). In other words, market forces must control the market!

Every revolutionary giant stride forward of the Soviet economy at that time, because outside the market, is portrayed by this high priest of ’market socialism’ as disorder and “economic chaos”. He says:

“By eliminating the market and installing instead Asiatic bazaars the bureaucracy has created… the conditions for the most barbaric gyrations of prices and consequently has placed a mine under commercial calculations. As a resuit the economic chaos has been redoubled.” (p.34).

Trotsky, who in December 1925, at the 14th Party Congress of the CPSU, had tried to force on the Party the policy of immediate collectivisation of the peasantry, when the conditions necessary for such collectivisation were totally lacking — the same Trotsky, in 1933, when collectivisation was well on the way to completion, comes out in opposition to the policy of liquidating the kulaks, demanding instead the establishment of “a policy of severely restricting the exploiting tendencies of the Kulak” (p.47).

In other words, capitalism must not be abolished.

And this mountebank, who railed against the Soviet regime for its policy of eliminating the kulaks some twelve years after the socialist revolution in Russia, had the audacity to denounce as a total capitulation to the bourgeoisie the policy, put forward in 1936 — i.e., long before the socialist revolution — by Mao Tse-tung, of moderating the agrarian class struggle in the Chinese countryside in the interests of maintaining national unity in the national revolutionary struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Praying for miracles, declares Trotsky: “commodities must be adapted to human needs…” (p.44). Trotsky’s position amounts to this: “Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.”

That is what Professor Von Mises said in 1920. And it was precisely for writing an article in the same vein that Brutzkus was exiled in 1922. At the time Trotsky described the Soviet government’s attitude towards the likes of Brutzkus as “preventative humanity.” “Learned ideologists,” he wrote in Pravda, “are not at present dangerous to the Republic, but external or internal complications might arise which would oblige us to have these ideologists shot. Better let them go abroad…” (Quoted from B Brutzkus, Economic Planning in Soviet Russia, English translation, 1935).

But eleven years later the same Trotsky, literally parroting Von Mises and Brutzkus, says that society can never be rid of the market, for “economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.”

Trotsky therefore comes to the conclusion that: “It is necessary to put off the Second Five Year Plan. Away with shrieking enthusiasm!” (p. 41).

Although bourgeois economics learnt nothing from Trotsky’s Soviet Economy in Danger, seeing as he had but repeated, in a clumsy way, what had been said a decade earlier by Von Mises and Brutzkus, it was nevertheless extensively quoted in the imperialist press by the bourgeois critics of socialist construction, for it enabled the latter to stress that their ’objective’ and ’impartial’ critique of socialism, and their dogma that it was impossible for society to free itself from the market, were fully accepted by this ’old Bolshevik’.

Incidentally, Trotsky’s adherence to ’market socialism’ explains why so many Trotskyists find themselves in the Labour Party in Britain and similar social-democratic outfits elsewhere, and why they busy themselves with developing bourgeois reformism — for if ’market socialism’ were actually socialism, as this gentry along with the revisionists believe it to be, it is only another way of saying that the social needs of the working class can be expressed and met through the market, that is, through the conflict of private interests in production for the market. If this were to be the case, why on earth should capitalism not evolve itself into socialism without any need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism? If that were to be revealed by life, then one would have to admit that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were wrong, whereas Duhring, Proudhon, Bernstein, Kautsky, Trotsky and Tito were right.

However life, far from confirming this, actually provides an eloquent refutation of ’market socialism’. Yugoslavia, which embarked on the path of ’market socialism’ ten years earlier than the USSR and other Eastern European countries, is a perfectly good example. Its economy is characterised by high unemployment, mass emigration and subjection to foreign monopoly capital. Socially it is being tom asunder. It was the Titoites’ adherence to ’market socialism’ which led to Yugoslavia’s expulsion from Cominform and not, as is claimed by an assortment of renegade socialists (not to mention the imperialists) Stalin’s alleged unsuccessful attempt to impose Soviet hegemony over Yugoslavia. This was made perfectly clear when the proponents of ’market socialism’ in the USSR, the Khrushchevite revisionists, having triumphed at the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, went on to establish fraternal relations with the Titoite revisionists. Khrushchev rightly regarded Tito as a pioneer of this new variety of ’socialism’.