How Socialism Became Social Imperialism - Summary of the book "Reading How the Soviet Union Became a Social-Imperialist State”

 

(Translator’s preface: Officially sanctioned “red” websites in China, like Utopia from which this piece came, are quite convincing about the restoration of capitalism in China, but generally reject the description of contemporary China as “social-imperialist” - ie, socialist in words, but imperialist in deeds. This short piece purports to be a critique of a book about how the former Soviet Union became social-imperialist, but in between the lines is a critique of how China became social-imperialist. It is a pity that such views need to be disguised in this way in order to be posted on a so-called “red” website.)

The term "social-imperialism" comes from Lenin's appraisal of the Second International and the traitor Kautsky. He called them "socialists in words, imperialists in practice" i.e., social-imperialists, with the difference that Kautsky and others did not hold state power, while once the revisionists came to power, the original socialist countries would either degenerate into social-imperialist countries or become colonies of other imperialist countries, and the Soviet Union belonged to the former situation.

The economic base determines the superstructure, and to understand how socialism has become social-imperialist, we must first understand what the economic basis of capitalist imperialism and socialism is and how it came to be, so that we naturally understand what social-imperialism is.

The economic basis and most obvious feature of imperialism is monopoly. Lenin pointed out that "if imperialism is to be defined as briefly as possible, it should be said that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. "But the monopoly of capitalist imperialism is formed through the accumulation and agglomeration of capital over a long period of time (the continuous annexation of small and medium-sized enterprises by large enterprises and the union of other large enterprises), in four main forms: cartels, syndicates, trusts and conglomerates. It should be pointed out that since the monopoly of capitalism was formed over a long period of time, in the initial stage of capitalism its relations of production were adapted to the productive forces, and it was only at the stage of imperialism, with the complete decay of capitalist relations of production, that imperialism became "dying capitalism". Social imperialism, on the other hand, revealed its decadence and decline from the very beginning, as will be discussed later.

The economic basis of socialism is the socialist state-run economy, which was formed after the proletariat seized power through violent revolution and confiscated the monopoly capital and enterprises of the former capitalist countries without compensation. This state-run economy controls the economic lifeline of the entire socialist country, is the main economic basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and plays an important role in supporting and guiding the transformation of agriculture, the individual economy in urban and rural areas, and in the transition from the economy of collective ownership to the ownership of the whole people. At the same time, its development is inseparable from the support of the collective ownership economy and the partial individual ownership economy, which complement each other and are indispensable.

However, "the bourgeoisie is in the Communist Party", the whole socialist stage is full of struggles between two classes and two lines, and the ideology of the bourgeoisie will persist for a long time, all this determines that "the restoration of capitalism is possible at any time". Once the bourgeois spokesmen of the Party seize the leadership and pursue a revisionist line, the nature of the Party and the country as a whole will change fundamentally. And the socialist economy itself is an economy highly integrated with the state power, for it is only under the leadership of the proletarian power that the socialist state economy can play its range of roles. Once the leadership is usurped, the nature of such an enterprise will also change, from serving the working people as a whole to serving the nascent bureaucratic bourgeoisie, "The question of why is a fundamental question, a question of principle." This metamorphosed and degenerated state economy then became the economic basis of social-imperialism.

Social-imperialism still has the five characteristics pointed out by Lenin, except that, as mentioned above, social-imperialism is the result of the degeneration of the erroneous line carried out by the revisionists within the socialist countries, so it has no progressive significance to speak of, but is decayed and backward from the beginning, and its interests are sharply opposed to those of the working people. For example, a soviet revisionist agricultural trust manager shouted "The trust is my home, I can do whatever I want", and another Soviet revisionist official barked wildly: "Are you speaking for the Party or do you speak for the people?"

Since the economic base determines the superstructure, and since the economic base of social-imperialism is the state economy serving the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the actual rulers of the social-imperialist state are the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, while the working class aristocracy and a section of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and their intellectuals, who are bribed with high monopoly profits, are the social class base of bureaucratic rule.

The future is bright, but the road is tortuous. The degeneration of socialism into social-imperialism (and eventually its disintegration, as in the Soviet Union) is undoubtedly a huge setback in the communist movement, but everything always "goes to its opposite, and then to the negation of the negation". With the help of proletarian intellectuals and revolutionaries, the working people are gradually awakening. When this force that determines the development of history once again merges into a revolutionary torrent, the light of socialism will surely shine on the earth again!