Development,
Part 5a
Lenin: Co-ops work under the working class
The main
item today is Lenin’s “On Co-operation”, a short but very rich and
extraordinary document written in January 1923. Lenin suffered his third and
last stroke in March of that year, from which he did not recover, dying in
January, 1924. This short text is therefore among his last works.
Writing in
post-revolutionary conditions, Lenin briefly acknowledges the criticism that
had been heaped upon co-ops under the bourgeois dictatorship: “There is a lot of fantasy in the dreams of
the old co-operators. Often they are ridiculously fantastic,” he says.
Following
which he proceeds to place an extremely high value on co-operatives, in the new
conditions, as being almost the most important component of the advance to full
socialism, saying: “since political power
is in the hands of the working-class, since this political power owns all the
means of production, the only task, indeed, that remains for us is to organize
the population in co-operative societies.”
We can note
that in this article Lenin anticipates at least one or two decades of further
life of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed bourgeois activity under
proletarian state power.
What
actually happened was that within about four years after Lenin’s death the NEP
had been reversed and the policy of the Soviet Union had become one
of large-scale five-year plans, only. The centralisation of the economy,
started under Lenin as complementary to the NEP, had in effect become treated
as an either/or mutually exclusive alternative to it.
Is this a
necessary dichotomy? In South Africa, we will at some stage have to decide. So
far, since the democratic breakthrough of 1994 South African governments have
encouraged all kinds of employment, and small business development, including
encouragement of co-operatives that has been rather nominal. In that context,
note what Lenin says about the NEP: that it made the mistake of neglecting
co-operatives.
This short
article of Lenin’s on co-operation ranges more widely than simply on co-ops as
such. Particularly interesting are the concluding paragraphs of Part 2 of the
document, where Lenin refers to a “cultural revolution”.
In the
penultimate paragraph of Part 1, Lenin had written:
“By ability to be a trader I mean the ability
to be a cultured trader. Let those Russians, or peasants, who imagine that
since they trade they are good traders, get that well into their heads. This
does not follow that all. They do trade, but that is far from being cultured
traders. They now trade in an Asiatic manner, but to be a good trader one must
trade in the European manner. They are a whole epoch behind in that.”
The
difference that Lenin refers to as between “Asiatic” and “European” trading is
the difference between production for sale without having secured a market, and
on the other hand, production for a known market, or for a
previously-identified demand. We will pursue this question in relation to the
next item, on “entrepreneurship”.
In Part 2,
Lenin re-states the difference between pre- and post-revolutionary co-ops,
saying: “…we are right in regarding as
entirely fantastic this ‘co-operative’ socialism, and as romantic, and even
banal, the dream of transforming class enemies into class collaborators and
class war into class peace (so-called class truce) by merely organizing the
population in cooperative societies.
“…But see how things have changed now that the
political power is in the hands of the working-class, now that the political
power of the exploiters is overthrown…”
Illustration: Selling Surplus Grain Crops at the Office of
the People's Co-operative, Wang Qi, People’s Republic of China, 1953
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: On Co-operation, Lenin.
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