Marxism-Leninism, as the Soviet state codified it, had three components. There was dialectical and historical materialism, its philosophy; there was political economy, its account of how societies produce and distribute; and there was a third discipline, junior to the other two and peculiar to the Soviet century, called scientific communism. It was the science of the destination — of the transition from capitalism to communism, of the state that was to wither, of the future itself. This book is its primer. "Scientific communism," Afanasyev writes, "is thus a science dealing with the ways and means of destroying capitalism, with the laws governing the creation of the new, communist society, and with the economic, social and spiritual conditions for the all-round development of man." And, he adds, marking the boundary, "This distinguishes scientific communism from the other components of Marxism-Leninism, i.e., from Marxist philosophy and Marxist political economy." What follows is the confident, orderly exposition of a science whose subject matter is a world that does not yet exist.
For once in this series the date on the spine can be trusted. Many Progress translations lag their Russian originals by years, and several volumes in this catalogue wear a reformer's jacket over a much older book. Not this one. The latest event Afanasyev cites is the Twenty-Third Congress of the CPSU, held in March and April 1966, which he quotes four times; the current plan is "the five-year plan of economic development for 1966–70"; the schools figure is for "the 1965/66 school year." There is no reference to anything later. The phrase "developed socialism" — the Brezhnev-era formula that would soon become the doctrine's central category — does not occur once. This is a text of 1966–67, and it is worth pausing on the year, because 1967 was the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the jubilee for which the whole apparatus of Soviet ideology was mobilised, and this book is a jubilee book: the state's account of where it had come from and, above all, where it was going, offered to the world in the fiftieth year as a completed science.
The author is not a minor functionary. Viktor Grigoryevich Afanasyev (1922–1994) was one of the keystone textbook writers of late Soviet Marxism, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and the man who from 1976 would edit Pravda itself — the closest thing the system had to an official voice. He wrote the primers of two of the three components: the Marxist Philosophy already in this series, and this book. That a single pen produced both the philosophy and the futurology, and then moved on to run the Party newspaper, tells you what these books were. They were not inquiries. They were instruction, issued from the centre, in the doctrine as the centre wished it taught — first to Soviet students sitting their compulsory examinations, then to the wider world in the language of international circulation.
State the doctrine precisely, because the criticism depends on taking it seriously. The frame is the standard historical ladder — utopian socialism giving way to the "science" founded by Marx and Engels and completed by Lenin — and onto it Afanasyev fixes the specific claims that make scientific communism a distinct discipline. First, the two phases. Communism arrives in two stages, socialism being "the first phase," and the two are separated by their principle of distribution. Under socialism the rule is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work"; under full communism it becomes "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." The passage is Marx's, from the Critique of the Gotha Programme, and Afanasyev transmits it faithfully. Second, the transition is law-governed and therefore predictable: the experience of building socialism, he writes, yields "general laws governing the transition from capitalism to socialism" that "have repeated and will continue to repeat themselves." Third, the whole architecture rests on a single foundational document, the Third Programme of the CPSU — the Programme "adopted at the 22nd Congress of the C.P.S.U." in 1961, which Afanasyev quotes more than two dozen times and treats as the charter of the science.
That reliance dates the book more precisely than any calendar. The 1961 Programme was the most extraordinary promissory note in Soviet history: it announced that the material and technical basis of communism would in the main be built within twenty years, and pledged that the generation of Soviet people then living would see communism itself. Afanasyev's book is that Programme turned into a syllabus. And yet — this is the first quiet tension in it — he never repeats the date. He quotes the Programme's ringing definition of communism, "a classless social system with one form of public ownership… under it, the all-round development of people will be accompanied by the growth of the productive forces," but the calendar promise, the living generation, the year 1980, are nowhere in the book. Khrushchev, who had staked his name on that timetable, had been removed in October 1964. By 1967 the timetable was becoming an embarrassment, and Afanasyev writes as a man committed to the Programme's whole world-picture while stepping carefully around its one falsifiable clause. The confidence is total; the deadline has silently gone.
This is what makes 1967 the interesting year to catch this doctrine in. It is before "developed socialism" — before the admission, coded into that phrase, that communism had receded over the horizon and the present would have to be renamed to make the wait bearable. It is before the stagnation that everyone, including the Soviet economists, would later date to these very years. Scientific communism here is at its moment of maximum forward confidence, describing the future in granular, almost loving detail. Chapters eight, nine and ten are given over to it: the material and technical basis of communism, automation and "the man-machine system," the merging of the two forms of property, the disappearance of the distinction between town and country and between mental and physical labour, the moulding of "the new man," and at last the arrival of distribution according to need. Afanasyev can tell you how machines will be designed under communism and how leisure will be spent. The science reaches confidently across decades it will never see.
And here the book's own method turns against it. A discipline that calls itself predictive — Lenin's own charge to it, quoted by Afanasyev, was "to study, detect and predict" — invites the obvious question of what it can see when it looks not forward but around. The answer is: not the one institution that mattered. Consider the state. The withering away of the state is the doctrine's crown jewel, inherited from Engels and Lenin, and Afanasyev expounds it at length: "The state appeared with the rise of classes; with the disappearance of classes it will necessarily wither away." But watch what he does with the present. "Naturally," he writes, "this does not mean that the state of the proletarian dictatorship is a withering state." The withering is then deferred twice over — first to the completion of communism at home, and then to its victory abroad: "If communism triumphs in one or another country or in one group of countries or another and armed capitalist vultures remain in the world, the state function of defending the country will be preserved." Since capitalism plainly remained in the world, the withering was postponed to an indefinite future, and the actually existing Soviet state was exempted from the analysis in the same breath that praised the analysis. The science predicts the dissolution of the state in the year 2000 and guarantees its full powers today.
The same evasion governs what the book calls, following the 1961 Programme, "the state of the whole people." The proletarian dictatorship, Afanasyev explains, has already grown over into a higher, non-class form: "The socialist nature of the state does not change with the growth of the proletarian dictatorship into a state of the whole people." A dictatorship that is no longer a dictatorship of anybody over anybody; a state belonging to everyone equally — and, thirty years after Afanasyev, still standing, still policing, still appointing. The one actor never examined in this examination of everything is the apparatus doing the examining. Bureaucracy does appear in the book — exactly once, and revealingly, in the final pages, where it is handled as a stain rather than a structure. "Bureaucracy is alien to the society of builders of communism," Afanasyev writes, "but it cannot be eradicated in one sweep. It is surmounted by day-to-day improvement of all social… relations." It is a survival, an external residue of the old world, to be washed away gradually by good administration — never a stratum with interests of its own, never the thing that runs the state that will not wither. Apply the test this series has learned to trust: error is admissible in these books, but the category never turns inward. A Soviet official may be inefficient, may need "improvement"; he is never the beneficiary of a system. The word "opportunist" in this volume is reserved, as always, for those outside — "Right and Left opportunism" among the enemies of the movement (line after line about their "petty-bourgeois mentality"), never a possibility that could attach to the men in Moscow who commissioned the book.
The answer to all of this was written thirty years before Afanasyev sat down, by a man he does not name. Leon Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the standing reply to every Soviet account of Soviet society, and it anticipated this book almost line for line. Where Afanasyev insists the workers' state is not a withering state and leaves the matter there, Trotsky asked why it was not withering, and found the answer in the very principle of distribution that Afanasyev repeats without disturbance. Socialism's rule, "to each according to his work," is not yet a communist principle but a bourgeois one — Marx's own point in the Gotha critique, that in the first phase an equal standard is still applied to unequal people. Afanasyev half-sees this; he concedes that "the principle of equal pay for equal work signifies the application of one and the same yardstick to different people," and that the result is real inequality of incomes. But he calls the yardstick natural and necessary and moves on. Trotsky drew the conclusion Afanasyev will not: a state that must enforce unequal shares needs an enforcer. "The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character," he wrote: "socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life's goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value." For the defence of that "bourgeois" measure "the workers' state was compelled to create a 'bourgeois' type of instrument — that is, the same old gendarme, although in a new uniform." The state does not wither precisely because someone has to hold the yardstick, and the someone becomes a caste.
That caste is what Afanasyev's "state of the whole people" was built to hide, and Trotsky's demolition of the phrase — written against the 1936 Stalin Constitution, but pointed straight at the doctrine Afanasyev would inherit — remains exact. A genuinely people's state, freed of class contradictions, could only be a dissolving state, Trotsky argued: "when the bearer of dictatorship becomes the people, freed from class contradictions, that can only mean the dissolution of the dictatorship in a socialist society — and, above all, the liquidation of the bureaucracy… With the liquidation of classes, not only the bureaucracy dies away, and not only the dictatorship, but the state itself." What Afanasyev offers instead is a "people's" state that keeps all its organs, all its appointments, all its powers. "Classes are abolished," Trotsky wrote of exactly this claim. "Of Soviets there remains only the name. But the bureaucracy is still there. The equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy." On the inequality that Afanasyev files under "one yardstick," Trotsky was blunt: the official average wage was "an arithmetical fiction whose function is to mask the real and cruel inequality in the payment of labor," and in the spread between the privileged and the poor "the Soviet Union has not only caught up to, but far surpassed the capitalist countries." Socialism would be reached, he insisted, "not under the whip of a bureaucracy. For this very whip is the most disgusting inheritance from the old world."
There is a further silence in the architecture, and it is the load-bearing one. The whole book is organised around a "world socialist system" — a bloc of national states each building communism on its own territory — without the doctrine that makes such a thing thinkable ever being argued. "Socialism in one country" is nowhere stated and everywhere assumed. Afanasyev takes as given that socialism, and then communism, can be completed within national borders while capitalism survives abroad; his only concession to the international dimension is that the state's defensive function must persist until "the complete abolition of capitalism on a world-wide scale." This is the settled Stalinist position, and it is precisely the one the Marxist tradition contested. Trotsky's answer, in the Transitional Programme of 1938, tied it directly to the bureaucracy Afanasyev cannot see: "The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers' state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation — not only theoretically, but this time, practically — of the theory of socialism in one country." The isolated state, he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed, remained "a precise expression of the relative strength of world capitalism, the relative weakness of socialism," and "from an isolated 'socialist' state to a socialist society once for all done with the state remains a long historic road, and this road exactly coincides with the road of international revolution." What the Soviet leaders called the victory of socialism, he added drily, was something narrower: "When speaking of the victory of socialism, they meant their own victory." The USSR, on this reading, was not the first phase of communism marching to the second, but "a degenerated workers' state" — a real conquest of October, state property and planning intact, sitting under the rule of a privileged stratum that had to be removed, not waited out. A reader can weigh that verdict against Afanasyev's and decide; but Afanasyev never lets the argument into the room. Trotsky is not refuted in this book. He is simply absent, and the position attributed to nobody is the one the whole structure quietly rests on.
One small emblem of the method is worth recording, because it recurs across this series and this book takes part in it. On disarmament Afanasyev reaches, as Soviet authors always did, for Lenin's authority: "Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved." The quotation stops there, at a footnote mark, and the argument moves on to Soviet peace proposals. But Lenin's sentence does not stop there. It was written in 1916, in "The 'Disarmament' Slogan," as an argument against putting disarmament in a socialist programme, and the very next words are the point: "But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist." Lenin's conclusion was the opposite of a disarmament appeal — "Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat." Afanasyev prints the first two sentences and cuts at the turn. He is the not the only one; at least five other volumes in this catalogue make the identical cut at the identical place, and the identification is not ours to claim — Progress's own USSR and Countries of Africa names the article. The cut is small, but it is the whole operation in miniature: the master is quoted exactly up to the point where he becomes inconvenient, and there the quotation ends.
None of this means the book is worthless, and the reader owes it the credit it has earned. When Afanasyev transmits the tradition rather than adapting it, he transmits it well. The opening history — the "from a utopia to a science" narrative, with its portraits of Winstanley, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen — is a competent rendering of Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and a student who read it would come away genuinely informed about the pre-Marxian socialists and why Marx and Engels broke with them. The two-phase theory of communism is Marx's, accurately given. The withering-away doctrine is really Engels's and Lenin's; Afanasyev even preserves Engels's fine image of the state sent off "to where it belongs — the museum of antiquities, alongside the spinning wheel and the bronze axe." The analysis of the first phase as a realm of persistent inequality is, as we have seen, Marx's own. The machinery of the classical argument is here, in working order, and much of what once drew serious people to this tradition is legible in these pages. The failure is not that the book teaches falsehoods about Marx. It is that the machinery is switched off at the one place it would have cut toward home — the point where Marx's "bourgeois right" in the first phase, faithfully described, would have forced the question of who wields it. Afanasyev quotes the analysis and drops the name Marx gave it, and in that gap between the description and its label the entire critical tradition, from Marx through Trotsky, is quietly shut out.
So read this as the doctrine at its confident middle — the fiftieth-anniversary summation, poised between the utopian deadline of 1961 that it has already learned not to mention and the "developed socialism" of the 1970s that would explain the deadline's disappearance. Its author would spend the next two decades editing the newspaper that reported the Soviet present, having written the textbook that mapped the Soviet future, and neither the paper nor the textbook ever found room for the bureaucracy that employed them both. The state Afanasyev promised would wither did not wither; it dissolved, in the end, not into "communist social self-administration" but into something he would have called counter-revolution, and it took the world socialist system with it. That the book could not foresee this is not, by itself, a reproach — no science sees everything. The reproach is that it claimed to be the science of exactly this, the laws of the transition and the destiny of the state, and could describe the automation of the year 2000 in detail while remaining blind to the men in the office next door. A predictive science that cannot see its own present is telling you something, and it is not about the future.