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·seems not to have occurred to either Lenin or Bukharin, even as a
subject for speculation, that there might be profound differences
between the
economic
monopolistic control, by private capitalist
groups, of branches of production and the
political
("totalitarian")
monopoly exercised by politicians over the entire national econ–
omy. In his entire book, Bukharin touches on this theme only once,
in a footnote:
Were the commodity character of production to disappear–
for instance through the organization of all world economy into
one gigantic State trust, the impossibility of which we tried to
prove in our chapter on ultra-imperialism-we would have an
entirely new economic form. This would be capitalism no more,
for the production of
commodities
would have disappeared; still
less would it
be
socialism,
for the power of one class over the
other would have remained (and even grown stronger) . Such an
economic structure would, most of all, resemble a slave·owning
economy where the slave market is absent.
This is such an interesting adumbration of what actually has come
about in Germany that one regrets all the more keenly that Buk–
harin did not carry it further.
It
is worth noting, in passing, that
Bukharin can conceive of production losing its commodity charac–
ter and hence ceasing to be capitalist if a single
world
trust should
arise-the reason being, of course, that in that case international
competition would cease and the world market would have no
meaning. But he fails to see that likewise, once a
national
monop–
oly has been established within a single nation, those same market·
commodity relations are also destroyed and for the same reasons
as would be the case on the world market.
The defects of the traditional Marxist conception of the com–
ing 'State capitalist trust' as merely a mechanical extension of
private
monopolism may . be seen if we compare the economic
effects of the two developments. It is now generally agreed that,
while monopolistic (or, more accurately in most cases, 'oligopolis–
tic') trusts establish a more orderly and 'planned' kind of economy
within their own particular sectors of production, the effect on
capitalist economy as a whole is to intensify its contradictions. Far
from moderating the swings of boom and depression, as Bernstein
and the pre-1914 Marxist 'revisionists' thought would be the case,
the rise of finance-capital monopolies has had the effect that Lenin
and Luxemburg predicted it would have: greatly
intensified
crises.
