Leon Trotsky: What Is the 'Smychka'?

December 1928

[Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-1929), New York 1981, p. 352-360]

This word has entered into circulation internationally. Nothing was discussed so much after Lenin's death as the smychka. And there was perhaps no area in which so many errors were made as in this one. In fact the whole theory of socialism in one country was derived from the smychka. The line of thinking was this: since the smychka consists in correctly balanced relations between state industry and peasant agriculture, or relations that are becoming more and more correctly balanced, isn't it obvious that a gradual, even if slow, development of the productive forces, resting on the foundation of the smychka, will automatically lead to socialism (if foreign military intervention does not prevent it)?

This whole line of argument rests upon a string of schoolboy errors. Its premises are, first, that the smychka has already come into being. The grain collections crisis is decisive empirical refutation of this idea, which we subjected to a thoroughgoing theoretical critique long before this crisis. Second, even if a sturdy bond between industry and peasant agriculture had actually come into being, it would not constitute the foundation for a future socialist economy within a national framework, but only a foundation on which to build a properly balanced and stable relationship between the proletariat and peasantry within a single isolated country for the entire period of the "breathing spell," i.e., until either a new war or new revolutions in other countries. For us, proletarian victory in the advanced countries would mean a radical restructuring of the economic foundations themselves to conform to a more productive international division of labor, which is the only means by which the true foundations for a socialist system can be built.

The third and final error is that there is no guarantee that even the smychka that has to one extent or another been achieved today will remain stable in the future throughout the transitional period.

We aspire to make a transition from the disharmonious and therefore crisis-ridden capitalist economy to a harmonious socialist economy. But the transitional period by no means implies the gradual dying out of the contradictions or the easing of economic crises. On the contrary even a theoretical analysis should tell us in advance that the coexistence of two systems, the socialist economy and the capitalist economy, simultaneously in conflict with one another and nourishing one another, must from time to time produce crises of unparalleled severity. The planning principle tends to weaken, if not paralyze, the market mechanism, which has its own way of overcoming the contradictions of capitalism. In its very essence the planning principle during the transitional period to a certain extent is bound to be the instrument of generalized crises. This is by no means a paradox. The planning principle in the conditions of the transitional era-applied for the first time in a backward country and in a situation, moreover, of unstable world economic relations-contains within itself a tremendous risk of miscalculation.

Laplace said that we could predict the future in all fields if we had minds capable of taking into account all the processes within the universe, understanding them in their interactions and projecting their future lines of development. Laplace didn't have that kind of mind himself. And we won't go into the question of the number of Laplaces in the present leadership. The need for an a priori solution to economic problems, which takes the form of an equation with an enormous number of unknowns, inevitably has the result that in some cases through planned regulation some partial or particular difficulties are gotten out of the way by being driven inward, being swept under the rug, thus accumulating problems and laying the basis for generalized crises, crises which send sky high certain economic relationships which had seemed to be solidly established.

If we add to this the leadership's low theoretical level and practical short-sightedness, it's easy to understand how planning can become a self-destructive instrument, bringing crises to a point of extreme tension that threatens the system as a whole.

A classic example is the grain collections crisis itself, for it occurs along the line of the relationship between state industry and peasant agriculture; that is, along the very line of the supposedly solid and secure smychka.

It was at the same seventh plenum of the ECCI where the Left Opposition was condemned, and Marxism along with it, that Bukharin – as we know – chose this question of the grain collections as the "factor" assuring the automatic strengthening of the smychka and hence of socialism.

"What was the most powerful argument that our Opposition used against the Central Committee of the party (I have in mind here the autumn of 1925)? They said then: the contradictions are growing monstrously, and the CC of the party fails to understand this. They said: the kulaks, in whose hands almost the entire grain surplus is concentrated, have organized 'the grain strike' against us. That is why grain is coming in so poorly. We all heard this. … The Opposition estimated that all the rest was only the political expression of this fundamental phenomenon. Subsequently the same comrades intervened to state: the kulak has entrenched himself still further, the danger has still further increased. Comrades, if the first and second affirmations had been correct, we would have even a stronger 'kulaks' strike' against the proletariat this year. … The Opposition slanders us by stating that we are contributing to the growth of the kulaks, that we are continually making concessions, that we are helping the kulaks to organize the grain strike; the real results are proof of just the contrary" (December 9, 1926, seventh plenum of the ECCI).

This attack on us, which was so cruelly discredited by the subsequent course of economic events, follows entirely from the mechanistic conception of the economics of the transition period as the economics of contradictions that are dying out. The most abstract expression of this view and the most consummate in its scholastic lifelessness was the article by Bukharin motivating the resolution of the seventh plenum of the ECCI about our alleged Social Democratic deviation. That article proceeded deductively from the abstract scholastic conception of the smychka, to the abstraction of socialism in one country. And made the demand upon us that we demonstrate that point or boundary line where the steady process of the strengthening of the smychka and its growing over into a single integrated planned economy could be interrupted by any internal factor whatsoever.

In this schema of growing harmonization of the relations between town and country and of the economy as a whole Bukharin managed to include without any difficulty all practical questions. The peasants were enriching themselves. The kulaks were growing over into socialism. It goes without saying, of course, that from year to year the grain collections were getting better and better. (We are talking about Bukharin's schema of course, not the reality.) In his speech at the seventh ECCI plenum Bukharin chose precisely this question to illustrate the conflict between the "Trotskyist conception" and the correct "party conception" of economic problems.

At the July plenum in 1928 Rykov was obliged to admit that he had given a falsely optimistic picture of the economy at the Fifteenth Congress and had not foreseen the grain collections crisis or its severity. Yet that crisis had been predicted with absolute accuracy in a number of documents of the Opposition, and even earlier in our report on industry at the Twelfth Congress (1923!), in which the problem of the scissors was formulated for the first time.

The warning, despite all its urgency, was neither assimilated nor even understood. On the contrary, it was used as the basis for the charge of "superindustrializing," a concept which, in the light of our whole economic experience, cannot be called anything but idiotic.

What percentage of the grain collections crisis is attributable to the difficulties or contradictions embodied in the planning principle in a backward peasant country, and what percentage derives from the petty-bourgeois, passive, wait-and-see, tail-ending attitude toward the problem of the smychka? Of course an exact mathematical answer cannot be given to that question. But there can be no doubt that the extreme aggravation of the crisis was the result of theoretical scholasticism and practical shortsightedness.

The positive question of the smychka since 1923 has taken the negative form of the scissors. The administrative regulation of prices, in the context of the wrong polices followed in the distribution of the national income and in regard to the "disproportion” for a certain length of time drove the contradictions inward, hiding them from view and feeding the Bukharinist illusion that the contradictions were dying out.

From Mikoyan, in charge of domestic trade, we have heard that although it is difficult to make the government trusts in state industry submit to regulation, the task has been accomplished 100 percent in regard to rural economic operations.

Thus, theoretical scholasticism about the transitional period is supplemented by wishful thinking in the practical management of domestic trade. The grain collections crisis of 1928 was the wholesale payoff for the illusions and errors of the preceding years – or more accurately, the beginning of the payoff.

The problem of the scissors was an expression of the problem of the transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution in a very precise, numerical way in terms of the market. The overthrow of the monarchical landlord regime benefited the peasants in the amount of about 500 million rubles saved on land rent and taxes annually. The scissors – that is, the change in the ratio of agricultural to industrial prices – cost the peasantry about 1.5 billion a year. Those are the basic indices of the smychka. What the peasantry gained in terms of land rent is a definitive statement of the favorable results of the democratic revolution. What the peasants lost through the scissors is the nondefinitive, still current statement for them of the negative results of the socialist revolution. State industry has exchanged its products for the products of peasant labor with a loss for the peasant of a billion rubles a year by comparison with the prewar period. When these illuminating figures were first cited by us at a Central Committee plenum there was of course an attempt to challenge them. Yakovlev, a well-known minimizer of statistics, tried to reduce the price deficit suffered by peasant agriculture from a billion to three or four hundred million rubles. The grain strike by the upper layers of the peasantry shows that it is harder to deal with the objective economic reality than with its reflection in statistics. Even Yakovlev, this tamer of wild Arabic numerals, could not bring himself to deny that for the peasantry the balance sheet of the two revolutions, socialist and democratic, has thus far, after the positive and negative sums are figured in, come out with a deficit of several hundred million rubles.

Of course when I speak of the democratic revolution I don't mean the February revolution, which gave the peasantry nothing, but the October Revolution, which solved the agrarian question in a radical way. The peasantry made a very clear and precise distinction between the two stages of the revolution by stating that they were for the Bolsheviks but against the Communists. The NEP retreat was the direct result of the peasants' calculation of its gains and losses from the democratic and socialist revolutions respectively.

In practical terms the tasks of the smychka, on the basis of NEP, were formulated as follows: to achieve a situation in which state industry and commerce could exchange the products of "socialist labor" for those of the fragmented peasant economy at least as cheaply as prewar capitalism had done, and after that in the same ratio at least as the world capitalist market. The timely narrowing of the scissors back to the prewar level would have meant that the problem of the smychka was solved not for all time but for a certain period of time. The same would be true concerning the problem of achieving parity with prices on the world capitalist market.

There are no calendars telling us the deadline by which we had to solve these problems. But we could not drag the process out indefinitely. The chronic grain collections crisis is evidence that things have been dragged out too long. And the farther this goes, the more will be required in order to get out of the crisis.

"In [agriculture in] the West there is disintegration and decay. That is entirely natural. Not so in Russia. In our country the development of agriculture cannot proceed along that line if for no other reason than that we have Soviet power here and the instruments of production are nationalized and therefore such a development would not be allowed." According to that logic the danger of restoration was greater before capitalism.

The democratic revolution and the socialist revolution in the villages have not yet grown together. Not in the sense that the village has not yet begun to engage in socialist production. (That would mean that the village is no longer the village. Carrying out that kind of task still remains a long-term perspective for the future.) Not even in the sense that socialist industry has shown the peasants in practice that it is increasingly advantageous for the peasants as compared to capitalism. We have in mind a much more modest stage of development. Socialist industry has not yet achieved parity, not by a long shot, with prewar capitalism's capacity to serve the needs of the villages. The price scissors constantly reopens the gap between the democratic and socialist revolutions, giving this disparity a very sharp political character. Until this wound is closed and healed over, we cannot say that the foundation has been laid – not the foundation of independent, self-sufficient socialism, but the foundation for correct relations between the proletariat and the peasantry during the period that separates us from the victorious revolution of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries.

Let us now approach this contradictory economic process using the criteria presented at the seventh ECCI plenum. What is our revolution in and of itself? In the light of the fundamental economic processes and realities this question must be answered as follows: Our revolution has a contradictory, dual character. Even if we leave aside for the moment how the revolution is coping in its twelfth year with the problem of the material conditions of the industrial workers, the indisputable fact remains that the socialist aspect of the October Revolution thus far represents a burdensome deficit in the budget of the peasantry – that is, the overwhelming bulk of the population. The only ones who would gloss over this fact would be cowards of the reactionary national-socialist breed or Americanized wheeler-dealers who have for the most part learned only one thing from American technology, the art of pulling the wool over people's eyes.

The peasants tried to counterpose the Bolshevik to the Communist, that is, the revolutionary democrat to the socialist reorganizer of the economy. If two really different political species were involved the choice between them would not represent any difficulty for the peasants. They would support the Bolshevik, who gave them the land, against the Communist, who buys their grain cheaply and sells them manufactured goods at high prices and in insufficient quantities. But the heart of the matter is that the Bolshevik and the Communist are one and the same. This is the result of the fact that the democratic revolution was only the introductory stage of the socialist revolution.

Here we come back again to Marx's formula of the proletarian revolution backed up by a peasant war. If the peasants had gotten the land from a democratic dictatorship and not a proletarian dictatorship, the Soviet regime, given the present price ratio, would probably not be able to last even one year. But the problem is that in that event it would never have been established in the first place. (We have discussed that amply in another chapter [see "Marxism and the Relation Between Proletarian and Peasant Revolution"].) Here we see what weighty content there still is today in the question of the political methods by which the democratic revolution grows over into the socialist revolution. Only because the agrarian question as a revolutionary-democratic question was resolved not by a petty bourgeois, that is, a democratic, dictatorship but by a proletarian one – owing solely to that fact – the peasants not only supported Soviet power during a bloody, three-year civil war but are still reconciled to Soviet power in spite of the prolonged losses that state industry has meant for them.

From our analysis the apologists of capitalism and the petty-bourgeois reactionaries, above all, the Mensheviks, deduce the necessity for a return to capitalism. The semiofficial slanderers give those apologists back-handed support when they say that no other conclusion can be drawn from my analysis. But since my analysis cannot be refuted, since it rests on the indisputable facts and processes which it properly explains, the end result of the semi-official criticism is to encourage people to think along Menshevik lines, although approaching from the opposite direction. And yet what follows from my analysis is not the economic inevitability of a return to capitalism but the political danger of capitalist restoration. They are not at all the same thing. To say that socialist industry today is less advantageous for the peasantry than prewar capitalism was, is not the same as to say that a return to capitalism under present conditions would be more advantageous for the peasant than the existing state of affairs. No, a return to capitalism now would mean, first of all, a fierce and intense battle within the world imperialist camp for the right to control this second edition of "Old Russia." It would mean that Russia would again become part of the chain of imperialism, having the clearly understood status of a subordinate link – that is, on a semicolonial basis. It would mean turning the peasant into a payer of tribute to imperialism, while the development of the productive forces in our country would be retarded in the extreme. In other words, Russia would not take its place alongside the United States, France, and Italy but would fall into the same category as India and China.

These considerations do not all belong in the sphere of historical prediction. The reactionary character of Menshevism and the Otto Bauer school is that they think of Russia in terms of "capitalism in one country" rather than examine the question of the fate of a capitalist Russia in the light of international processes.

It is hard to ask or to expect that the peasants would be guided in their attitudes toward Soviet power by a complex historical prognosis, no matter how clear and indisputable it might be to any serious Marxist. Even the proletarian, never mind the peasant, proceeds from his own life experience. Colonial bondage is a historical perspective and at the same time a bitter past reality. That is why the present situation, which is characterized by the absence of a firm foundation for the smychka, gives rise not to the economic necessity, but to the political danger of a return to capitalism.