(From the book: Soviet Revisionism and the Struggle of the PLA to Unmask It)

In his work “Imperialism and the Revolution” Comrade Enver Hoxha has said that, state monopoly capitalism, which represents the highest stage of the concentration of production and capital and is the main form of property prevailing today in the Soviet Union, is the main expression of the capitalism re-established in the Soviet Union.

From the standpoint of its essence, this capitalism is similar to the state monopoly capitalism prevailing in the other bourgeois countries. They .have in common the subjection of the state apparatus to the monopolies, the complete economic and political domination of the bourgeoisie in the whole life of the country, the exploitation of the broad working masses and the strangling of revolutions and peoples’ liberation struggles.

However, there are some special features which distinguish Soviet state monopoly capitalism from that of the other bourgeois countries. Those features have to do with the peculiarities of the birth, the forms of expression and the economic mechanism with the aid of which the right of ownership is exercised in the Soviet Union, etc. Seen from this angle, the capitalism restored in the Soviet Union is different from the capitalism of the West because it manifests itself as revisionist centralized bureaucratic capitalism.

1. State monopoly capitalism emerged in the Soviet Union during the process of the degeneration of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party of the working class into a dictatorship and party of the new revisionist bourgeoisie, a process which began with the advent to power of the Khrushchevites. This degeneration could not fail to lead to changes in the economic base, to the divesting of the working class of the means of production and the transformation of labour power into a commodity like all other commodities. And according to Marxism-Leninism, the society in which labour power is turned into a commodity and bought and sold freely on the labour market is nothing but a pure capitalist society.

After usurping the leadership of the party and the state, the Khrushchevites applied such forms and methods of organization and management that gradually led to alteration of the essence of the socialist relations of production, established in the time of Lenin and Stalin, and introduced into the Soviet economy an economic mechanism whereby capitalist profit became the aim of production. Consequently, the former common property began to lose its socialist features and to be transformed into the property of the new revisionist bourgeoisie, the property of a new capitalist class.

Thus, the correctness of the Marxist-Leninist thesis that the socialist social character of property depends on the class nature of the state, on the class in the interests of which it is used, was confirmed. “In all cases when the working class led by its genuine Marxist-Leninist party is not in power,” points out Comrade Enver Hoxha, “in the big nationalized enterprises, the only alternative to socialism is capitalism, the only alternative to socialist state property is capitalist state property.”*

There is not and cannot be a middle or third road in this cardinal question. The very character of modem large-scale production excludes this. Consequently, the revisionist pseudo-theories which try to present the present-day state property in the Soviet Union as socialist state property, in fact are meant to defend and publicize the strategy of world imperialism which, in its search of a hybrid “new society”, to prop up the rotten capitalist system, has mobilized its hack writers to provide the form to this “society”. And as Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “At present they have this ‘new’ form in the capitalist-revisionist society of the Soviet Union, which is nothing but a degenerate society”* bourgeois down to its tiniest pores.

2. Soviet state monopoly capital is distinguished from that of the other imperialist countries by its very high level of concentration of production and capital in the hands of the state, by its being the prevailing form of property in the Soviet capitalist economy.

In the Soviet Union, state monopoly capitalism includes almost the entire economy. It extends everywhere and runs everything, while in the countries of classical capitalism it is not so widespread. In the various imperialist countries of the West the state monopoly sector accounts for 20-30 percent of the total national production, while in the Soviet Union industrial, agricultural, construction, and transport enterprises, finance and banking, trading enterprises, the fund of houses, the land and its resources, etc belong to the state monopoly sector.

Underlining the fact that the main form of capitalism in the Soviet Union is state monopoly capitalism does not mean that other forms of capitalist property are not encountered there. On the contrary, in the Soviet capitalist economy, just as in the economies of the other capitalist countries, there are other forms of capitalist property such as capitalist collective property and petty and middle private capitalist property, etc.

3. The state monopoly capitalism in the Soviet Union is presented as “socialist”, as “developed socialism” and, to some extent retains the old forms of the economic structure and the political superstructure.

By formally retaining bureaucratic centralism in the economy and in the state and taking measures “to strengthen it within the bounds allowed by the intrinsic laws of the market economy, the Soviet bourgeoisie tries to present the Soviet capitalist economy as a “regulated and planned” economy. This enables it to cloak its actions as “socialist”, to cover everything with the slogan of the estate of the entire people”, to use a number of laws and norms of its fascist dictatorship in its own interests, squeeze the maximum benefits for as long as possible from those indisputable superiorities which stemmed from the Soviet order created by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union.

The high rate of exploitation of wage labour, the high level of accumulation and capitalization of the surplus value, the distribution of the value newly created in necessary and surplus labour, which is appropriated without payment by the revisionist bourgeoisie and, in general, all the economic processes in the Soviet Union are not realized simply by individual capitalists, but first of all by the organisms of state monopoly capitalism.

4. As a consequence of the fact that Soviet state monopoly capitalism has created its own financial oligarch, there are special characteristics in the field of the appropriation and distribution of the surplus value created through the merciless exploitation of the working class and the other working masses. In this connection Comrade Enver Hoxha points out in his work, “Imperialism and the Revolution”, that “Unlike the countries of classical capitalism, where this surplus value is appropriated in proportion to the amount of capital of each capitalist, in the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries it is distributed according to the position people of the higher bourgeois stratum occupy in the state, economic, scientific and cultural hierarchy, etc.”*

To the proletariat it is of no importance at all whether the surplus value it creates is appropriated by individual capitalists, or by the bourgeois class as a whole, as a “collective capitalists, and then redivided among them in various forms, either according to the capital invested, or according to position in the hierarchy established in the state, economic, military, scientific, cultural or other apparatus. In either case, exploitation remains exploitation. Consequently, in the Soviet Union, too, we have to do with the same relations as those which are created in the other capitalist countries by the struggle to ensure maximum profit, and which in essence, express the antagonistic contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class. This means that in the revisionist countries, too, the bourgeois class as a whole is opposed to the working class. Therefore, the working class, for its part, is interested in countering the united bourgeois front with the united proletarian front.

5. The economic integration of the capitalism re-established in the Soviet Union into the capitalist world system is done through the organisms of state monopoly capitalism which represent and defend the imperialist interests of the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie in the international arena.

In this context the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie carries out the export of capital from the Soviet Union to other countries and the attraction of foreign capital into the Soviet Union, conducts its competition and struggle for markets, for spheres of investment, for the plunder of raw materials and the preservation of neo-colonialist laws in world trade, through the direct participation of the organisms of state monopoly capitalism, at a time when in the other imperialist countries these processes are carried out with the aid of private and state capital.

However, this does not mean that social-imperialist expansion is different in essence from imperialist expansion, because just like any other capitalist country, the Soviet Union, too, with its so-called credits and aid, investments of capital, exports of technology, etc is struggling for the redivision of the world, the capture of new markets and the subjugation of peoples, through the economic exploitation, first of all, of the vassal countries, as well as other countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially the countries of the so-called socialist orientation. In these international capitalist economic relations the Soviet social-imperialist state struggles to squeeze out the maximum profits in the interests of its own bourgeoisie, by exploiting the working class and the working masses of other countries.

By restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union, the Khrushchevite revisionists destroyed socialism to its foundations and opened up fields for the operation of the intrinsic laws of capitalism. Thirsting for maximum profits and the realization of its hegemonic aims in rivalry and alliance with its counterpart in the West, the revisionist bourgeoisie is intensifying its oppression and exploitation of the ordinary Soviet people who, in order to escape from this situation, must rise in struggle to overthrow the supreme power of the new tsars and re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, through revolution.