CHAPTER 5

PART 3

The Domination of the Producers by the Production Apparatus

The practice of "price fixing" resolves itself therefore into one in which the State conducts a "price policy". It is without doubt Varga's intention that this should be a class policy, which is why he then proposes a low price rating for products which are of considerable importance to the workers, such as bread and sugar, and a correspondingly higher rating for luxury products. It should be noted, however, that he considers these variations to have more a propagandist than an economic significance, since he knows perfectly well that the vast sums swallowed up by the State must in the last analysis come from the masses, ie. from the proletariat.

This "class policy", however well-intentioned it may be, in fact reveals the entire rottenness of the state-communist method of distribution. It demonstrates very clearly that the producer has not -as through the very act of labour the producer should have - simultaneously determined a share in the social product, but that this share has been fixed in the higher echelons of the administration through subjective administrative decisions. As a result of this, the old political struggles for government posts are continued in a new form. The fact is brought quite clearly to light that whoever disposes of political power in the State at the same time holds the totality of the social product and, through the instrumentality of the "prices policy", dominates distribution. It is nothing but the old struggle for positions of power, which is fought on the backs of the labouring consumers. If, additionally, we bear in mind that wages also are fixed by the Supreme Economic Council (E.Varga: ibid, page 75), then the picture of state communist mass slavery is complete. The central administration of production has complete power to nullify any increase of wages achieved through struggle by means of their prices policy. Along with this, we also see that, with the construction of the state-communist system, the working class has laboured to create a system of production which then raises itself above and against the producers, and it grows into a vast engine of oppression against which it is even more difficult to struggle than it is against the capitalist system itself.

This relationship of rulers to ruled is given its appropriate disguise through the democratic forms assumed by the distributive organisations. For instance, on the 20th of March 1919 a Decree was issued in Russia which made it compulsory for the entire Russian population to be organised in consumer cooperatives:

"All those cooperatives which exercised a certain independence within their sphere of operations were then amalgamated into one organic whole, whilst the consumers controlled the process of distribution through their meetings and congresses; they were 'masters in their own house'. Although the initiating force behind the formation of consumer cooperatives and their amalgamation was the state, after the formation of the organisation the responsibility for the distribution of products was left to the population at large." (6)

References

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