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What I’ve been reading: This is from Introduction, one of two samizdat essays written in the late 1970s by an East European official occupying a high managerial position, writing in French under the pseudonym Felipe García Casals. The author was later revealed as the Romanian Marxist intellectual Pavel Câampeanu. The essays were circulated in French and reached the West through academic channels, then published in English translation as The Syncretic Society (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1980, trans. Guy Daniels).

Casals uses the term Stalinism to refer not just to Stalin’s dictatorship, but to the characteristic mode of production under classical Soviet models of central economic planning from the introduction of the Five Year Plans until perestroika and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. One of the ideas he especially wants to develop is that totalitarian politics and the cult of personality are integral parts of, and downstream consequences of, the economic planning system. He also wants to argue that system is really not characterized by worker ownership as in the revolutionary slogans, but also not by a form of disguised ownership where the Party or the State effectively takes on the role of a capitalist proprietor as in some left-wing critiques of actually-existing communism as a form of state capitalism. Instead, he argues, the system is characterized by an ongoing, perennial, systematically-sustained form of property vacuum, and a great deal of other consequences, follow. He writes (footnotes are by the translator, Guy Daniels):

Stalinism does not act on necessity, but in its name. Such is its basis for solving the fundamental problem left unsolved by premature socialism: that of organizing ownership, the decisive premise of industrialization. That organization consists largely in the productive utilization and multiplication of the means of production, whose form of ownership is essential to this process. The convulsive form of ownership that was typical of premature socialism had defined the terms of the problem: the premature but effective elimination of the private ownership of the means of production creates the risk of establishing their premature but ineffective social ownership. Being intolerable in its private mode, and inaccessible in its social form, ownership becomes volatile.

Stalinism did not create this ownership-in-abeyance. Rather, [12] it represents an economic and social system which is centered not on a transition of that state of abeyance toward social ownership but on the former’s perpetuation. Having acquired an historical existence because of its duration, ownership-in-abeyance must also acquire a conceptual existence. It is quite possible that such a role could be assumed by the formula of a property vacuum. In the light of that concept, Stalinism can be viewed as a mode of production based on a system of organizing ownership which is doubly negative: anticapitalist (because capitalism has been eliminated) and nonsocialist (because social ownership was never tried out). Those interpretations which attribute to proprietorship under Stalinism a univocal and/or positive character overlook the essential uniqueness of that multivocal society.

At first glance, the concept of a vacuum of ownership makes for a certain distrust. It represents, however, phenomena that are perfectly familiar from the historical viewpoint but overlooked from the conceptual viewpoint; e.g., the land reform that followed the October Revolution. Promulgated by the Second Congress of Soviets after the take-over of the Winter Palace, the Land Decree proclaimed that land was … a national patrimony put in the possession of those who worked it. Land ownership was made completely vague: control was separated from possession. One historian of the USSR rightly stated that … the Land Decree introduced a principle that was quite the opposite of ownership in rural areas (Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, L’Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline: 1917-1953, p. 77). The concept of a property vacuum is aimed at grasping the phenomenon while avoiding its definition by negation.

The property vacuum represents the absence of autonomous economic mechanisms securing for one social stratum the complete ownership, juridically ratified, of the means of production. Complete proprietorship makes it possible to control both the organization of production and the appropriation of the product. In this sense, the absence of proprietors is the best proof of a property vacuum. The latter consists in an [13] incomplete control of the prerogatives of ownership; viz., a control limited to organizing production. As such, it results not from the action of an autonomous economic mechanism but from a perpetual extra-economic intervention. Finally, it is not ratified juridically, since laws can legitimize ownership but not its absence. That is why, under Stalinism, law does not merely proclaim ownership: it supplants the latter.

Under the conditions of a property vacuum, the means of production can neither be sold nor bought: they are not commodities. Consequently, they do not have an economically determined value. Yet they do have a conventional price–one intended to serve only the purposes of accounting. That noneconomic price is assigned to them, necessarily, by an extra-economic authority possessing that prerogative. The production of means of production is not aimed at their profitable sale. Hence the mechanism of its regulation is not the economic stimulus of a viable demand but an extra-economic order [commande]: the plan. For Stalinist industrialization, this substitution of an order for demand plays an essential role. That is why it becomes, spontaneously, the general model for organizing social relations.

The property vacuum has the result that the means of production are shifted into an extra-economoic sphere. This means that they are not susceptible of appropriation, since ownership does not exist outside of the economic sphere. Thus the means of production have a real existence as regards technology, and only an apparent existence as economic phenomena.

According to the Stalinist dispensation, the means of production are owned by the producers themselves. According to most of Stalinism’s critics, the means of production are owned by the State or the bureaucracy. Although it dismisses both of these assertions, the concept of a property vacuum does not equate them with each other. First, there is already an important equalizing element: the two categories of presumptive owners share in the appropriation of the social product via the same mechanism, the wage. (Here one must except collectivized agriculture.) This form of appropriation–which is indirect, [14] nonspecific, and independent of the appropriating subject–does not confirm, in economic terms, the proprietary character ascribed to the two categories. The elements of their inequality do not involve the amount of salary but rather its connection with the work done, and the degree to which ownership is inaccessible to them. The incomplete control of certain prerogatives of ownership, which is typical of a property vacuum, remains strictly inaccessible to the producers, and constitutes a monopoly of power. Hence it is solely with respect to that monopoly that the property vacuum is manifested as separation between the possession and control of property. The monopoly, therefore, is not one of ownership but of its incomplete control founded on nonpossession.

The limits to this incomplete control are set by the common form of appropriation: the wage. Hence there is a lack of connection between the nature of that activity and its remmuneration, which engenders yet another nonrelation: between the amount of activity and the amount of remuneration.

That brings us to the second inequality between the two categories. Although equalized by the mode common to both, the wage, they are differentiated by the varied action of that common mode. If one is willing to apply the term management to the incomplete control of property, one can state that the general principle to each according to his work applies to the nonmanagerial producers but not to the managers, who are not producers. From this angle of vision, the latter are also favored as compared to capitalists, since profits express precisely the dependencec of appropriation on the economic results of management.

In the monopoly of management, Stalinism has created a specific type of activity without at the same time creating a specific mechanism for its remuneration. In so doing, it has provided the objective basis for the separation between management and responsibility. Lacking any economic standard of comparison, managerial activity is subject to no audit on the social plane. The fact that it is protected against any regular economic [15] penalty represents the economic basis of its infallibility. A system of management which is unaffected either by production or by its economic valuation, is in fact not subject to any evaluation. Thus infallibility expresses, not an evaluation of the managers’ abilities, but the society’s systematic inability to evaluate this kind of activity. Perfection being incommensurable, the incommensurable is perceived as perfection. This attribute is possessed, not by the different individuals performing a certain function, but by the function performed by those different individuals.

After a while the property vacuum, being artificially maintained, engenders the objective necessity of this subjectification: the function of infallibility. Criticism of Stalinism on the level of the ecult of personality only perpetuates the confusion between the objective necessity for that function in a property vacuum and the historical agents who perform that function at one time or another. Actually, all those figures who lose that function–whether through death or political change–lose at the same time that infallibility which they personified without possessing it. The function of infallibility perdures, regardless of those ephemeral figures who perform it, and who are usually found, a posteriori, to have been personally unfit to fulfill that function. It is not the providential leaders who produce the function of infallibility: it is the function of infallibility which produces the agglomeration of providential leaders. The true message brought by the providential leader is that of a society dominated by providence; i.e., by the most tyrannical form of necessity: chance, which is the natural result of failure in the matter of theory. The infallible leader is the institutionalized negation of theory, although he claims to be its sole incarnation. But the best that theory can do is to be adequate. The moment it is declared infallible, it is already dead, having degenerated into mythology.

The result is an evident confusion of values of which the infallible leader is only one of the consequences. Its most general consequence is incommensurability, which spontaneously [16] gives rise to a lack of proportionality [démesure].^[1] The latter represents the lack of a system of values that is coherent, adequate, and hence socially operative. Such a system can unify elements that are diverse yet mutually conditioned. It cannot, however, unify elements that are disjunct by reason of their incompatibility. The syncretism of the society is echoed in the syncretism of its values.

— Felipe García Casals [Pavel Câampeanu], Introduction
In The Syncretic Society (1977/1980), pp. 11-16. Translated from the French by Guy Daniels.

1. ^[1]Casals seems to be using démesure (a rather arcane word) in overlapping senses, to suggest both a lack of proportionality and immeasurability.—G.D.↩