Then in late 1928 a wave of panic hit the bureaucracy in the face of warlike threats from Britain and a domestic crisis as peasants held back supplies of food, creating hunger in the cities.59 Afraid of losing their control over the country through a combination of rebellion at home and armed pressure from abroad, the bureaucracy, led by Joseph Stalin, turned pragmatically to a series of measures that involved super-exploitation of the peasantry and the working class in order to build the industry the country lacked. The cumulative effect was to push the whole economy towards a new dynamic other than that of fulfilling people's needs-a dynamic ultimately determined by military competition with the various Western states.
As the Czech historian Michael Reiman has said:
There were not enough resources to guarantee the proposed rate of industrial growth. The planning agencies therefore decided . . . to balance the plan by means of resources the economy did not yet have at its disposal. . . The fulfilment of the plan depended on a very brutal attack on the living and working conditions of industrial workers and the rural population . . . This was a plan o f organised poverty and famine. <sup>60</sup>
Stalin, justifying the subordination of everything else to accumulation, insisted, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us". <sup>6</sup> "The environment in which we are placed . . . at home and abroad . . . compels us to adopt a rapid rate of growth of our industry" <sup>.62</sup>
In undertaking the task of accumulation, the bureaucracy substituted itself for a capitalist class that no longer existed. But the methods it used were essentially those of capitalist industrialisation elsewhere in the world. "Collectivisation"-in reality the state takeover of the land-increased the proportion of agricultural output available for industrial accumulation while driving a very high proportion of the peasantry from the land, just as enclosures had for England's early capitalists. The growing industries were mainly manned by wage labour-but some subordinate tasks were carried out by some millions of slave labourers. The rights workers had held onto through the 1920s were abolished.
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Capitalism in the 20th Century