THE MARXIAN THEORY OF SOCIALISM 5 Since Stalin emphasizes that an economic 'law* operates 'independently of our will* (pp. 93-95, etc.), it follows that the above quotation does not describe a goal to be achieved but states the objective inevitability of a continuously expanding production resulting from socialist or public ownership of the means of production, i.e. of (b) and (c) automatically following upon (a). But this is surely a point to be established rather than assumed, especially in the light of recent events. Our study of socialism should therefore start from the detailed scrutiny of (a) alone, so as to establish without preconceptions what are the possibilities of development once a socialist economy is established and the means of production are made public property. II We assume, to begin with, that we have here a society where the state owns and controls all means of production and that the state has no particular interests of its own, as against those of the citizens at large. The latter assumption will have to be examined later; but for the present we will proceed with it. Adopting these two assumptions, the second one implicitly, Engels stated without qualification, that 'the seizure of the means of production by society puts an end to commodity production1 (Anti-Duhring, p. 420). Stalin reads this formula in a rather unpersuasive manner: Engels was thinking of the seizure of all 'means of production*. Therefore, since in the USSR public property was confined to industry, while agriculture was under cooperative property, commodity production had to continue until the collective farms too were transformed into state farms or public property. He makes it seem as if commodity production in the socialist economy was inescapable only because the collective farms were insisting on money-payments for their products and would not be satisfied with goods-exchange (Problems of Socialism, pp. 13-21). Here he totally overlooks the inevitability of commodity production so long as there is a system of wages, though elsewhere (p. 23) he admits that 'consumer-goods which are needed to compensate the labour power expended in the process of production are produced and realized in our country as commodities'. The duality in Stalin's treatment of the matter probably stems from an anxiety not to challenge directly the theoretical validity of the view adopted by both Marx and Engels that commodity production would end as soon as the capitalists are expropriated after a proletarian revolution. However, the weakness of this position, even though adopted by Marx, can be seen from Marx's own exposition of it in his 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'.