What makes a person a revisionist.

[Comrade_Stalin]

I left a forum a long time ago and went back to see some of the answer I posted, while I was there. Here Is one reply that I would like to talk about with you guys.

From the other forum


"It's best not to give a shit about "revisionism" at all. If the fundamentals are wrong (and they are in many cases...), revising them is not a bad idea at all. The "revisionist" slur is just a way to keep people thinking what you want them to. They say something you don't like, then you can be like "But you're not a Marxist if you think that ;_;!" - but I don't care about being a Marxist. In fact, I would never call myself such, and I'm pretty sure Marx wouldn't have either. I care about being right, and if Marx wasn't right in some cases, well, duh. The Communist Manifesto, for instance, is painfully wrong at lots of points, and some stuff that's in there is just plain embarrassing. Admitting that is thoughtcrime among Marxists, though, because it's evil revisionism. Well, frag that. I'm a revisionist. So? That doesn't change one bit of my determination to fight for socialism and communism. Also it doesn't mean that I don't respect Marx and Engels, Stalin and Lenin. But I won't let any oh so faithful and orthodox "Anti-Revisionists" tell me what to think.

This is not at all scientific. Lots of what Darwin said was bullshit too, as modern science has recognized, and you'll find no biologist that tells you you mustn't criticize Darwin. I'm CERTAIN that Marx wouldn't have wanted to be revered the way he is. And if Marx had gotten over his ego, he'd probably even have liked to be criticized and questioned.

This is something I hate about socialist countries in general, by the way. Marx was a scientist. What he created were scientific theories, not religious dogmas, and still, every socialist country treated them like they were. Marx and Lenin were treated like holy figures, whose thoughts were not only considered absolute truth. Marxism-Leninism was treated like a divine revelation. And if anybody even dared that they might have been wrong about anything, he was called a revisionist and with that, his political career was over, because the revisionist is the epitome of evil, because according to them, to question Marx is to be a counter-revolutionary, and to be a counter-revolutionary is to be an enemy of the party, and because the party is the most important force for "good" (petit-bourgeois moralists, the lot of them...), to be an enemy of the party is to be a vile criminal, a piece of dirt, an enemy of humanity as a whole. Want to know what Marx himself said about this very way of thinking?

Quote:
The enemy of the party is quite consistently turned into a heretic, by transforming him from an enemy of the actually existing party who is combated, into a sinner against humanity — which only exists in the imagination — who must be punished.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /05/11.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/05/11.htm)


And if you're not getting it, he was making fun of such people.

Quote:
Revisionism is evolutionary socialism as preached by people such as Eduard Bernstein. More or less they do not believe in the armed struggle or the dictatorship of the proletariat. They believe socialism will be formed via reforming capitalism.


Like Marx did?

Quote:
Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labour; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same. You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labour.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /09/08.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm)


Why did Marx say that it might be possible to do it peacefully (i.e. through reforms) in America and England, but not in the rest of Europe? Precisely because America and England were democracies. What Marx is doing here is advocating revolution through the ballot box.

And even if he doesn't, I can still like the idea. Being a revisionist is awesome."


This got me thinking, could Lenin and therefore Stalin be seen as revisionist? If Marx was right we would not need the Vanguard Party or Democratic centralism. So does Lenin Vanguard part makes him a revisionist

[Winter]

Revisionism is not further developing Marxist theory.

Revisionism is class collaboration and introducing backward capitalist practices.

[mikelepore]

Marx did not say that the goal can be achieved "peacefully (i.e. through reforms) in America and England." He said that the goal may be obtained by peaceful means in America and England. This is not equivalent to proposing reforms. It means that a NON-REFORMIST objective, a fundamentally new social system, can be established peacefully.

[Joe_Germinal]

This got me thinking, could Lenin and therefore Stalin be seen as revisionist? If Marx was right we would not need the Vanguard Party or Democratic centralism. So does Lenin Vanguard part makes him a revisionist

The word revisionist gets thrown around a lot, and so it's natural to wonder what it actually means.

Marx was a social scientist, and Marxism is a science. Like any other science, its theoretical content must change as we get new evidence. Lenin, for example, developed a theory of imperialism based on historical evidence unavailable to Marx and Engels because they died before the structure of modern imperialism was developed fully enough to be properly understood. Lenin also developed the concept of a vanguard party in response to the practical historical failures of mass parties. This is nothing more than good scientific practice.

We can compare these advances to the theory of evolution. Darwin developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection. In response to new evidence, others have modified this theory adding to it a theory of genetics, of genetic drift, of punctuated equilibrium, etc. while getting rid of certain teleological aspects of Darwin's original work. Like the changes made to Marxist theory by others, there is no problem with this. Indeed, without such changes, both theories would have to be discarded in whole or in part. Even Marx made numerous changes to his own theory while he was developing it.

However, as with all sciences, there are fundamental Marxist principles which are so well established in historical fact that they cannot be abandoned without severely compromising Marxism's integrity as a guide to analysis and action. Just as an evolutionary theorist would be dismissed as a pseudo-scientist if he or she abandoned philosophical naturalism, and started theorizing about supernatural elements affecting the phenotype and genotype of organisms, a Marxist can be called a revisionist if he or she rejects the fundamental principles of Marxism.

So, when evolutionary socialists argue that, for the first time in history, one mode of production will replace another without a revolution, they are revisionist. When social democrats reject class struggle which is clearly an element of all class societies in history, and say that capitalism can be reformed in such a way as to make life tolerable for workers, they are revisionist. However, adding to Marxism a theory of nationalism, of a vanguard party, of imperialism, etc. is not revisionist because they remain on firm historical foundations.

[cska]

Marx did not say that the goal can be achieved "peacefully (i.e. through reforms) in America and England." He said that the goal may be obtained by peaceful means in America and England. This is not equivalent to proposing reforms. It means that a NON-REFORMIST objective, a fundamentally new social system, can be established peacefully.

Exactly. The problem is that whenever someone talks about a peaceful revolution, they are considered revisionist.

[red cat]

Revisionism is not further developing Marxist theory.

Revisionism is class collaboration and introducing backward capitalist practices.

A very common strategy of revisionists to implement these processes is to slander ongoing revolutions by posing as most radical elements and trying to label these revolutions as "anti-proletarian".

But every type of revision can be identified by lack of revolutionary actions. When their inaction is questioned, the above kind of revisionists try to hide their motives by quoting earlier revolutionary leaders and ignoring the later development in revolutionary theory and practice.

[Winter]

A very common strategy of revisionists to implement these processes is to slander ongoing revolutions by posing as most radical elements and trying to label these revolutions as "anti-proletarian".

But every type of revision can be identified by lack of revolutionary actions. When their inaction is questioned, the above kind of revisionists try to hide their motives by quoting earlier revolutionary leaders and ignoring the later development in revolutionary theory and practice.

lol, yes, we see this on a daily basis here on RevLeft. Shoot down those who succeed and reward the armchair revolutionary who nit-picks at the success we ought to be praising.

[mikelepore]

What makes a person a revisionist

Eduard Bernstein in Germany suggested that the right path to socialism was not to have the workers take over anything on their own, but for the workers to petition government to pay for setting up new projects.

The form that this trend this took in the United States was a group that came to be called the right wing of the Socialist Party, led by such people as Victor Berger, Algernon Lee, and Henry Slobodin. They said that municipal utility projects were revolutionary. Some of them even said, when the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin established a city sewer system, that the halfway point to the Marxist objective had been reached!

[RED DAVE]

Eduard Bernstein in Germany suggested that the right path to socialism was not to have the workers take over anything on their own, but for the workers to petition government to pay for setting up new projects.

The form that this trend this took in the United States was a group that came to be called the right wing of the Socialist Party, led by such people as Victor Berger, Algernon Lee, and Henry Slobodin. They said that municipal utility projects were revolutionary. Some of them even said, when the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin established a city sewer system, that the halfway point to the Marxist objective had been reached!As a result, this kind of reformism is actually often called "sewer socialism."

RED DAVE

[RED DAVE]

In my experience around RevLeft, revisionism is the tag that Stalinists put on Khruschev, et al., so they can blame him and the post-Stalin CPSU for the reversion of Russia to corporate capitalism.

It's bullshit because the fundament social relationship, the control of surplus value, did not change between the Khruschev and Stalin regimes. The party state bureaucracy exerted this control in both cases, not the working class. The fundamental revision was done during the accession of Stalin when Marxism was perverted into a system of justification for bureaucratic state capitalism.

RED DAVE

[Joe_Germinal]

In my experience around RevLeft, revisionism is the tag that Stalinists put on Khruschev, et al., so they can blame him and the post-Stalin CPSU for the reversion of Russia to corporate capitalism.

It is true that Khrushchev and his successors were revisionists, but surely most anti-revisionists see revisionism in the CPSU as one factor in causing the capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR. Of course, this counter-revolution could not have succeeded without decades imperialist "cold war" aggression and sabotage.


It's bullshit because the fundament social relationship, the control of surplus value, did not change between the Khruschev and Stalin regimes.

Of course not, no dialectical materialist would argue that a powerful dictatorship of the proletariat would collapse in a single day when a revisionist comes to power. What you did have under Khrushchev is the CPSU abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat, and claiming that the Soviet Union was no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a government of all the Soviet people. What this meant was that the development of socialist production relations which had been proceeding since the 1920s was halted. No reverse, just halted. The result was stagnation exacerbated by the pressure put on the Soviets by the bourgeois imperialists. Gorbachev, as a good revisionist saw the solution not in returning to active development of socialist relations, but in the development of capitalist relations. If perestroika wasn't a change in "the fundamental social relationship," I don't know what was.


The fundamental revision was done during the accession of Stalin when Marxism was perverted into a system of justification for bureaucratic state capitalism.

For a dialectical materialist to make this argument is as absurd to argue that the social relations of production reverted during the accession of Khrushchev. Modes of production don't change overnight because of a single leader, they change over long periods of time due to long historical and material processes which only become fully visible at moments of revolution or counter-revolution.

[Weezer]

Revisionism means simply to distort communism, whether it's the belief capitalism can be reformed(social democrats,Shachtmanites) or whether you believe once a socialist society should be a society of all people, rather than workers.(Khrushchev, Class Collaboration)

[RED DAVE]

In my experience around RevLeft, revisionism is the tag that Stalinists put on Khruschev, et al., so they can blame him and the post-Stalin CPSU for the reversion of Russia to corporate capitalism.
It is true that Khrushchev and his successors were revisionists, but surely most anti-revisionists see revisionism in the CPSU as one factor in causing the capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR. Of course, this counter-revolution could not have succeeded without decades imperialist "cold war" aggression and sabotage.One more time, you have failed to demonstrate that there was any difference in the class nature of the regime under Khruschev and Stalin. Under both men the state bureaucracy controlled the distribution of surplus value.


It's bullshit because the fundament social relationship, the control of surplus value, did not change between the Khruschev and Stalin regimes.
Of course not, no dialectical materialist would argue that a powerful dictatorship of the proletariat would collapse in a single day when a revisionist comes to power.(1) You have not demonstrated that the USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat. You've assumed it.

(2) So, what is the basis of your assertion that the point of Khruschev's ascention to power, the USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat? Where are the institutions, from the workplace on up, that the working class used to control the means of production?


What you did have under Khrushchev is the CPSU abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat, and claiming that the Soviet Union was no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a government of all the Soviet people.What you have is Khruschev abandoning the rheoric of the proletarian dictatorship. This was not difficult as it so obviously had nothing to do with the relations of production he inherited.


What this meant was that the development of socialist production relations which had been proceeding since the 1920s was halted.What socialist production? For production to be socialist,the relations ofproduction would have had to have been controlled by the working class. This was obviously not the case. No such control existed.


No reverse, just halted. The result was stagnation exacerbated by the pressure put on the Soviets by the bourgeois imperialists. Gorbachev, as a good revisionist saw the solution not in returning to active development of socialist relations, but in the development of capitalist relations. If perestroika wasn't a change in "the fundamental social relationship," I don't know what was.Perestroika represented the beginning of the transition from state capitalism to private capitalism, but for the working class, there was no change in the fundamental social relationships of work. Neither under state capitalism nor private capitalism did/does the working class control production.


The fundamental revision was done during the accession of Stalin when Marxism was perverted into a system of justification for bureaucratic state capitalism.
For a dialectical materialist to make this argument is as absurd to argue that the social relations of production reverted during the accession of Khrushchev.They didn't revert or change. Khruschev may have changed some of the strategies of the state capitalist ruling class, but state capitalism is what he inherited when he ascended and what he passed on when he was deposed.


Modes of production don't change overnight because of a single leaderRight. The leader is only a leader, not the creator, of the process.


they change over long periods of time due to long historical and material processes which only become fully visible at moments of revolution or counter-revolution.I hope you are just confusing "modes of production" and "relations of production." I donj't want to get into sematics.

The fundamental relations of production, which we are discussing, concern the control of society, and, on the most fundamental level, the control of surplus value. This can and does change overnight at the point of revolution.

The mode of production is, I believe, the level of development of material forces or means of production. Marxism posits an eventual conflict between the mode (and means) of production and the relations of production.

What happened in Russia during the period 1917 to approximately 1922, was the working class, incompletely and bureaucratically, controlling the relations of production and thereby controlling the means of production. During the period 1922 to 1928, a counter-revolution took place, and the bureaucracy came to control the means of production, which the working class, due to the backward conditions of Russian capitalism, the relatively small size of the working class, and the civil war, had never completely concentrated in its hands.

RED DAVE

[Joe_Germinal]

One more time, you have failed to demonstrate that there was any difference in the class nature of the regime under Khruschev and Stalin. Under both men the state bureaucracy controlled the distribution of surplus value.

I failed to demonstrate it because I clearly argued that there was no difference in the class nature of the USSR under Khrushchev and Stalin. It was a dictatorship of the proletariat under both.


So, what is the basis of your assertion that the point of Khruschev's ascention to power, the USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat?

This is hardly the right thread for an in depth discussion of the class nature of the Soviet Union, but I'll take the bait. My basis for saying this is that, up until the late 1980s there was almost no extraction of surplus value from the Soviet working class. I know this because I've read the accounts of the bourgeois economists who managed the transition from socialism to capitalism, and they are very clear on this point. Allow me to quote myself:


When Jeffrey Sachs and his cronies (many now high officials in the American regime) went to the former USSR they encountered an interesting dilemma. They would go to factory accountants and say "This factory needs to make a profit." The accountants would say "We do make a profit." Sachs et al. would reply, "No you don't, I'm looking at your balance sheet right here, you're breaking even." The accountants would direct Sachs et al. to examine the accounts more closely. What did they find? They found that indeed the factories made "profits." These "profits" were automatically spent on things like union sponsored dances, concerts, and other evening entertainments, luxury resorts which factory workers would visit on vacations, etc. In a word, the fruit of the factory's production was redistributed as benefits to the workers. Most of these benefits were administered by the unions, so the workers could democratically decide what to spend the money on (i.e. where the factory resort would be). In order to restore capitalism, Sachs et al. needed to teach factory accountants to pass these profits onto the new capitalist class instead of spending it on the workers.

Another problem Sachs and his friends encountered was that there was not enough money concentrated in private hands to buy state enterprises from the government. That is to say, capital accumulation in Russia and the other ex-soviet republics in the 1990s was primitive accumulation not general accumulation. All the high officials who had supposedly been running a "state capitalist" regime should have had the capital (accumulated through the extraction of surplus value from the workers) on hand to buy assets off the state. They did not. Where did the money go? It was not concentrated in the hands of a small elite, it was broadly distributed among the workers.



What you have is Khruschev abandoning the rheoric of the proletarian dictatorship.

Yes, given that I've shown that socialist relations of production existed in the Soviet Union, it is clear that anti-communist sentiment would have to begin in the superstructure, in backwards elements of the state bureaucracy. I went on to show how in this case, the superstructure acted on the base, with great difficulty and over 35 years, to finally restore capitalism.


Perestroika represented the beginning of the transition from state capitalism to private capitalism, but for the working class, there was no change in the fundamental social relationships of work.

Tell this to almost any worker on the streets of Moscow, Budapest, or Berlin, then duck to avoid the punches. If the transition to capitalism wasn't a fundamental change for workers, why do most Russian workers tell pollsters that desire a return to the pre-1985 Soviet Union, if that would just mean swaping one type of capitalism for another.


I hope you are just confusing "modes of production" and "relations of production." I donj't want to get into sematics.

I wasn't.


The fundamental relations of production, which we are discussing, concern the control of society, and, on the most fundamental level, the control of surplus value. This can and does change overnight at the point of revolution.

The mode of production is, I believe, the level of development of material forces or means of production. Marxism posits an eventual conflict between the mode (and means) of production and the relations of production.

No, the mode of production is the combination of the forces of production (meaning labor and the means of production) and the social and technical relations of production. It is between these elements that Marx predicts (correctly) a conflict. If, as you claim, the Soviet Union was socialist, if imperfectly, before Stalin, then the forces of production would be socialized while relations of production would be based upon workers ownership. If, as you claim, the Soviet Union had become capitalist when Stalin came to power, then the forces of production would be socialized while relations of production would be based upon private property. I think you'll agree that this change in the relations of production would have constituted a change in the mode of production if it had taken place, because a mode of production where forces are social and relations are private is exactly what we have in the capitalist countries. I have always been puzzled as to how the "state capitalist" analysis got so popular, could this basic misunderstanding as to what a mode of production is be the answer?

[RED DAVE]

Just for openers:


When Jeffrey Sachs and his cronies (many now high officials in the American regime) went to the former USSR they encountered an interesting dilemma. They would go to factory accountants and say "This factory needs to make a profit." The accountants would say "We do make a profit." Sachs et al. would reply, "No you don't, I'm looking at your balance sheet right here, you're breaking even." The accountants would direct Sachs et al. to examine the accounts more closely. What did they find? They found that indeed the factories made "profits." These "profits" were automatically spent on things like union sponsored dances, concerts, and other evening entertainments, luxury resorts which factory workers would visit on vacations, etc. In a word, the fruit of the factory's production was redistributed as benefits to the workers. Most of these benefits were administered by the unions, so the workers could democratically decide what to spend the money on (i.e. where the factory resort would be). In order to restore capitalism, Sachs et al. needed to teach factory accountants to pass these profits onto the new capitalist class instead of spending it on the workers.This quote clearly shows that the workers were not in control of the surplus value. They received benefits, it's true, and they had control of some of those benefits, but the fundamental decisions as to the disposition of the surplus value was in the hands of the bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent or nonbenevolent this bureaucracy was.

Do you really believe that the above quote shows direct, democratic workers control?

RED DAVE

[Joe_Germinal]

Do you really believe that the above quote shows direct, democratic workers control?

What my entire quotation, not just the snippet you copied, shows is that surplus value was not extracted from workers, viz. workers kept the entire fruit of their labor. This economic arrangement was administered; it was not yet the spontaneous economic cooperation we would expect under communism. In some cases it was administered by the state bureaucracy, sometimes by the trade unions. How it was administered is irrelevant. If the USSR was capitalist, then surplus value was extracted from workers by someone or something else. If that is true, I ask you to prove it by showing me where the wealth went if not to the workers.

If the wealth did go to the workers, then the USSR was socialist. You may not have preferred the way socialism in the USSR was administered, and that's fine. Trotsky for example disliked it very much, so he called it "a degenerated workers state." But the simple fact that Soviet workers chose a different method of administration than you or anybody else would have liked tells us absolutely nothing about the class nature of the county.

[Black Sheep]

It never ceases to amaze me how leninist marxists as the years pass have a favorite curse word.
In the 20s-30s it was trotskyist/fascist and any combination of these two.
In the kruschev years it was stalinist.
And after that it was revisionist.

In my view,revisionism is going back and changing aspects,thesies,strategies of class struggle which have been proven correct, due to subjective/idealistic reasons.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

What my entire quotation, not just the snippet you copied, shows is that surplus value was not extracted from workers, viz. workers kept the entire fruit of their labor. This economic arrangement was administered; it was not yet the spontaneous economic cooperation we would expect under communism. In some cases it was administered by the state bureaucracy, sometimes by the trade unions. How it was administered is irrelevant. If the USSR was capitalist, then surplus value was extracted from workers by someone or something else. If that is true, I ask you to prove it by showing me where the wealth went if not to the workers.

If the wealth did go to the workers, then the USSR was socialist. You may not have preferred the way socialism in the USSR was administered, and that's fine. Trotsky for example disliked it very much, so he called it "a degenerated workers state." But the simple fact that Soviet workers chose a different method of administration than you or anybody else would have liked tells us absolutely nothing about the class nature of the county.

That is far too simplistic a view of Capitalism and Socialism.

Sure, the surplus value question is vital when ascertaining whether a society is Capitalist or Socialistic. However, just because surplus value is kept in the hands of the workers, it does not automatically make this society Socialist, which seems to be the primitive causal link you have established.

That there was an entrenched bureaucracy which controlled where surplus value was distributed, shows the fragile nature of such an arrangement. Sure, at this one point in time (when Sachs visited), the 'profits' may have been spent on the workers (and thus no ruling class kept, as such, the surplus value), however, due to the lack of direct workers' control (i.e. they were still being given their rewards from on high), a situation could easily entail where the bureaucrats take away the rewards under any pretence. This is not Socialism, comrade. This is the degeneration of the workers' state into bureaucracy.

[RED DAVE]

Do you really believe that the above quote shows direct, democratic workers control?
What my entire quotation, not just the snippet you copied, shows is that surplus value was not extracted from workers, viz. workers kept the entire fruit of their labor.You haven't shown this at all. What you showed was that certain benefits were distributed to the workers from the factory profits, and they even had control over some of the benefits, but it's evident that the fundamental process, even from snippet you posted, was [i]not[/] under workers control. It was under the control of the bureaucracy. How else would "Jeffrey Sachs and his cronies" have been able to advise the accountant in that way, changing the benefits structure without the workers tossing him out the window?


This economic arrangement was administered;This economic arrangement was controlled – by a force outside the working class.


it was not yet the spontaneous economic cooperation we would expect under communism.Why would you say "yet"? Where is the indication that economy was moving in that direction?


In some cases it was administered by the state bureaucracy,Controlled by the state bureaucracy.


sometimes by the trade unions.Show me a significant branch of the USSR economy that was controlled by the unions.


How it was administered is irrelevant.Oh, ho ho!Let's see where you're going with that.


If the USSR was capitalist, then surplus value was extracted from workers by someone or something else.That is correct: the bureaucratic state capitalist ruling class.


If that is true, I ask you to prove it by showing me where the wealth went if not to the workers.Uhh, how about to support the state and the bureaucracy. Or do you think those things ran for free?


If the wealth did go to the workers, then the USSR was socialist.No, if the wealth was controlled by the workers, then the USSR was socialist. If a capitalist institution, say a corporation, is not running a profit because of its wage packet, would you say that it's socialist?

The issue is workers control, not workers wealth. Were Sweden or the US, where the workers received higher wages than the USSR, therefore more socialist?


You may not have preferred the way socialism in the USSR was administered, and that's fine.It's not what I prefer or not. It's whether or not there was a workers democracy, which there clearly was not. And we're not even going to try to deal with China.


Trotsky for example disliked it very much, so he called it "a degenerated workers state."[/quote}That was his formulation in the late 1930s. Trotsky held that so long as the institution of nationalized property existed, there was some kind of workers state. Trotsky was wrong. Nationalized property is compatible with capitalism. The economy of Taiwan was built up after WWII based on nationalized property, which, now is being transformed into private property.

[quote=Joe_Germinal]But the simple fact that Soviet workers chose a different method of administration than you or anybody else would have liked tells us absolutely nothing about the class nature of the county.Uhh, and when and where was this choice made? Workers control of industry was iffy in the USSR from the beginning due to the underdevelopment of the economy and the working class and the civil war. It is clear that by the late 1920s. tje bureacracy had accomplished a counter-revolution and they were in control of the economy. They remained in control until the late 1980s, which the corporate capitalists got control. In both cases, the institutions of control was the bureaucracy. It's party was the CPSU.

Again, you are not able to show any institutional control of the economy by the working class. The bureaucracy could be more or less benevolent, as can the capitalists in any capitalist country. But the fact is, they were firmly in control of the economy.

RED DAVE

[Joe_Germinal]

Sure, the surplus value question is vital when ascertaining whether a society is Capitalist or Socialistic. However, just because surplus value is kept in the hands of the workers, it does not automatically make this society Socialist, which seems to be the primitive causal link you have established.

It's not the primitive link I've established. If we were analyzing a class society, we would look at a number of factors, e.g. the classes involved, the system of ownership, and the organization of surplus value, etc. The problem is, people have come up with "state capitalism" analysis which says that you can have a capitalist system without the bourgeoisie, without private ownership, etc.

It is not I who established the primitive link, but those who came up with the analysis, because you can't argue against it by talking about the property system. Your interlocutor will just say, "ah, you see, this is state capitalism, there is no private property." I have merely chosen the only territory on which "state capitalist" analysts will fight.

If you and other "state capitalist" analysts are now admitting that there was no surplus value extracted, we are now in a position to speak of a form of capitalism without a bourgeoisie, without private ownership, where workers were not exploited but instead kept the full fruit of their labor. And I simply ask, where's the capitalism?

[Joe_Germinal]

You haven't shown this at all. What you showed was that certain benefits were distributed to the workers from the factory profits, and they even had control over some of the benefits, but it's evident that the fundamental process, even from snippet you posted, was [i]not[/] under workers control.

Comrade, we're going around and around in circles here, and unless you're going to start bringing some evidence to this discussion, I think we should end it. If a bureaucratic elite towered over working people and extracted surplus value, you can't just keep saying it, you have to show me. Show me Stalin's millions, show me Kaganovich's gold.

At the very least, explain to me why, if the events of 1990-1995 were merely a transition from one form of capitalism to another, why was accumulation in this period primitive accumulation and not general accumulation. Shouldn't the state bureaucrats have had capital already? If you or anyone else can show me that accumulation in this period was general, then I will recant. If you can not do this, then we need to be comradely and honest and admit that we have an argument about the nature of democracy in a socialist state.

[Comrade_Stalin]

So going back to my question what makes a person a revisionist, the answer is........:confused:

Let try this one, a revisionist is someone who turns communism into a religion will the leaders and their works, cannot be questioned?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It's not the primitive link I've established. If we were analyzing a class society, we would look at a number of factors, e.g. the classes involved, the system of ownership, and the organization of surplus value, etc. The problem is, people have come up with "state capitalism" analysis which says that you can have a capitalist system without the bourgeoisie, without private ownership, etc.

It is not I who established the primitive link, but those who came up with the analysis, because you can't argue against it by talking about the property system. Your interlocutor will just say, "ah, you see, this is state capitalism, there is no private property." I have merely chosen the only territory on which "state capitalist" analysts will fight.

If you and other "state capitalist" analysts are now admitting that there was no surplus value extracted, we are now in a position to speak of a form of capitalism without a bourgeoisie, without private ownership, where workers were not exploited but instead kept the full fruit of their labor. And I simply ask, where's the capitalism?

I don't throw all my eggs in the State Capitalist argument. I do not fully subscribe to it, nor fully to the bureaucratic workers' state thesis. I'd just like to make that clear first of all before you get the impression of me as a dogged Trot, which I am not.

Surplus value may not have been extracted by the bourgeoisie or by private property owners as such, but you must still acknowledge that there was the unfortunate existence of a ruling strata, if not a class, which directed the value of the workers' production where it was needed. As I stated before, at the time of Sachs' visit, clearly the workers he saw were receiving an honest and fair remuneration that was in keeping with the value of what they produced. It is questionable, however, whether this can be applied across the board. I refer in particular to the clear plight of the poor peasants - the Kolkozhniks and Sovkhozniks, in economic terms. I won't bring in the political malevolences of the period, they aren't wholly relevant to this debate.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

In fact, my post above is probably rubbish. It's late. Tear my argument apart here, i'll come back with a more coherent point tomorrow :)

[Joe_Germinal]

So going back to my question what makes a person a revisionist, the answer is........:confused:

Comrade, I apologize for my role getting us bogged down in a debate over the class nature of the Soviet union. I think posts 2-8 on this thread are a fairly good description of what a revisionist is. If I had to summarize it in one sentence it'd be: "A revisionist is someone who abandons the work of scientifically developing Marxist theory and practice and instead revises fundamental aspects of Marxist theory and practice such as class struggle, materialism, and revolution."

Hope that helps.

[Joe_Germinal]

In fact, my post above is probably rubbish. It's late. Tear my argument apart here, i'll come back with a more coherent point tomorrow :)

I have no wish to tear your argument apart, only to try, through argument with comrades with whom I disagree, to develop my understand and analysis. It got heated between me and Red Dave mostly because he accused me without justification of not understanding basic Marxist concepts and because he continually argues with slogans instead of evidence. You kind of got caught up in it, for which I apologize. I should never have lumped you in with the "state capitalist" analysts.


Surplus value may not have been extracted by the bourgeoisie or by private property owners as such, but you must still acknowledge that there was the unfortunate existence of a ruling strata, if not a class, which directed the value of the workers' production where it was needed.

I agree that there was administration of the economic system, sometimes democratically through trade unions (as in the case of sports, culture, entertainment, some information outlets, some factory floors, and most urban housing) sometimes bureaucratically through the state (as in the case of rural production and some factory floors). This is certainly not the dictatorship of the proletariat exactly as described by Marx; it certainly did have a larger bureaucracy than Marx and Engels envisioned.

However, you have to put it in perspective. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say nothing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, other than it would be the victory of democracy, and outlining 10 provisional demands. After the historical experience of the Paris Commune, they changed their description of the dictatorship of the proletariat to incorporate what workers had learned in that struggle. There is no road map to socialism; workers are surveying the terrain while they go.

So yes, there was both democratic and undemocratic administration in the Soviet Union. The question is, does that undemocratic administration make the Soviet Union capitalist? I say, if there is no private property, no capital accumulation i.e. no extraction of surplus value, and no bourgeoisie, it is very difficult to say that a country is capitalist.

Once we understand this, we can begin the real work of historical analysis, because we must be like Marx and Engels. We must analyze the Soviet Union as they analyzed the Commune. We must understand what was done correctly and incorrectly so we can modify the vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is exactly what the state capitalist analysis prevents us from doing. Not doing so would be dogmatic just as ignoring the Soviet Union as "just another capitalist state" is revisionist.

[Joe_Germinal]

Also, would it be possible to get an admin or someone to split this thread up? Posts 10-11, 13-16, 18-21, 23-24, and 26 have developed into a whole other conversation. It's unfair to comrade stalin who just wanted a simple question answered to clutter the thread like this.

[Comrade_Stalin]

This happens to me all the time on revleft, so their is no need, at least it was not moved to the OI Learning.

[LeninistKing]

KARL MARX SAID THAT THERE IS NO REAL CHANGE WITHOUT BLOOD AND VIOLENCE


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/marx/79_01_05.htm

No great movement has ever been inaugurated Without Bloodshed.

The independence of America was won by bloodshed, Napoleon captured France through a bloody process, and he was overthrown by the same means. Italy, England, Germany, and every other country gives proof of this, and as for assassination, it is not a new thing, I need scarcely say. Orsini tried to kill Napoleon; kings have killed more than anybody else; the Jesuits have killed; the Puritans killed at the time of Cromwell.

These deeds were all done or attempted before socialism was born. Every attempt, however, now made upon a royal or state individual is attributed to socialism. The socialists would regret very much the death of the German Emperor at the present time. He is very useful where he is; and Bismarck has done more for the cause than any other statesman, by driving things to extremes.

.





Marx did not say that the goal can be achieved "peacefully (i.e. through reforms) in America and England." He said that the goal may be obtained by peaceful means in America and England. This is not equivalent to proposing reforms. It means that a NON-REFORMIST objective, a fundamentally new social system, can be established peacefully.