Capital(ism) Without Market?

[Kiev Communard]

It seems that the majority of state capitalist theories of the USSR and other "Soviet" societies' social nature view (or at least historically viewed) - I am not talking here about Bordigist or Bettelheim's ideas on the issue - the "Soviet" economy as one undifferentiated capital that exploited the uniform group of industrial, agrarian and intellectual workers totally subordinated to it, with "Soviet" nomenklatura (high bureaucracy) fulfilling the roles traditionally played by individual capitalists and/or capitalist corporations.

However, there may be an objection to such a representation of "Soviet" society as state capitalist, according to which capital as social relationship cannot exist without (relatively) free commodity markets' movements and the competition of individual capitals. At least this is an objection that is most often hurled at supporters of state capitalist theories both by Brezhnevite apologists and proponents of "deformed workers' state"/bureaucratic collectivist theories. Of course, I know about Cliff's clarification on the preeminence of USSR's role on the world market as the defining feature of its state capitalist nature. Nonetheless, it seems that state capitalist theories somewhat ignore the internal dynamics of "Soviet" society's development.

That said, I would like to hear the opinions of representatives of different political tendencies of the Left on the following questions:

1) Is capital inherent in commodity exchange relations per se, or is it something superimposed upon them?

2) Can capital-wage labour relationship basically exist in the absence of developed commodity market? (EDIT: I am fully aware that labour force itself is a commodity under capitalism; what I am referring to as the "commodity market" is basically the internal market in other physical and non-physical goods and services).

3) If capital's existence is predicated upon the existence of class antagonism between wage labourers and employer-managers of modern means of production, does it mean that "marketless" capitalism (i.e. the one lacking the entrenched market structures outside of labour market) may exist, and if so, did it exist in the USSR?

I would be glad to hear different points of view on these subjects.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I think you're on to something here.

As I've said before, not all forms of generalized commodity production are capitalist or bourgeois society. Unless you wish to dispense of class-based analysis of the system (generalized commodity production is more separate from class relations than cursory glances between the two), we should limit those two terms to those forms of generalized commodity production that have:

1) Consumer goods and services markets
2) Labour markets
3) Capital markets

According to Russian Marxist and former Soviet dissident Boris Kagarlitsky, and despite attempts to stretch things by "Marxist-Humanists," the Soviet economy didn't have any of these (not even a Fully Socialized Labour Market as referenced below). Even Bill Bland's Restoration of Capitalism stretched things re. the Kosygin-era cost accounting being oriented towards "socialist profit," or lack of planned approvals for exchanges exercised between directors on behalf of their respective state enterprises. It takes much more than that (scrapping Gossnab, for starters) to have capital markets.

Most state-capitalist critiques are aimed mainly at trying to paint the Soviet Union as an "imperialist"/"social-imperialist" power.

Anyway, "state capitalism" as properly understood applies only to most of the satellite states: lax controls over foreign trade (consumer, capital markets), agricultural production (consumer, capital markets), extensive reliance on education abroad (labour markets), etc.


If capital's existence is predicated upon the existence of class antagonism between wage labourers and employer-managers of modern means of production, does it mean that "marketless" capitalism (i.e. the one lacking the entrenched market structures outside of labour market) may exist [...]?

I don't think so, and re. labour markets, I do think it's possible to have a Fully Socialized Labour Market (http://www.revleft.com/vb/supply-side-political-t152098/index.html).

[Kiev Communard]

Thank you for your thoughts. I will present my own, more detailed reply later. For now, I would just like to know your own position regarding the USSR's socioeconomic nature. Do you think it was "deformed workers' state", "immature socialist", "bureaucratic collectivist", or something entirely else? I would be glad to see a detailed exposition of your views on this subject.

[S.Artesian]

It seems that the majority of state capitalist theories of the USSR and other "Soviet" societies' social nature view (or at least historically viewed) - I am not talking here about Bordigist or Bettelheim's ideas on the issue - the "Soviet" economy as one undifferentiated capital that exploited the uniform group of industrial, agrarian and intellectual workers totally subordinated to it, with "Soviet" nomenklatura (high bureaucracy) fulfilling the roles traditionally played by individual capitalists and/or capitalist corporations.

However, there may be an objection to such a representation of "Soviet" society as state capitalist, according to which capital as social relationship cannot exist without (relatively) free commodity markets' movements and the competition of individual capitals. At least this is an objection that is most often hurled at supporters of state capitalist theories both by Brezhnevite apologists and proponents of "deformed workers' state"/bureaucratic collectivist theories. Of course, I know about Cliff's clarification on the preeminence of USSR's role on the world market as the defining feature of its state capitalist nature. Nonetheless, it seems that state capitalist theories somewhat ignore the internal dynamics of "Soviet" society's development.

That said, I would like to hear the opinions of representatives of different political tendencies of the Left on the following questions:

1) Is capital inherent in commodity exchange relations per se, or is it something superimposed upon them?

2) Can capital-wage labour relationship basically exist in the absence of developed commodity market? (EDIT: I am fully aware that labour force itself is a commodity under capitalism; what I am referring to as the "commodity market" is basically the internal market in other physical and non-physical goods and services).

3) If capital's existence is predicated upon the existence of class antagonism between wage labourers and employer-managers of modern means of production, does it mean that "marketless" capitalism (i.e. the one lacking the entrenched market structures outside of labour market) may exist, and if so, did it exist in the USSR?

I would be glad to hear different points of view on these subjects.

Wow. Best questions I've encountered about the nature of the fSU.

Full disclosure: I am not a partisan of any of the "state capitalist" categorizations of the fSU. What am I partisan of? Beats the hell out of me. I don't know what it was, but I start by knowing what it was not-- and it was not capitalism.

How do I know what it was not? Because I cannot imagine, conceive, of a capitalism absent a capitalist class. Now if the bureaucracy were a class, they would have a unique, specific relationship to the organization of production, something that only they could introduce into the organization of property and property's doppelganger, labor.

That would mean, in essence, that only the bureaucracy could expropriate the Russian bourgeoisie and the landowners, etc. and the bureaucracy patently did not do that, did not introduce a organization of property and labor that it alone "incubated."

End of disclosure.


1) Is capital inherent in commodity exchange relations per se, or is it something superimposed upon them?


How about "neither" and "both"? Not very helpful, I know. Neither because I am not advocate of "incipient capitalism" somehow sprouting out of commercial relations regarding production and exchange. For example, Mao to the contrary notwithstanding, capitalism was not incipient, but somehow suppressed by the pressure of imperialism.

Neither because, for the same reason, not all commodity exchange can be supplanted by capitalist exchange relations. Again, China being the example [although there are many others] capitalist relations of agriculture were not able to supplant the traditional peasant based "subsistence + surplus" agriculture and dispossess the direct producers.

Both because, it can and has been imposed on such exchange, for example, in the case of Mexico where near-slave like conditions on the haciendas were determined by, accelerated by, imposed by, the increasing engagement of the haciendas in production for the world markets.


2) Can capital-wage labour relationship basically exist in the absence of developed commodity market? (EDIT: I am fully aware that labour force itself is a commodity under capitalism; what I am referring to as the "commodity market" is basically the internal market in other physical and non-physical goods and services).

No. For capital to be capital, the means of productions themselves have to be organized as commodities. There has to be accumulation of the means of production not for the production of use but for the production of.... the relations of accumulation, of value. To my readings, those conditions did not exist in the fSU. The means of production were not commodities that could be "alienated" for personal aggrandizement. Money, as money, could not freely purchase labor and the means of production.


3) If capital's existence is predicated upon the existence of class antagonism between wage labourers and employer-managers of modern means of production, does it mean that "marketless" capitalism (i.e. the one lacking the entrenched market structures outside of labour market) may exist, and if so, did it exist in the USSR?.

No. Marketless capitalism cannot exist, at least not for very long. Certainly history is full of examples of the state becoming a vector, an enabler, for accumulation by the bourgeoisie. Certainly, there are many examples of the state controlling production, owning production [Argentina--- and well before Peron, Mexico and before Cardenas]. Yet in every example the state has either acted as a "captured" market, or as, in the case of the oil states, a renter state, accumulating through engagement with the world market, through producing for domestic and/or world markets as markets, as exchange mechanisms for the realization of value.

[Jose Gracchus]

II am not talking here about Bordigist or Bettelheim's ideas on the issue

What's wrong with their views? Quite frankly, I think they are the only coherent views on the USSR.

I highly recommend Paresh Chattopadhyay's The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience) and the LRP's "Stalinist Capitalism" (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter5_stalinistcapitalism.pdf).

The USSR in the 1920s under the NEP was clearly state capitalism; so how could there be some magical ahistorical agent that is not the working class that superseded capitalism and somehow separated the USSR from the thoroughly globalized and limitless capitalist mode of production in the 1930s, as a stand-alone territory?

As for DNZ: if you're capable of admitting that Eastern Europe was state capitalism, it strikes me as totally absurd to call the, I suppose "better disciplined" Soviet bureaucracy magically a different mode of production. Who cares what your favorite revisionist of the day, Boris Kagarlitsky, says. Its just a way of having to dodge the Soviet question, because one is either a crypto-Stalinist (like you), or one has abandoned class analysis even conceptually.

[S.Artesian]

Where's the capitalist class' power in the 1920s? Where is the capitalist class accumulating means of production as values for the production of more value?

[Jose Gracchus]

What do you purport to be the cause of accumulating means of production in the 1920s? A wonderous one-party state bureaucracy that just happens to care about the workers and want to improve things? Lenin himself calls it state capitalism; he just adds the kludge the mystically "workers'" (since they have long been shut out of any substantive means of participation and control) party controlling it somehow transmutes the relations into socialism. Obviously, I think he was being a self-serving prick.

Non-capitalism in a single country is just as preposterous as socialism in a single country. Modes of production are intrinsically epochal and all-encompassing, especially capitalism.

As for the composition of the state; I think the USSR in the 1920s was a Bonapartist regime, where neither the Stalinist statified capitalist-bureaucratic class nor the workers were able to maintain power as a class as such, so the party elite did. This has historical precedent: the Second French Empire is described by Marx as a formally Bonapartist regime, but it was obviously a state in the capitalist mode of production - it was not "feudal" or "neither". A state can be embedded in a mode of production without that MOP's class being able to maintain its direct class power. Otherwise what do we make of all of Marx's discussion on France, and the differing content of the Jacobin, First Bonaparte, Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Bonapartist phases?

[Apoi_Viitor]

the Stalinist statified capitalist-bureaucratic class

Could you explain this further? How is the relation of the bureaucratic class to the means of production capitalistic? Are you saying they took over the role of the bourgeios?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The USSR in the 1920s under the NEP was clearly state capitalism

That's not the issue debated here.


As for DNZ: if you're capable of admitting that Eastern Europe was state capitalism, it strikes me as totally absurd to call the, I suppose "better disciplined" Soviet bureaucracy magically a different mode of production.

The Soviet Union from Stalin to Chernenko didn't have lax controls over foreign trade (consumer, capital markets), extensive private agricultural production (consumer, capital markets), extensive reliance on education abroad (labour markets), etc.

In fact, unlike in the satellite states, it had a whole directorate of the (albeit corrupt) MVD dedicated to Combating Speculation and the Embezzlement of Socialist Property.

I am labelling most Eastern European satellite states "state capitalist" in accordance with their own official "Marxism-Leninism." Only Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia went past "state capitalism."


Who cares what your favorite revisionist of the day, Boris Kagarlitsky

On what basis are you calling him a "revisionist"?


because one is either a crypto-Stalinist (like you), or one has abandoned class analysis even conceptually.

Screaming "state capitalism" and "state bourgeoisie" just because a society still has generalized commodity production already loses the class analysis at the outset. Having workers command all of generalized commodity production in a transitional period, and then still calling the society "capitalist" (this already being better than coordinator-class efforts), is what the Marxist-Humanist take on "state capitalism" amounts to.

And where did you get the "crypto-Stalinist" label from??? Second International politics or revival of such isn't "crypto-Stalinist."

[Broletariat]

1) Is capital inherent in commodity exchange relations per se, or is it something superimposed upon them?

I don't really know what you mean by "superimposed," but I know that capital springs up later after commodity exchange relations exist. C-C is an exchange of commodities, yet with no money form yet created, capital cannot accumulate.


2) Can capital-wage labour relationship basically exist in the absence of developed commodity market? (EDIT: I am fully aware that labour force itself is a commodity under capitalism; what I am referring to as the "commodity market" is basically the internal market in other physical and non-physical goods and services).

I don't know what you mean by internal market.

But what I do think of is the mine-towns in earlier America where the company controlled everything about the town. The Capitalists made the laws in those towns, they set prices of food, rent, wages, etc.

To me, that is the most striking similarity of the USSR, I'm quite historically ignorant, so I may very well be wrong. And of course, the USSR being a quite up-scaled version of those mining towns.


3) If capital's existence is predicated upon the existence of class antagonism between wage labourers and employer-managers of modern means of production, does it mean that "marketless" capitalism (i.e. the one lacking the entrenched market structures outside of labour market) may exist, and if so, did it exist in the USSR?

I will allude back to the mining-towns. There was no market within those towns, everything was strictly controlled by the company, yet those antagonisms clearly exist.

[S.Artesian]

What do you purport to be the cause of accumulating means of production in the 1920s? A wonderous one-party state bureaucracy that just happens to care about the workers and want to improve things? Lenin himself calls it state capitalism; he just adds the kludge the mystically "workers'" (since they have long been shut out of any substantive means of participation and control) party controlling it somehow transmutes the relations into socialism. Obviously, I think he was being a self-serving prick.

Or maybe, he's just wrong. He was wrong before, about many things regarding Russia's economic and social development. Anybody remember "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"?

I think he was wrong in labeling Russia state capitalist, basically because I don't see anything that resembles a class of capitalists accumulating means of production for the purposes of valorization.

Doesn't mean I like Lenin, or Trotsky, or the NEP, or Bukharin, or "enrich yourselves" or the first or second 5 year plans. I just don't think they measure up to capitalism on the value-o-meter.


Non-capitalism in a single country is just as preposterous as socialism in a single country. Modes of production are intrinsically epochal and all-encompassing, especially capitalism.


Modes of production do not exist as things in themselves, as abstractions. They exist as the real relations between classes. I don't find capitalist relations in the fSU because-- well because the bureaucracy doesn't have that particular relation to the organization of the economy, either in the overthrow of the pre-existing mode, or in what happens next.

And if modes of production are intrinsically epochal and all encompassing, then we should see a world-wide explosion of states overthrowing the bourgeoisie, expropriating the property of that class by a revolutionary process, and that process should not be confined simply to a) economies of considerable "underdevelopment" or b) economies where Russia can impose the system militarily.

We should see this new class germinating, with its new property form and new labor relations, right in the core of the old society. Anybody see any of that in the former Czechoslovakia? Hungary? Cuba?

We should see the new class taking power in advanced countries, no? We don't. We don't see a "stealth" state-capitalist class advancing with the proletariat, riding the proletariat into power to impose its new organization. On the contrary, we see the loyalists of the 3rd International, of the glory of the Soviet Union, engaging in popular fronts, taking up arms directly or indirectly against the proletariat's revolution


As for the composition of the state; I think the USSR in the 1920s was a Bonapartist regime, where neither the Stalinist statified capitalist-bureaucratic class nor the workers were able to maintain power as a class as such, so the party elite did. This has historical precedent: the Second French Empire is described by Marx as a formally Bonapartist regime, but it was obviously a state in the capitalist mode of production - it was not "feudal" or "neither". A state can be embedded in a mode of production without that MOP's class being able to maintain its direct class power. Otherwise what do we make of all of Marx's discussion on France, and the differing content of the Jacobin, First Bonaparte, Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Bonapartist phases?

Except Louis Napoleon didn't arise out of nothing; he arose out of the failed revolution of 1848-1850-- a revolution that failed to transform the property relations, the organization of labor, and the valorization of capital.

Whatever else we think, it is clear that the Russian Revolution did transform the property relations, did transform the organization of labor, and did suppress the valorization of capital.

I don't think Daum considers the fSU to have been state capitalist in the 1920s, so the question of the metamorphosis is just as important for the views you endorse as for the view you oppose.

Anyway, I'd like to hear your answers to KC's three questions.

[28350]

Bordigist or Bettelheim's ideas on the issue

sorry to go against the specifications of your original question, but would anyone mind explaining to me what these were?

InformCandidate, do the links you posted express these ideas?

[Savior]

I believe the USSR was Bureaucratic Collectivist. After the 1917 Revolution, In my opinon the USSR was a Workers state. but as time went on with external pressures, The Soviet Unions economic backwardsness, and the lack of Industry, the USSR began to degenerate. I believe once Stalin solidified the role of the Party, that it became a degenerated workers state, with the bureaucracy as the new ruling class. It was a new form of class society. The S.U kept degenerating until it became a fully capitalist state. The satellite states were deformed workers states because their mode of production wasint formed be a degerated homegrown political revolution, but by an external force.

However, i also regard facist states to be degenerated capitalist states, and regimes the are put into power by another country that wants them to liberalize their economies are deformed capitalist states.

[Jose Gracchus]

S. Artisan:

I don't think one can credibly claim to make a material scrutiny of history today, if something that occurred across near half the world's population and some of its largest states and old powers is just "????". I think if you deliberately avoid making any positive claims or theories about the Soviet-type societies, then you're tacitly suggesting that the Marxian theories of history are false.

What was the material basis and material content of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet-type societies, besides what amounts to "something not desirable"? The fact remains that workers remained workers; the USSR exploited a proletariat. If there is a wage labor society organized around generalized production for the sake of exchange, it is a capitalist society. The capitalist is a mere functionary of capital as such. I feel you're excessively focused on the capitalist class as a discrete group of people. I mean are state enterprises in European social democracies not quite capitalist enterprises, because there's no specific capitalists you can point to? Your "I cannot imagine" test would apply just as much there. Are you claiming they do not have internally capitalist relations, because you can't "point and see" the old-fashioned capitalist? They only acquire those relations by exposure to bona fide old-fashioned capitalist enterprises?

Today most capitalism is organized by abstract legal entities guaranteed privileged and powers by the state, controlled by a small group of contractually-bound employees formally working on behalf of an abstracted mass of micro-owners of the enterprise. Already in this phase of conventional state capitalism, the identity of the bourgeois class, and its direct relation to enterprises it owns, is much more attenuated than the 19th century.

Stalinism was just a detour for backward national capitals (particularly lagging world powers who failed to transform the agrarian economy in the 19th century) to integrate successfully into international capitalism. It seems clear that this was the historical mission of Stalinist political economy. Furthermore, it is embedded historically, ideologically, and economically in a whole trend toward statification of capitalism in the 20th century. There are full spectrum of intermediates between the United States (which seems to be the de facto touchstone for 'orthodox capitalism' for most leftists) and the USSR in the 1930s-1950s: mass social democratic public ownership in Scandinavia and Europe, Meidner Plan, the increasingly market socialist Eastern European states, Titoist Yugoslavia, Dengism, the NEP.

It simply doesn't have anything to do with Marxian transitions in mode of production. What was the Burmese Road to Socialism? A state elite just selecting to transform itself, at will? What's going on here? I may be wrong, and I'm willing to be convinced. But so far all I see is what must amount to an abandonment of Marxian theories and techniques.

I don't see how you get generalized commodity production, primitive accumulation, the expulsion of the peasantry from the land, and productive labor organized as wage labor across an economy and not have capitalism.

Have you read Chattopadhyay? I was wondering if you had any specific critiques.

[Kadir Ateş]

I would be curious to hear comrades' opinions on Preobrazhensky's idea of "socialist accumulation" as it ties in I think to this discussion quite well, especially when one considers the debates between the NEP and the right (Bukharin, Stalin) and those who wanted a more "left" approach to industrialialisation (Preob. and Trotsky).

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ That post of yours is more appropriate for the thread on Bukharin as a "capitalist roader."

[robbo203]

I think you're on to something here.

As I've said before, not all forms of generalized commodity production are capitalist or bourgeois society. Unless you wish to dispense of class-based analysis of the system (generalized commodity production is more separate from class relations than cursory glances between the two), we should limit those two terms to those forms of generalized commodity production that have:

1) Consumer goods and services markets
2) Labour markets
3) Capital markets

According to Russian Marxist and former Soviet dissident Boris Kagarlitsky, and despite attempts to stretch things by "Marxist-Humanists," the Soviet economy didn't have any of these (not even a Fully Socialized Labour Market as referenced below). .

They actually had all three. The confusion arises because the assumption is made that a market only exists as a "free market". Not so. A regulated market, even a heavily regulated market, is still a market

It is manifestly obvious that a consumer goods market existed in the SU. Cirizens bought consumer goods with cash, did they not? There was an element of payment in kind although oddly enough this element expanded rather than contracted after the demise of the SU

There was clearly also a labour market by virtue of the very fact the labour power was a commodity which was bought and sold in exchange for a wage packet. In fact, the labour market in the SU was not quite as strictly regulated as is sometimes imagined as state emterprise managers had quite a lot of leeway in setting wages and the like to attract labour. Commonly, job vacancy lists were posted at factory gates and so on. As was so often the case there was a huge gap between the rhetoric of so called central planning and the realities on the ground.

Finally , means of production were clearly bought and sold between enterrpises with state agencies like GOSSNAB essentially acting as intermediaries or facilitators. Ironically , the whole set up in the SU guaranteed fierce competition between state enterprises and the single minded pursuit by state enterprises of their own interests without regard to the wider "social" interests. The need to accumulate capital our of surplus value resulted in the legal imposition (formally ratified in 1936) on state enterrpises to make a profit. State enterprises that did not make a profit could be heavily penalised

There was nothing whatsoever about the SU that could lead us to conclude that, in terms of its basic core features, it was anything other than a capitalist economy albeit run by the state. There were certainly differences with western style capitalism in the extent to which capitalism's imperatives were mediated through the planning apparatus but these were superficial by comparison.

There was certainly a capitalist class in a de facto sense - the nomenklatura who effectively controlled - and hence owned - the means of production via their pivotal role in the decisionmaking process. This was reflected in the huge differences in material standards of living.

One of the greatest ironies is that those who denied the existence of a capitalist class in the SU - like Trotsky - resorted to an essentially idealist explanation to back up their claim despite claiming to be marxian materialists. In effect, a capitalist class according to them could not have existed because there was no de jure basis that entitled individuals to hold stocks and shares. In other words, a capitalist class owes its existence to a legal superstructure rather than to the material de facto situation on the ground in which it is actually quite impossible to separate ownership from ultimate control. However, because the nomenklatura ultimately controlled everything that can only mean that they comprised a distinct class that, in effect collectively owned the means of production. A state capitalist class, in other words...

[S.Artesian]

IFC: Good points-- will take me a little time to respond.

[RED DAVE]

Let me toss my two cents in with some observations on chronology.

First of all, it all happened in the USSR so fast. From the time of the Revolution to the point of establishment of capitalism in the commonly-expressed sense was a period of a little more than 70 years. A blip on the radar screen of time (badly mixed metaphor).

So, let's divide this into some stages and see what we can see. All this below is horribly condensed. Substages and sub-substages, could easily be introduced or the division of any one stage into smaller stages.

Stage 1 – Revolutionary period – 1917-1923 (the February Revolution; July Days; October Revolution; Civil War; ending arbitrarily with the death of Lenin: a the rise and struggles of the infant workers state)

Stage 2 – Counter-revolutionary period – 1923-1928 (the Lenin Levy, the fight within the Party; the defeat of the United Opposition – the destruction of the workers state)

Stage 3 – Primary accumulation – 1928-1941 (the 5-year plans; the purges; the growing threat of fascism; united fronts)

Stage 4 – WWII – 1941-1945

Stage 5 – Recovery and the Cold War – 1945-1960 (recovery from the depredations of WWII; the development of Eastern Europe; the Chinese Revolution; the Cold War; the Korean War; death of Stalin and the rise of the post-Stalin regimes

Stage 6 – Slow stagnation – 1960-1985 (introduction of various "reforms" and the gradual introduction of capitalist forms; increasing unrest and restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe)

Stage 7 - Perestroika – 1985-1990 (increasing introduction of capitalism, leading to full restoration)

Stage 8 – Capitalism – 1990 to present

Now, all this happened, and much more, in 7 decades. It is, therefore, my opinion, that the periods where the USSR was stable enough to be given a fixed definition, are extremely short. In my opinion, and Marxist economics is not my strong point, Stalinism, as descried by The Inform Candidate as "a detour for backward national capitals," is accurate.

The Chinese, for example, went through this process, in 40 years; the Eastern European nations went through it in about the same time or less; Cuba and the DRPK are still struggling with it, but the establishment of full capitalism is imminent for both of them. Finally, Nepal may skip right over this process and, if its present government, which includes the Maoists, has its way, it was go directly to full-blown capitalism, if it can attract enough investment.

It worth noting that in the post-WWII period, Taiwan went through a state capitalist period, which is only ending now. At one point I remember reading in the early 1960s that the percentage of state ownership of heavy industry was about the same in Taiwan and Poland!

Much to think about. One good thing: no one on this thread seems to be weird (or dumb) enough to call any of these states socialist.

RED DAVE

[Savior]

I would like to know others thoughts on the theories of Bureaucratic Collectivism, New Class, and Coordinatorism.

Thanks.

[Kiev Communard]

What's wrong with their views? Quite frankly, I think they are the only coherent views on the USSR.

Both of them seem to exaggerate the importance of private capitals in the USSR, with Bordiga going as far as claiming that bank account holders in the former Soviet Union constituted the basis of the bourgeoisie. Considering the fact that all these "private capitals" were later wiped out/embezzled by state officials administering them in 1991 (who became a part of real new private capitalist class), the Bordigist views on the USSR's class character appear to be somewhat unrealistic, which may have something to do with Bordiga's technocratic idealization of central planning that made them unwilling to concede that centralized planning apparatus may itself be the basis of the new ruling class.

Similar criticism goes to Bettelheim, who identified the USSR as basically still socialist until Kosygin's "reform" of 1965, even though the latter merely altered internal organization of intra-class relationship between various layers of ruling bureaucracy, without changing the class system itself, which remained essentially the same as that of late 1930s/1950s.



I highly recommend Paresh Chattopadhyay's The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience) and the LRP's "Stalinist Capitalism" (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter5_stalinistcapitalism.pdf).

Thanks for recommendations! I have already had these books, yet until this day I lacked the time to read them in earnest. Hopefully I may now make up for this failure.

[Kiev Communard]

I would like to know others thoughts on the theories of Bureaucratic Collectivism, New Class, and Coordinatorism.

Thanks.

I would highly recommend Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (http://ifile.it/n53oax/ebooksclub.org__Western_Marxism_and_the_Soviet_Uni on__Historical_Materialism_Book_Series_.l_t5x37106 3xjjx8.pdf) by Marcel van der Linden for a coherent and sufficiently brief exposition of various theories of Soviet Union's social nature. The review of the book may be found there - http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15765

I especially recommend Chapter 5, as it contains the detailed analyses of some of the more exotic and less known Marxist theories on the USSR than those of an "orthodox" triad (i.e., "state capitalism", "degenerated workers' state", and "bureaucratic collectivism").

[Jose Gracchus]

Both of them seem to exaggerate the importance of private capitals in the USSR, with Bordiga going as far as claiming that bank account holders in the former Soviet Union constituted the basis of the bourgeoisie. Considering the fact that all these "private capitals" were later wiped out/embezzled by state officials administering them in 1991 (who became a part of real new private capitalist class), the Bordigist views on the USSR's class character appear to be somewhat unrealistic, which may have something to do with Bordiga's technocratic idealization of central planning that made them unwilling to concede that centralized planning apparatus may itself be the basis of the new ruling class.

My views are basically most importantly based on Chattopadhyay's work, with some supplements. I went from being a Cliffite-Jonathan-Forest type (vulgar) state-cap, to adopting basically something like the Albert-Hahnel coordinator third class NSNC view, to reading Chattopadhyay (while at the same time getting my feet a lot wetter with the Marxian concept of capital and the theories of successive modes of production) which is where I am at now. I basically kept some of the prior views: I think the specific empirical content of the ruling class and its specific internal dynamics is described well by some of the NSNC theories, and Albert-Hahnel's coordinatorism in particular. But they cannot be said to be a ruling class in the sense of Marx that has its own historical mission and unique relations to production - capitalists are firstly the functionaries of capital, which is a social relation - the separation of the workers from the conditions of work. It came to be that the associated "haute coordinators," if you will, in the party elite and nomenklatura, came to serve as the functionaries of Soviet capital.

I basically reject the idea that you can merely do a vulgar empiricist-positivist "what is the USSR like, how does it differ" analysis vis-a-vis the West's capitalism, and work from there. That's contrary to the methodology one is using everywhere else if you're adhering to Marxian methods in analyzing any other capitalism.

Could you develop what you mean by Bordiga's idealization of central planning, and thus his fixation with trying to repudiate the USSR as "real planning"? I do think the USSR wasn't real planning, as it happens, and believe the bureaucratic center simply filled similar functions to the state bureaucratic and financial apparatus in Western capitalism.


Thanks for recommendations! I have already had these books, yet until this day I lacked the time to read them in earnest. Hopefully I may now make up for this failure.

A real material history and integrated 20th c. historical analysis of the Stalinist economies and their origin and historical task is a major project of mine. I'm really interested in this topic, and definitely let me know what you think when you finish them. Maybe even punch up a review of the work.

[Savior]

I would highly recommend Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (http://ifile.it/n53oax/ebooksclub.org__Western_Marxism_and_the_Soviet_Uni on__Historical_Materialism_Book_Series_.l_t5x37106 3xjjx8.pdf) by Marcel van der Linden for a coherent and sufficiently brief exposition of various theories of Soviet Union's social nature. The review of the book may be found there - http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15765

I especially recommend Chapter 5, as it contains the detailed analyses of some of the more exotic and less known Marxist theories on the USSR than those of an "orthodox" triad (i.e., "state capitalism", "degenerated workers' state", and "bureaucratic collectivism").

The download said i need a "download ticket"

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[S.Artesian]

S. Artisan:

I don't think one can credibly claim to make a material scrutiny of history today, if something that occurred across near half the world's population and some of its largest states and old powers is just "????". I think if you deliberately avoid making any positive claims or theories about the Soviet-type societies, then you're tacitly suggesting that the Marxian theories of history are false.

I didn't make any claim either for Marxist analysis, I said I personally don't know how to describe what it was, so I begin with what I know it was not. And that is capitalism as Marx's analysis apprehends capitalism.



What was the material basis and material content of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet-type societies, besides what amounts to "something not desirable"? The fact remains that workers remained workers; the USSR exploited a proletariat. If there is a wage labor society organized around generalized production for the sake of exchange, it is a capitalist society. The capitalist is a mere functionary of capital as such. I feel you're excessively focused on the capitalist class as a discrete group of people. I mean are state enterprises in European social democracies not quite capitalist enterprises, because there's no specific capitalists you can point to? Your "I cannot imagine" test would apply just as much there. Are you claiming they do not have internally capitalist relations, because you can't "point and see" the old-fashioned capitalist? They only acquire those relations by exposure to bona fide old-fashioned capitalist enterprises?

I think it is a bit more complicated than that, since Marx's analysis of capitalism has, as one of its axes, the conflict between the private ownership and the social basis of production. This is why the objects are produced as commodities, as values, and not simply and directly for consumption, for use, for need.

Need, consumption, use only have significance through accumulation, through value, through the reproduction of capital, the means of production of private property, and labor as social labor, as a class relation, an expropriation.

I believe our best tool conducting an analysis of the fSU is expanding upon the implications of the theory of uneven and combined development-- where the revolution becomes proletarian as that class is the only class capable of breaking the organization of property that circumscribes the bourgeoisie, and that the bourgeoisie use to circumscribe production.

As a consequence, without the victory of the revolution in the advanced countries any and every government/of/by/for the proletariat will confront the necessity of reproducing the conflict of achieving a technical level sufficient with doing away with the proletariat as a proletariat and the reality that the only way to achieve that level is through exploitation of the proletariat, through accumulation that is not in fact socialist accumulation, but analogous to capitalist accumulation. And analogous is the specific word I want to use as it has a specific meaning in evolutionary sciences-- "different historical origin, similar function."

Now there are ways to handle this contradiction-- ways that improve the prospects for the proletariat; ways that emphasize enhancing socialist relations of production, but those prospects depend first and foremost on coincident and concomitant support for international revolution.

The fSU, unfortunately from the moment Lenin and Trotsky offered up the Turkish left communists to Ataturk, emphasized, and in a sense, preserved the weakness of the proletarian base of the revolution.

Still, that is not the same as springing into history as a new class, that somehow does not have a new, distinct, particular, organization of property and a new relation with labor power.

I cannot conceive of a capitalism where accumulation does not begin, continue, reproduce, maintain, and end with the accumulation of the means of production themselves for the purpose of valorization, of increased production of value; for the purpose of increased accumulation.

I don't think such accumulation is possible absent a ruling class acting collectively in its individual needs to own, accumulate aggrandize, and even destroy the means of production; nor absent a ruling class acting individually in its needs to collectively exchange the values extracted in order to realize that

Now Robo123 might claim such relations existed, but in my readings on the economy of the fSU by Nove, Angus Maddison, Roger Munting, Raymond Hutchings, I don't find evidence that such relations were anything more than secondary, existing in the interstices of the economy.


Today most capitalism is organized by abstract legal entities guaranteed privileged and powers by the state, controlled by a small group of contractually-bound employees formally working on behalf of an abstracted mass of micro-owners of the enterprise. Already in this phase of conventional state capitalism, the identity of the bourgeois class, and its direct relation to enterprises it owns, is much more attenuated than the 19th century.Most capitalism has been guaranteed privilege and power by the state since the period of parliamentary enclosure in England and Scotland. As far as the "micro-owners" of the enterprise-- I think micro-ownership as the dominant characteristic is vastly overrated [how's that for stringing together oxymorons?].

The tapping of accumulated wealth through joint stock companies, mutual funds, etc. hardly diminishes the concentration of capital itself, the interlocking connections between corporations through boards of directors. Nor does it diminish the need to accumulate value as value.

Back in the 60s and 70s, the same issue was raised about the so-called "faceless" or "democratic" or "mass" or "classless" capitalists of the US. Domhoff, if I remember correctly, did yeoman's work disproving those assertions.


Stalinism was just a detour for backward national capitals (particularly lagging world powers who failed to transform the agrarian economy in the 19th century) to integrate successfully into international capitalism. It seems clear that this was the historical mission of Stalinist political economy. Furthermore, it is embedded historically, ideologically, and economically in a whole trend toward statification of capitalism in the 20th century. There are full spectrum of intermediates between the United States (which seems to be the de facto touchstone for 'orthodox capitalism' for most leftists) and the USSR in the 1930s-1950s: mass social democratic public ownership in Scandinavia and Europe, Meidner Plan, the increasingly market socialist Eastern European states, Titoist Yugoslavia, Dengism, the NEP.Except in those intermediates, like the US, like the UK, France, Egypt, Mexico, Argentina we do not see an expropriation, the actual action of expropriation of the class of capitalists.


It simply doesn't have anything to do with Marxian transitions in mode of production. What was the Burmese Road to Socialism? A state elite just selecting to transform itself, at will? What's going on here? I may be wrong, and I'm willing to be convinced. But so far all I see is what must amount to an abandonment of Marxian theories and techniques.


I don't see how you get generalized commodity production, primitive accumulation, the expulsion of the peasantry from the land, and productive labor organized as wage labor across an economy and not have capitalism.I do not believe the fSU had generalized production of commodities as Marx describes the production of commodities, the existence of commodities, as representatives, carriers, vectors for the accumulation of value as value.


Have you read Chattopadhyay? I was wondering if you had any specific critiques.Read a little. Had a brief discussion with him once which kind of ended abruptly when he said the October 1917 was a capitalist revolution, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the capitalist party. I literally didn't know what to say.

After the July days, the Bolsheviks were the closest they ever were to the proletariat, the connection between Bolsheviks and the self-organization of the Russian workers was deep, organic, fundamental in that the Bolsheviks were the workers involved intimately in that self-organization.

To say October was a capitalist revolution flies in the face of everything I know about uneven and combined development, and the actual class struggle in Russia. FWIW I think uneven and combined developed is the seminal extension and application of Marx's analysis of capital to the 20th century of capitalism. It stands head and shoulders above Lenin's theory of imperialism, Rosa's accumulation of capital... way above.

[S.Artesian]

A real material history and integrated 20th c. historical analysis of the Stalinist economies and their origin and historical task is a major project of mine. I'm really interested in this topic, and definitely let me know what you think when you finish them. Maybe even punch up a review of the work. ___

Now this is indeed an incredibly important project.

[S.Artesian]

I would be curious to hear comrades' opinions on Preobrazhensky's idea of "socialist accumulation" as it ties in I think to this discussion quite well, especially when one considers the debates between the NEP and the right (Bukharin, Stalin) and those who wanted a more "left" approach to industrialialisation (Preob. and Trotsky).


Been a long time since I read it. I remember liking it at first, and then thinking... "no, this won't do." Socialist accumulation means reproducing socialist relations of production which means the workers themselves have to make the decisions, do the governing.


But I'll go back and reread it. I just don't think there's any such thing as "primitive socialist accumulation." What Preobrazhensky is describing is developmentalism-- its electrification without the soviets. It's a the government without the cooks.

[Kiev Communard]

The download said i need a "download ticket"

I would love to read the material. Would you help me get it downloaded?

The download ticket is free. Just request it, enter CAPTCHA, and download the book;).

[Rowan Duffy]

I basically reject the idea that you can merely do a vulgar empiricist-positivist "what is the USSR like, how does it differ" analysis vis-a-vis the West's capitalism, and work from there. That's contrary to the methodology one is using everywhere else if you're adhering to Marxian methods in analyzing any other capitalism.

There is nothing vulgar about empirical approaches that seek to find observable differences between things. I think the onus is on the anti-empiricists to demonstrate how their poetic approach to analysis is distinguishable from fairy tales or it should be completely rejected just as we should reject the rest of religious nonsense.

The NEP period in the USSR was essentially dirigisme. However, that stage was superseded by planning. Is central planning also state capitalism? What good is the term state capitalism if the US and USSR is state capitalism. They both functioned very differently as should be obvious to anyone who ever looked at it.

It's even more distressing because of the huge cost in human life that was effected by the collapse of the USSR. If the system was the same, why did people start dying in huge numbers when it collapsed?

In my estimation, the bureaucratic positions did not come close to realising the unbridled power of capitalism and the combination of a lack of self-belief and the potential of unbridled exploitation was sufficient to convince them to transition. If they are both "state capitalism" the vast scale of the change is a bit hard to explain.

The abstraction that places everything into the "capitalist" box, is an abstraction whose granularity is so large that it is hardly useful. There is essentially zero analytic boundary between systems.



The USSR in the 1920s under the NEP was clearly state capitalism; so how could there be some magical ahistorical agent that is not the working class that superseded capitalism and somehow separated the USSR from the thoroughly globalized and limitless capitalist mode of production in the 1930s, as a stand-alone territory?

First, the motive agent of the Russian revolution was clearly the working class. The Bolsheviks definitely substituted themselves for the working class, but it was only with proletarian power that they were able to make the transition in the first place.

Additionally, it is completely unnecessary for the working class to be the motive force in a change of economic system. The idea that it has to be capitalism if the working class is not involved in its management would put feudalism and absolutism in the same box as capitalism.

Obviously we will not have obtained our goal of proletarian revolution until we abolish the class system and therefor we will need the proletariat to remain in control. That doesn't mean that all systems are capitalism until this takes place.



Today most capitalism is organized by abstract legal entities guaranteed privileged and powers by the state, controlled by a small group of contractually-bound employees formally working on behalf of an abstracted mass of micro-owners of the enterprise. Already in this phase of conventional state capitalism, the identity of the bourgeois class, and its direct relation to enterprises it owns, is much more attenuated than the 19th century.

First, while they may be formally working on behalf of an abstracted mass of micro-owners, in practice CEOs are paid in excess of 50% stock themselves and the true micro-owners form only a small fraction of stock owners. In addition these stock owners, are owners in name only and get sacrificed at the chopping block in any downturn. The capitalist class is not attenuated, it is just as focused as it was in 1920. The difference is that they now afford a larger number of managerial positions in the direction of the circuit of capital.



Could you develop what you mean by Bordiga's idealization of central planning, and thus his fixation with trying to repudiate the USSR as "real planning"? I do think the USSR wasn't real planning, as it happens, and believe the bureaucratic center simply filled similar functions to the state bureaucratic and financial apparatus in Western capitalism.

The bureaucratic strata did not have the same pressures to perform that capitalists place on enterprises. The circuit of capital did not exist. The dynamics are so different that it seems incredibly bizarre to use the same abstract classification. It's like insisting that in biology we describe everything as animals and not get lost in the details. The details are what separate the apes from the worms.

A few questions:

Do you not think that commodity production is a good thing if we mean the production of essentially interchangable items?

If we are looking to ensure that we use labour in areas where it is most wanted in a world which is not yet post-scarcity we will probably also have to have some finite allocation mechanism. Is that a wage?

We will also need to have globally redirected labour, allocated towards the production of public goods such as information, hospitals and rail lines etc. Will this be a "profit" extracted from our "wage labourers"?

If you are not careful, all possible systems will become capitalism in your analysis and communism will have to retreat to the transcendent.

[Savior]

The download ticket is free. Just request it, enter CAPTCHA, and download the book;).

Thank you greatly.

Are there other places on the internet that i can get books id like for free?

[Kiev Communard]

Thank you greatly.

Are there other places on the internet that i can get books id like for free?

Try library.nu (http://library.nu/)and ebookee.org (http://ebookee.org/). The former requires a registration (it is free), the latter does not.

[Kiev Communard]

Could you develop what you mean by Bordiga's idealization of central planning, and thus his fixation with trying to repudiate the USSR as "real planning"? I do think the USSR wasn't real planning, as it happens, and believe the bureaucratic center simply filled similar functions to the state bureaucratic and financial apparatus in Western capitalism.

Perhaps this critique of Bordiga's views by council communist thinkers Giles Dauvé and Karl Nesic might clarify the things a bit (emphases mine):




Amedeo Bordiga is one of the very few who took democracy seriously: he didn't look at its methods, but at its principle. However, he likened proletarian democracy so much to bourgeois democracy that he ended up missing the principle itself.

His starting point is that democracy consists in individuals regarding themselves as equals, each forming his own opinion according to his free will, then comparing it with the opinion of others, before taking a decision (usually after a vote and according to majority rule: this is important, yet not essential to the definition). Parliament stifles the proletarians by forcing them into a political partnership with the bourgeois. Nothing original in that last statement, but the deduction that follows is not so common : Bordiga thinks worker democracy is also to be rejected, because it decomposes the proletarian fighting spirit into individual decisions. Democracy means a reunion of equal rights and wills, which is impossible in bourgeois parliamentarianism, and pointless in proletarian class activity: revolution does not depend on combining a mass of individual decisions, nor on majority or proportional procedures, but on the ability of the organized proletariat to act as a centralizing body and a collective mind. (Bordiga calls this body and mind "a party", but his party is very different from the Leninist one, since it is not based on socialist intellectuals introducing socialism into the working class from outside. To make things more complicated, Bordiga never openly criticized Lenin's conception of the party.)

"(..) the principle of democracy has no intrinsic value. It is not a "principle", but rather a simple mechanism of organization (..) revolution is not a problem of forms of organization. On the contrary, revolution is a problem of content, a problem of the movement and action of revolutionary forces in an unending process (..)" (The democratic principle, January 1922)

Several decades later, Bordiga wrote : "The 'content of socialism' (..) won't be proletarian autonomy, control and management of production, but the disappearance of the proletarian class, of the wage system, of exchange - even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for labour-power; and finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as well. There will be (..) nobody to demand autonomy from." (The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism, 1957)

Indeed communist revolution is the creation of non-profit, non-mercantile, co-operative and fraternal social relations, which implies destroying the State apparatus and doing away with the division between firms, with money as the universal mediator (and master), and with work as a separate activity. That is the content.

What Bordiga fails to see, is that this content won't come out of any kind of form. Some forms are incompatible with the content. We can't reason as if the end was the only thing that mattered: the end is made out of means. Certain means get us closer to the end we want, while others make it more and more remote and finally destroy its possibility. The content of communism (which Bordiga was right to emphasize) can only be born out of the self-organized action of "the vast majority" of the proletariat (Communist Manifesto). The communist movement is not democratic: neither is it dictatorial, if the dictator is one part of the proletariat oppressing the rest. Soon enough that part loses whatever proletarian character it had and turns into a privileged group telling people what to do. This is what happened in Russia, as some like Otto Rühle understood as early as 1920-21.

Bordiga lacks a critique of politics. He perceives revolution as a succession of phases: first it would replace bourgeois power, then it would create new social relations. This is why he has no trouble believing that the Bolsheviks could have ruled Russia for years and, even without being able to transform the country in a communist way, still have promoted world revolution. Yet power is not something revolutionaries can hold on to with no revolution happening in their country or anywhere else. Like many others, Bordiga equates power with an instrument. When Jan Appel was staying in Moscow as a KAPD delegate in the Summer 1920, he was shown factories with well-oiled machines that could not be operated for lack of spare parts: when revolution breaks out in Europe, the Russian workers would tell him, you'll send us spares and we'll be able to operate these machines again. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks must have thought of themselves as something similar: a machinery preparing for world revolution. Unfortunately, power (and even more so State power) is not a tool waiting to be properly handled. It's a social structure that does not remain on stand-by for long. It has a function: it connects, it makes people do things, it imposes, it organizes what exists. If what exists is wage-labour and commodity exchange, even in the original and makeshift existence it had in Russia in 1920, power will manage that kind of labour and that kind of exchange. Lenin died a head of State. On the contrary, a revolutionary structure is only defined by its acts, and if it does not act it soon withers.

Like Trotsky, Bordiga theorizes the necessity to do violence to particular proletarians in the name of the future interests of the proletarians in general: as late as 1960, he would still justify the Bolshevik repression of the Kronstadt rising in February-March, 1921. He never understood that at the time he was writing The Democratic Principle, the Russian experience that he extensively used to back up his thesis was eliminating whatever revolution was left in Russia. Bordiga was attacking democratic formalism on behalf of a revolution that already had less substance than form.

Dictatorship is the opposite of democracy. The opposite of democracy is not a critique of democracy.

http://www.troploin.fr/textes/16-a-contribution-to-the-critique-of-political-autonomy?start=11
(http://www.troploin.fr/textes/16-a-contribution-to-the-critique-of-political-autonomy?start=11)




A real material history and integrated 20th c. historical analysis of the Stalinist economies and their origin and historical task is a major project of mine. I'm really interested in this topic, and definitely let me know what you think when you finish them. Maybe even punch up a review of the work.

Why, this an excellent contribution! I would be glad to help you in this project, if you may. After I finish reading Chattopadhyay's work, I will notify you of my impression thereof.

[Jose Gracchus]

There is nothing vulgar about empirical approaches that seek to find observable differences between things. I think the onus is on the anti-empiricists to demonstrate how their poetic approach to analysis is distinguishable from fairy tales or it should be completely rejected just as we should reject the rest of religious nonsense.

Yadda yadda, I know you've been hanging around RL's street corners, peddling this home cure.

Its not 'poetic'. I'm afraid you have a skin-deep understanding of 'the scientific method' and the philosophical grounding of various thought. I think you should keep in mind Popperism was basically constructed around the idea you cannot learn anything from history (a defense of marginalism and neoclassicism and an explicit attack on Marxism). I strongly recommend reading Michael Macnair's review of Jairus Banaji's "History as Theory" (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004237) for a review of this topic. The overview of what modes of production really mean is especially crucial.


The NEP period in the USSR was essentially dirigisme. However, that stage was superseded by planning. Is central planning also state capitalism? What good is the term state capitalism if the US and USSR is state capitalism. They both functioned very differently as should be obvious to anyone who ever looked at it.

Not quite dirigisme in the empirical sense (i.e., using the French prototype); virtually all the enterprises were owned by the state, if coordinated by 'spontaneous market' price mechanism, rather than administrative-directive price-setting.


It's even more distressing because of the huge cost in human life that was effected by the collapse of the USSR. If the system was the same, why did people start dying in huge numbers when it collapsed?

I'm totally unaware of the fact that every large loss of life or decline in living standards in history associated with any or all economic change is a distinct transition in the mode of production (an intrinsically historical and epochal phenomena).

This is just a reiteration of the welfarism underpinning Brezhnevite politics. Living standards of the working class were attacked everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s. The welfare and autarkic qualities of 20th century state capitalism (a historical phase in the development of world capitalism, the whole capitalist mode of production) were dismantled and assaulted everywhere by neoliberalism.

I think reading Loren Goldner's works (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/) is most helpful (particularly start with this piece (http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/bordiga.html) on Bordiga) in properly historicizing the events of the 20th c., something modern Marxists aside from leftcoms seem loathe to do; rather they transmogrify into liberals after 1914 and imagine that everyone could have been different due to this or that organizational schema, leadership personality, or conceptual politics. They seem to be very uncomfortable locating in the historical height of the classical labor movement the same essential material story that Marx gave for the 19th c.

The basic fact is this: as Macnair puts it, modes of production are best understood as overarching historical epochs which are most archetypical at their apogee. The French economic system in 1788 was not properly "feudal" though we agree that 1789 was a bourgeois revolution. Similarly, though capitalism is probably best understood in terms of Western Europe in the 19th century, we're hardly outside the arc of its development today (this would be the meaning of "decadence" in the left communist formulation). For Marx the big thing is how are you organizing production, human labor, and class around property forms.

You get certain essential ingredients - so you have your manor lord and serf in feudalism as the fundamental dynamic of feudalism. You could no more have one without the other, than you can have wage labor and turnover in workers between individual enterprises - without capitalism. In the USSR, though the formal juridical owner of all enterprises was the state, each enterprise had factual legal identity, the right to conduct economic relationships with other enterprises, to hire and fire labor, and it exercised those privileges. If you read Chattopadhyay, I think you'll be surprised to what extent the empirical features of the USSR line up with capitalism - in the distribution of differential wages throughout the working class, compared to the neoclassical definition of capitalism. You haven't transcended capitalism when all the major features of commodity production, the law of value, wage labor (empirical evidence suggests that labor turnover between enterprises in the USSR was on the norm of Western capitalist states like the U.S, UK, etc.).

Since you have a taste for detail and voluminous evidence, I really do recommend Chattopadhyay, leaving aside Artesian's comments for a moment (I personally do not find it hard to believe that the content of the Bolsheviks after 1919, but certainly by 1921 was essentially bourgeois).

More importantly, since on the left we're concerned not with treating production and society as composed of timeless features based on fundamental laws in a -vulgar- pantomime of physics (i.e., the idea that capitalist production and exchange arises from "human nature" and fundamentals of economic supply-and-demand like the production possibilities frontier), but rather the essentially historical and historicized origin of a particular nexus of particular human social relationships, I think looking in the rearview mirror of the USSR and command economies, they seem to be part of a particular trend realized everywhere toward bureaucratism, planning, restrain and conscious interference with the neoclassical fetish for spontaneous prices (which has never been central to a left or Marxian view of capitalism) that was everywhere overturned and defeated and overturned as a historical trend in the late 1970s to 1990s (in many ways based on computers and information technology, which incidentally led me originally to realize Paul Cockshott's politics were essential idealist - there was very real class reasons why the only way Soviet bureaucrats were going to be importing computers and organizing production around them was when they went neoliberal and burnt down their own society - there was no capacity for the 'free agency' of the bureaucrats and party officials).

If you actually read carefully, most NSNC interpretations of the USSR were historically grounded in the belief that the command economies would be enduring features of modern society, or even the future of all societies (bureaucratic collectivists basically held this view, and used it as a basis for rather right-wing politics). I think it is impossible to maintain credibility for that now in retrospect: its not 1955.


In my estimation, the bureaucratic positions did not come close to realising the unbridled power of capitalism and the combination of a lack of self-belief and the potential of unbridled exploitation was sufficient to convince them to transition. If they are both "state capitalism" the vast scale of the change is a bit hard to explain.

What is really so 'vast' about the 'scale' of the changes? Can you provide any, I dunno, empirical evidence on what was so dramatic, rather than just relying on vague qualitative assessments? I mean I think it was terrible too, but the fact was the USSR was in decline for quite some time, and had been moving toward Western-form capitalism for quite some time.

The fact is the UN has compared the scale of the decline to the historical Great Depression in the United States; a big deal, but hardly a transition in mode of production. Worse yet, what do you make of Leninist party-states which have much more comfortably and effectively bridged the gap and integrated themselves into international markets in a conventional fashion, such as Vietnam and the People's Republic of China? What of the economic content of the Eastern European states, some of which did not even collectivize agriculture, leaving it on the basis of private production (Poland), were highly integrated into Western finance via IMF debt-finance (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, etc.), and increasingly adopted market socialist models thoroughly (Yugoslavia, Hungary).


The abstraction that places everything into the "capitalist" box, is an abstraction whose granularity is so large that it is hardly useful. There is essentially zero analytic boundary between systems.

I didn't realize 11th century England is characterized by "doubly free" labor circulating between individualized enterprises who engaged workers with "exchange of equivalents" labor based on contract. The USA today, in 1930, and the USSR throughout its life, were.


First, the motive agent of the Russian revolution was clearly the working class. The Bolsheviks definitely substituted themselves for the working class, but it was only with proletarian power that they were able to make the transition in the first place.

The workers as a class power were defeated in 1918. Contrary to vulgar anarchist and liberal analysis, the Bolshevik party is not some "free agent" which can substitute itself for a social class with a "historical mission" in the Marxian sense. There are social forces at work, the question are which. Since I don't think the "bureaucracy" and "petty bourgeoisie" can be said to really have a credible and different total worldview for the society in the way the working class (communism) and capitalist class (the modern state and wage labor commodity production in "all its infinite gradation" [Marx]), does in this epoch.


Additionally, it is completely unnecessary for the working class to be the motive force in a change of economic system. The idea that it has to be capitalism if the working class is not involved in its management would put feudalism and absolutism in the same box as capitalism.

Except those systems were characterized by different ways of mediating labor and value besides "doubly free" labor based on the "exchange of equivalents" (wage labor), where production is organized for the purposes of generalized commodity production. They were based on different dynamics of class and production.


Obviously we will not have obtained our goal of proletarian revolution until we abolish the class system and therefor we will need the proletariat to remain in control. That doesn't mean that all systems are capitalism until this takes place.

Unless we're abandoning most of the Marxian understanding of the development of class societies up until capitalism, as if everything somehow changed in 1900, no we can't.


First, while they may be formally working on behalf of an abstracted mass of micro-owners, in practice CEOs are paid in excess of 50% stock themselves and the true micro-owners form only a small fraction of stock owners. In addition these stock owners, are owners in name only and get sacrificed at the chopping block in any downturn. The capitalist class is not attenuated, it is just as focused as it was in 1920. The difference is that they now afford a larger number of managerial positions in the direction of the circuit of capital.

The CEO may serve direct profits by the above mechanism, but they cannot be said to be a capitalist in the sense of really owning the property that they serve as "functional capitalist" for.

Also, where are you coming up with the "circuit of capital" device?


The bureaucratic strata did not have the same pressures to perform that capitalists place on enterprises. The circuit of capital did not exist. The dynamics are so different that it seems incredibly bizarre to use the same abstract classification. It's like insisting that in biology we describe everything as animals and not get lost in the details. The details are what separate the apes from the worms.

Absolutely not. Read Chattopadhyay; the USSR and other similar societies collapsed precisely because of their contradictions, in the direction of neoliberal capitalism. They were under enormous pressures their essentially mobilizational and extensive-growth economy could not yield to. State industries and welfare systems in Europe were subject to "soft budget limits" as well. This is Hayek's capitalism, not Marx's. You can stick with the former if you really want.


A few questions:

Do you not think that commodity production is a good thing if we mean the production of essentially interchangable items?

You know what is meant here by generalized commodity production. We mean where production is carried on for the purposes of exchange for the benefit of productive apparatus, not for the needs of the producer. I don't think socialism in one country can be realized; the world market and world capitalist production must be suppressed entirely.


If we are looking to ensure that we use labour in areas where it is most wanted in a world which is not yet post-scarcity we will probably also have to have some finite allocation mechanism. Is that a wage?

No, that would be an idiotic definition of 'wage'.


We will also need to have globally redirected labour, allocated towards the production of public goods such as information, hospitals and rail lines etc. Will this be a "profit" extracted from our "wage labourers"?

That's not profit. You're simply organizing available resources toward socially determined ends. You're not producing and extracting a profit on top of the sale of commodities based on the producers' propertylessness and need for subsistence, are you?


If you are not careful, all possible systems will become capitalism in your analysis and communism will have to retreat to the transcendent.

To be honest, and at the risk of seeming churlish, I think you should read a lot more left philosophy, rather than spending so much paddling around in the liberal soup of Cockshott, liberal political science, and probably garbage DNZ peddles.

The real question to me becomes one of do we think that within the real movement and real struggle of the working class is the fundamental possibility of communism, or whether it is this or that scheme thought up by "conscious" intellectuals outside the real movement of the class. Do I think programs and proposals matter? Of course, but ultimately you're going to have mass city-center occupations, mass assemblies, workplace councils, and all manner of self-organization, which, if it spreads far enough, may implement collectivist programs which begin to overturn capital and the whole complex of social relationships based upon it, including the state. But I think we need to look for the prescient elements of that within those struggles, rather than coming up with magical jury ideas plucked from poor readings of Classical Athens, or magical computers with labor hours in a vacuum, or making the European Central Bank (!) answerable to a jury, or the like.

[Jose Gracchus]

Perhaps this critique of Bordiga's views by council communist thinkers Giles Dauvé and Karl Nesic might clarify the things a bit (emphases mine):

Brilliant. I've never read this before, but my reading of Pirani and Getzler and other historians basically led me to a certain critique and synthesis of Bordiga which almost precisely anticipated this critique (although much more poorly, of course).

These guys hit it on the head in regard to a lot of baggage left over in left communism, as well. I think there's a lot of confusion on whether the Comintern could ever had really had that much revolutionary proletarian content, considering the tension between workers' revolutionism (embodied in support for soviets, factory councils - and their real movement - and world revolution) and sclerotic Kautskyist-Social Democratic statism and bureaucratism (where I essentially agree with Goldner that the content was bourgeois, and about mobilizing the proletariat for the next phase of capital accumulation worldwide) in Bolshevik practice and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Very few people follow through their conceptions of 1917 forward. I think Zanthorus suggested the soviet movement was itself the party in the Marxian sense; but logically we must see therefore that this "workers' party" was under attack by Bolshevism by mid-1918. Social Democracy in all its cancerous tendencies firmly asserted itself by the late Civil War, and in my view 1921 represented the decisive and final victory of the Bolshevik Bonapartists, in my view, which inevitably set the stage for the 1928 counter-revolution by the Stalinist bureaucratic-statified capitalists (capitalists are first the functionaries of capital).


Why, this an excellent contribution! I would be glad to help you in this project, if you may. After I finish reading Chattopadhyay's work, I will notify you of my impression thereof.

Excellent. Feel free to PM me, or we can exchange emails. Maybe we could even get a mailing list going of some contributors.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You could no more have one without the other, than you can have wage labor and turnover in workers between individual enterprises - without capitalism. In the USSR, though the formal juridical owner of all enterprises was the state, each enterprise had factual legal identity, the right to conduct economic relationships with other enterprises, to hire and fire labor, and it exercised those privileges. If you read Chattopadhyay, I think you'll be surprised to what extent the empirical features of the USSR line up with capitalism - in the distribution of differential wages throughout the working class, compared to the neoclassical definition of capitalism. You haven't transcended capitalism when all the major features of commodity production, the law of value, wage labor (empirical evidence suggests that labor turnover between enterprises in the USSR was on the norm of Western capitalist states like the U.S, UK, etc.).

I really think you should start a separate thread on the existence or non-existence of a Fully Socialized Labour Market or some other labour market in the Soviet Union from Stalin to Chernenko. As I said before, turnover can be caused by hiring and firing, but it can also be caused by changes in job preferences. There's also transitioning to newer jobs away from obsolete ones (Paul Cockshott on socialist job security, if you recall). Labour discipline and performance measurement do not make a labour market, let alone a Fully Socialized Labour Market.


there was very real class reasons why the only way Soviet bureaucrats were going to be importing computers and organizing production around them was when they went neoliberal and burnt down their own society

Russia today isn't computerized much. That's the policy failure of not opting for industrial espionage.


If you actually read carefully, most NSNC interpretations of the USSR were historically grounded in the belief that the command economies would be enduring features of modern society, or even the future of all societies (bureaucratic collectivists basically held this view, and used it as a basis for rather right-wing politics). I think it is impossible to maintain credibility for that now in retrospect: its not 1955.

Wrong. Most NSNC interpretations, probably including the "Coordinator" position of the pareconists, were grounded on the belief that generalized commodity production would continue under the new system, at that getting past this was the "higher phase."


What of the economic content of the Eastern European states, some of which did not even collectivize agriculture, leaving it on the basis of private production (Poland), were highly integrated into Western finance via IMF debt-finance (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, etc.), and increasingly adopted market socialist models thoroughly (Yugoslavia, Hungary)?

As I said before, even according to official "Marxism-Leninism" such satellite economies were state-capitalist. Not so Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR.


To be honest, and at the risk of seeming churlish, I think you should read a lot more left philosophy, rather than spending so much paddling around in the liberal soup of Cockshott, liberal political science, and probably garbage DNZ peddles.

We're not liberals. Now look who's peddling around the l-word? :rolleyes:


The real question to me becomes one of do we think that within the real movement and real struggle of the working class is the fundamental possibility of communism, or whether it is this or that scheme thought up by "conscious" intellectuals outside the real movement of the class. Do I think programs and proposals matter? Of course

This coming from someone who's moved away from even pareconist programs ( :( ), but the important thing is that revolutionary programs are developed within the working class, but the reality is, within the class, they are developed outside the class movement (various kinds of intellectuals -> educated proletarians -> class movement). This applies to both maximum programs (the communist mode of production) and minimum programs (including Post-Keynesianism).

[Jose Gracchus]

I have no interest in engaging that what you yourself call the work of "bourgeois socialists."

[Savage]

Both of them seem to exaggerate the importance of private capitals in the USSR, with Bordiga going as far as claiming that bank account holders in the former Soviet Union constituted the basis of the bourgeoisie. Considering the fact that all these "private capitals" were later wiped out/embezzled by state officials administering them in 1991 (who became a part of real new private capitalist class), the Bordigist views on the USSR's class character appear to be somewhat unrealistic, which may have something to do with Bordiga's technocratic idealization of central planning that made them unwilling to concede that centralized planning apparatus may itself be the basis of the new ruling class.

Perhaps this critique of Bordiga's views by council communist thinkers Giles Dauvé and Karl Nesic might clarify the things a bit (emphases mine):

I Think you have misinterpreted Bordiga's analysis. In his Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/doctrine.htm) he says,

''Does not the basic form of capitalism disappear with the disappearance of the private individuals who, as owners of factories, organise production? This is the objection in the economic field which attracts many people’s attention.
“The capitalist” is named a hundred times by Marx. Besides, the word “capital” comes from the word caput, meaning head, and so traditionally capital is any wealth linked, intestate, to any singular titular person. However, the thesis to which we have dedicated expositions for a long time doesn’t contain anything new, but only explains, remaining true, that the marxist analysis of capitalism does not consider as vital the element of the person of the factory owner.
Quotations from Marx would be innumerable: let us then conclude with just one.
Let us take the so called “classic” capitalism of the “free” factory. Marx always put these in quotation marks, they in fact characterise the bourgeois school he fought and destroyed with his economic concepts — this is the point that is always forgotten.
One naturally supposes that Mr. X, the first capitalist to appear, had a sum of money to hand. Good. Entire sections of Marx’s work reply with the question: how come? The replies vary: theft, robbery, usury, black marketeering or, as we have seen more than a few times, royal charter or law of the land.
So X, instead of stashing his gold coins in a sack, so as to run his fingers through them every night, acts as a citizen imbued with liberal and humanitarian social ideals. He nobly faces the risks and circulates his capital.
So, first element accumulated money.
Second element, acquisition of raw materials, the classic raw cotton bales, of so many little chapters and paragraphs.
Third element, acquisition of the works where he sets up plant and looms to spin and weave.
Fourth element, technical organisation and management. The classic capitalist looks after this himself. He has studied, gone on trips and journeys and has thought out new systems to work the bales and, by producing thread in quantity, cuts costs. He will dress cheaply yesterday’s urchins and even the blacks of Central Africa who were used to going about naked.
Fifth element, the workers at the looms. They do not have to bring an ounce of raw cotton or a single spare spool — that happened in the semi-barbaric times of individual production. But at the same time there will be trouble if they remove a single thread of cotton to patch their trousers. They are rewarded with a just equivalent for their labour time.[7] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/doctrine.htm#_ftn7)
Through the combination of these elements, one achieves the one that is the motive and the reason for the whole process: the mass of yarn or textiles. The essential fact is that only the capitalist can take this to market and the financial return is his and his alone.
Always the same old story. Yes, you know the little sum — the cost of the raw cotton, something for the wear and tear on plant and machinery, the workers wages. Receipts: the price of the product sold. This is greater than the sum of the costs and the difference constitutes the profit margin of the factory.
It matters little that the capitalist does what he likes with the money he gets back — he could do that with his original cash already without manufacturing anything. The important fact is that after restocking in everything to the level of his original investment, he still has a mass of money on hand. He could consume it himself, certainly. But socially he cannot, and something forces him to in large part invest it, to translate it into capital again.
Marx says that the life cycle of capital consists only in its movement as value perpetually set in motion so as to multiply itself. The desire of the person of the capitalist is not required in this, nor would he be able to impede it. Economic determinism not only obliges the worker to sell his labour time, but similarly the capitalist to invest and accumulate. Our criticism of liberalism does not consist in saying there is a free class and a slave class. There is an exploited one and a profiteering one, but they are both tied to the laws of the historical capitalist mode of production.
The process is therefore not within the factory, but is social and can only be understood as such. Already in Marx there is the hypothesis of the separation of the various elements from the person of the capitalist entrepreneur, which is substituted with a share participation in the profit margin of the productive enterprise. Firstly, the money can be got from a lender, a bank, who receives periodic interest. Secondly, in such a case the materials acquired with that money are not really the property of the entrepreneur, but of the financier. Thirdly, in England the owner of a building, house or factory may not be the owner of the land on which it stands: thus houses and factories can be rented. Nothing prohibits the same for looms and other machinery and tools. Fourth element, the entrepreneur may lack technical and administrative managerial capacities, he hires engineers and accountants. Fifth element, workers’ wages — evidently their payment too is made from loans from the financier.
The strict function of the entrepreneur is reduced to that of having seen that there is a market demand for a certain mass of products which have a sale price above the total cost of the preceding elements. Here the capitalist class is restricted to the entrepreneurial class, which is a social and political force, and the principal basis of the bourgeois state. But the strata of entrepreneurs does not coincide with that of money, land, housing and factory owners and commodity suppliers.
There are two basic forms and points required to recognise capitalism. One is that the right of the productive enterprise to dispose of the products and the sales proceeds (controlled prices or requisitions of commodities do not impair the right to such proceeds) is unimpaired and unimpairable. What guards this central right in contemporary society is from the outset a class monopoly, it is a structure of power, and the state, the judiciary and police punish whoever breaks this norm. Such is the condition for enterprise production. The other point is that the social classes are not isolated one from another. There are no longer, historically speaking, castes or orders. Belonging to the landed aristocracy was something that lasted more than one lifespan, as the title was handed down through the generations. Ownership of buildings or large finances lasts on average at least a lifespan. The “average period of personal membership of a given individual to the ruling class” tends to become even shorter. For this reason we are concerned about the extremely developed form of capital, not the capitalist. This director does not need fixed people. It finds and recruits them wherever it wants and changes them in ever more mind bending shifts.''

At no point does he imply that nationalization negates the capital. Gilles Dauve isn't a council communist (most would say he is a lot closer to Bordiga) and I don't think that critique of his views on democracy can be applied that well as a critique of his understanding of capital in the USSR, in his Notes on Trotsky, Pannekoek, Bordiga (http://libcom.org/library/notes-trotsky-pannekoek-bordiga-gilles-dauv%C3%83%C2%A9) he says that Bordiga's analysis is superior to that of the council communists,

''Most of Bordiga's work was theoretical. A considerable part of it dealt with Russia. He showed that Russia was capitalist and that its capitalism was not different in nature from the western one. The German left (or ultra-left) was wrong on that question. To Bordiga, the important thing was not the bureaucracy, but the essential economic laws which the bureaucracy had to obey. These laws were the same as the ones described in Capital: value accumulation, exchange of commodities, declining rate of profit, etc. True, the Russian economy did not suffer from over-production, but only because of its backwardness. The ultra-left believed that Russia had altered the basic laws described by Marx. It insisted on the control of the economy by the bureaucracy, to which it opposed the slogan of workers' management. Bordiga said there was no need for a new program; workers' management is a secondary matter; workers will only be able to manage the economy if market relations are abolished. Of course this debate went beyond the framework of an analysis of Russia.''

Bordiga's concept of the transitional state was not based on 'technocratic idealization of central planning', this seems to conform to the vulgar understanding of him as some sort of 'ultra-left stalinist',

''Parliamentary democracy in which citizens of every class are represented is the form assumed by the organisation of the bourgeoisie into a ruling class. The organisation of the proletariat into a ruling class will instead be achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, through a type of state in which representation (the system of workers' councils) will be decided only by members of the working class (the industrial proletariat and the poor peasants), with the bourgeois being denied the right to vote.

After the old bureaucratic, police and military machine has been destroyed, the proletarian state will unify the armed forces of the labouring class into an organisation which will have as its task the repression of all counter-revolutionary attempts by the dispossessed class and the execution of measures of intervention into bourgeois relations of production and property.''

[Die Neue Zeit]

I have no interest in engaging that what you yourself call the work of "bourgeois socialists."

Bourgeois Socialism means one of two things: welfare statism and various forms of Ricardian Socialism. :confused:

[S.Artesian]

Marx says that the life cycle of capital consists only in its movement as value perpetually set in motion so as to multiply itself.

So where in the fSU, prior to its last years, do we find its movement as value perpetually in motion to multiply itself as value-- as abstract wealth that commands, exchanges, with all other things because such "things" are in fact only manifestations of the relation that reproduces value?

[MarxSchmarx]

2) Can capital-wage labour relationship basically exist in the absence of developed commodity market? (EDIT: I am fully aware that labour force itself is a commodity under capitalism; what I am referring to as the "commodity market" is basically the internal market in other physical and non-physical goods and services).


One problem this definition of yours introduces is that the focus on the "internal market" is way too myopic. The Soviet union ultimately could only survive by participating in a global market for commodities, exporting and importing their goods with foreign businesses and governments in a basically open market.

Part of the appeal of the state capitalist critique is that it draws an analogy of the soviet union as a glorified company town. It used to be quite common for people to pay rent to company housing, see the company doctor, buy everything from company stores and send their children to company schools. But the company one worked for was no less capitalist because of it, and people who lived in company towns lived in capitalist societies. The surplus value of labor still operates (arguably more directly) and workers were alienated from their own products.

So too in the soviet union - there was still surplus value of labor being produced, most workers were systamatically alienated from the fruits of their labor (which either went to the cities/military or often went abroad and came back in the form of greater capital investment) and so on.

Sure, the analogy is imperfect, probably antiquated, and not really intuitive in many respects, but at the same time, your definition of a "commodity market' restricted to an internal market would categorically seem to suggest that a corporation with something like a company town could very well be considered a non-capitalist entity given the right set of circumstances.

[KC]

The argument boils down to "Hey workers got paid a wage, and bureaucrats got rich, so therefore it must be capitalism!" which really makes no sense whatsoever because capitalism isn't solely based on whether or not an upper strata (in this case not a class) exploits a group through the use of wage labor.

This fact is apparently lost on supporters of state-capitalist theory. What none of them seem to get into, though, is that if the USSR was actually capitalist, then how do the laws of Kapital apply to the Soviet economy? They never get into this because even on the most cursory glance, it's quite obvious that the laws that serve as the framework for the development of the capitalist system do not apply to the Soviet economy.

- How is a market price determined in a capitalist society? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- How does capital accumulate in a capitalist society? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- How does a capitalist determine profitable avenues of investment? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- By what mechanism in capitalism does the drive to increase the productive forces occur? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- What is the cause of overproduction crises in a capitalist economy? Compare with the Soviet economy.

We could get further into it. If the USSR was state-capitalist, then what determined prices set? If it was actually state-capitalist, with the Soviet state acting as a single monopoly power, then how does its actions as a single monopoly over the entire economy compare with such a notion under capitalist society? If the goal of the Soviet state was to maximize profit, as is the goal of any firm in a capitalist society, then why did this not occur?

I'm all over the place in this post, I realize that. That's because state-capitalism theory is swiss cheese.

I think this article (http://marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1940/statecapitalism.htm) by the genius economist Hilferding sums it up pretty well. Capitalism is by definition a market economy, therefore the USSR wasn't "capitalist".

[Die Neue Zeit]

Correction: Capitalism is by definition generalized commodity production operating on the basis of a real existing market economy (including real existing labour markets, not absurdly stretched-out definitions of such).

[KC]

Wow, awesome pointless elaboration there. Yet another worthless post by our resident blowhard.

[Savage]

The argument boils down to "Hey workers got paid a wage, and bureaucrats got rich, so therefore it must be capitalism!" which really makes no sense whatsoever because capitalism isn't solely based on whether or not an upper strata (in this case not a class) exploits a group through the use of wage labor.

This fact is apparently lost on supporters of state-capitalist theory. What none of them seem to get into, though, is that if the USSR was actually capitalist, then how do the laws of Kapital apply to the Soviet economy? They never get into this because even on the most cursory glance, it's quite obvious that the laws that serve as the framework for the development of the capitalist system do not apply to the Soviet economy.

- How is a market price determined in a capitalist society? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- How does capital accumulate in a capitalist society? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- How does a capitalist determine profitable avenues of investment? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- By what mechanism in capitalism does the drive to increase the productive forces occur? Compare with the Soviet economy.
- What is the cause of overproduction crises in a capitalist economy? Compare with the Soviet economy.

We could get further into it. If the USSR was state-capitalist, then what determined prices set? If it was actually state-capitalist, with the Soviet state acting as a single monopoly power, then how does its actions as a single monopoly over the entire economy compare with such a notion under capitalist society? If the goal of the Soviet state was to maximize profit, as is the goal of any firm in a capitalist society, then why did this not occur?

I'm all over the place in this post, I realize that. That's because state-capitalism theory is swiss cheese.

I think this article (http://marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1940/statecapitalism.htm) by the genius economist Hilferding sums it up pretty well. Capitalism is by definition a market economy, therefore the USSR wasn't "capitalist".

Yes, there are a very large amount of weak state capitalist theories, that's why I consider those put forth in the vein of Bordiga to be the most cohesively Marxist. A good example is Paresh Chattophadyay's The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience) which I believe answers everything that you asked in this post based on a Marxian analysis. I suggest you and anyone else considering the USSR to be non-capitalism to at least read it in full so as to be able to put forth an adequate critique of the state capitalist theory.

[Jose Gracchus]

So where in the fSU, prior to its last years, do we find its movement as value perpetually in motion to multiply itself as value-- as abstract wealth that commands, exchanges, with all other things because such "things" are in fact only manifestations of the relation that reproduces value?

I think you haven't thought this through (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2149071&postcount=32):


Knock out the labor theory of value, and you knock out surplus value. Knock out surplus value, and you knock out the organization of labor as a commodity, as wage-labor. Knock out wage- labor and you have no capital. You have no social relationship of production, no social organization of labor that drives capital through its circuits, metamorphoses, expansions, contractions-- that drives accumulation, and forces capital up the inside of the cage of accumulation it has fashioned for itself.

You put it better than I did. If there is no value, no capital, then how is there wage labor, how is there a proletariat, within whose real movement is incipient communism? If we follow through your argument to its logical conclusion, we see that we have a breakthrough from capitalist relations that does away with the immanence of proletarian revolution inherent to it. Your analysis tells us there is no reason apart from perhaps "bolted-on" ethical socialism that calls for the "pseudo-proletariat" that we may happen to find in the USSR's "pseudo-individual enterprises" to have a "pseudo-workers' revolution". In a fell swoop you've done away with the prospect of Marxian socialism in the USSR, the role of the revolutionary proletariat.

You have falsified Marxism. Yet Hungarian workers and their soviets in 1956 were certainly onto something you have missed. I'd like to be proved wrong, but I don't see anyway out of this quandary.

[S.Artesian]

I think you haven't thought this through (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2149071&postcount=32):



You put it better than I did. If there is no value, no capital, then how is there wage labor, how is there a proletariat, within whose real movement is incipient communism? If we follow through your argument to its logical conclusion, we see that we have a breakthrough from capitalist relations that does away with the immanence of proletarian revolution inherent to it. Your analysis tells us there is no reason apart from perhaps "bolted-on" ethical socialism that calls for the "pseudo-proletariat" that we may happen to find in the USSR's "pseudo-individual enterprises" to have a "pseudo-workers' revolution". In a fell swoop you've done away with the prospect of Marxian socialism in the USSR, the role of the revolutionary proletariat.

You have falsified Marxism. Yet Hungarian workers and their soviets in 1956 were certainly onto something you have missed. I'd like to be proved wrong, but I don't see anyway out of this quandary.




That's some fucking charge.... "You've falsified Marxism" When people starting making charges like that, I usually tell them to go fuck themselves.

So after I tell you to go fuck yourself, I'll repeat my question: Where is the production of and for value, that continuous movement towards valorization in the Soviet economy.

[S.Artesian]

Well, now that I got that off my chest, let's try to unpack some of this. Actually, that, that part about the connection between wage-labor, surplus value and capital is the part I've thought out the most, as clearly the meaning of uneven and combined development, as demonstrated by the Russian Revolution, entails the interruption of the connection, the identity of wage-labor and capital accumulation as capital accumulation, i.e. the expanding reproduction of value, of the means of production as value.

Based on the same material conditions of Russia that compelled the proletariat to take power, every measure to substantiate, expand that power quite simply would have required levels of uncompensated labor, uncompensated extraction of surplus labor from the workers, and dispossession of the rural producers from the land.

Now timing, method-- means are everything here. And more than that, success of the revolution internationally is more than everything here.

So we have a double interruption going on-- the expropriation of the ruling classes in Russia interrupts value production; interruption of the revolution internationally "freezes" the proletariat's revolution internally.

What develops in the spaces of those interruptions is the expansion of uneven and combined development; of greater disparity between city and countryside; of greater impulses to capitalist restoration-- but it is not capitalist restoration itself.

The suppression of value production, accomplished by the revolution, is not overturned. Capital may be imitated, aped, mimicked, imported even, but it is not the dominant mode of production. It is not self-valorization for the purposes of self-valuation.

The citations referring to "abstract capitalism"-- a capitalism where capitalists are not necessary-- are all fine and dandy except Marx is referring specifically to a very advanced capitalism, a very advanced level of accumulation, that is inherent in capital, but requires its own development to even approach that condition-- and that condition is in fact an asymptotic to capital. It doesn't spring up full-blown from conditions of uneven and combined development. It hasn't sprung up in the areas of the most advanced capitalist development.

Such an interruption is highly unstable, to say the least; sustains itself only by making itself vulnerable to collapse as the regime embodying such an interruption has the necessity, as the regime, of preventing the resurgence of proletarian revolution internationally-- as the fSU most certainly did. In so doing, the regime strengthens the impulse to capitalist restoration internally. But that is not the same thing as being the class of capitalists accumulating value.

Now if somebody wants to argue that by 1918, the proletarian revolution in Russia had been defeated-- then one is essentially arguing that the Bolsheviks were in fact the organization of a state-capitalist class. And if that were the case, we need to find the essential, unique relationship the Bolsheviks had to a state-capitalist mode of production before ever taking power.

We need to find that relationship so we can explain why there was a civil war in Russia, as civil wars are wars of class upon class.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The citations referring to "abstract capitalism"-- a capitalism where capitalists are not necessary-- are all fine and dandy except Marx is referring specifically to a very advanced capitalism, a very advanced level of accumulation, that is inherent in capital, but requires its own development to even approach that condition-- and that condition is in fact an asymptotic to capital. It doesn't spring up full-blown from conditions of uneven and combined development. It hasn't sprung up in the areas of the most advanced capitalist development.

We've had our differences, but could you please explain this further (advanced capitalism and allegedly not existing in the US, Europe, or Japan today)?


Wow, awesome pointless elaboration there. Yet another worthless post by our resident blowhard.

You didn't refer to Marx's term generalized commodity production, though. I'm taking the high road here.

[S.Artesian]

We've had our difference, but could you please explain this further (advanced capitalism and allegedly not existing in the US, Europe, or Japan today)?


Certainly advanced capitalism exists, but this notion that capital eventually dispenses with the needs of the capitalists, that it no longer requires a personification, that it can exist without a capitalist class and private ownership of the means of production-- that is a tendency of capital.

And like all tendencies of capital, it is contradicted by the very forces giving rise to it.

For 1: for capital to valorize, money must be able to command labor and organize it as labor-power. While capital has a tendency, once initiated to do that, it requires people; it requires that private ownershop of the means of production to embody money with that power to command production.

For 2: Classes decay, wither, weaken, but they don't disappear completely leaving behind an automatically reproducing economy. The notion of "abstract capital" existing without concrete capitalists is a little bit like the notion of abstract labor existing without concrete labor.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Thanks!

Would the DOTP and the transition to the (post-monetary) lower phase of the communist mode of production be characterized, then, among other things, as greater and greater domination by "abstract capital" and the transition from "concrete" labour markets (even Fully Socialized Labour Markets) to abstract labour "markets" (like the alleged labour situation in the USSR)?

[Rowan Duffy]

Yadda yadda, I know you've been hanging around RL's street corners, peddling this home cure.

Its not 'poetic'. I'm afraid you have a skin-deep understanding of 'the scientific method' and the philosophical grounding of various thought. I think you should keep in mind Popperism was basically constructed around the idea you cannot learn anything from history (a defense of marginalism and neoclassicism and an explicit attack on Marxism). I strongly recommend reading Michael Macnair's review of Jairus Banaji's "History as Theory" (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004237) for a review of this topic. The overview of what modes of production really mean is especially crucial.

I'm not insisting that you are being poetic. What I'm trying to insist is that people not be poetic.

People who are fond of Bordiga, rather ironically, keep talking about scientism and attacking empiricism. I hear very similar themes coming from Buddhists and Christians. This presents a real problem to socialist theorists. We absolutely can not be allowed to devolve into mysticism.

I'm not trying to be abusive when I say that a retreat from scientific approaches will be religious. "God" as a concept is in the class of theories which is not amenable to direct exploration by observation. When you converse with someone about it, you'll find that this retreat is used repeatedly.

It is not in the slightest, a coincidence that Christians and mystic Marxists use exegesis as there mode of obtaining information. It is revealed information, conceptual, but defended against attack by having no observable properties. In the schema of Lakatos, they are pseudoscience.

I'm not saying that your personal theoretical approach to theory is mystical. What I would like to say is that your statement in opposition to observations was indicative of the sort of protective belt that is thrown up around a theory which can lead to the theory degenerating.

I say I find it ironic that I hear this most often from sympathisers with Bordiga, because I agree with Bordiga on essentially nothing, but his insistence on the use of the scientific method.



Not quite dirigisme in the empirical sense (i.e., using the French prototype); virtually all the enterprises were owned by the state, if coordinated by 'spontaneous market' price mechanism, rather than administrative-directive price-setting.

Dirigisme is used terminologically to refer to various centralised state approaches to investment and reinvestment that demonstrate a stronger state power than capitalist power.

As always, I'm fairly neutral regarding definitions, and I'm quite willing to bow to yours.

I think there are definitely cases where ideology+state coercive power trumps the power of the bourgeois class. I think this represents a distinction which is important, since it represents the primacy of a bureaucracy over the actual driving force of profit and the circuit of capital. A case in point which would fit your model of dirigisme would be the US under Nixon.



I'm totally unaware of the fact that every large loss of life or decline in living standards in history associated with any or all economic change is a distinct transition in the mode of production (an intrinsically historical and epochal phenomena).

Fair enough.

Personally, I think the loss of life was in this case is directly related to the changing social relations. I happened to have been there just as it was collapsing and the rise of very different social relations was quite apparent to me.



This is just a reiteration of the welfarism underpinning Brezhnevite politics. Living standards of the working class were attacked everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s. The welfare and autarkic qualities of 20th century state capitalism (a historical phase in the development of world capitalism, the whole capitalist mode of production) were dismantled and assaulted everywhere by neoliberalism.

I was living in a first world country, and left it as a third world country.

Neoliberalism is definitely a serious attack on workers wages that occurred in a similar period, but I think it is characteristically very different. It represents simply a rolling back of the social welfare provisions of the state, and privitisation of some sectors in a mixed economy.

I don't think that is what occurred in the collapse. Instead you had a very radical change in property relations, distribution channels, and the general management of investment.



You haven't transcended capitalism when all the major features of commodity production, the law of value, wage labor (empirical evidence suggests that labor turnover between enterprises in the USSR was on the norm of Western capitalist states like the U.S, UK, etc.).

I don't think you have to "transcend" capitalism in order not to have it. You could just have something else, like semi-feudalism with artisanry and without a circuit of capital, or central planning where individual production quotas need be met.



Since you have a taste for detail and voluminous evidence, I really do recommend Chattopadhyay, leaving aside Artesian's comments for a moment (I personally do not find it hard to believe that the content of the Bolsheviks after 1919, but certainly by 1921 was essentially bourgeois).

I find it absolutely preposterous. How much accumulation was Lenin entitled to? Trotsky?

Seriously, I don't think that can stand up to scrutiny. Compare instead with the Bourgeois revolution in France and look at the actual methods and modes of accumulation of the Jacobins.



More importantly, since on the left we're concerned not with treating production and society as composed of timeless features based on fundamental laws in a -vulgar- pantomime of physics (i.e., the idea that capitalist production and exchange arises from "human nature" and fundamentals of economic supply-and-demand like the production possibilities frontier), but rather the essentially historical and historicized origin of a particular nexus of particular human social relationships,

There is an easier way about this which isn't in such a danger of degenerating int mysticism, and it comes from physics. Condensed matter routinely deals with "particles" which are not in existence outside of a particular regime. Their utility is simply for the specific conditions - in this case "historicised". Yet despite not being absolute laws that can be said to exist in all regimes, they are elements of a model which has a prescribed regime of suitability.

Indeed, both Newtonian physics and Quantum physics have the property that they only work in the regions in which they are meant to be used, and there is no need to assume Newtonian physics is "wrong" and go around claiming the infalliability of Quantum when we're plotting ballistic trajectories.

It seems to me that the anti-empiricists have a rather shallow view of how science works. Science is not based on the inexorable dynamics of immutable laws. It is based on producing models which have well defined observables (and sometimes control parameters) and which can demonstrate for us some predictive capacity.



What is really so 'vast' about the 'scale' of the changes? Can you provide any, I dunno, empirical evidence on what was so dramatic, rather than just relying on vague qualitative assessments? I mean I think it was terrible too, but the fact was the USSR was in decline for quite some time, and had been moving toward Western-form capitalism for quite some time.

I'm sure you are already aware of the enormous increases in poverty, unemployment and death, the rise of a brutal mafia which was related to the changes in the distribution mechanism, and the change over from management to ownership of major means of production.

I think the change really does call into question why it should be so much more brutal if production was essentially only done to expropriate labour previously. Neo-liberalism was largely a process of rolling back - what happened in the USSR was enormously punctuated.

In any case, I'll get back to you in this thread on the question with some concrete examples of the changes and some sources.



The fact is the UN has compared the scale of the decline to the historical Great Depression in the United States; a big deal, but hardly a transition in mode of production.

Hardly anything changed in terms of the relationship between the capitalist class and the means of production in this case. I really don't see the comparison.

Really, you have to make the claim that the bureaucrats were running the system for profit. Capitalists make their money through profits. Despite your claim that CEOs are more abstracted from their profits, then in earlier versions of capitalism, they really aren't. They are simply more liquid.

The bureaucracy could collectively derive greater benefits from a more productive economy, but each individual would not be able to do so. They did not have sectional interests against other capitalists which required that only the most productive industries be engaged in with respect to the accumulation of surplus. They could allow an industry to under-perform quite arbitrarily.

I think a better description would be Bureaucratic Absolutism. Collectively, the entire system relied on production and the Bureaucratic class took a larger share of the collective product than the proletariat.



I didn't realize 11th century England is characterized by "doubly free" labor circulating between individualized enterprises who engaged workers with "exchange of equivalents" labor based on contract. The USA today, in 1930, and the USSR throughout its life, were.

That really does not well characterise the USSR, which is what I'm getting at.

In capitalism, the individual enterprises need to have sectional interests, the ability to fail, the need to acquire profit, and have a capitalist class who uses a portion of the surplus for consumption, and the majority to inject back into the circuit of capital looking for the largest payout.

This network characterisation where individual firms have profits or failure, where capitalists exist outside of wage labour and reinvest their profits, with its attendant financial institutions that enable this, I consider the heart of capitalism.

I can get an improvement in my wage by performing better, and increasing company profits. That does not make me a capitalist. Even if I perform on a commission basis, I'm not a capitalist. It seems to me you are claiming I am.



The workers as a class power were defeated in 1918. Contrary to vulgar anarchist and liberal analysis, the Bolshevik party is not some "free agent" which can substitute itself for a social class with a "historical mission" in the Marxian sense.

I think this might actually be a core of my disagreement. I actually, do think that is possible. I think we see examples of it throughout history. Modes of production are tremendously powerful forces on the development of history - and a social relation to a means of production has powerful effects on the psychology of the person involved, both through self-selection bias, and in order to reduce-cognitive dissonance in that individual.

I don't believe, however, that we can go from that fact to claiming that the Bolsheviks were capitalists. We require more evidence of their direct enrichment and accumulation. If they weren't doing it for that purpose, were they subconsciously controlled by capitalism? They certainly had to figure out how to continue producing in order that the whole programme didn't fall into complete disaster.

But if that is the subconscious drive towards capitalism, then perhaps we really are well and truly in trouble. The need to continue production has to be a guiding constraint on all revolutions. The productive economy will need to function. If we are simply capitalists for realising that, we've got a problem.



Except those systems were characterized by different ways of mediating labor and value besides "doubly free" labor based on the "exchange of equivalents" (wage labor), where production is organized for the purposes of generalized commodity production. They were based on different dynamics of class and production.

When do we become "doubly free"? Let's look at the two aspects:

1) When is collective ownership not state ownership? It seems to me that the collective management of the means of production requires democratic control. Therefor we want this freedom subject to real public control.

2) In terms of the freedom to acquire search for an occupation elsewhere which would be remunerated in some way. We need this freedom in terms of the ability to find socially useful labour which can be engaged in as largely at the individuals discretion as is compatible with collective responsibilities.

Does this mean I'm a capitalist?



The CEO may serve direct profits by the above mechanism, but they cannot be said to be a capitalist in the sense of really owning the property that they serve as "functional capitalist" for.

Yeah, actually they can be said to. Stock ownership is often used to liquidate corporations and take the underlying capital assets.



Also, where are you coming up with the "circuit of capital" device?


M-C-M' which acts as the motive force underlying capitalist dynamics. It is a grow or die trend that pushes the whole economic system.



Absolutely not. Read Chattopadhyay; the USSR and other similar societies collapsed precisely because of their contradictions, in the direction of neoliberal capitalism.

I look forward to reading Chattopadhyay.



You know what is meant here by generalized commodity production. We mean where production is carried on for the purposes of exchange for the benefit of productive apparatus, not for the needs of the producer. I don't think socialism in one country can be realized; the world market and world capitalist production must be suppressed entirely.

Actually, I don't know what people mean by GCP. I've seen it used so broadly that Rome ends up being capitalist.

My understanding of the term was that it meant the majority of consumables were produced as commodities for the purpose of extracting from profits from wage-labour.



No, that would be an idiotic definition of 'wage'.

Good, then tell me what a wage consists of.




That's not profit. You're simply organizing available resources toward socially determined ends. You're not producing and extracting a profit on top of the sale of commodities based on the producers' propertylessness and need for subsistence, are you?

Good, I agree.



To be honest, and at the risk of seeming churlish, I think you should read a lot more left philosophy, rather than spending so much paddling around in the liberal soup of Cockshott, liberal political science, and probably garbage DNZ peddles.

Actually, I think this comment is pretty well unjustified. A much more useful approach would be to attempt to remedy my failings by pointing them out and demonstrating a better approach in relevant literature.

I remain extremely distrustful of the recurrent attacks on empiricism. That sets off my mystical-nonsense alarm. If you think that's unjustified I really insist that you demonstrate how this alternative approach is distinguished from religion.

I've read quite a lot of left political philosophy. Some of it has a tendency to error on the side of poetic characterisations to suit a purpose (which I think is what calling the USSR capitalist comes down to - essentially a feeling that we can assign bad things to capitalism, and restore our faith in socialism) and
extremely vague predictions about how things should be restructured. Both of these are very unhelpful in trying to find problems in the past and guess methods of avoiding them for the future.




The real question to me becomes one of do we think that within the real movement and real struggle of the working class is the fundamental possibility of communism, or whether it is this or that scheme thought up by "conscious" intellectuals outside the real movement of the class. Do I think programs and proposals matter? Of course, but ultimately you're going to have mass city-center occupations, mass assemblies, workplace councils, and all manner of self-organization, which, if it spreads far enough, may implement collectivist programs which begin to overturn capital and the whole complex of social relationships based upon it, including the state. But I think we need to look for the prescient elements of that within those struggles, rather than coming up with magical jury ideas plucked from poor readings of Classical Athens, or magical computers with labor hours in a vacuum, or making the European Central Bank (!) answerable to a jury, or the like.

The motive force of revolution obviously has to come from the mass movement of the proletariat. Having that motive force doesn't in the least get us out of the problem of figuring out how we can get out of our present economic system. It is a necessary but insufficient pre-condition for socialist revolution.

Compare our current condition with the clarity of the Jacobins. I think that you'll find we aren't only in a worse shape in terms of movement and motive force, but also in terms of vision.

[S.Artesian]

Thanks!

Would the DOTP and the transition to the (post-monetary) lower phase of the communist mode of production be characterized, then, among other things, as greater and greater domination by "abstract capital" and the transition from "concrete" labour markets (even Fully Socialized Labour Markets) to abstract labour "markets" (like the alleged labour situation in the USSR)?


Honestly, it beats the hell out of me, except to say, I think any transition requires less and less "domination" of labor by any mechanism; less and less labor time; the end to all labor markets.

The only means to accomplish this is the most "radical" of organizations of the proletariat-- where parties, such as they are, exist only to make themselves unnecessary, where the "superintendence" function is rotated blindly and collectively among all.

The bottom line is, I think there is a real economic need for the most rigorous of proletarian democracies, where conscious social labor is the vaccine against commodity production.

Now if I could just establish somehow the actual economics of that need........

[S.Artesian]

I'm not insisting that you are being poetic. What I'm trying to insist is that people not be poetic.

I disagree. "I am a man of prose, not poetry," said Metternich, the great organizer of "Order!" against revolution [and Kissinger's hero].

I think we should be poetic, concretely poetic. I don't know how anyone can read Marx's Economic Manuscripts and not hear the poetry in there.

Revolution itself is poetry.

Nothing wrong with poetry in determining the content of social labor. In fact, poetry may be the purest expression of emancipated social labor.

And you know what else I think, being in a poetic mood? That when the mathematics at the heart of the universe is uncovered, when the unified force theory is properly annotated-- those two things will be discovered to be music.

[Rowan Duffy]

And you know what else I think, being in a poetic mood? That when the mathematics at the heart of the universe is uncovered, when the unified force theory is properly annotated-- those two things will be discovered to be music.

However poetic it is, it's also an immensely stupid idea that there will be a mathematical core at the heart of the universe that is discovered.

The idea of something having simplistic beauty as poetry? Fine - but if we want it to be a theory worthy of serious reflection it needs to explain something observable. Otherwise it's mystical bullshit.

P.S. Your attempt to associate science with Kissinger is simply an association fallacy. I suppose it's the sort of nonsense one can expect from poets.

[S.Artesian]

However poetic it is, it's also an immensely stupid idea that there will be a mathematical core at the heart of the universe that is discovered.

The idea of something having simplistic beauty as poetry? Fine - but if we want it to be a theory worthy of serious reflection it needs to explain something observable. Otherwise it's mystical bullshit.

P.S. Your attempt to associate science with Kissinger is simply an association fallacy. I suppose it's the sort of nonsense one can expect from poets.


You need to get out more. I wasn't associating science with Kissinger. Personally, I think science, and mathematics, have a bit more to do with poetry than they do with prose.

I was associating Kissinger with Metternich; and Metternich with prose.

You ever read Marx's manuscripts from 1857-1864? Pretty poetic in places.

[Jose Gracchus]

That's some fucking charge.... "You've falsified Marxism" When people starting making charges like that, I usually tell them to go fuck themselves.

So after I tell you to go fuck yourself, I'll repeat my question: Where is the production of and for value, that continuous movement towards valorization in the Soviet economy.

Jesus Christ, get over yourself. I ask about one problem in your conception, and you start screeching as if I'm trying to drag your mother into disrepute. I thought we had a dialogue going but by all means, prefer the hissy fit. I'm so sorry you can't handle anyone putting questions to you and your inconsistencies. Why don't you demonstrate where the immanent capacity for workers' revolution lie in the contradictions of the Soviet economy, and society?

Marx seems to think this has something to do with the intrinsic contradictions inherent to capitalism. Since you think it was wandering around in a magical zone that wasn't capitalism, wasn't socialism, wasn't anything (that might cause you to have to dirty your clean white hands of your politics) for over seventy years, and somehow managed to reproduce itself in China, Eastern Europe, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Do you think that workers' revolution was the solution in the Soviet-type society? What material basis did it have?

You say that capital was "aped"; what of the fact that Soviet planners themselves admitted the law of value compelled their actions, that the law of value still was in play in the economy? You essentially assign responsibility for this in the revolution's isolation. This is basically Cliffism; that value and pseudo-capitalist relations were some how osmotically absorbed from a capitalist world for by a "frozen" workers' revolution in isolation.

If you believe the USSR is really an example of workers' expropriating the ruling class and that explains its composition and departure from capitalism, than what of the Soviet-type societies, where there was no workers as an agent of expropriation? How do we explain that in terms of Marxian theory?

[S.Artesian]

Jesus Christ, get over yourself. I ask about one problem in your conception, and you start screeching as if I'm trying to drag your mother into disrepute. I thought we had a dialogue going but by all means, prefer the hissy fit. I'm so sorry you can't handle anyone putting questions to you and your inconsistencies. Why don't you demonstrate where the immanent capacity for workers' revolution lie in the contradictions of the Soviet economy, and society?

Marx seems to think this has something to do with the intrinsic contradictions inherent to capitalism. Since you think it was wandering around in a magical zone that wasn't capitalism, wasn't socialism, wasn't anything (that might cause you to have to dirty your clean white hands of your politics) for over seventy years, and somehow managed to reproduce itself in China, Eastern Europe, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Do you think that workers' revolution was the solution in the Soviet-type society? What material basis did it have?

You say that capital was "aped"; what of the fact that Soviet planners themselves admitted the law of value compelled their actions, that the law of value still was in play in the economy? You essentially assign responsibility for this in the revolution's isolation. This is basically Cliffism; that value and pseudo-capitalist relations were some how osmotically absorbed from a capitalist world for by a "frozen" workers' revolution in isolation.

If you believe the USSR is really an example of workers' expropriating the ruling class and that explains its composition and departure from capitalism, than what of the Soviet-type societies, where there was no workers as an agent of expropriation? How do we explain that in terms of Marxian theory?

I can handle any number of questions. What I will not handle, or engage with, is people claiming that I'm falsifying Marxism when I present a honest analysis. Either show where it's wrong using the categories Marx used, show where it's wrong somewhere else, or not.

But accusing me of dishonesty gets always and only the same response. Go fuck yourself.

Now get over yourself, because if the situation where reversed and I had accused somebody I was having an rigorous discussion with of "falsifying" Marxism, I'd at least have the integrity to apologize for that choice of words.

[Jose Gracchus]

I can handle any number of questions. What I will not handle, or engage with, is people claiming that I'm falsifying Marxism when I present a honest analysis. Either show where it's wrong using the categories Marx used, show where it's wrong somewhere else, or not.

But accusing me of dishonesty gets always and only the same response. Go fuck yourself.

Now get over yourself, because if the situation where reversed and I had accused somebody I was having an rigorous discussion with of "falsifying" Marxism, I'd at least have the integrity to apologize for that choice of words.

I'm not accusing you of purposeful dishonesty. I'm accusing you of being unaware of contradictions and problematics, unsolved, in your overall view (and if you're contending that you're starting first with what the USSR "was not" without positing any idea of "what it is", I think it should be hardly surprising to you that you'd be left with holes or unanswered questions).

I am saying that I don't think we can sustain Marxian theories in the face of a seventy year exception, that's my view. And the real factual effect of the Soviet experience was to do exactly that throughout the workers' movement and the left in this century, and exactly one of myriad ways liberals attempt to dispose of Marxism. So I consider it a serious problem, not just a matter of rhetoric and airy debate, that's for certain. Even if you find it not a big deal, it certainly has had a factual impact on Marxism.

That said, I do not think you "falsified" Marxism, and I apologize for insulting you. I shouldn't have said that. I do value your analysis and I would not be sustaining this if I felt you weren't acting in good faith (versus, say, DNZ there).

I want to know how we can preserve Marx's (in my view irreplacable) arguments for socialist revolution inherent in the proletariat, where value production has purportedly ceased. That's an important aim, I think. And I would like if you could explain to me how we could.


Well, now that I got that off my chest, let's try to unpack some of this. Actually, that, that part about the connection between wage-labor, surplus value and capital is the part I've thought out the most, as clearly the meaning of uneven and combined development, as demonstrated by the Russian Revolution, entails the interruption of the connection, the identity of wage-labor and capital accumulation as capital accumulation, i.e. the expanding reproduction of value, of the means of production as value.

Short version: You think here we have a society expanding wage labor and production on that basis that is not capitalist. True or false?


Based on the same material conditions of Russia that compelled the proletariat to take power, every measure to substantiate, expand that power quite simply would have required levels of uncompensated labor, uncompensated extraction of surplus labor from the workers, and dispossession of the rural producers from the land.

So you're saying the incipient workers' power in the Soviet experience...necessitated Stalinism? Or primitive accumulation? (Before you fly off the handle and accuse me of trying to slander you, I genuinely do not understand what you're getting at, but that's what it sounds like to me, though it'd make no sense from the rest of your politics.)


Now timing, method-- means are everything here. And more than that, success of the revolution internationally is more than everything here.

In my view, the workers overthrew the old absolutist state, and expropriated the bourgeoisie, but were unable to maintain power under the material conditions, and a kind of substitutionist clique in the same sense as Maximilian Robespierre after suppressing the Herbertists and Enrages, or in the case of the Bonapartes, was the only possible solution. I think the choices the Bolsheviks made subjectively increased the probability of an outcome like this. I don't think just because one is fighting a war, or forming a state, that that necessarily means one is in a settled class system, or settled unique mode of production. I think the class struggle in France proves that there is simply as you view any system over a serious time-span, a tendency toward devolution to direct rule by a single class. I don't think this can credibly take seventy years though. Maybe this is arbitrary on my part.

Of course, at no point under France's evolution could it really be said to have been restored as a "feudal state" with a "feudal mode of production" (its doubtful these categories can even be that usefully employed before the Great French Revolution of 1789); it remained a state embedded in the early stages of the capitalist mode of production, however the rule of the state and major institutions oscillated somewhat among the warring classes.

I find this quote by Michael Macnair to be helpful (despite my other disagreements with him and his politics):


Banaji rules out in principle the interpretation of particular forms as transitional. He makes the superficially legitimate point that there is a risk that the ‘transitions’ will swallow up the ‘mode of production’. However, arguably we should read ‘modes of production’ as forms of social dynamics which rise and decline, and which only have strongdirect descriptive value at the moment of apogee. (This moment should be placed for feudalism somewhere around the 11th-13th centuries; for classical antiquity somewhere before the fall of the Roman republic; for capitalism - probably - in the 19th century.)The workers were unable to maintain power, but the Bolsheviks had ridden into influence and strength with the workers' power. Therefore they became analogous to the Bonapartes, in that they could bestride classes too weak to take power while still defending their own power from reactionary challenge (like the Whites).


So we have a double interruption going on-- the expropriation of the ruling classes in Russia interrupts value production; interruption of the revolution internationally "freezes" the proletariat's revolution internally.

Is that really what happened? I mean I guess one could argue that the failure of a revolutionary outbreak certainly overdetermined a failure of the Russian Revolution, but the workers were forced from power in 1918 with the suppression of the soviet elections that turned down the Bolsheviks. This is before the outbreak of revolutions in Hungary, Slovakia, and Germany, and semi-revolutionary moments in Italy and elsewhere. I suppose if it had all gone the other way, maybe the Bolsheviks would've been forced to the bargaining table in favor of international workers' power in 1921, instead of crushing attempts by workers to re-enter the soviets and social and political process with the war having been concluded. But it seems like a stretch to me. I strongly recommend you read Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat; it really underscored how much the Bolsheviks' ideology by the mid-late Civil War had departed from workers' revolution in favor of already a kind of super-substitutionist, productivist cant that left no role for the workers as a class for itself and really did presage Stalinist "steeleating."


What develops in the spaces of those interruptions is the expansion of uneven and combined development; of greater disparity between city and countryside; of greater impulses to capitalist restoration-- but it is not capitalist restoration itself.

The suppression of value production, accomplished by the revolution, is not overturned. Capital may be imitated, aped, mimicked, imported even, but it is not the dominant mode of production. It is not self-valorization for the purposes of self-valuation.

Then I suppose we're left with basically orthodox Trotskyism, with the USSR being a workers' state overgrown with bureaucratic infestation and oppression that sucks the workers dry for...what reason, now? Since there's no material basis for it in the same sense of capital?


The citations referring to "abstract capitalism"-- a capitalism where capitalists are not necessary-- are all fine and dandy except Marx is referring specifically to a very advanced capitalism, a very advanced level of accumulation, that is inherent in capital, but requires its own development to even approach that condition-- and that condition is in fact an asymptotic to capital. It doesn't spring up full-blown from conditions of uneven and combined development. It hasn't sprung up in the areas of the most advanced capitalist development.

So you do think the identity of a specific historical group of individuals with specific personal relations to capital is what fundamentally makes the capitalist class, and a capitalist society?


Such an interruption is highly unstable, to say the least; sustains itself only by making itself vulnerable to collapse as the regime embodying such an interruption has the necessity, as the regime, of preventing the resurgence of proletarian revolution internationally-- as the fSU most certainly did. In so doing, the regime strengthens the impulse to capitalist restoration internally. But that is not the same thing as being the class of capitalists accumulating value.

Why would the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1950 fear workers' revolution in a corner of the globe (for the sake of argument, let's say Vietnam), compulsively? You seem to think its especially compelled because a workers' revolution could relieve the "freeze". But I don't think the USSR internally by very long after the Civil War was at any real greater direct risk of being overturned by a workers' revolution as any capitalist state. Perhaps much less so since the ideology of the state was so obfuscating and its grip on society so tight that workers' organization and resistance was very attenuated.

I guess for me what matters is the relations going on in production for the workers, not how the rulers and managers are compelled, or how they perceive themselves to be compelled, to exploit the workers.


Now if somebody wants to argue that by 1918, the proletarian revolution in Russia had been defeated-- then one is essentially arguing that the Bolsheviks were in fact the organization of a state-capitalist class.

You're arguing we can't suggest the workers were defeated in 1918 besides the fact that the ranks of the Bolsheviks were not able to exert control over the party tops, despite the fact that the attempts by workers to solve the questions of management in industry and of relations to the peasantry were quashed, that the workers' soviets were essentially turned into a pyramid of glorified parliaments where no elections by workers however proletarian, could be allowed to turn out non-Bolsheviks?

No, we can't suggest that, because according to your mechanistic system, we would be suggesting the Bolsheviks had to be representing an alien class as such. Yet you yourself believe the Bolsheviks became a regime sustained in a vacuum over a working class which had been "frozen" after expropriating the ruling class for seventy years without any unique class basis. Again, the Bonapartes didn't "represent" capitalism in Marx's schema, yet they took power. What about Robespierre after he quashed the elements which represented the incipient working class and sans-culottes?


And if that were the case, we need to find the essential, unique relationship the Bolsheviks had to a state-capitalist mode of production before ever taking power.

We need to find that relationship so we can explain why there was a civil war in Russia, as civil wars are wars of class upon class.

It is certainly untrue that all civil wars are "wars of class upon class". The Maoists in China were not "representing the peasantry," yet they fought a civil war for decades. Again, the Bonapartes show that a failed revolution that cannot bring the working class to power can still yield a regime that will defend the status quo against further reaction.

[S.Artesian]

Thank you for that.

Will get back to you on the other stuff. But first... as I stated from the getgo... I cannot answer all the questions about the nature of the fSU. I think everything I've read, from Trotsky's formulations through the state-caps has been proven to be inadequate, and incapable of answering all the questions.

And I don't think the questions can be answered separate and apart from the role the fSU played in the world markets, in the international order of "things."

[S.Artesian]

I'm not accusing you of purposeful dishonesty. I'm accusing you of being unaware of contradictions and problematics, unsolved, in your overall view (and if you're contending that you're starting first with what the USSR "was not" without positing any idea of "what it is", I think it should be hardly surprising to you that you'd be left with holes or unanswered questions).

Oh, I am well aware of how inadequate the analysis is; how it does not account for all the contradictions. However, my "fall back position" is based on what I know about class and capital. For capital to be capital it has to be able to transform from Money to Mo' Money. Production has to be subjugated, organized around, and an expression of valorization. Money has to be able to purchase labor, for private aggrandizement.

Class has to have a unique relationship to the organization of labor, to the means of production. A capitalist class has to be organized around realizing value. The products of the capitalist class system are not immediately, nor directly realizable as value. These products have to "display" in a sense their worth against all other values. I don't see any of the above being dominant in the fSU.

Did the law of value operate? In some form, I'm sure it did. It sure does now. Was the organization of the economy disrupted by the eruptions of the law? I think so. But was production organized for the accumulation of value? That's the question. My answer is "no."


I am saying that I don't think we can sustain Marxian theories in the face of a seventy year exception, that's my view. And the real factual effect of the Soviet experience was to do exactly that throughout the workers' movement and the left in this century, and exactly one of myriad ways liberals attempt to dispose of Marxism. So I consider it a serious problem, not just a matter of rhetoric and airy debate, that's for certain. Even if you find it not a big deal, it certainly has had a factual impact on Marxism.


I think it is one of the most serious problems we face. But that seriousness does not become resolved, or erased if we say "Oh, it was state capitalism," if in fact it does not conform to Marx's analysis of capitalism as self-valorizing value; as the accumulation of value for the purpose of the accumulation of value.

We don't strengthen Marxism by saying "This is capitalism" if the "this" doesn't reproduce itself as capital.


BTW, Thanks again. I'm touchy over 3 things, and probably only the 3: 1) being accused of being an "objective ally" of imperialists, mass murderers, nazis 2) physical threats 3) being accused of being dishonest.

Being wrong? Not a problem. Been wrong before. Might be wrong this time. Wouldn't have it any other way.


I want to know how we can preserve Marx's (in my view irreplacable) arguments for socialist revolution inherent in the proletariat, where value production has purportedly ceased. That's an important aim, I think. And I would like if you could explain to me how we could.


I agree. That is a critical task. We begin, I think, from the impossibility of the proletarian revolution ever isolating itself from the world market, from the international pressures of what is the global dominant mode of production, capitalist accumulation. So the NEP finds its way to connection with the world markets, as does "socialism at a snail's pace," as do the five year plans-- especially the first 5 year plan, as does.........WW2 returning the favor by finding its connection to the fSU and inflicting a toll from which, IMO, the fSU never recovered.

Can I do better than that? Not on such short notice, and I've only been thinking about this for 40 years, so I need a little more time.



Short version: You think here we have a society expanding wage labor and production on that basis that is not capitalist. True or false?


Awkwardly,[coughs, mumbles] yeah, true. Fucked if I'm happy with it, but yeah.



So you're saying the incipient workers' power in the Soviet experience...necessitated Stalinism? Or primitive accumulation? (Before you fly off the handle and accuse me of trying to slander you, I genuinely do not understand what you're getting at, but that's what it sounds like to me, though it'd make no sense from the rest of your politics.)

No, I'm saying there was no resolution to the problem within the fSU; that the resolution really did require an international revolution; I'm saying SIOC is an impossibility, which is why Preobrazhensky's primitive "socialist" accumulation was an oxymoron; why earlier industrialization would not have resolved the problem. However, the problem was not created, IMO, by Bukharin's policies, or the shifting alliances in the bureaucracy, of Stalin, or Lenin's suppression of the Left SRs.

Nor does that mean that actions, policies, programs, internal to the fSU didn't matter-- were meaningless and might as well have been put on hold until the glorious international revolution. It does mean, any solution put forward by the bureaucracy that was not fashioned outside the diktat of the party, that did not originate, depend on actual soviet or worker council execution, review and adjustment could only sooner, rather than later, lead to the same contradiction that had propelled the revolution to power in the first place-- the inability of capital, locally and globally, to resolve the conflict between the needs of the society requiring expanding the means of production, and the low level of agricultural and industrial productivity circumscribing those means in any single national theater.

Does that sound awkward? I mean yeah, hell, how could it not be. Don't you feel a bit of awkwardness with the state-capitalist argument?



In my view, the workers overthrew the old absolutist state, and expropriated the bourgeoisie, but were unable to maintain power under the material conditions, and a kind of substitutionist clique in the same sense as Maximilian Robespierre after suppressing the Herbertists and Enrages, or in the case of the Bonapartes, was the only possible solution. I think the choices the Bolsheviks made subjectively increased the probability of an outcome like this. I don't think just because one is fighting a war, or forming a state, that that necessarily means one is in a settled class system, or settled unique mode of production. I think the class struggle in France proves that there is simply as you view any system over a serious time-span, a tendency toward devolution to direct rule by a single class. I don't think this can credibly take seventy years though. Maybe this is arbitrary on my part.

Of course, at no point under France's evolution could it really be said to have been restored as a "feudal state" with a "feudal mode of production" (its doubtful these categories can even be that usefully employed before the Great French Revolution of 1789); it remained a state embedded in the early stages of the capitalist mode of production, however the rule of the state and major institutions oscillated somewhat among the warring classes.

I find this quote by Michael Macnair to be helpful (despite my other disagreements with him and his politics):
The workers were unable to maintain power, but the Bolsheviks had ridden into influence and strength with the workers' power. Therefore they became analogous to the Bonapartes, in that they could bestride classes too weak to take power while still defending their own power from reactionary challenge (like the Whites).

OK, but Bonaparte does not introduce a different mode of production unique to the Bonapartists. That's the key about Bonapartism. The "Bonapartists" of this century in Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, don't expropriate the capitalist class. Maybe they apply the screws; hell, they even kill some; but they do not expropriate the class as a class; they do not overthrow the mode of production.

So either the degeneration of the fSU starts in 1918, and Lenin and co. are really capitalists; or the Bonapartist formation is not a class and cannot abolish the very social conditions from which it grew.


Is that really what happened? I mean I guess one could argue that the failure of a revolutionary outbreak certainly overdetermined a failure of the Russian Revolution, but the workers were forced from power in 1918 with the suppression of the soviet elections that turned down the Bolsheviks. This is before the outbreak of revolutions in Hungary, Slovakia, and Germany, and semi-revolutionary moments in Italy and elsewhere. I suppose if it had all gone the other way, maybe the Bolsheviks would've been forced to the bargaining table in favor of international workers' power in 1921, instead of crushing attempts by workers to re-enter the soviets and social and political process with the war having been concluded. But it seems like a stretch to me. I strongly recommend you read Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat; it really underscored how much the Bolsheviks' ideology by the mid-late Civil War had departed from workers' revolution in favor of already a kind of super-substitutionist, productivist cant that left no role for the workers as a class for itself and really did presage Stalinist "steeleating."



I think the Bolsheviks fucked up almost everything, royally. Almost everything. I think the suppression of the Left-SRs was boneheaded beyond belief, particularly as the Petrograd section of the Left-SRs were models of class loyalty to the class organs of the government.

I think forced requisitioning was conducted brutally, stupidly, and could not do otherwise that antagonize the poor peasantry, rather than encourage the necessary class differentiation.

But does that amount to the restoration or imposition of capitalism? To the Bolsheviks acting as a class, with specific, class economic interests requiring suppression of the workers; antagonism of the poor peasantry in order to solidify its mode of production?


Then I suppose we're left with basically orthodox Trotskyism, with the USSR being a workers' state overgrown with bureaucratic infestation and oppression that sucks the workers dry for...what reason, now? Since there's no material basis for it in the same sense of capital?


I find that completely unsatisfactory for the same reasons I find state capitalism unsatisfactory: it isolates the local manifestation of the revolution from its truly international causes.

Why does the bureaucracy have to exploit the workers? To survive. Look there are parasites that keep the host alive, aren't there? Doesn't make them any less inimical to the health of the host, does it?



So you do think the identity of a specific historical group of individuals with specific personal relations to capital is what fundamentally makes the capitalist class, and a capitalist society?


I think it is a specific social relation between specific classes, where each, capital and wage-labor, reproduces the other. I do identify a bourgeoisie with a specific, unique relationship to an organization of social labor essential to capitalism, to capitalist society. I don't see any way of capital to function, in its dominant mode, without such a class having that relation.



Why would the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1950 fear workers' revolution in a corner of the globe (for the sake of argument, let's say Vietnam), compulsively? You seem to think its especially compelled because a workers' revolution could relieve the "freeze". But I don't think the USSR internally by very long after the Civil War was at any real greater direct risk of being overturned by a workers' revolution as any capitalist state. Perhaps much less so since the ideology of the state was so obfuscating and its grip on society so tight that workers' organization and resistance was very attenuated.


I quite disagree. They were always seeking rapprochement with the bourgeoisie in order to preserve their national interest, the stability of the Soviet economy internally and in its interconnections with the world markets.

I think they were in mortal fear of a class specific, class conscious, class led, revolution erupting and pushing aside all their international mechanisms for assuring the stability of their control over the proletariat, and the stability of capitalism.

I think that fear extends from China in the 1920s through Spain in the 1930s through Vietnam at the end of WW2; through France in 1968; through Chile in the 1970s; through the Turin strikes in Italy in 1981 (?)



I guess for me what matters is the relations going on in production for the workers, not how the rulers and managers are compelled, or how they perceive themselves to be compelled, to exploit the workers.


Matters for me too. See remarks about awkwardness and inability to answer all questions.


You're arguing we can't suggest the workers were defeated in 1918 besides the fact that the ranks of the Bolsheviks were not able to exert control over the party tops, despite the fact that the attempts by workers to solve the questions of management in industry and of relations to the peasantry were quashed, that the workers' soviets were essentially turned into a pyramid of glorified parliaments where no elections by workers however proletarian, could be allowed to turn out non-Bolsheviks?


I'm arguing that for the revolution to be defeated, capitalism would have had to be restored. In this regard, I think clearly, 1991, and after that the Yeltsin years, representative a qualitative change, an undoing of the revolution-- one that was prefigured perhaps by steps taken in 1918, and 1923, 1926, 1928, 1937, 1939, etc, but still, is qualitatively different than any, or all of those steps.

I think the obvious marker of that qualitative difference is the destruction of Soviet industrial capacity, literally driving it from the scene through the "markets." I think those are clearly actions taken by the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie against the workers as a class; and most significantly, none of those steps would have been possible without the international support, cooperation and intervention of the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries.



No, we can't suggest that, because according to your mechanistic system, we would be suggesting the Bolsheviks had to be representing an alien class as such. Yet you yourself believe the Bolsheviks became a regime sustained in a vacuum over a working class which had been "frozen" after expropriating the ruling class for seventy years without any unique class basis. Again, the Bonapartes didn't "represent" capitalism in Marx's schema, yet they took power. What about Robespierre after he quashed the elements which represented the incipient working class and sans-culottes?



What about it? Was a "new feudalism" created. Did the trappings of empire that Bonaparte draped himself with indicate a "second Rome"? Of course not. What the little Napoleons of history always represent is an end to the prospects for further revolution.


It is certainly untrue that all civil wars are "wars of class upon class". The Maoists in China were not "representing the peasantry," yet they fought a civil war for decades. Again, the Bonapartes show that a failed revolution that cannot bring the working class to power can still yield a regime that will defend the status quo against further reaction.

That was a class war in China, just as the revolution in Mexico contained an agrarian class war. If it wasn't determined by class struggle, by class interest against class interest, how do you explain civil war, as an aberration-- as detached somehow from economic determinants?


In closing-- see previous comments about awkwardness.

[robbo203]

The NEP period in the USSR was essentially dirigisme. However, that stage was superseded by planning. Is central planning also state capitalism? What good is the term state capitalism if the US and USSR is state capitalism. They both functioned very differently as should be obvious to anyone who ever looked at it. .

What is it with this fixation on "planning" and the "planned economy" - as if the purest example of a free market you can conceive of is itself not full of plans! Planning itself is not the issue. The issue is whether you have many plans (polycentric planning) that must therefore spontaneously adjust to each other or one vast single plan - what is classically called "central planning" - in which the linkages between the erstwhile numeorus separate plans are themselves planned so that they disappear as a separate plans as such and are absorbed into the "society wide" central plan

The NEP was not superced by central planning if this is the point you are trying to make. It is a complete myth. There never was a single plan in the entire history of GOSPLAN that was faithfully implemented from start to finish. Almost always the "plan" at the start of the implementation period was quite different - often drastically different - to what it became at the end. Sometimes there was not even a plan available at state enterprise level after commencement of the implementation period itself.

The truth of the matter is that the plan handed down by GOSPLAN after due ratification was just basically a wish list of things the authority wanted the economy to achieve and which it usually did not achieve, thus prompting judicious modifications to be made to the so called plan to make it seem like the system was working. The reality is that soviet economy was not a centrallly panned economy in the classical sense of this term involving a single vast plan in which all inputs and output were allocated a priori. It was actually a lot more decentralised than is sometimes imagined - and of necessity - with state enterprises having considerable leeway to do do to what they needed to do to secure profits . In other words it was a polycentric planning system in which the the plans laid down by the central aithorities had to adapt to the plans made by other players in the field such as the state enterprises - and vice versa

And , yes, the so called centrally planned economy of the SU was a state capitalist one - without question. It exhibited all those fundamental features that we associate with capitaism - wage labour, generalised commodity production, money, profits, capital accumulation and so on. Sure there were differences between the state capitalism of the SU and the kind of mixed capitalism that prevailed elsewhere but such differences pale by comparison with what the different forms of capitalism had/have in common

Capitalism is not static; it form has changed as conditions have changed - a point that Engels made when he noted how the growth of the joint stock company and state ownership had to a large extent replaced the private or individual stockholding capitalist.

Of state ownership Engels wrote:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

He could have been describing the Soviet Union!

[S.Artesian]

Yes the so called centrally planned economy of the SU was a state capitalist one - without question. It exhibited all those fundamental features that we associate with capitaism - wage labour, generalised commodity production, money, profits, capital accumulation and so on. Sure there were difference between the state capitalism of the SU and the kind of mixed capitalism that prevailed elsewhere but such differences pale by comparison with what the different forms of capitalism had in common

All except one: production organized for the accumulation of value.

production organized for the reproduction of the means of production as values.

production organized for the private aggrandizement of wage-labor as a value producing relation.

Oops, that's three.

The thing about planning is that it represents, embodies, conscious direction of production for the satisfaction of need and use-- kind of important to that notion of moving from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

The planning capitalism does, that the bourgeoisie does , is planning for the valorization of capital.

The planning socialism does is for enhancing the abilities, talents, capabilities of all.

And by that definition, of course, the fSU was not socialist, perhaps the one thing on which we all can agree.

[Rowan Duffy]

You need to get out more.

True.


Personally, I think science, and mathematics, have a bit more to do with poetry than they do with prose.

If we mean parsimonious in its description I can see some vague "poetic" similarity. Otherwise I think they're pretty un-alike. Despite having done an epic fuck-ton of maths, I've never "composed" a theorem that I could slam at a cafe.

[Jose Gracchus]

Good show. Awkwardness is I think something every honest revolutionary leftist feels about the USSR; couldn't really pick a better term - quite apt. I'll try to critically develop the themes you've touched on in a bit, I need to ruminate on some of your points.

Again, sorry for implying you were objectively on the side of reaction, I didn't mean to imply that despite the fact in retrospect it should've been apparent.

[S.Artesian]

Not a problem. You said it, I reacted in my usual over-the-top fashion. You clarified. Matter closed.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Thanks!

Would the DOTP and the transition to the (post-monetary) lower phase of the communist mode of production be characterized, then, among other things, as greater and greater domination by "abstract capital" and the transition from "concrete" labour markets (even Fully Socialized Labour Markets) to abstract labour "markets" (like the alleged labour situation in the USSR)?

Honestly, it beats the hell out of me, except to say, I think any transition requires less and less "domination" of labor by any mechanism; less and less labor time; the end to all labor markets.

What I meant to say was that the share of the pie for the "domination" of labour shrinks. Within the smaller and smaller slice, the "abstract capital" gets larger and larger at the expense of real existing capital.

Re. labour markets:

Supply-Side Political Economy: More Public Management over Labour Markets (http://www.revleft.com/vb/supply-side-political-t152098/index.html)


Now if I could just establish somehow the actual economics of that need........

Try reading Cockshott, Devine, and Laibman, for starters. :)

[S.Artesian]

What I meant to say was that the share of the pie for the "domination" of labour shrinks. Within the smaller and smaller slice, the "abstract capital" gets larger and larger at the expense of real existing capital.

Re. labour markets:

Supply-Side Political Economy: More Public Management over Labour Markets (http://www.revleft.com/vb/supply-side-political-t152098/index.html)



Try reading Cockshott, Devine, and Laibman, for starters. :)


How can the "abstract capital" get larger and larger without the social relations, the class relations of capital getting larger and larger, stronger and stronger.

Seems to me you're confirming comrade IFC's analysis of the fSU as fundamentally state capitalist, where the abstract capital functions as capital, in the service of aggrandizement or exploitation, without a capitalist class.

There cannot be abstract labor without the concrete labor-- and this is what capital can never reconcile because the production is not consciously directed by the producers themselves for the realization of the powers of labor [as opposed to labor-power] of ALL.

To do that, to "reconcile" the abstract with the concrete labor is exactly the role of revolution, abolishing capital, the relation that describes capital, and thus creating the basis for the conscious direction of concrete labor in the "abstract"-- service to, of, for all.

Abstract capital cannot exist without abstract, aggrandized concrete labor. Conscious self-direction of labor replaces the abstraction of labor-- which is time, time expressed as value, which is money-- with emancipated social labor.

What happens in the transition-- well, it either follows the lines of emancipating labor as expressed above, or it devolves into the impulse to capitalist restoration.

[Die Neue Zeit]

How can the "abstract capital" get larger and larger without the social relations, the class relations of capital getting larger and larger, stronger and stronger.

I'm just going by your own post on "abstract capital" vs. real existing capital - "capital eventually dispenses with the needs of the capitalists, that it no longer requires a personification, that it can exist without a capitalist class and private ownership of the means of production... an automatically reproducing economy. The notion of "abstract capital" existing without concrete capitalists."


Seems to me you're confirming comrade IFC's analysis of the fSU as fundamentally state capitalist, where the abstract capital functions as capital, in the service of aggrandizement or exploitation, without a capitalist class.

The inability and/or refusal of the Soviet planning bureaucracy and higher leadership to dispense of money and go for non-circulating labour vouchers (and electronic labour credits later on) signalled a policy preference for continuing:

- M-M' (through the State Bank)
- C-M-C' (Socialist Primitive Accumulation exports of food produce and imports of more durable industrial equipment)
- M-C-M' (such as raw materials and intermediate products, even with the formation of Gossnab in 1947, and of course black markets)
- M-C...P...C-M' (the existence of wage labour and later on the Kosygin introduction of "socialist profit," more property law powers for enterprise managers, etc.)

[Naturally, the latter two signify capital as a process.]

Nonetheless, as I said above, I don't think that every single instance of generalized commodity production (as opposed to petty - see feudalism and chattel slave relations) is capitalist, which would then entail real existing markets. These, in turn, are precisely what the satellite states except Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia had (even according to their own official "Marxism-Leninism"):

The state capitalism of the DDR, Hungary, Poland, and Romania (http://www.revleft.com/vb/state-capitalism-ddr-t156747/index.html)

[S.Artesian]

I
'm just going by your own post on "abstract capital" vs. real existing capital - "capital eventually dispenses with the needs of the capitalists, that it no longer requires a personification, that it can exist without a capitalist class and private ownership of the means of production... an automatically reproducing economy. The notion of "abstract capital" existing without concrete capitalists."

Yeah, but I reject that notion of "abstract" capital existing apart from the "real existing capital." I don't buy into the notion that capitalism can exist without a capitalist class and private ownership. I think that's a tendency in capitalism, just as the expulsion of wage-labor from production, and the devaluation of capital is a tendency. But it is never realized.

[Wanted Man]

Wow, awesome pointless elaboration there. Yet another worthless post by our resident blowhard.

Luckily we have this useful post in response to it. :rolleyes: Don't spam up the forum with this kind of trolling again.

[Rowan Duffy]

I fall into a similar camp to Artesian in being not exactly sure what the fSU was exactly myself, while being fairly sure it wasn't capitalism.

Initially (somewhere around 1992) I had assumed that it was "state capitalism" on the giant company store model. However, as with many things, the quantitative can become qualitative if numbers are large enough. When an entire economy is run on this model, calling it capitalism starts to obscure what become the primary internal social relations.

The argument that Paresh Chattophadyay[1] uses to equate the two systems is a description by Marx of the capitalist collective.



Capital which in itself is based on the social mode of production and presupposes social concentration of the means of production and labour, directly assumes here the form of social capital in opposition to private capital. This is the abolition/sublimation [aufhebung] of capital as private property within the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself.This later leads to an identification of a collective management of profits. However, what is completely missing in my opinion is that the bureaucratic class in the fSU can not liquidate their positions and reinvest easily in competing enterprises. The capitalist collective is at once similar in their private ownership in their ability to manipulate directly the underlying capital assets, and the ability to liquidate their position in exchange for a new position at higher profit rates. This makes them actually less like the bureaucratic class in the fSU than a private capitalist would be!

I haven't read the whole piece by Chattophadyay yet, but I intend to.

Now, as for what it might be, a friend of mine has been insisting on calling it Bureaucratic absolutism. I asked him to describe the position, and I'm finding it more appealing the more he describes it.

The idea is basically that there are similarities in the fusion of the economic and political control without the duality where some political organ serves as a brokerage for various contradictory positions that can not be settled in the economic realm, or for underlying infrastructure which bourgeois capitalism can not exist without but is horrible at managing itself*, but that the main part of investment, employment and distribution is done by a capitalist class investing in various different positions seeking maximum surplus.

Instead, bureaucratic absolutism has a bureaucratic class that does the main part of planning, tries to ensure that sufficient production is maintained to derive taxation from the productive entities. Individual bureaucrats do not liquidate positions, but can place constraints on the producers to obtain greater tax that enters the state. This might result in promotion etc, but does not enjoy the bureaucrat either direct control of the underlying asset, or the ability to move any sort of accrued benefit elsewhere.

As it turns out, the fSU is not the first entity to enjoy these aspects. A very similar situation occurs in the Sui and Tang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-field_system) dynasties. In the Tang dynasty the state bureaucracy was extremely extensive (for instance, having 34,850 registered craftsmen).

For those who need to relate everything back to Marx, Marx does talk about the Asiatic mode of production - so there is some precedent for claiming that Marx knew about this other mode.

* For this reason, I think some privitisation aspects of neo-liberalism will actually be relatively short lived, perhaps a generation, since previously liberalism moved towards state control of infrastructural assets throughout Europe even in advance of the WWI due to capitals total incapacity to manage it properly for the collective benefit of capitalist.

[1] The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience, Paresh Chattophadyay