State Capitalism

[Mazzen]

I need a good definition of state capitalism. I've never heard of it before I saw it on this board. I have a pretty good idea of what it is...just by the word, but I need more input. Thanks.

[crazy comie]

china is an example of state capitalism it is affectivly a state that accts like a company it perssues surplus value for the benifit of the pepole in the goverment.

[chamo]

State Capitalism as in the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism (Most common affiliate)

After the October Revolution and up to the Civil War the Bolsheviks nationalized nearly all the large industries and Lenin introduced the Decree on the Land.
The contradictions of Marxism were as such:

1. Individual plots of land were given to peasants during the Civil War under the Land Decree; some peasants were lucky and got more fertile plots making creating a class of richer peasants (Kulaks).

2. Old capitalist managers of the Czarist regime were brought back into factories to run them.

3. Factory committees were replaced by a single director under state control.

4. Different firms competed against one another, under the New Economic Policy, in terms of selling more and with separate resources of money and raw materials, labour etc. as in the Market Economy, instead of using one large resource 'bank'.

So basically the system was run like a Capitalist system under state control. The workers did not control the running of the factories in the name of the Soviet, the state allocated managers who were centralized to the Supreme Company of National Economy during the Civil War and Lenin's 'War Communism'.

[redstar2000]

I need a good definition of state capitalism.

Don't we all!

Ok, try this. Any enterprise that hires wage-labor to produce a good/service that is sold in a market for a profit is a state-capitalist enterprise.

Any economy that consists solely or predominately of such enterprises is a state-capitalist economy.

That's nice and straightforward, isn't it?

Well, not exactly.

In a regular capitalist economy, the few state-owned enterprises that exist are seldom profitable. They run at a loss, often deliberately, and are subsidized by other government revenues. Wage-labor exists but surplus value is negative.

Working people are not ignorant of this; many aspire to a "government job" because they know they will make more money for less work than they would in a comparable job in the private sector.

The ruling class knows it too; hence the drive in recent decades to "privatize" many government enterprises...squeezing more work for less pay out of the working class.

In an economy that consists mostly or entirely of state-owned enterprises, those enterprises may or may not compete in a market place. If they do compete, then you have a "pure" state-capitalist economy.

If they don't directly compete in a market, then you have to determine if the economy as a whole is profitable. If it is, then surplus value (the source of profit) is still being extracted from the working class and the economy is state-monopoly capitalist.

I call that "Socialism, Inc."

Of course, there is nothing that says a state-monopoly capitalist economy "must" be profitable. Through managerial ineptitude it could run at a loss--the over-all average surplus value could be negative.

Or it could be "designed" to "break even"...with a surplus value of zero.

But those seem to be academic possibilities that could only exist in reality for a very brief period of time.

This stuff all comes up in connection with the USSR...how to analyze its class system from a Marxist perspective.

Not many people take seriously the old Trotskyist formula "degenerate workers' state". The fact that the party/state elite could behave as if they owned the means of production rendered the phrase "workers' state" an oxymoron.

The difficulty with characterizing the USSR as "state-monopoly capitalism" lies in such remnants of the revolution as the near impossibility of being fired, the obligation of the state to provide gainful employment, etc.

Evidently, state-monopoly capitalism is a remarkably benign--if wretchedly inefficient (unprofitable)--form of capitalism. I suspect it is rather like certain large atomic nuclei...inherently unstable. State-monopoly capitalism seems to spontaneously "decay" into ordinary monopoly capitalism.

I'm not sure of how useful it is to pursue this kind of analysis. In another context, I have labeled the USSR, China, etc. as proto-capitalist despotisms...regimes which laid the foundations for modern capitalism through the use of both state-monopoly and political despotism. (Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia have followed similar paths with capital mostly remaining in private hands but subject to considerable political direction.)

It's a rather unfortunate "accident of history" that all this crap took place under the label of socialism and was supposedly the work of "communists".

Living it down is going to take a while.

http://anarchist-action.org/forums/images/smiles/redstar.gif

The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/)
A site about communist ideas

[Kez]

State Capitalism is the most poorly analysed argument the left has ever seen.
It was created by the cliffites, and every time i meet a SWP member and talk to them about the issue they end up leaving the SWP because it is so theoretically bankrupt

http://www.marxist.com/TUT/TUT3-2.html

comrade kamo

[Cassius Clay]

In a Socialist country there is going to be elements of both Capitalism and Communism in the society. The question is in which direction the society is going, up until 1950's the USSR was going towards Communism, after then it was going towards Capitalism. Although full Capitalism wasn't in place until 1990's, the steps taken went back to Khruchev and were essentially put in place by Kosgyin and Brezhneve's 'economic reforms' in the 60's.

For example Redstar is wrong to say that it was impossible to get fired. By the 1970's there were eight million people in the USSR looking for work.

[redstar2000]

For example Redstar is wrong to say that it was impossible to get fired. By the 1970's there were eight million people in the USSR looking for work.

Source?

http://anarchist-action.org/forums/images/smiles/redstar.gif

The RedStar2000 Papers (http://www.anarchist-action.org/marxists/redstar2000/)
A site about communist ideas

[Xprewatik RED]

State Capitalism is horror, have you ever waited in line for 30 minutes just for a cabage? 30 minutes for milk? 20 years for a car? 10 years for a phone? 1 year to get your bathroom fixed? Its a joy

Before the 50's the boom can be attributed to forced labor, in which you slaved tirelessly for nothing building factories, which churned out weapons. Laying massive rail-roads and building dams and factories bring booms (on paper) to your, "ecomomy". Building the dictator of the protelitariats dacha(summer house) on the Dniepri is another good use of labor we saw.

[sc4r]

Originally posted by Xprewatik [email protected] 12 2003, 03:43 AM
State Capitalism is horror, have you ever waited in line for 30 minutes just for a cabage? 30 minutes for milk? 20 years for a car? 10 years for a phone? 1 year to get your bathroom fixed? Its a joy

Before the 50's the boom can be attributed to forced labor, in which you slaved tirelessly for nothing building factories, which churned out weapons. Laying massive rail-roads and building dams and factories bring booms (on paper) to your, "ecomomy". Building the dictator of the protelitariats dacha(summer house) on the Dniepri is another good use of labor we saw.
YOu cant actually say that State Capitalism is 'a horror' of an idea because conditions in the USSR were as you describe them.

The USSR does not = State Capitalism. The USSR, like all real states, was a result of following some ideas of state Capitalism, some ideas of Socialism, some ideas of Capitalism, Some (limited) ideas of democracy, some ideas of comunism, etc etc etc. And not only that, of course, but it is also influenced by starting conditions, and by attitudes to it from without, and by attitudes within about what it was trying to achieve.

All you are doing is picking out one element of a complex mix and choosing to ascribe all the problems to one particular element. By this type of assessment you could very easily conclude that the USA follows the ideal ideology; and according to many here that would be 'capitalst imperialism'. Which is , of course, complete rubbish.

No real state 'IS' any particular ideaology. When you say a state is this ideology, or another; what you are really saying is that it more closely fits the definition of that ideology than any other. BUT even minor variations in the precise application can sometimes result in very major diffeences in result.

'State Capitalism' is also a very misleading label because it emphasises a relationship between this idealised system and another (capitalism) which is, at best, fairly tenuous. And that emphasis is used to imply all sorts of things which are not actually any part of the real definition (such as it is). I say 'such as it is' because , like Fascism, even the ideological and systematic definition of 'State Capitalism' is somewhat vague. In fact given only some systematic definitions of 'state Capitalism' and 'Fascism', you could be hard pushed to tell which was which, or discern any difference.

[crazy comie]

The soviet union was a beuracratic socialist state not a state capitalst one.

[sc4r]

Originally posted by crazy [email protected] 12 2003, 12:35 PM
The soviet union was a beuracratic socialist state not a capitalst one.
No offence Crazia commie but who said the USSR was capitalist ? No-one.

You are doing what all too many do and assuming that if you know the words this will unambigously convey the meaning, and that you can validly think up your own concept. You are assuming that labels are constructed always so as to reveal what the concept they describe is.

'State Capitalism' is what is known in linguistics as a symbol. 'Capitalism' is another. Both are used as a shorthand way to communicate that one is talling about a known concept. The trouble is that because they are independent symbols any similarity between the words they are made up from is only incidental. Ideally of course one would not allow confusion of labels and symbols to arise; but in practise (and especially in politics) it often does.

In this case the symbol 'State Capitalism' fails completely to convey that while the concept it relates to does share some similarities with the concept described by the symbol 'Capitalism' it shares more with the concept described by the symbol 'Socialism'.

Sometimes, of course, one has to guess at what a symbol means if one does not know it; but it is unwise to ascribe a very high confidence level to such an assumption.; it can be very misleading. This is an enormously common fault, which causes massive problems in commmunication (and BTW it is not helped by people who decide that it is valid to quite deliberately make up their own 'definition' of what a symbol means (invent their own definition in other words) and then tell others that this is what it really means).

State Capitalism is not Capitalism, The USSR (another symbol) was not just either, but it had much greater similarity with the concept 'state capitalism' than with the concept 'Capitalism'.

[Xprewatik RED]

The USSR was Socialism, Isolationist Socialism. prices were controlled, so was currecy so was housing, and factories earned the same no matter how little they produced.

[crazy comie]

Originally posted by Xprewatik [email protected] 12 2003, 03:43 AM
State Capitalism is horror, have you ever waited in line for 30 minutes just for a cabage? 30 minutes for milk? 20 years for a car? 10 years for a phone? 1 year to get your bathroom fixed? Its a joy

i presumed thus was talking a bout the soviet union or a warsaw pact country.

when i said capitalist i meant state capitalist i edited my mistake.