Would 18th Century Liberals Support Socialism/Communism Today?

[Ilyich]

On post #14 of this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/mikhail-gorbachev-true-t158024/index.html?t=158024), RedMarxist says that if the United States were to become communist, it would conflict with the interests of the Founding Fathers and presumably other Enlightenment figures. I think this poses an interesting question.

First of all, although capitalism as a developed economic theory was supported by almost every liberal Enlightenment figure, in advocates were not necessarily anti-socialists. They were anti-mercantilists. Some liberal economists of the time, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo were a huge influence on Marx and other future socialist economists.

Also, the Enlightenment liberals valued highly what they saw as equality. Few could be considered actual socialists but some, like Robespierre and Hebert (by the way, happy Bastille Day) could be considered bourgeoisie socialists.

The question remains: If the Enlightenment liberals knew about socialism and communism the way we know about them today, would some of them support it?

[Ismail]

Possibly.

That's pretty much the best answer that can be given. Pretty much everyone outside of the most "socialistic" of the bunch felt that private property was the most free state of existence possible. Don't forget that most of these figures were part of the emerging bourgeois class and thus represented its interests.

[Ocean Seal]

If someone was willing to stand up to feudalism three centuries ago, it is quite possible that they would stand up to capitalism today, in the same way that I believe that many of the people who stood against the slave society in ~1600 years ago would do the same as well.

[jake williams]

If someone was willing to stand up to feudalism three centuries ago, it is quite possible that they would stand up to capitalism today, in the same way that I believe that many of the people who stood against the slave society in ~1600 years ago would do the same as well.
They weren't doing it out of great moral fibre. They were doing it because the monarchy was often bad for their economic interest as slave traders and planters, as early industrialists and as bankers, and because in doing so they had the funds to deal with the monarchy. We're taking about a group of businessmen who had an economic interest in abolishing feudalism, and the means to do it. They did it. They have no economic interest in abolishing capitalism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Cromwell suppressed the Levellers. The Jacobins suppressed the Girondists and also Babeuf. The original Pennsylvania constitution was short-lived. In other words, I don't think so.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

The Jacobins suppressed the Girondists and also Babeuf.
Technically, it was the Directoire that suppressed Babeuf, not the Jacobins (though the Directoire did include a few ex-Jacobins who'd turned against Robespierre.) Conversely, Babeuf's program (including the dictatorship idea) was pretty closely based on what he thought Robespierre had intended.

Finally, there's Rousseau, whose ideas about community had an enormous influence on all future revolutionaries. (Throw in Thomas Moore, as well.)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Rousseau wasn't exactly a liberal political philosopher, unlike Locke or Montesquieu, for instance.

[Sasha]

Don't forget that "equality" and "freedom" and such for these people ment something quite different than for us, for starters it wasn't something they even considerd that it would ever apply to women, non-whites, poor people etc etc for most of humanity to be short. They only wanted equality and freedom for rich white men like themselves.

[Jose Gracchus]

Cromwell suppressed the Levellers. The Jacobins suppressed the Girondists and also Babeuf. The original Pennsylvania constitution was short-lived. In other words, I don't think so.

The Jacobins under Robespierre suppressed the Enragés and the Herbertists, is what you may be thinking.

Its also worth noting that the Founders and Framers ended up regarding the Jacobins as mad excess, with the pro-British Right (the Federalists) even trying to slander the opposition party as "Jacobins". Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the opposition, regarded the 'black Jacobins' of the Haitian Revolution with special horror (after all, it was slaves overthrowing masters here, not just freedmen deposing a king).

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Rousseau wasn't exactly a liberal political philosopher, unlike Locke or Montesquieu, for instance.

Funny you should mention it, I've been spending some time in the Bibliotheque Nationale with some late (1785-1799) French pamphlets and manuscripts. I think Robert Darnton was right: a lot of those late 18th-c. folks were "second-generation" philosophes, not liberals but critics of liberalism, and their criticism could easily stretch into something many among us would approve of. Kind of like Horckheimer and Adorno taking on Enlightenment.

Diderot, for instance, is a proto-feminist (who wrote some great pornography, BTW). Rousseau's thumbprints are all over the speech of the French revolutionaries. One reason Robespierre got zapped is, a few days before Thermidor he went off to meditate on Rousseau's grave outside of Paris.

[Geiseric]

On a scale of Churchill to Lenin, how radical was Robespierre for his time? Relative to class relations did the Jacobins represent the proto proletariat and lowest members of the third estate to the extent that the Bolsheviks represented the russian workers and peasents?

[Jose Gracchus]

Robespierre was pretty radical, but also petty bourgeois. The Enragés and the Herbertists were more radical, and more early proletarian. The terror against the counterrevolution which was originally demanded from him and his Jacobins was quickly turned against the ultra-left (sounds familiar, no?). There was also the dynamic of the directly democratic revolutionary "sections" (basically neighborhood conferences or assemblies of the immediate inhabitants, dominated by the rank-and-file sans-culottes) through the Parisian city.

[A Marxist Historian]

Technically, it was the Directoire that suppressed Babeuf, not the Jacobins (though the Directoire did include a few ex-Jacobins who'd turned against Robespierre.) Conversely, Babeuf's program (including the dictatorship idea) was pretty closely based on what he thought Robespierre had intended.

Finally, there's Rousseau, whose ideas about community had an enormous influence on all future revolutionaries. (Throw in Thomas Moore, as well.)

Babeuf was the first real communist in his program, though his ideas of how to get there were not terribly workable. He was quite wrong in thinking Robespierre was a cothinker of his. The "enrages," the nearest thing to socialism during the Terror, were guillotined just like anyone else who went against what Robespierre wanted.

But he provides a very good measure for the late 18th century enlighteners and bourgeois revolutionaries, in America even better than in France.

Who was the most radical, most revolutionary leader in the American Revolution? Tom Paine.

In France, he was a Girondin, narrowly escaping the guillotine. But when the Directory came in and Babeuf organized his conspiracies, Paine read the Babeuf program and wrote a pamphlet opposing it.

In the pamphlet, he comes out for something that sounds a whole lot like Democratic Party New Deal liberalism. Way ahead of his time. But clearly counterposed to ideas of workers' revolution and socialism/communism, of which Babeuf was the first real advocate.

-M.H.-

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Relative to class relations did the Jacobins represent the proto proletariat and lowest members of the third estate to the extent that the Bolsheviks represented the russian workers and peasents?
Yup - that is, not much. On paper the Jacobins made a huge number of promises that they never implemented - whether they couldn't or wouldn't is a good question. (My personal fave. is the Right to Dress, which is contained in the Constitution of 1793). Robespierre himself was a bit of a double agent for his own class of bourgeois administrators. He had no interest whatsoever in abolishing private property, though he was obsessed with rooting out speculators and "corruption." Statistics show that the highest proportion of folks tossed in jail during the Terror were not the nobility, but artisans and petty bourgeois.

The main issue here is that the myth of the Jacobins as a vanguard party had such deep influence on the Boshevik Revolution. Horckheimer said it best (and you can apply the following to a couple of revolutionary leaders I can think of:)


Formal greatness, greatness regardless of its content, is in general the fetish of the modern concept of history. The pathos of justice accompanied by ascetic severity, the demand for general happiness along with hostility to carefree pleasure, justice embracing rich and poor with the same love, vacillation between partisanship for the upper and lower class, rhetorical spite against the benefactors of his own policy, and real blows against the masses that are to help him to victory ‑ all these peculiarities of the leader follow from his historical function in the bourgeois world.

[A Marxist Historian]

Yup - that is, not much. On paper the Jacobins made a huge number of promises that they never implemented - whether they couldn't or wouldn't is a good question. (My personal fave. is the Right to Dress, which is contained in the Constitution of 1793). Robespierre himself was a bit of a double agent for his own class of bourgeois administrators. He had no interest whatsoever in abolishing private property, though he was obsessed with rooting out speculators and "corruption." Statistics show that the highest proportion of folks tossed in jail during the Terror were not the nobility, but artisans and petty bourgeois.

The main issue here is that the myth of the Jacobins as a vanguard party had such deep influence on the Boshevik Revolution. Horckheimer said it best (and you can apply the following to a couple of revolutionary leaders I can think of:)

The Jacobins started as a club! Not a party in the modern sense, and especially not either democratic or centralist.

If they were the vanguard of anything, it was the vanguard not of the workers, a class that didn't really exist yet, or even of the artisans, but of the bourgeoisie, or rather petty bourgeoisie really. A whole lot of them were lawyers.

-M.H.-

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Tom Paine [...]was a Girondin, narrowly escaping the guillotine.
Eh, the "real' Girondins were grands bourgeois. Paine was busted as a member of the Cercle Social, which included Condorcet and Nicolas Bonneville - whose sons Paine took in back in America. The Cercle Social may not have been as radical economically as Babeuf or the Enrages, but culturally they were way ahead of their time, for instance in terms of gender and racial equality.


Paine read the Babeuf program and wrote a pamphlet opposing it.
Hey, I didn't know that. Got a ref?

[Zanthorus]

Hey, I didn't know that. Got a ref?

Pretty sure he's referring to 'Agrarian Justice (http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php&title=1082&search=%22agrarian+justice%22&chapter=17450&layout=html)'. From the editor's introduction:

The prefatory Letter to the Legislature and the Directory, now for the first time printed in English, is of much historical interest, and shows the title of the pamphlet related to the rise of Socialism in France. The leader of that movement, François Noel Babeuf, a frantic and pathetic figure of the time, had just been executed. He had named himself “Gracchus,” and called his journal “Tribune du Peuple,” in homage to the Roman Tribune, Caius Gracchus, the original socialist and agrarian, whose fate (suicide of himself and his servant) Babeuf and his disciple Darthé invoked in prison, whence they were carried bleeding to the guillotine. This, however, was on account of the conspiracy they had formed, with the remains of the Robespierrian party and some disguised royalists, to overthrow the government. The socialistic propaganda of Babeuf, however, prevailed over all other elements of the conspiracy: the reactionary features of the Constitution, especially the property qualification of suffrage (of whose effects Paine had warned the Convention in the speech printed in this volume, chapter xxv.) and the poverty which survived a revolution that promised its abolition, had excited wide discontent. The “Babouvists” numbered as many as 17,000 in Paris. Babeuf and Lepelletier were appointed by the secret council of this fraternity (which took the name of “Equals”) a “Directory of Public Safety.” May 11, 1796, was fixed for seizing on the government, and Babeuf had prepared his Proclamation of the socialistic millennium. But the plot was discovered, May 10th, the leaders arrested, and, after a year’s delay, two of them executed,—the best-hearted men in the movement, Babeuf and Darthé.

Paine too had been moved by the cry for “Bread, and the Constitution of ’93”; and it is a notable coincidence that in that winter of 1795–6, while the socialists were secretly plotting to seize the kingdom of heaven by violence, Paine was devising his plan of relief by taxing inheritances of land, anticipating by a hundred years the English budget of Sir William Harcourt.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

The Jacobins started as a club!
Not a party in the modern sense, and especially not either democratic or centralist.

1) ??? Not a party in the US sense, anyhow. For one thing, the feature that may have well inspired Lenin most was Robespierre's institution of a rigorous purge system, so that by 1793 the Jacobin were closest to a vanguard party in the Marxist-Leninist sense, no matter what their politics were.

2) Unlike the later CP, Robespierre did not have total control of the Jacobin clubs, especially in the provinces where they had a tendency to move further to the left (or at least get even nastier at times than Robespierre might have wished). So it's not quite right to argue that Robespierre's class position was the position of each individual Jacobin or local club. (There's been a longstanding tendency among historians to focus on Paris exclusively during the French Revolution). Much as I hate Michael Andress, his recent book about the Terror does a decent job of arguing that at least some of what we take for political dissension was, in fact, bureaucratic infighting. Same could be said of the CP in the 20th century, obviously.



If they were the vanguard of anything, it was the vanguard not of the workers, a class that didn't really exist yet, or even of the artisans, but of the bourgeoisie, or rather petty bourgeoisie really. A whole lot of them were lawyers.

Well, hey, if you want to argue that the workers did not exist as a "class" you might as well side the reactionary historians of the past thirty years who claim there can't have been a class component to the French Revolution because Karl Marx hadn't been born yet, so the workers had no way of knowing they were a class. (Yup, that's what they say.)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Robespierre was pretty radical, but also petty bourgeois. The Enragés and the Herbertists were more radical, and more early proletarian. The terror against the counterrevolution which was originally demanded from him and his Jacobins was quickly turned against the ultra-left (sounds familiar, no?). There was also the dynamic of the directly democratic revolutionary "sections" (basically neighborhood conferences or assemblies of the immediate inhabitants, dominated by the rank-and-file sans-culottes) through the Parisian city.

FYI on the Jacobins: they were the main political tendency in the Paris Commune of 1871, followed by the Blanquists. Considering this, it's no wonder why they were reticent to expropriate the Bank of France.

[A Marxist Historian]

Eh, the "real' Girondins were grands bourgeois. Paine was busted as a member of the Cercle Social, which included Condorcet and Nicolas Bonneville - whose sons Paine took in back in America. The Cercle Social may not have been as radical economically as Babeuf or the Enrages, but culturally they were way ahead of their time, for instance in terms of gender and racial equality.


Hey, I didn't know that. Got a ref?

Agrarian Justice, as in the link provided by Zanthorus.

In general, the revolutionary bourgeoisie were *better* on questions of gender and race than the artisan pre-proletariat of the time, at least in America. The radical democrats in Pennsylvania, who thought Paine was a sellout, were also very much into massacring Indians. Federalist John Adams's wife was a proto-feminist, and Alexander Hamilton, the ultimate bourgeois elitist of the American Revolution, was an abolitionist.

And of course there was Thomas Jefferson, the white racist slaveholder who initially was a *supporter* of the Jacobins, until the slaves were freed in Haiti.

I'm not sure if this dynamic applied equally in France or not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

-M.H.-

[Susurrus]

The Quakers could be considered Christian Socialists I suppose...

[A Marxist Historian]

1) ??? Not a party in the US sense, anyhow. For one thing, the feature that may have well inspired Lenin most was Robespierre's institution of a rigorous purge system, so that by 1793 the Jacobin were closest to a vanguard party in the Marxist-Leninist sense, no matter what their politics were.

Well, Hitler had a rigorous purge system too. If you think that there is no real difference between Nazis and Communists, then what you say makes sense. Otherwise not.

You'll find nothing in What Is To Be Done about party purges. The first party purge in the Soviet Communist Party was in 1921 -- at the demand of the Workers Opposition, who wanted bourgeois influences purged from the party. It was a concession to them. I wasn't really until the 1930s that party purges fully took on a political character.


2) Unlike the later CP, Robespierre did not have total control of the Jacobin clubs, especially in the provinces where they had a tendency to move further to the left (or at least get even nastier at times than Robespierre might have wished). So it's not quite right to argue that Robespierre's class position was the position of each individual Jacobin or local club. (There's been a longstanding tendency among historians to focus on Paris exclusively during the French Revolution). Much as I hate Michael Andress, his recent book about the Terror does a decent job of arguing that at least some of what we take for political dissension was, in fact, bureaucratic infighting. Same could be said of the CP in the 20th century, obviously.

Robespierre represented upper revolutionary strata of the Paris petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoise, Hebert and so forth lower strata. No doubt things varied a lot out in the provinces.

And of course Hebert's basic platform was that the Terror was insufficiently ruthless against the aristocrats.


Well, hey, if you want to argue that the workers did not exist as a "class" you might as well side the reactionary historians of the past thirty years who claim there can't have been a class component to the French Revolution because Karl Marx hadn't been born yet, so the workers had no way of knowing they were a class. (Yup, that's what they say.)

I'd be interested in your sources on that, because that strikes me as a total misunderstanding.

The reactionaries are saying that the French Revolution wasn't a *bourgeois* revolution, not that it wasn't a workers revolution. The reactionaries are saying, after the model of liberal ex-Stalinist Francois Furet who was their godfather, that all the stuff written by the revolutionaries about the Third Estate or if you prefer the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was just political propaganda, whereas the real capitalists were monarchists, and analyzing anything in terms of social classes is delusional.

The idea that the French Revolution was a workers' revolution is just silly. Hardly any proletariat existed at the time. The lower classes in the cities were artisans, who owned their own tools and often little shops. At the bottom you'd have apprentices, who after they learned the trade would set up on their own as artisans, and not become a working class.

You had some real factories set up under the Jacobins, especially for military production, and the beginnings of the creation of a working class. Which is why Babeuf and his ideas were possible and could become a serious movement.

It was the Jacobins under Robespierre, by the way, who passed the Le Chapelier law illegalizing unions and strikes. Before his time such a law would have been unnecessary, as France unlike England had no proletariat worth mentioning.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

The Quakers could be considered Christian Socialists I suppose...

The original Quakers during the English Revolution, who were the very opposite of pacifists by the way, were not unsympathetic to the radical democratic Levellers, but weren't Diggers, the proto-Socialist movement that briefly popped up.

But after the monarchy was restored they decided that they shouldn't get into politics, and should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and got very very bourgeois. The extreme example being William Penn, founder of the state of Pennsylvania. During the American Revolution most Pennsylvania Quakers were loyalists and against the American Revolution. Ben Franklin, one of the richest men in America, was definitely the most conservative and conciliatory to Britain of all the revolutionary leaders.

-M.H.-

[Crux]

My history teacher once pointed out the inconsistency in the bourgeois analysis of the Reign of Terror, when in fact there were many many more executed after the crushing of the Paris Commune.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

You'll find nothing in What Is To Be Done about party purges.
Perhaps; but you'll find plenty about group loyalty, exclusivity, "purification." I didn't mean "purges" in any violent sense, simply the structuring of the Party/Club through the whole set of psychological and political bonding that we know and hate.


It was the Jacobins under Robespierre, by the way, who passed the Le Chapelier law illegalizing unions and strikes. Before his time such a law would have been unnecessary, as France unlike England had no proletariat worth mentioning.
Nope. Loi le Chapelier passed in 1791; The Jacobins split up a month later, with Chapelier going one way and Robespierre taking over (see "purification," above). Chapelier was guillotined in 1794. Such a law would have been impossible before the Night of August 4, 1789, when the guilds and associations of the Old Regime were abolished. Were there guilds and strikes and worker's actions (as well as peasant actions) before the French Revolution? Duh...



whereas the real capitalists were monarchists,

Furet et al. are picking up on a very valid point made by Tocqueville, viz. that there's a continuity of personnel and ideology from the Old Regime bourgeoisie through the French Revolution. How one can make that point without bringing up the concept of a social class is beyond me.


The reactionaries are saying that the French Revolution wasn't a *bourgeois* revolution, not that it wasn't a workers revolution.
....
The reactionaries are saying....by the revolutionaries about the Third Estate or if you prefer the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was just political propaganda
...
and analyzing anything in terms of social classes is delusional.

I think we've found your problem - which, by the way, is a problem I find with 90% percent of discussions on this list: your definition of "the workers," "the proletariat," is purely inductive, from some weird model of "what a worker should be" which, by the way, doesn't even apply to the Commune, let alone the French Revolution. You can't have a single class, the bourgeoisie, conducting warfare against a non-existent proletariat if the proletariat doesn't exist, can you? Nor should you expect to have people running around with little labels on their hats that say "bourgeois" or "proletarian." Furet was quite correct in condemning the inductive positivist methodology of traditional Marxist historians, but since his own position as a Kantian/Popperian liberal was also inductive positivist he had nothing to contribute himself.

[A Marxist Historian]

Perhaps; but you'll find plenty about group loyalty, exclusivity, "purification." I didn't mean "purges" in any violent sense, simply the structuring of the Party/Club through the whole set of psychological and political bonding that we know and hate.


Nope. Loi le Chapelier passed in 1791; The Jacobins split up a month later, with Chapelier going one way and Robespierre taking over (see "purification," above). Chapelier was guillotined in 1794. Such a law would have been impossible before the Night of August 4, 1789, when the guilds and associations of the Old Regime were abolished. Were there guilds and strikes and worker's actions (as well as peasant actions) before the French Revolution? Duh...

As for Lenininsm, that should or could be a whole separate discussion for a different thread. Anyone can read What Is To Be Done for themselves and judge for themselves whether the Leninist party model has anything to do with the Cassidy version.

It is an interesting datum that the Jacobin Club split a month after the law was passed, and that Le Chapelier was guillotined. Which would be meaningful if and only if Robespierre was against the Le Chapelier law, which he most certainly wasn't, the Jacobins did their best to enforce it.

Guilds are not workers' organizations. They are artisan organizations, technically organizations of the petty bourgeoisie, which seek to maintain a monopoly for guild members of a particular craft. Which invariably excluded oppressed layers of society from the craft, women, foreign nationalities, black slaves, etc. They are reactionary bodies, and abolishing them was abstractly a good thing, though in practice, given the absence of unions and working class bodies to replace them, abolition strengthened the bourgeoisie vs. the lower classes.

You had the compagnonages, organizations of guild journeymen in conflict with the guild masters. They came closer to being working class organizations, though no cigar. I think you had occasional compagnonage strikes vs. the guild masters. I think there were loose groupings of apprentices here and there, which could be considered working class organizations, as apprentices were in fact employees of full guild members.



Furet et al. are picking up on a very valid point made by Tocqueville, viz. that there's a continuity of personnel and ideology from the Old Regime bourgeoisie through the French Revolution. How one can make that point without bringing up the concept of a social class is beyond me.

I think we've found your problem - which, by the way, is a problem I find with 90% percent of discussions on this list: your definition of "the workers," "the proletariat," is purely inductive, from some weird model of "what a worker should be" which, by the way, doesn't even apply to the Commune, let alone the French Revolution. You can't have a single class, the bourgeoisie, conducting warfare against a non-existent proletariat if the proletariat doesn't exist, can you? Nor should you expect to have people running around with little labels on their hats that say "bourgeois" or "proletarian." Furet was quite correct in condemning the inductive positivist methodology of traditional Marxist historians, but since his own position as a Kantian/Popperian liberal was also inductive positivist he had nothing to contribute himself.

What is a worker? That's defined by relationship to the means of production. Do you recall that idea?

If an artisan owns his own means of production, he is not a worker. In his own tiny way, he is a member of the bourgeoisie. A petty bourgeois, in the literal meaning of the term.

And that was the situation of the vast majority of artisans in revolutionary France. In revolutionary America too. By the time of the Paris Commune, there had been a century of economic development and things were quite different.

Your sympathy for Furet is because you, like he, are not a materialist but an idealist. This is crassly obvious with Furet, who lived in a world of ideology. But your definition of a worker seems to be simply a member of the lower class of society. If they are oppressed, they are workers because they are the good guys and the capitalists are the bad guys. You seem to have no understanding of the importance of the industrial revolution in transforming everything.

The French Revolution was not about warfare between capitalists and proletarians, it was about a revolution against an absolute monarchy that was feudalist in its essence, led by petty bourgeois who wanted to *become* a bourgeoisie, and pretty much said so.

Furet noticed (which Soboul sometimes didn't) that they really weren't a bourgeoisie as of 1789. They *became* one in the process of the Revolution itself.

The Jacobins were the vanguard, most class conscious, most revolutionary, segment of a bourgeoisie that existed before the Revolution as a class in itself, but not a *class for itself.*

The bourgeoisie, just like the proletariat albeit less so, as it is a ruling class, cannot always come to full class consciousness spontaneously.

-M.H.-

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Anyone can read What Is To Be Done for themselves and judge for themselves whether the Leninist party model has anything to do with the Cassidy version.
You've mangled the best part of my argument, and I'll restate it, because it's worth pursuing:
a) The Bolsheviks consciously, deliberately, took up certain aspects of French Revolutionary tradition and were proud to call themselves Jacobins. Deny that if you can, you'll be in a minority;
b) Among the most important elements they borrowed was the psychodynamics of the Jacobin clubs, say 1791-1793, a particular form of bureaucracy (Max Weber, you're welcome).
c) This is where it gets worthwhile: is there a consistent pattern of this kind of dynamics affecting left-radical in-groups in the 20th c.? Yes, I believe so, but I suspect it's inherent in their mission and class position. Not a good thing but perhaps structurally inevitable. (A really good article there.)



It is an interesting datum that the Jacobin Club split a month after the law was passed, and that Le Chapelier was guillotined. Which would be meaningful if and only if Robespierre was against the Le Chapelier law, which he most certainly wasn't, the Jacobins did their best to enforce it.
I knew you were going to say that. My response might indeed be factual nitpicking if Robespierre and/or the Jacobins had done their best to enforce it, that is, if they had acted as straightforward agents of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie. If you believe they did, then once again you're in a very small minority. The issue at hand is the ambivalence of Rob/Jac's actions. The painter Jacques-Louis David was almost guillotined with Robespierre (someone told him to call in sick on 9 Thermidor.) The day after, he explained to the Convention that Robespierre had "fooled him." So Robespierre fooled Babeuf; fooled the major French Marxist study group at the Sorbonne (known as the Societe des etudes Robespierristes); fooled Le Chapelier, who was dumb enough to return to France and ask for Robespierre's protection. Didn't fool you, though...



Guilds are not workers' organizations. They are artisan organizations...
...
You had the compagnonages, organizations of guild journeymen in conflict with the guild masters...
...
What is a worker? That's defined by relationship to the means of production. Do you recall that idea?
...
If an artisan owns his own means of production, he is not a worker.
Make up your mind. Is a social class ("proletariat")defined by membership in an organization, or by ownership of instruments of production ("hammer") or by the social relationships among producers, that is social relationships organized around economic production? Because if the latter definition is true (and it's the only one even approaching Marx's meaning), then you're just beating around the bush, viz: to what extent did the guild/compagnonnage structure concretize the real relations among producers? Were there other group activities (riots, strikes, militias, communes) that could be seen to concretize such activities?


And that was the situation of the vast majority of artisans in revolutionary France...
Do you know the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris? Have you heard of the Reveillon Riots of April, 1789? Formally, the rue consisted of small workshops (it still does, to a certain extent). In practical terms, even in 1789 it was one large factory concentration. The Reveillon Riots were set off by a single employer who was rumored to have called for a salary cut. (BTW- the Bastille is down the street).



The French Revolution was not about warfare between capitalists and proletarians, it was about a revolution against an absolute monarchy that was feudalist in its essence.
No wonder you guys have a hard time with dialectics - you can't even handle the most basic Boolean permutations... Is it just possible that the FR was a battle on several fronts, cap. vs. prole, feudal vs. cap., prole vs. feudal, cap&prole vs. feudal, feudal&prole vs. cap, etc.?


By the time of the Paris Commune, there had been a century of economic development and things were quite different.
Not so different that a majority of the Communards killed or deported would not have passed your test. Tough noogies.


But your definition of a worker seems to be simply a member of the lower class of society. If they are oppressed, they are workers.
Fuckin' A. And you know what? When all of you guys were sitting on your butts deciding who was worthy of your approval (which seems to me the principal activity on this site), I was the one who went out and joined with my buddies. Live with it.



You seem to have no understanding of the importance of the industrial revolution in transforming everything.
You still haven't figured out that defining a "worker" as a dude in overalls with a spanner in his pocket is a sure-fire road to irrelevance and powerlessness. Sometimes I think you guys enjoy being powerless and irrelevant, it reflects your own class ambivalence. I wish you'd stop trying to persuade others.

[Tim Finnegan]

Nor should you expect to have people running around with little labels on their hats that say "bourgeois" or "proletarian."
We should see about getting a bunch of those made. It would make everything a lot more straightforward.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

We should see about getting a bunch of those made. It would make everything a lot more straightforward.
Then you'd need to hire the "KlaPo" (Klassen Polizei) to make sure everybody had the right label...Oh, wait...!

[A Marxist Historian]

You've mangled the best part of my argument, and I'll restate it, because it's worth pursuing:
a) The Bolsheviks consciously, deliberately, took up certain aspects of French Revolutionary tradition and were proud to call themselves Jacobins. Deny that if you can, you'll be in a minority;
b) Among the most important elements they borrowed was the psychodynamics of the Jacobin clubs, say 1791-1793, a particular form of bureaucracy (Max Weber, you're welcome).
c) This is where it gets worthwhile: is there a consistent pattern of this kind of dynamics affecting left-radical in-groups in the 20th c.? Yes, I believe so, but I suspect it's inherent in their mission and class position. Not a good thing but perhaps structurally inevitable. (A really good article there.)

What did the Bolsheviks take up from the Jacobins? A simple question to which there is a simple answer.

Marxists, once upon a time, used to think of the French Revolution as a *bourgeois revolution.* Not a workers revolution as Cassidy thinks, but a *bourgeois revolution.*

The radical party of the French *bourgeoisie,* according to the traditional Marxist understanding, split into a radical revolutionary wing, the Jacobins, and a moderate compromise wing, the Girondins.

By analogy, the Bolsheviks saw themselves as the radical revolutionary wing of the Russian workers movement, and the Mensheviks as the Girondins of the Russian workers movement.

The rest of your "psychodynamics" are just psychobabble as far as I can tell.


I knew you were going to say that. My response might indeed be factual nitpicking if Robespierre and/or the Jacobins had done their best to enforce it, that is, if they had acted as straightforward agents of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie. If you believe they did, then once again you're in a very small minority. The issue at hand is the ambivalence of Rob/Jac's actions. The painter Jacques-Louis David was almost guillotined with Robespierre (someone told him to call in sick on 9 Thermidor.) The day after, he explained to the Convention that Robespierre had "fooled him." So Robespierre fooled Babeuf; fooled the major French Marxist study group at the Sorbonne (known as the Societe des etudes Robespierristes); fooled Le Chapelier, who was dumb enough to return to France and ask for Robespierre's protection. Didn't fool you, though...

Well, what was Carnot, the Jacobin who famously successfully organized the French war industry? On what economic basis did he organize war production? Contracting it out to capitalist entrepreneurs like himself of course.

Now, I don't claim to be a great expert on labor relations in revolutionary France, but I know enough to tell you're dodging the question. None of the episodes you mention are even relevant to the key point.

The Loi Chapelier banned the forming of unions and strikes. Did the Jacobins enforce that, or didn't they? What I recall from what I have read is that they did. Do you disagree?

Babeuf, by the way, was not particularly in favor of forming unions, so this would not have bothered him. He was in favor of the working class, this brand new class just coming into existence, seizing power by a secret conspiracy, in alliance with Robespierrists and other disgruntled people, and then by the power of his own superior organization taking the reins and creating a socialist society. And of course guillotining anybody who got in the way.

His conspiracy, be it said, came surprisingly close to success. Had it succeeded it is very hard to tell what would have happened, though it is hard to imagine the end result being some sort of socialist France, if for no other reason than that France was far too economically backward for that to be practical.


Make up your mind. Is a social class ("proletariat")defined by membership in an organization, or by ownership of instruments of production ("hammer") or by the social relationships among producers, that is social relationships organized around economic production? Because if the latter definition is true (and it's the only one even approaching Marx's meaning), then you're just beating around the bush, viz: to what extent did the guild/compagnonnage structure concretize the real relations among producers? Were there other group activities (riots, strikes, militias, communes) that could be seen to concretize such activities?

I made up my mind quite a while ago that Marx's definition of social class, relationship to the means of production, worked for me. You obviously don't like it and are trying to slide away from it, while still for some odd reason calling yourself a Marxist.

Riots, strikes, militias, communes represent group activities *in the context* of the relations among producers, nonproducers and everybody in between to the means of production. They don't *concretize* class relations, they attempt to change them.

I particularly enjoy your suggestion that "membership in an organization" defines social class. That is almost hilarious.

And just what is ownership anyway? It's a social relation, isn't it? And what concretizes social relations?

Law, that's what. It's the *legal* relations that are the ultimate determinant of a stable social system. That is why the transformation of French *law* in the French Revolution was the true proof that it was a bourgeois revolution, in which the bourgeoisie became the ruling class of society. But I digress...


Do you know the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris? Have you heard of the Reveillon Riots of April, 1789? Formally, the rue consisted of small workshops (it still does, to a certain extent). In practical terms, even in 1789 it was one large factory concentration. The Reveillon Riots were set off by a single employer who was rumored to have called for a salary cut. (BTW- the Bastille is down the street).

I visited Paris in the '80s, it was still quite gorgeous then. Walked down the Rue Saint-Antoine and had really good coffee in a little shop there. But I digress again...

As for the Reveillon riots, who were the employers and who were the employees? Was this a strike by journeymen vs. the guild masters, or of apprentices against both? Or what?

The fact that a big riot shut down production in the district really tells you almost nothing if you don't know just what the social relations among these producers actually was. Your attitude seems to be gee, that sounds like a strike, so they must all have been class conscious proletarians. Doesn't work like that.


No wonder you guys have a hard time with dialectics - you can't even handle the most basic Boolean permutations... Is it just possible that the FR was a battle on several fronts, cap. vs. prole, feudal vs. cap., prole vs. feudal, cap&prole vs. feudal, feudal&prole vs. cap, etc.?

Well of course it was, that goes without saying, all social battles are always battles on several fronts.

But here you obviously can't see the forest for the trees. Was it a bourgeois revolution in essence, or a proletarian revolution in essence?

Until very recently when pseudo-Marxists like yourself started plagiarizing from Furet and other French anti-Marxists, not only was it a consensus among *all* Marxists that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, but it was also a near two century long consensus among just about *all French historians,* except for the occasional aristocratic reactionary like Tocqueville (a personal friend and close political ally of Gobineau, the man who invented the intellectual doctrine of white racism as such) that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution.


Not so different that a majority of the Communards killed or deported would not have passed your test. Tough noogies.

In the 19th century, the artisans were being *transformed* into a working class. A process not finished by 1871 in France, but hardly even begun in 1789.

If you have *any* familiarity with Marx's writings, you should know that Marx thought that the whole problem of the workers movement of his time, not least in France, was that it wasn't really a workers movement yet. His letters are absolutely filled with complaints to Engels about how the "knoten" as he called them, the half-artisans half-workers who made up the Communist League and the First International and so forth, simply couldn't understand his ideas because they weren't really proletarians.

That by the way is one of the reasons why he saw the failure of the Paris Commune as inevitable. Though confining that to his letters to Engels of course. Not the sort of thing that it would have been a good idea to say in public.


Fuckin' A. And you know what? When all of you guys were sitting on your butts deciding who was worthy of your approval (which seems to me the principal activity on this site), I was the one who went out and joined with my buddies. Live with it.

Ya know, this is really not the place to get into a pissing match about who has engaged in more class struggle than who one-upmanship.

Especially since if we did, I'd kick your ass right out of the bleachers I am *quite* sure. I don't call myself "old vet" in the upper right hand corner for nothing. But that is really besides the point, it doesn't prove anything one way or the other.


You still haven't figured out that defining a "worker" as a dude in overalls with a spanner in his pocket is a sure-fire road to irrelevance and powerlessness. Sometimes I think you guys enjoy being powerless and irrelevant, it reflects your own class ambivalence. I wish you'd stop trying to persuade others.

A worker is defined by his or her relationship to the means of production, not by what he wears or the color of her collar, or whether she is a horny-handed son of toil or maybe sitting behind a desk.

Question is, does his/her labor produce surplus value that is appropriated by an employer who turns it into profit for him? (While sharing it with the banker, the landlord, the tax collector etc.?)

If he (definitely he in this case) is an independent artisan who owns his own means of production, as the vast majority of artisans were in the year 1789 in France, then he is not a worker.

-M.H.-

[Zanthorus]

Marx's definition of social class, relationship to the means of production,

But Marx never once in his works actually ever gave a definition of what a 'class' is. The idea that for Marx class means some kind of 'relationship to the means of production' is a distillation of what he wrote by post-Marx Marxists, and whether that is actually how Marx saw class is up for debate by everyone except ideologues clinging desperately on to the safe embrace of orthodoxy.

[A Marxist Historian]

But Marx never once in his works actually ever gave a definition of what a 'class' is. The idea that for Marx class means some kind of 'relationship to the means of production' is a distillation of what he wrote by post-Marx Marxists, and whether that is actually how Marx saw class is up for debate by everyone except ideologues clinging desperately on to the safe embrace of orthodoxy.

Marx, good Hegelian that he was, talked about a "class in itself," defined in purely economic-material terms, and a "class for itself,' a class that had acquired "class consciousness."

How does a class acquire consciousness? Class consciousness is *political* consciousness. The usual, though not only of course, vehicle for political consciousness is a political party, tendency or faction. That was most certainly how Marx treated class consciousness in all his political writing.

All Marxists understood this, this was far from some innovation by Lenin. Kautsky, the theoretician of the Second International, wrote quite a lot on this subject.

Only recently have various post-Marxists, starting with that confusionist E. P. Thompson, tried to play word games to confuse this very simple question.

-M.H.-

[Zanthorus]

Only recently have various post-Marxists, starting with that confusionist E. P. Thompson, tried to play word games to confuse this very simple question.

:rolleyes:

The fact that you call someone as distuinguished as E. P. Thompson (I don't entirely agree with him btw) a 'confusionist' and talk about serious questions of Marx scholarship as 'word games' tells me all I really need to know about the value of continuing this conversation with you. I won't trouble you by disturbing your Kautskyan comfort blanket.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

I visited Paris in the '80s,-M.H.-

I visited Paris two weeks ago, where I spent a couple of days in the Bibliotheque Nationale, going over a series of pamphlets and manuscripts, 1785 to 1799. I was looking through the writings of a minor second-generation philosophe who had surprising thoughts about class and culture.

[We now return you to your secondary sources, in translation, no doubt...]

[A Marxist Historian]

:rolleyes:

The fact that you call someone as distuinguished as E. P. Thompson (I don't entirely agree with him btw) a 'confusionist' and talk about serious questions of Marx scholarship as 'word games' tells me all I really need to know about the value of continuing this conversation with you. I won't trouble you by disturbing your Kautskyan comfort blanket.

Thompson a distinguished historian? Sure. A truly great labor historian. But a Marxist? No.

Yes, Thompson annoys the hell out of me, because his peculiar species of "cultural Marxism" drove real Marxism right out of academia. I call him a confusionist because he successfully confused an entire generation of Marxists and historians. A confusionist on the grand scale, and in his own way, definitely a Great Man.

There. Is that respectful enough for you?

In his gentler fashion than me, Perry Anderson critiqued Thompson quite brilliantly, as have many other Marxists.

Thompson's "cultural Marxism" prepared the way for the abandonment of class analysis by most historians these days altogether, and the reign of "cultural history."

He did this by assaulting basic pillars of Marxism, calling what he replaced them with Marxism, and convincing most "western Marxists" that his version was the real thing. Starting with his assault on the base/superstructure distinction, which was very far from original with Marx or Engels and is necessary for *any* scientific understanding of human society.

So for Thompson, class was not an economic but in the last analysis a cultural category. And from there to cultural analysis instead of class analysis altogether was a small step, which pretty much the leftwing historical/academic community of the English speaking world took as a whole. And Thompson was probably more personally to blame for this than any other historian. Grrr!

And as a result, all too many would-be Marxists taking their Marxism from Thompson instead of Marx himself have turned Marxism into an ideology in the bad sense, indeed playing word games instead of analyzing material reality.

-M.H.-

PS: isn't Revleft an odd place to complain about lack of respect for distinguished prominent people?

[A Marxist Historian]

I visited Paris two weeks ago, where I spent a couple of days in the Bibliotheque Nationale, going over a series of pamphlets and manuscripts, 1785 to 1799. I was looking through the writings of a minor second-generation philosophe who had surprising thoughts about class and culture.

[We now return you to your secondary sources, in translation, no doubt...]

Oy. Now we have academic one-upmanship here. We really don't need that I don't think.

So how are the coffee and croissants these days? Have fun with your research about some minor philosophe or other that nobody's bothered to write about before. Publish or perish, after all.

As it happens, my BA was in French. Then I got interested in other things...

-M.H.-

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Oy. Now we have academic one-upmanship here. We really don't need that I don't think.

So how are the coffee and croissants these days? Have fun with your research about some minor philosophe or other that nobody's bothered to write about before. Publish or perish, after all.

As it happens, my BA was in French. Then I got interested in other things...

-M.H.-
Hmmm... I guess your dick really is smaller after all.

[Zanthorus]

blah blah E. P. Thompson

Ok, first point, Thompson's brand of class analysis is not original. Although many academics would probably prefer to skip him over there was this crazy general secretary of the PCd'I once who wrote:


What in fact is a social class according to our critical method? Can we possibly recognise it by the means of a purely objective external acknowledgement of the common economic and social conditions of a great number of individuals, and of their analogous positions in relationship to the productive process? That would not be enough. Our method does not amount to a mere description of the social structure as it exists at a given moment, nor does it merely draw an abstract line dividing all the individuals composing society into two groups, as is done in the scholastic classifications of the naturalists. The Marxist critique sees human society in its movement, in its development in time; it utilises a fundamentally historical and dialectical criterion, that is to say, it studies the connection of events in their reciprocal interaction. Instead of taking a snapshot of society at a given moment (like the old metaphysical method) and then studying it in order to distinguish the different categories into which the individuals composing it must be classified, the dialectical method sees history as a film unrolling its successive scenes; the class must be looked for and distinguished in the striking features of this movement.- Amadeo Bordiga, Party and Class

Second of all my critique of the 'relationship to the means of production' schema is not the same as Thompson's abandonment of structural analysis, that's just your assumption and binary thinking.

[A Marxist Historian]

Hmmm... I guess your dick really is smaller after all.

Double oy.:rolleyes:

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Ok, first point, Thompson's brand of class analysis is not original. Although many academics would probably prefer to skip him over there was this crazy general secretary of the PCd'I once who wrote:

- Amadeo Bordiga, Party and Class

Second of all my critique of the 'relationship to the means of production' schema is not the same as Thompson's abandonment of structural analysis, that's just your assumption and binary thinking.

Bordiga? Bordiga? Bordiga? The fellow I thought was the ultimate ironbound mechanical Marxist, who totally screwed up resistance to Mussolini? "Crazy" is indeed an adjective some have applied to him.

I admit I am totally unacquainted with Bordiga's real theoretical views, and I look forward to being enlightened about them.

A good friend of mine who read Bordiga's analysis of the Soviet Union told me once that Bordiga's version of state capitalism was that they really did have a stock market in the Soviet Union, except that they hid it in the basement of the Kremlin so that the workers wouldn't find out.

But then the friend in question was and is inclined to poetic exaggeration.

-M.H.-

[Tim Cornelis]

On post #14 of this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/mikhail-gorbachev-true-t158024/index.html?t=158024), RedMarxist says that if the United States were to become communist, it would conflict with the interests of the Founding Fathers and presumably other Enlightenment figures. I think this poses an interesting question.

Why should we give a shit about the 'interests' of a bunch of people who died 200 years ago?

That being said, Thomas Jefferson was a "socialist" believing in common ownership: "It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land.... By an universal law, ... whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

[Kiev Communard]

A good friend of mine who read Bordiga's analysis of the Soviet Union told me once that Bordiga's version of state capitalism was that they really did have a stock market in the Soviet Union, except that they hid it in the basement of the Kremlin so that the workers wouldn't find out.

Once again, a new sectarian attack of yours against another tendency to the left of orthodox Trotskyism :rolleyes:. ...

More seriously, Bordiga seems to have believed that the investments were distributed between different branches/enterprises in the USSR according to the same criteria as in the "classical" capitalist countries, so that the functions of stock market were played by Gosplan, and instead of stock brokers one had lobbyists of these different industrial groups playing their role with regard to securing the Gosplan funding. For all the possible questions to this kind of analysis, it is far from the assertion you have made.

[A Marxist Historian]

Why should we give a shit about the 'interests' of a bunch of people who died 200 years ago?

That being said, Thomas Jefferson was a "socialist" believing in common ownership: "It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land.... By an universal law, ... whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

Jefferson did not believe in the sacredness of private property because he was not a capitalist.

He was a slaveholder. Not quite the same thing, though plantation slavery was thoroughly integrated into the capitalist market.

Also, he was the originator of the *intellectual* doctrine that there was such a thing as a black "race," and that it was inferior to the white race. At the time he put this idea forward, in Notes on the State of Virginia, there was lots of racial prejudice running around, but no prominent intellectual had cohered it into an intellectual doctrine.

His views on black people were *extremely* influential at the time, as he was the only American other than Ben Franklin who was seen as on the same level with the Enlightenment philosophers of France and England. So, since he was more familiar with black people than they were, a lot of the Enlightenment intellectuals who had doubts about blacks being inferior tended to take his word for it.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Once again, a new sectarian attack of yours against another tendency to the left of orthodox Trotskyism :rolleyes:. ...

More seriously, Bordiga seems to have believed that the investments were distributed between different branches/enterprises in the USSR according to the same criteria as in the "classical" capitalist countries, so that the functions of stock market were played by Gosplan, and instead of stock brokers one had lobbyists of these different industrial groups playing their role with regard to securing the Gosplan funding. For all the possible questions to this kind of analysis, it is far from the assertion you have made.

The friend in question definitely represents a trend to the left of orthodox Trotskyism in *my* terms, but I like the guy a lot anyway, even if he is an ultra-leftist. Which IMHO those I have been criticizing here are not. He used to call himself a "Luxemburgist."

Anyway, your version of Bordiga's theories does sound like the kind of thing that he'd translate into a quip like that. It doesn't sound that incredibly far off to me.

On how Gosplan really functioned, are you familiar with the books of the guy actually in charge of Gosplan under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Nikolai Baibakov? I've read one of them. I certainly don't agree with his politics, but reading it gave me a lot of insight I thought into how the Soviet economy actually worked. *Much* further from Bordiga's ideas than my friend's parodies of said ideas.

-M.H.-

[Tim Finnegan]

Hmmm... I guess your dick really is smaller after all.
When I went to France, instead of reading anything I went to a tank museum and climbed inside a Saracen APC when the guard wasn't looking. Does that mean that I have the biggest dick of all? :D

[eric922]

In Agrarian Justice Paine seems to speak out against the concept of private property even if he does not have a solution for getting rid of it. He says here that:
"There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue."

[A Marxist Historian]

In Agrarian Justice Paine seems to speak out against the concept of private property even if he does not have a solution for getting rid of it. He says here that:
"There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue."

*Landed* property yes. The most left wing bourgeois revolutionaries and radicals have usually been in favor of getting rid of property *in land,* for the reasons well explained by Tom Paine.

Ricardo, the bourgeois economist supreme, was hostile to land rent precisely because it was a deduction from capitalist profit.

Paine is suggesting getting rid of landlords and land rent, thereby facilitating the growth of capitalism and private profit.

-M.H.-

[Invader Zim]

In some cases, perhaps. But for the most part 18th/19th century liberal figures were middle class figures who had specific class interests.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Anyway, your version of Bordiga's theories does sound like the kind of thing that he'd translate into a quip like that. It doesn't sound that incredibly far off to me.

On how Gosplan really functioned, are you familiar with the books of the guy actually in charge of Gosplan under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Nikolai Baibakov? I've read one of them. I certainly don't agree with his politics, but reading it gave me a lot of insight I thought into how the Soviet economy actually worked. *Much* further from Bordiga's ideas than my friend's parodies of said ideas.

-M.H.-

What work of Baibakov?

He was an interesting figure indeed, but he wasn't really in charge of Gosplan until Kosygin became prime minister. The two-year stint under Khrushchev was amidst high turnover in Gosplan's leadership at that time, not least because of Khrushchev's hare-brained reorganizations.

The more interesting part of his career was as People's Commissar for the oil industry, when Stalin said to his face, "If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot. And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again."

[Kiev Communard]

Jefferson did not believe in the sacredness of private property because he was not a capitalist.

There were forms of pre-capitalist exploitative class (i.e. private) property in the U.S. at that time, and Jefferson was their firm supporter.


He was a slaveholder. Not quite the same thing, though plantation slavery was thoroughly integrated into the capitalist market.

I would say that the Southern U.S. slaveholders were a peculiar sort of capitalist class, just as distinct from "classical" capitalists, as the Soviet bureaucratic capitalists were later.

[Kiev Communard]

The friend in question definitely represents a trend to the left of orthodox Trotskyism in *my* terms, but I like the guy a lot anyway, even if he is an ultra-leftist. Which IMHO those I have been criticizing here are not. He used to call himself a "Luxemburgist."'

I do not think Luxemburgism is a coherent, or even clearly formulated doctrine, but, yes, in the sense of at least denouncing one-party regime (with which orthodox Trotskyism was happy until 1938) and the substitution of workers' self-management with state-capitalist "one-man management" (which Trotsky never rejected), it is indeed to the left of Trotskyist ideas.



On how Gosplan really functioned, are you familiar with the books of the guy actually in charge of Gosplan under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Nikolai Baibakov? I've read one of them. I certainly don't agree with his politics, but reading it gave me a lot of insight I thought into how the Soviet economy actually worked. *Much* further from Bordiga's ideas than my friend's parodies of said ideas.

You may find it interesting that S. Gubanov, a prominent Stalinist economist of modern Russia (a member of United Workers' Front, a RCWP-RPC founding organization), basically follows the ideas close to Bordigism in his writings on the Soviet economy, while making use of official Soviet statistics. Here is one of his theses (again, in Russian:


Практического перехода от формальной национализации к реальной СССР так и не добился...После национализации система общественного воспроизводства не изменилась: как была, так и осталась фабрично - заводской с отдельным отраслевым предприятием в качестве основного звена...

Именно разрозненные предприятия составляли экономический базис советского народного хозяйства, вследствие чего он стойко сохранял частнохозяйственный характер. Направление хозяйственной деятельности предприятий в единое госкапиталистическое русло осуществлялось внеэкономически, усилиями политической надстройки...

Госкапиталистические начала поддерживала политическая надстройка, тогда как частнокапиталистические начала коренились в экономическом базисе. Ведущим звеном в советском госкапитализме выступало государство, но не экономическая система. Под советский госкапитализм так и не удалось подвести адекватный экономический базис...Короче, госкапитализм удерживался внеэкономически, тогда как частный капитализм разрастался экономически...

Госкапитализм удерживался в СССР внеэкономически, а потому постоянно и неотвратимо разлагался экономически, сдавая одну позицию за другой: в планировании, ценообразовании, централизации управления, отношении к прибыли и т.д. В итоге частнокапиталистический базис победил госкапиталистическую надстройку и вернул себе частнокапиталистическую.

...Да, формально при передаче продукции от одного предприятия другому смены собственника не происходило - зато происходила смена баланса, которая по экономическому значению ничем не отличалась от смены собственника. (курсив С. Губанова - М. И.). Формально средства производства исключались из товарооборота, а на самом деле их оборот как товаров был централизован, на баланс они ставились по стоимости, их изготовителям также возмещалась стоимость их производства...

Обособленные предприятия производили не для собственного потребления, свою продукцию они отдавали в обмен на деньги, критерием эквивалентности служила величина стоимости, производительность определялась вновь созданной стоимостью - налицо все предпосылки товарообмена. Своеобразие заключалось лишь в том, что вместо персонифицированной частной собственности использовалась балансовая, поскольку контрольный пакет акций принадлежал совокупному капиталисту, или, если угодно, совокупному акционеру. (курсив С. Губанова - М. И.)

Конструкция отношений собственности с монопольным акционером никак не в состоянии упразднить товарный характер производства. (мой курсив - М.И.)...

Подобная конструкция обладала несомненными преимуществами по сравнению с обыкновенным капитализмом...(курсив С. Губанова - М. И.) Но от обычного капитализма она отличалась только централизацией рынка, только централизацией товарообмена, только централизацией доходов, занятости, оптовой и розничной торговли, жилищного строительства, здравоохранения, образования. Само же производство, и организационно, и экономически оставалось таким же, каким было на момент национализации: дезинтегрированным, частнохозяйственным. Никаким иным декреты о национализации и стоимостные планы сделать его не могли. Достаточно было убрать централизацию, - а именно к ней и свелась национализация, - и вся экономика вновь становилась частнокапиталистической...

...На практике советские предприятия все время работали как частнохозяйственные, с тем только отличием, что условия товарно - денежного обращения были в 30 - 50 -е годы жестко централизованными. Но централизация товарообмена вовсе не равнозначна его устранению (курсив С. Губанова - М. И.). Назначение поставщиков и потребителей, назначение цен и объемов - это не уничтожение товарообмена, а лишь его условия. В обмен на поставки предприятие получало выручку, так или иначе эквивалентную стоимости продукции...

Конкуренция переместилась на отраслевой уровень и бушевала между наркоматами и министерствами; стихия и анархия проявлялись в диспропорциях, приписках и дефицитах, притом все более и более разрушительных; инфляцию переименовали в ценовые перекосы; нищету скрывали распределением бедности на трудящиеся массы; безработица маскировалась непроизводительной занятостью; ни на миг не останавливалось и накопление "теневого" капитала. Типичные явления капитализма не исчезли, а приняли иные формы.

This article of him is entitled State Capitalism and Socialism: Continuing the Discussion (Государственный капитализм и социализм: в продолжение дискуссии). For some reason, I cannot find it on the Web, but it was actually quoted extensively in Marlen Insarov's (the leader of "synthesist" left-communist-cum-anarchist-cum-Maximalist Alliance of Revolutionary Socialist) article State and Capital in Russia (Государство и капитал в России). You may find the latter article here (http://zhurnal.lib.ru/i/insarow_m/stateandcapital.shtml).

[A Marxist Historian]

What work of Baibakov?

He was an interesting figure indeed, but he wasn't really in charge of Gosplan until Kosygin became prime minister. The two-year stint under Khrushchev was amidst high turnover in Gosplan's leadership at that time, not least because of Khrushchev's hare-brained reorganizations.

The more interesting part of his career was as People's Commissar for the oil industry, when Stalin said to his face, "If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot. And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again."

Ot Stalina do Yeltsina

As to Gosplan, minor correction acknowledged. He was a central figure in Soviet economic planning for quite a while, including for that matter under Stalin, with coal giving way to oil as the main Soviet energy source.

He's also a perfect example of one of Sheila Fitzpatrick's "Brezhnev generation" vydvizhentsy, getting his start as a rank and file oil field worker, getting promoted to the bureaucracy by way of engineering school, and appointed by Kaganovich to be in charge of refinery and other types of oil construction in 1938 after all the previous oil trust leaders were shot.

I've seen a piece by him in the oil industry journal in 1937 criticizing the then trust leadership for sabotage and wrecking. So he was not exactly an innocent victim of Stalin's bullying.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I do not think Luxemburgism is a coherent, or even clearly formulated doctrine, but, yes, in the sense of at least denouncing one-party regime (with which orthodox Trotskyism was happy until 1938) and the substitution of workers' self-management with state-capitalist "one-man management" (which Trotsky never rejected), it is indeed to the left of Trotskyist ideas.

Well, I should not speak for someone not currently on Revleft. Though I've told him about it.

His variant of Luxemburgism included all you describe, but *also* was combined with a strong dose of support for the Soviet Union vs. capitalism, enthusiasm for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, etc.

Different strokes for different folks...


You may find it interesting that S. Gubanov, a prominent Stalinist economist of modern Russia (a member of United Workers' Front, a RCWP-RPC founding organization), basically follows the ideas close to Bordigism in his writings on the Soviet economy, while making use of official Soviet statistics. Here is one of his theses (again, in Russian:

Interesting perhaps but highly unsurprising to me.

The current Russian Stalinists by and large are extreme Russian nationalists engaged in "red brown coalitions" with fascists and reactionaries, I do not see them as truly workers parties at all.

I can see how a theory that the Soviet economy was actually capitalist would be attractive to such people, seeing as they are Soviet nostalgics who are basically pro-capitalist themselves. Indeed the Zyuganov party at least has plenty of bona fide capitalists within its ranks, and has no involvement or interest in organizing workers to fight capitalism as far as I can tell.

Their "socialism" is simply to defend whatever remnants of Soviet social welfare measures haven't been abolished yet, for the benefit of the pensioners who are their main voting base.

-M.H.-



This article of him is entitled State Capitalism and Socialism: Continuing the Discussion (Государственный капитализм и социализм: в продолжение дискуссии). For some reason, I cannot find it on the Web, but it was actually quoted extensively in Marlen Insarov's (the leader of "synthesist" left-communist-cum-anarchist-cum-Maximalist Alliance of Revolutionary Socialist) article State and Capital in Russia (Государство и капитал в России). You may find the latter article here (http://zhurnal.lib.ru/i/insarow_m/stateandcapital.shtml).