State capitalism?

[tir1944]

What exactly is state capitalism?
What are the examples of historical "state capitalist" states?

[Hit The North]

There are a number of different approaches to the question of the theory and practice of state capitalism and this Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism) is a fairly good overview of how the term has developed and been reinterpreted within the Marxist tradition. It's also worth checking out the discussion page where there is some decent discussion.

A pretty good introduction to the IS tradition of state capitalist theory is this article by Pete Binns (http://www.marxists.de/statecap/binns/statecap.htm#12) which has the virtue of being much shorter than Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/index.htm)

In terms of which countries have been designated as state capitalist, it is primarily the USSR and those countries which adopted the same state form in eastern Europe and the regime in China.

[Kornilios Sunshine]

Example of state capitalism. All the countries in the EU.

[Tim Cornelis]

State capitalism can refer to the 'opposite' of free market capitalism, that is capitalism where the state intervenes on behalf of social classes, mixed economics, and/or corporatism (like KommounistisGR seemingly meant).

In radical left-wing circles it usually refers to the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production under self-declared socialist regimes. This means that despite socialist rhetoric wage labour, commodity production, and the monopolisation of productive resources by a privileged minority still exist as they did under capitalism--except now it is concentrated in the hands of public officials rather than private individuals. The socialist state functions like a gigantic capitalist corporation.

Historical examples could be any self-declared socialist state, including the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Vietnam and Cuba.

A while ago I found this article: State-capitalism or bureaucratic collectivism (http://thecommune.co.uk/ideas/state-capitalism-or-bureaucratic-collectivism-the-debate-on-the-russian-question-in-the-workers-party)

But I haven't found the time to actually read it--sounds interesting though.

[thefinalmarch]

Example of state capitalism. All the countries in the EU.
you must be on some mighty strong shit.

[Soldier of life]

What exactly was 'capitalist' about the USSR?

[The Idler]

Banks
Millionaires
Production for exchange
Extraction of surplus value


"Exploitation, with class struggle between wage-labour and capital, was at the heart of the so-called Soviet system. Re-naming the capitalist class as the “state capitalist class” makes no difference to that ugly reality. ... Soviet Russia was a capitalist country, trading on the world markets, and with a class system which exploited the working class through the wages system." Setting the record straight (http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/article%20record%20straight.shtml)

[robbo203]

Banks
Millionaires
Production for exchange
Extraction of surplus value


Incredibly enough, Lenin said this of banks:

Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism;..A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" (Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? October 1, 1917 Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87-136).

I wonder what he would have said about the global protests yestereday and the anger vented against the banking establishment in particular

[Nox]

What exactly is state capitalism?
What are the examples of historical "state capitalist" states?

State Capitalism is where the means of production is in the hands of the state.

The USSR is a great example.

[Soldier of life]

State Capitalism is where the means of production is in the hands of the state.

The USSR is a great example.

But it was a planned economy, not a market economy. Surely a more accurate description would be to call it 'state socialism' if anything.

My only experience in the real world of this term is when it is used by the Tony Cliff cult.

[thefinalmarch]

But it was a planned economy, not a market economy.
So you're denying the existence of the labour market in the USSR, and by extension, of wages?

[robbo203]

But it was a planned economy, not a market economy. Surely a more accurate description would be to call it 'state socialism' if anything.

My only experience in the real world of this term is when it is used by the Tony Cliff cult.


You are labouring under a serious misapprehension. The USSR was not a so called "planned" economy. It was a market ecopnomy. Labour power was a commodity. Consumer goods were commodities. Production goods - capital - were commodities being bought and sold between state enterprises on the basis of legally binding contracts. with official and sometimes unoffical funding Gosplan was basically a farce, a charade No plan emanating from ir was ever strictly fuilfilled. Some never appeared until well into the planning implementation period. The plans did not actually guide the economy but, on the contrary, were routinely modified as circumstances changed to make it appear as if the targets were being fulfilled. State enterprises, required by law since the Stalin days to pursue profit, had far more room for manouvre in respect of wages levels, employment and sourcing inputs than is sometimes supposed. Indeed the whole system was a lot more decentralised than is often imagined.

In fact "state capitalism" is the only apt decription of the system that existed in the Soviet Union. It had nothing whaotsoever to do with socialism in its traditional Marxian sense

[HEAD ICE]

It should be emphasized that separating "state capitalism" vs "free market capitalism" is a meaningless exercise. First, there is no such thing as the "free market" outside of economic models. All forms of capitalism are state capitalism, even the most "free." Capitalism needs a form of monopolized violence (the State) to enforce and protect the property relations specific to it.

Second, we shouldn't view state capitalism as the state/government taking over or gaining more influence within production. Rather, it should be seen as capitalism taking over and gaining more direct control of the state apparatus.

[HEAD ICE]

But it was a planned economy, not a market economy. Surely a more accurate description would be to call it 'state socialism' if anything.

My only experience in the real world of this term is when it is used by the Tony Cliff cult.

Tony Cliff was not the first person to develop a theory of state capitalism and he most certainly wasn't the last. There are people who disagree with his conception of the class nature of Russia yet also accept that fact that Russia was capitalist. One of the earliest people to say that the Soviet Union was state capitalist was Vladimir Lenin.

[Soldier of life]

Tony Cliff was not the first person to develop a theory of state capitalism and he most certainly wasn't the last. There are people who disagree with his conception of the class nature of Russia yet also accept that fact that Russia was capitalist. One of the earliest people to say that the Soviet Union was state capitalist was Vladimir Lenin.

Do you know the source of that Lenin quote?

[Soldier of life]

You are labouring under a serious misapprehension. The USSR was not a so called "planned" economy. It was a market ecopnomy. Labour power was a commodity. Consumer goods were commodities. Production goods - capital - were commodities being bought and sold between state enterprises on the basis of legally binding contracts. with official and sometimes unoffical funding Gosplan was basically a farce, a charade No plan emanating from ir was ever strictly fuilfilled. Some never appeared until well into the planning implementation period. The plans did not actually guide the economy but, on the contrary, were routinely modified as circumstances changed to make it appear as if the targets were being fulfilled. State enterprises, required by law since the Stalin days to pursue profit, had far more room for manouvre in respect of wages levels, employment and sourcing inputs than is sometimes supposed. Indeed the whole system was a lot more decentralised than is often imagined.

In fact "state capitalism" is the only apt decription of the system that existed in the Soviet Union. It had nothing whaotsoever to do with socialism in its traditional Marxian sense

Do you recommend any text on the subject of how the wider soviet economy engaged (or didn't) with Gosplan, and the general workings of the economy before the war, the detail changes during the war and then the situation up to before Gorbachev came to power?

[GatesofLenin]

Incredibly enough, Lenin said this of banks:

Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism;..A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" (Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? October 1, 1917 Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87-136).

I wonder what he would have said about the global protests yestereday and the anger vented against the banking establishment in particular

Lenin would hate banks being run by few private corporations. Remember that all banks today operate with one thing in mind: maximize profits, they don't care who they help as long as they make as much $$$$ as possible. I love the idea of having a state-run bank that is there to help people, people first!

[HEAD ICE]

Do you know the source of that Lenin quote?

I rephrase what I said. Lenin didn't say the SU was state capitalist, he said it would be an advancement if the SU was state capitalist (instead of regular "private" capitalism").

http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm


In regard to domestic issues, we see the same thing on the part of the group of Left Communists, who repeat the main arguments levelled against us from the bourgeois camp. For example, the main argument of the group of Left Communists against us is that there can be observed a Right Bolshevik deviation, which threatens the revolution by directing it along the path of state capitalism.

Evolution in the direction of state capitalism, there you have the evil, the enemy, which we are invited to combat.

When I read these references to such enemies in the newspaper of the Left Communists, I ask: what has happened to these people that fragments of book-learning can make them forget reality? Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory.

...

What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.
As you can see Lenin erroneously believes that capitalism under control of the proletarian dictatorship can be directed towards socialist ends. History, but also the people Lenin was polemicising against, argued that state capitalism is not a transition to socialism but a transition back to "private" capitalism.

However most interesting about this passage is not that Lenin is arguing in favor of state capitalism but that he never calls the SU socialist. The only time Russia was said to have socialist production relations was under Stalin.

[Iron Felix]

If planned economy=socialism, then all the major participants(Germany, America, Russia, England, Japan) of the second World War were state Socialist. Besides that, the economy of the Soviet Union wasn't all that planned really. It was way more chaotic and improvised under Stalin than the economies of any other great power, and many forget this.

[Soldier of life]

If planned economy=socialism, then all the major participants(Germany, America, Russia, England, Japan) of the second World War were state Socialist. Besides that, the economy of the Soviet Union wasn't all that planned really. It was way more chaotic and improvised under Stalin than the economies of any other great power, and many forget this.

Well even in times outside of war, a capitalist economy has strong elements of planning. Essentially, the 'free market' has always been a sham.

[The Idler]

If planned economy=socialism, then all the major participants(Germany, America, Russia, England, Japan) of the second World War were state Socialist. Besides that, the economy of the Soviet Union wasn't all that planned really. It was way more chaotic and improvised under Stalin than the economies of any other great power, and many forget this.
Doesn't Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates plan their economy? Does this mean Otto von Bismarck's central planning of the economy made him an early socialist?

[Astarte]

Banks
Millionaires
Production for exchange
Extraction of surplus value


Non-sense. "Millionaries" were RUBLE Millionaires and the use value of their "Capital" could only be used in so far as investing in THE STATE or STATE enterprises - hence capital could not manifest any kind of power outside the economic arena which was ultimately dominated by party bureaucrats.

The latter two without the use value of capital for private non-state enterprises yields a non-capitalist system. We've had this discussion so many times before and the state-capitalist people just seem to resort to waffling and reiterating the same debunked points finalizing their argument with "...but it really was state-capitalism".

Please refer to this thread:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/nature-ussr-t161229/index.html?t=161229

[RED DAVE]

I have to say that I am amazed and delighted by the knowledge of state capitalism displayed in this thread. Wow! Comrades! Cool!


There are a number of different approaches to the question of the theory and practice of state capitalism and this Wiki is a fairly good overview of how the term has developed and been reinterpreted within the Marxist tradition. It's also worth checking out the discussion page where there is some decent discussion.

A pretty good introduction to the IS tradition of state capitalist theory is this article by Pete Binns which has the virtue of being much shorter than Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia

In terms of which countries have been designated as state capitalist, it is primarily the USSR and those countries which adopted the same state form in eastern Europe and the regime in China.Excellent. The Binns article is a good one if a little crude. Cliff's book is a classic but there are I believe some problems. As I recall, he attributes the action of the law of value to the USSR's position within the world economy rather than as an inherent property of the economy. I could be wrong. It's been years.


A while ago I found this article: State-capitalism or bureaucratic collectivismThis article is definitely heavy going but worthwhile, especially of you've never read Schactman or Dunayevskaya.

RED DAVE

[Dave B]

There is a compilation of Lenins state capitalism quotes at post 18 on this site

http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-and-state-t118579/index.html


There about half a dozen more that I didn’t catch the first time.

And the following from Trotsky in 1922;



this is explicable in part by an incomprehension of an expression frequently used by us, that we now have state capitalism. I shall not enter into an evaluation of this term; for in any case we need only to qualify what we understand by it. By state capitalism we all understood property belonging to the state which itself was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which exploited the working class.

Our state undertakings operate along commercial lines based on the market. But who stands in power here? The working class. Herein lies the principled distinction of our state ‘capitalism’ in inverted commas from state capitalism without inverted commas.


What does this mean in perspective? Just this. The more state capitalism say, in Hohenzollern Germany, as it was, developed, the more powerfully the class of junkers and capitalists of Germany could hold down the working class. The more our ‘state capitalism’ develops the richer the work ing class will become, that is the firmer will become the foundation of socialism.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm


And from Mao in 1953;



The transformation of capitalism into socialism is to be accomplished through state capitalism.


1. In the last three years or so we have done some work on this, but as we were otherwise occupied, we didn't exert ourselves enough. From now on we should make a bigger effort.


2. With more than three years of experience behind us, we can say with certainty that accomplishing the socialist transformation of private industry and commerce by means of state capitalism is a relatively sound policy and method.


3. The policy laid down in Article 31 of the Common Programme should now be clearly understood and concretely applied step by step. "Clearly understood" means that people in positions of leadership at the central and local levels should first of all have the firm conviction that state capitalism is the only road for the transformation of capitalist industry and commerce and for the gradual completion of the transition to socialism. So far this has not been the case either with members of the Communist Party or with democratic personages. The present meeting is being held to achieve that end.


4. Make steady progress and avoid being too hasty. It will take at least three to five years to lead the country's private industry and commerce basically onto the path of state capitalism, so there should be no cause for alarm or uneasiness.


http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/TC53.html

[Искра]

In order to contribute to this thread I would encourage you to read a book by Raya Dunayevskaya called Marxism and Freedom where she’s talking about state capitalism in USSR and Mao’s China.

Also, here are few of her articles on topic of state capitalism and USSR:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm

[HEAD ICE]

The analysis of the Soviet Union as having capitalist production relations belongs to Paresh Chattopadhyay in his book The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience. Despite the clunky title and the breadth of the subject matter, it is actually a very readable book (I read it in one day). Unlike Tony Cliff's conception of state capitalism, Paresh (convincingly) argues that the law of value functioned within the Soviet state rather than being imposed upon it by military competition, as well as that Russia was not one large capital competing with the rest of the world but a country with many independently competing capitals.

http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience

[Astarte]

Try Karl Wittfogel's tome "Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power", unless you have investigated this book, which was written by member of the Frankfurt School, and later "anti-Communist" using Marxian analysis, Wittfogel, I can under stand why the theory of state-capitalism makes so much sense. Wittfogel argues it was bureaucratic collectivist, and calls it a "total managerial state". In capitalism, there is no single entity which controls 100% of all capital in a country or region or globally (yet at least), I think the closest thing to actual "state-capitalism", arguably, was Musharraf's regime in Egypt. In a total managerial state, capital which is outside of the state's hands, or has no use value to it, besides "investing it" in state warbonds, or state enterprises, "capital" i.e. Soviet Rubles lose the currency quality that Western capital had, in that in the capitalist West, if you have enough capital to start with you can privately begin to accumulate more capital essentially within any legal bounds, domestically or internationally. This was illegal in the USSR. This is why there was the need for a black market - the lack of a variety of producers and makers, as existent in a capitalist society led to a longing for, and duping by, the glamorization of western products.

"Soviet: I am a Ruble millionaire, I will give you 30,000 rubles for a pair of Levis.
Westerner: Lulz, dude, someone in Russia paid me $300 for a pair of Levis".
(What was the exchange rate anyway, I wonder?)

[Soldier of life]

In light of the Trotsky quote by Dave B, is it not a bit contradictory to identify oneself as trots as say the SWP do, and denounce 'state capitalism' as something as evil as ordinary state capitalism (without the inverted commas;))

[Rooster]

In light of the Trotsky quote by Dave B, is it not a bit contradictory to identify oneself as trots as say the SWP do, and denounce 'state capitalism' as something as evil as ordinary state capitalism (without the inverted commas;))

You do know that there's the benefit of hindsight?

[Gustav HK]

Here are some analysis of post-Stalin revisionist USSR, which became state-capitalist:

http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html

http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.html

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/index.htm#Albania

[Lucretia]

In light of the Trotsky quote by Dave B, is it not a bit contradictory to identify oneself as trots as say the SWP do, and denounce 'state capitalism' as something as evil as ordinary state capitalism (without the inverted commas;))

Not everything Trotsky said was holy writ, just as not everything Marx wrote was gospel. These people, like us, were humans. And sometimes, they got shit wrong and fucked things up. Plain and simple. Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a caste-ruled degenerated workers' state was wrong. And he's wrong in the quote also. Trotsky acknowledged he got shit wrong, at least implicitly, in his changing views on whether a revolution was necessary to overthrow what he called the Stalinist caste.

Trotsky's quote in which he claims the USSR to be a more benevolent form of state capitalism is premised on the notion that there can be capitalist-style "production for the sake of production" that is democratically controlled, or controlled by the workers. There cannot be. Because production for the sake of competitive accumulation necessarily entails having to make decisions about production on the basis not of what the people want or choose, but on the basis of what your competitor is doing. It's based on the anarchic law of value, whether that law be imposed from markets functioning "freely" within a nation-state, or whether the law is operating on the basis of competition between states. A democratic "workers' capitalism" just logically cannot happen.

What the quote also shows, interestingly enough, is Trotsky's growing recognition that the USSR was essentially capitalist.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

'State Socialism' is a contradiction in terms. In addition, arriving at such a term is clearly a process not based on Marxian analysis of labour exploitation, of working class relationships to the means of production and so on. It is merely the equation thus:

State Capitalism + red flags + quasi-Marxist rhetorical demagoguery = 'State Socialism'.

[Belleraphone]

State capitalism is every capitalist system that was ever present. There has never been laissez-faire capitalism. The closest that America got to it was in the 1920's, right before the Great Depression. While many would condemn state capitalism as a tool for pressing the public, which in some ways it is, some state capitalist states are much better than others. Think Finland versus China.

The reason that State Capitalism is so prevalent is that laissez-faire capitalism is so unstable and unpredictable, even the elites won't want it. In fact, the elites would rather have true socialism than laissez-faire capitalism, because within a few years, all their power would be undermined by under businesses and they would be living in poverty. Like I said, just look at the Great Depression.

[tir1944]

'State Socialism' is a contradiction in terms.A
According to?

[Belleraphone]

A
According to?
Bakunin.

[Jose Gracchus]

Try Karl Wittfogel's tome "Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power", unless you have investigated this book, which was written by member of the Frankfurt School, and later "anti-Communist" using Marxian analysis, Wittfogel, I can under stand why the theory of state-capitalism makes so much sense. Wittfogel argues it was bureaucratic collectivist, and calls it a "total managerial state". In capitalism, there is no single entity which controls 100% of all capital in a country or region or globally (yet at least), I think the closest thing to actual "state-capitalism", arguably, was Musharraf's regime in Egypt. In a total managerial state, capital which is outside of the state's hands, or has no use value to it, besides "investing it" in state warbonds, or state enterprises, "capital" i.e. Soviet Rubles lose the currency quality that Western capital had, in that in the capitalist West, if you have enough capital to start with you can privately begin to accumulate more capital essentially within any legal bounds, domestically or internationally. This was illegal in the USSR. This is why there was the need for a black market - the lack of a variety of producers and makers, as existent in a capitalist society led to a longing for, and duping by, the glamorization of western products.

"Soviet: I am a Ruble millionaire, I will give you 30,000 rubles for a pair of Levis.
Westerner: Lulz, dude, someone in Russia paid me $300 for a pair of Levis".
(What was the exchange rate anyway, I wonder?)

Theories like Wittfogel's vastly overrate the juridical fig-leaf of the Soviet state (where, with no legitimate public sphere outside state monopoly campaigning, law was essentially all nothing but ideological decree, and all law-breaking an ideological crime; laws lack the substance of relations they reflect in Western capitalism). As Bordiga notes, the state can centralize the management of enterprises and organizations, but it cannot centralize the economy. An amazing amount of inability for the political center to meaningful control production and development developed, Ticktin and Aufheben, as well as Chattopadhyay (peripherally) touch on this. The system cannot properly be called planning. The 'owners' could not intensively exploit labor-power, and could not control the output of production adequately: the system was buried by defective use-values, unnecessary construction projects, aggrandizement of sectoral concerns within industrial ministeries via the bureaucratic and blat bargaining web, pants no body would buy, even when they were available, ad nauseum.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

State capitalism is every capitalist system that was ever present. There has never been laissez-faire capitalism. The closest that America got to it was in the 1920's, right before the Great Depression. While many would condemn state capitalism as a tool for pressing the public, which in some ways it is, some state capitalist states are much better than others. Think Finland versus China.

The reason that State Capitalism is so prevalent is that laissez-faire capitalism is so unstable and unpredictable, even the elites won't want it. In fact, the elites would rather have true socialism than laissez-faire capitalism, because within a few years, all their power would be undermined by under businesses and they would be living in poverty. Like I said, just look at the Great Depression.

I understand why you've made your point, but the truth is that we have, in general, had either State Capitalism or a limited form of laissez-faire Capitalism called 'free market Capitalism'. I agree there has never been full blown anarcho-Capitalism, though, which is what I think you're saying.

But economies like Finland or the European post-WW2 Social Democracies were not actually State Capitalist, because in general the state, as an employer, was seen as the 'employer of last resort' and the guarantor of a minimum standard of life, whereas in genuine State Capitalist societies such as the USSR, the 'state' was interwoven with the government and decided, pretty much (though this did change with Kruschev, Kosygin et al), prices, employment, what was to be produced.

In places like Finland etc., the market has always decided, via the demand curve, what is to be produced (well, theoretically, of course!). Thus, no State Capitalism. It's a particular theory, it's not simply Capitalism attached to a strong welfare state.

[Rooster]

A
According to?

Lenin? In State and Revolution, Lenin argues that the state is there because there are class antagonisms, and the state acts in a way to suppress a class (or classes) or to facilitate class rule. As socialism is a classless society (Stalin said that there were no longer any class antagonisms in the 30s) then why would there need to be a state?

[tir1944]

As socialism is a classless society (Stalin said that there were no longer any class antagonisms in the 30s) then why would there need to be a state?
To supress the leftovers of defeated classes,to oppose and defend against global imperialism.
Stalin,IIRC,said that there were no class antagonisms,but that different classes still existed.

[ZeroNowhere]

A
According to?
Daniel De Leon.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

To supress the leftovers of defeated classes,to oppose and defend against global imperialism.
Stalin,IIRC,said that there were no class antagonisms,but that different classes still existed.

If imperialism is still global, then how can Socialism and, further, communism, be anywhere near being achieved?

[tir1944]

If imperialism is still global, then how can Socialism and, further, communism, be anywhere near being achieved?
Socialism can,Communism can't.

[Rooster]

Stalin,IIRC,said that there were no class antagonisms,but that different classes still existed.

So if you have more than one class then it's not socialism nor communism. What you are describing is corporatism where, in this case, two classes are working together, but we both know that wasn't how it happened and what really happened was that the peasant class was suppressed.

[tir1944]

So if you have more than one class then it's not socialism nor communism.
Says who?

[Gustav HK]

Here is an analysis more of state capitalism in USSR:

http://anasintaxi-en.blogspot.com/2011/09/working-class-in-khrushchev-brezhnev.html

Here is an analysis on PRC:

http://espressostalinist.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/the-path-of-capitalist-development-of-chinese-economy/


Basically the economy of post-Stalin USSR became decentralized, with the individual enterprises getting more power, and Gosplan lesser, especially after the 1965 economic reform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform

The PRC economic system allowed for capitalists to recieve dividends from their capital, and other ways to get profits, although officially it was state property.
Capitalists often also remained leaders of the state enterprises.

[Belleraphone]

I understand why you've made your point, but the truth is that we have, in general, had either State Capitalism or a limited form of laissez-faire Capitalism called 'free market Capitalism'. I agree there has never been full blown anarcho-Capitalism, though, which is what I think you're saying.

But economies like Finland or the European post-WW2 Social Democracies were not actually State Capitalist, because in general the state, as an employer, was seen as the 'employer of last resort' and the guarantor of a minimum standard of life, whereas in genuine State Capitalist societies such as the USSR, the 'state' was interwoven with the government and decided, pretty much (though this did change with Kruschev, Kosygin et al), prices, employment, what was to be produced.

In places like Finland etc., the market has always decided, via the demand curve, what is to be produced (well, theoretically, of course!). Thus, no State Capitalism. It's a particular theory, it's not simply Capitalism attached to a strong welfare state.
Hmm, well to me laissez-faire basically means no state intervention in the economy. All capitalist states have at one point or another tried to influence the economy through Keynesian means. Think of subsidies on farms and such. While they do not set prices, wages, ect, they do exert some kind of control over the economy when it suits them. This is why I think no "free market capitalism" has ever really existed, but rather different extents of state capitalism.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Hmm, well to me laissez-faire basically means no state intervention in the economy. All capitalist states have at one point or another tried to influence the economy through Keynesian means. Think of subsidies on farms and such. While they do not set prices, wages, ect, they do exert some kind of control over the economy when it suits them. This is why I think no "free market capitalism" has ever really existed, but rather different extents of state capitalism.

State Capitalism is a fundamentally different system to free-market Capitalism.

The former consists of the likes of the USSR, GDR, Cuba etc., whilst the latter is more USA, Western Europe etc.

Under State Capitalism, 'free markets' didn't really exist, rather the capitalist element came from the extraction of profit by the state, from the working class.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Socialism can,Communism can't.

Socialism cannot exist when different classes still exist, for the existence of different classes means that wage exploitation, in one form or another, will still continue.

Socialism isn't achieved by flying a red flag and saying 'we are Socialists, we are in power, therefore this is Socialism'.

[Belleraphone]

State Capitalism is a fundamentally different system to free-market Capitalism.

The former consists of the likes of the USSR, GDR, Cuba etc., whilst the latter is more USA, Western Europe etc.

Under State Capitalism, 'free markets' didn't really exist, rather the capitalist element came from the extraction of profit by the state, from the working class.
I realize this, but I'm saying in some way or another, even USA and western Europe intervene in the Free Market, which is why I don't they are really Free-Market capitalist states, just a moderate state capitalist state.

[A Marxist Historian]

Incredibly enough, Lenin said this of banks:

Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism;..A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" (Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? October 1, 1917 Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 26, 1972, pp. 87-136).

I wonder what he would have said about the global protests yestereday and the anger vented against the banking establishment in particular

First thing the bolsheviks did was to seize the banks at gunpoint. A fair amount of anger was involved.

So I assume he would say that that might be a better thing to do than just occupying parks and plazas in their general vicinity.

Though he would add that this would have to be done by a mass workers movement led by a revolutionary party like his own, not by self-appointed middle class semi-radicals obsessed with thumb wiggling.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

So you're denying the existence of the labour market in the USSR, and by extension, of wages?

A total non sequitur.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

You are labouring under a serious misapprehension. The USSR was not a so called "planned" economy. It was a market ecopnomy. Labour power was a commodity. Consumer goods were commodities. Production goods - capital - were commodities being bought and sold between state enterprises on the basis of legally binding contracts. with official and sometimes unoffical funding Gosplan was basically a farce, a charade No plan emanating from ir was ever strictly fuilfilled. Some never appeared until well into the planning implementation period. The plans did not actually guide the economy but, on the contrary, were routinely modified as circumstances changed to make it appear as if the targets were being fulfilled. State enterprises, required by law since the Stalin days to pursue profit, had far more room for manouvre in respect of wages levels, employment and sourcing inputs than is sometimes supposed. Indeed the whole system was a lot more decentralised than is often imagined.

This is cultish foolishness, reminiscent of the creationists' attempts to deny that there is evolution.

Yes of course it was a planned economy. What's produced in a capitalist economy is decided by the laws of supply and demand in a competitive economic system, as explained by Marx and, for that matter, any competent economist. What got produced in the Soviet Union was decided by the Politburo and implemented by Gosplan, whether or not it was profitable.

The Soviet economic system was noncompetitive, except in the same way you have competition within any bureaucracy between different bureaucrats seeking promotions. And over the long term it wasn't too competitive with the West, either, which is why it went under. Except in China, where it is!

Gosplan was a bunch of privileged bureaucrats, with little input from the Soviet people, so naturally their planning was very bureaucratic and often quite inept. Fortunately, it was somewhat decentralized as you note, which helped avoid the worst bureaucratic disasters.

The history of the Soviet economy is a constant seesaw between excessive decentralization leading to chaos and excessive centralization leading to bureaucratic blunders. Unsolvable, as either way planning is in the hands of privileged bureaucrats with insufficient input from the rank and file. Which is why you have a longterm tendency of Stalinist bureaucrats to resort to market measures when the economy starts running out of gas, China being the extreme example of this.

All that buying and selling between enterprises and legally binding contracts and profit figuring was just paperwork for convenience, which the Party could set aside instantly whenever it felt like it, and quite often did. Try that in a capitalist economy and everything goes kerflooey.

Basically your argument is that, since it didn't work very well, therefore it must have been capitalist. Trotsky commented on that back in the '30s, faced with similar arguments, that this was like (I'm paraphrasing) a guy with a Fix Or Repair Daily i.e. a Ford commenting after the tenth time it's Found On Roadside Dead that it isn't a car at all. Emotionally satisfying but unscientific.


In fact "state capitalism" is the only apt decription of the system that existed in the Soviet Union. It had nothing whaotsoever to do with socialism in its traditional Marxian sense

Well, it wasn't a socialist society, because a socialist society is something that has to be created, something that will take generations after the workers seize power, it ain't add water and stir once. And cannot possibly be created in an economically and socially backward country like the Russian Empire under the Tsars, with nine tenths of the population festering in rural idiocy and using sixteenth century horses and ploughs, and the vast majority illiterate.

In fact, as Marx and Engels repeatedly explained, you can't even have socialism in one country, you need worldwide workers rule so that the workers can *create* a socialist society, which to work has to have an economic and technological level *higher than* any capitalist society.

But the Russian Revolution broke the country free of capitalism and made the construction of socialism a possibility. Even under Stalinist bureaucratic rule, in the Soviet Union you had no unemployment, no homelessness, free health care and education for everybody, dirt cheap rent and public transportation, etc. etc. In other words you had the realisation of a large part of the socialist program.

And, of course, the Soviet Union beat Hitler and saved the human race from collapse into fascist barbarism, something the European capitalists were obviously incapable of doing, whether or not they even wanted to, which is more than open to question.

If in your eyes none of that has anything to do with socialism, then there is a problem here, and it's not a problem with socialism or the Soviet Union, it's a problem with you.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I rephrase what I said. Lenin didn't say the SU was state capitalist, he said it would be an advancement if the SU was state capitalist (instead of regular "private" capitalism").

http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm


As you can see Lenin erroneously believes that capitalism under control of the proletarian dictatorship can be directed towards socialist ends. History, but also the people Lenin was polemicising against, argued that state capitalism is not a transition to socialism but a transition back to "private" capitalism.

However most interesting about this passage is not that Lenin is arguing in favor of state capitalism but that he never calls the SU socialist. The only time Russia was said to have socialist production relations was under Stalin.

Well, Lenin unlike Stalin was a Marxist, and understood that it was impossible to build socialism in one country, and especially a country as backward as the one he had suddenly found himself at the head of. He understood that in the conditions of extreme economic and social backwardness of Tsarist Russia, even bringing in state-sponsored capitalist relations would be a step forward.

And he was absolutely right. The pro-capitalist "state capitalist" measures of his New Economic Policy, with state favoritism for small-scale private capitalism in agriculture (the "kulaks") and trade (the NEPmen) rescued Soviet Russia from economic collapse and starvation. It was very successful and an excellent idea.

What Lenin meant by "state capitalism" was favoritism for private capitalism by the Russian workers' state. So during the NEP period you had a socialist, state sector of the economy, and a private, capitalist sector of the economy, with the government holding the balance between them.

Under Stalin and particularly Bukharin, Mr. "peasants enrich yourselves," the capitalist sector started getting out of hand, with the beginnings of the kind of social polarization that you see now in China, with the ultra Bukharinist policies of the Chinese Communist Party. So Trotsky's Left Opposition came into being, demanding more emphasis on the state sector and higher taxes on the private sector to industrialize the USSR.

The country was falling behind and going into social crisis, so Stalin decided to kill two birds with one stone, and outflank the Left by just abolishing the private sector and state-izing everything, which gained him the support of Soviet workers vs. the Left but was a very bad idea resulting in economic disasters, notably the Great Famine in the Ukraine caused by forced premature collectivization.

And that's what created the bureaucratic Stalinist social system of the next fifty years, which finally collapsed under Gorbachev.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Not everything Trotsky said was holy writ, just as not everything Marx wrote was gospel. These people, like us, were humans. And sometimes, they got shit wrong and fucked things up. Plain and simple. Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a caste-ruled degenerated workers' state was wrong. And he's wrong in the quote also. Trotsky acknowledged he got shit wrong, at least implicitly, in his changing views on whether a revolution was necessary to overthrow what he called the Stalinist caste.

Trotsky's quote in which he claims the USSR to be a more benevolent form of state capitalism is premised on the notion that there can be capitalist-style "production for the sake of production" that is democratically controlled, or controlled by the workers. There cannot be. Because production for the sake of competitive accumulation necessarily entails having to make decisions about production on the basis not of what the people want or choose, but on the basis of what your competitor is doing. It's based on the anarchic law of value, whether that law be imposed from markets functioning "freely" within a nation-state, or whether the law is operating on the basis of competition between states. A democratic "workers' capitalism" just logically cannot happen.

What the quote also shows, interestingly enough, is Trotsky's growing recognition that the USSR was essentially capitalist.

Capitalism isn't production for the sake of "competitive accumulation," i.e. keeping up with the Joneses. It's production for *profit.*

Production decisions in the USSR weren't based on what your "competitor" was doing, except in the sense that if a bureaucrat's auto factory, say, was producing fewer or poorer cars than some other bureaucrats, said bureaucrat was less likely to get a promotion under Brezhnev, and/or more likely to end up shot or in the Gulag under Stalin.

They were based on the economic plan formulated by Gosplan. Which, as has been pointed out, was rarely properly fulfilled, but how well you fulfilled that plan was what *ultimately* determined a bureaucrat's upward or downward mobility in the bureaucracy.

The utter opposite of any capitalist economy, where if a company isn't making a profit, it goes broke, or gets taken over by a competitor. And the ultimate determinant is the stock market, something which didn't even exist in the USSR.

The notion that the *state* sector of the Soviet economy was "state capitalist" is something you'll find no trace of in anything Lenin ever said. This idea was Gregory Zinoviev's misinterpretation, which he started floating in around about 1922, the point in time at which you get that quote from Trotsky.

Between the death of Lenin in 1923 and Stalin's consolidation of power in 1925, if there was anybody recognized as the top Soviet leader, it was Zinoviev. He is the uncredited author essentially of the Tony Cliff version of "state capitalism."

Trotsky thought it was so utterly anti-Marxist that at first he did not support Zinoviev vs. Stalin in 1925, as he thought that Zinoviev's "state capitalist" misapplication of Marxist theory was as bad or worse than Stalin's idea of "socialism in one country," and might have equally disastrous consequences if not worse.

As he makes clear in his notes for his notebook on the party conference at which Stalin toppled Zinoviev, which have been published in the first volume I think it was of Challenge of the Left Opposition. Not transcribed yet for the Internet unfortunately.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I understand why you've made your point, but the truth is that we have, in general, had either State Capitalism or a limited form of laissez-faire Capitalism called 'free market Capitalism'. I agree there has never been full blown anarcho-Capitalism, though, which is what I think you're saying.

But economies like Finland or the European post-WW2 Social Democracies were not actually State Capitalist, because in general the state, as an employer, was seen as the 'employer of last resort' and the guarantor of a minimum standard of life, whereas in genuine State Capitalist societies such as the USSR, the 'state' was interwoven with the government and decided, pretty much (though this did change with Kruschev, Kosygin et al), prices, employment, what was to be produced.

In places like Finland etc., the market has always decided, via the demand curve, what is to be produced (well, theoretically, of course!). Thus, no State Capitalism. It's a particular theory, it's not simply Capitalism attached to a strong welfare state.

Fortunately you have noticed that there is a fundamental difference between a society like Finland (which of course was under heavy Soviet influence, indeed occupied by Soviet troops at first) and the Soviet Union. Anyone who can't at least see that is, simply, ignorant.

But the very definition of capitalism is that production is decided by profit and the market. If production is decided by "the state," that raises the question, just what is the state?

If you are a Marxist, you analyse the state as a social category stemming from class society, a vehicle for the dominion of one class over another.

If you are not a Marxist, then you don't analyse society in class terms, and you can see the state as a free floating entity ruling society, either "totalitarian" if you are an ordinary non-Marxist, or "bureaucratic collectivist" if you are an ordinary non-Marxist disguising yourself as a Marxist.

Can you have a capitalist state without a capitalist class? Well, if you are dealing with an economically backward society with no capitalist class, if you have a state whose purpose is to *construct* a capitalist class to rule over the country, that is a capitalist state, and the economy can be described if you like as "state capitalist," like say Burma, where once upon a time all industry, such as it was, was owned by the state, but which promptly turned all that over to the generals once they'd got things going enough. Musharraf in Egypt being another example, following upon Nasser, another "state capitalist." Or hell, the US Post Office, which now they want to privatize.

But there was no capitalist class in the USSR, just a bureaucracy that had risen out of the working class and the overwhelming majority of its members, like Brezhnev, being former factory workers. It was *not* in the business of privatizing the Soviet economy, which is why when the bureaucrats, or rather their children, finally decided that that was what they wanted, the Soviet state had to be destroyed and the Soviet Communist Party illegalized.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Says who?

That Marx fellow. He wrote a pamphlet about it, called the Communist Manifesto. Check it out.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

Jesus fuck, man, learn to fucking post. Or just leave us with a link to Spartland. No one takes that shit seriously but you anyway.

If you buy that Burma was "state capitalism" despite the fact that the Burmese State owned all property and productive output, and attempted to coordinate it via a central administration and Five Year "Plans", then what makes a workers' state, purely the rhetoric? I do not see how the social relations of production differed significantly in principle in the USSR post-1928 and Burma during the "Burmese Road to Socialism".

Significant portions of the Soviet bureaucracy clearly lost faith in the Soviet State and sought to dismantle the central administration (planning is an apologetic misnomer) and introduce a labor market so Soviet labor could be intensively exploited at prevailing international rates. They took the political decisions to dismantle the structures to introduce Western-style capitalism. The idea this was some fundamental 'all the way or nothing' issue is simply ridiculous if you look at the history of the reform through the 1980s, and the obvious counterexample of the PRC, which has indeed reformed its Leninist edifice into a fully-functioning capitalist state along Western lines, with a special role for SOEs and state investment, but looking at Western Europe for much of the post-war era tells us that is nothing special.

[Binh]

State-led industrialization in Japan in the late 1800s, Germany post 1870s, and Egypt under Nasser.

[Lucretia]

Yes of course it was a planned economy. What's produced in a capitalist economy is decided by the laws of supply and demand in a competitive economic system, as explained by Marx and, for that matter, any competent economist. What got produced in the Soviet Union was decided by the Politburo and implemented by Gosplan, whether or not it was profitable.

Very few people involved in left politics, and no serious contemporary scholars of the Soviet economy, dispute the fact that the Soviet Union did not have a "centrally planned" economy, where production and distribution operated according to a rational design. It was subject to the very same contradictions as every other capitalist society, which explains its tendency to stagnate (which was not, in case you are wondering, planned by the bureaucrats). Admittedly those contradictions were mediated by greater state intervention, but they were never eliminated.


The Soviet economic system was noncompetitive, except in the same way you have competition within any bureaucracy between different bureaucrats seeking promotions. And over the long term it wasn't too competitive with the West, either, which is why it went under. Except in China, where it is!This is incorrect and completely ignores the extent to which Soviet bureaucrats and economists constantly compared the productivity of the Soviet economy as a whole, and in specific industries, with Western counterparts. It did this because it was in competition with the West. The Cold War was one giant competition -- military, economic, scientific. And to ignore this is to render incomprehensible what was going on in both the United States and in the Soviet Union. The fact that the Soviet Union failed to compete does not mean that it did not try to compete.



Well, it wasn't a socialist society, because a socialist society is something that has to be created, something that will take generations after the workers seize power,Where in any of Marx's or Engels' texts do you see any reference to the idea that socialism/communism takes generations to build after the overthrow of capitalism? Socialism is the result of the revolutionary overthrow of class society. Class does not gradually wither away, and the idea that it does sounds more Bernsteinian than Marxian.

[Lucretia]

Capitalism isn't production for the sake of "competitive accumulation," i.e. keeping up with the Joneses. It's production for *profit.*

This is semantics. "Profit" differs from accumulation in what meaningful sense in the context of this debate? Not one iota. Capitalism is production for the sake of expanding production, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, as a way of competing with other outlays of capital -- whatever the relationship of those outlays to the state, or whether they constitute states. You have to remember Marx's definition of capital as self-expanding value. This is basic Marxian economics.


Production decisions in the USSR weren't based on what your "competitor" was doing, except in the sense that if a bureaucrat's auto factory, say, was producing fewer or poorer cars than some other bureaucrats, said bureaucrat was less likely to get a promotion under Brezhnev, and/or more likely to end up shot or in the Gulag under Stalin.If you honestly believe this, your username on this forum must be a joke. Soviet economists, bureaucrats, and their hangers-on were constantly analyzing the internal workings of their economy and comparing those workings with Western capitalism. These comparisons did not occur because of sheer curiosity. It occurred because of competition with the West. I almost feel embarrassed that I need to spell this out to a self-described historian, but that competition included competing for recently decolonized states that were looking for efficient ways to "modernize" by re-investing accumulated capital.


They were based on the economic plan formulated by Gosplan. This is like saying the U.S. government operates according to the U.S. Constitution. Plans were made, adjusted, abandoned, rewritten after the fact. Things did not operate according to any plan. As I wrote above, no serious scholar of the Soviet economy, including historians, disputes this. I am amazed that you do. Presumably for ideological reasons.


The utter opposite of any capitalist economy, where if a company isn't making a profit, it goes broke, or gets taken over by a competitor. And the ultimate determinant is the stock market, something which didn't even exist in the USSR.So a stock market is necessary for capitalism to exist? :blushing:


The notion that the *state* sector of the Soviet economy was "state capitalist" is something you'll find no trace of in anything Lenin ever said. This idea was Gregory Zinoviev's misinterpretation, which he started floating in around about 1922, the point in time at which you get that quote from Trotsky.Since I was not basing my argument on the veracity of Trotsky's quote, and was actually challenging it, I fail to see how impugning its accuracy to throw its veracity in to question affects my argument at all.

[A Marxist Historian]

Jesus fuck, man, learn to fucking post. Or just leave us with a link to Spartland. No one takes that shit seriously but you anyway.

If you buy that Burma was "state capitalism" despite the fact that the Burmese State owned all property and productive output, and attempted to coordinate it via a central administration and Five Year "Plans", then what makes a workers' state, purely the rhetoric? I do not see how the social relations of production differed significantly in principle in the USSR post-1928 and Burma during the "Burmese Road to Socialism".

Significant portions of the Soviet bureaucracy clearly lost faith in the Soviet State and sought to dismantle the central administration (planning is an apologetic misnomer) and introduce a labor market so Soviet labor could be intensively exploited at prevailing international rates. They took the political decisions to dismantle the structures to introduce Western-style capitalism. The idea this was some fundamental 'all the way or nothing' issue is simply ridiculous if you look at the history of the reform through the 1980s, and the obvious counterexample of the PRC, which has indeed reformed its Leninist edifice into a fully-functioning capitalist state along Western lines, with a special role for SOEs and state investment, but looking at Western Europe for much of the post-war era tells us that is nothing special.

Gracchus, who elected you as the guy who knows what everyone else here takes seriously? And frankly, as far as I'm concerned, if people here don't want to take the very serious things I have to say seriously, well, that's their misfortune and none o' my own.

How was Burma different from the USSR? Let me count the ways...

Actually, it's real simple. The Burmese state never did and doesn't now do anything for the working people of Burma. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Less social services there than in India.

And its whole *purpose* back then was to create a capitalist class in Burma, out of the army generals who made it up. Being as, at the time you had everything nationalized, there wasn't one! And did so, and now the generals make up one of the greediest and most brutal and vicious capitalist classes in the world. The same folk running Burma now that were running it then, when they were claiming to be "socialist" and everything was nationalized--something not accomplished by nationalizing anything owned by anybody in Burma, just old Brit property.

And in the USSR you had ... but I'd just be repeating myself. Eveybody knows that the USSR was totally different from the standpoint of working people. Run, albeit bureaucratically, in something resembling the interests of working people.

And now Russia and Ukraine are capitalist. How did that happen? Slowly and gradually as in Burma, with the same folk in charge at all times? No, by *destroying* the USSR, you can't even find it on the map anymore, and smashing and destroying the Soviet Communist Party and most of the apparatus of the Soviet state, which was pretty much the same thing as the Soviet Communist Party in the first place.

And claiming that China is a capitalist state is one of the great urban myths of Western leftists. Since the stuff they buy in stores is all made in China by Chinese capitalist entrepreneurs in the private sector, they think China is capitalist. People who actually live in China know better. Chinese capitalism is for export. The core of the Chinese economy is still state owned and run by the Chinese Communist Party, not by the Chinese capitalist class, which would very much like to run China but doesn't.

And run on political lines, with the bureaucrats balancing between the large, powerful and growing Chinese working and capitalist classes, which sooner or later will grind it out of existence between them, one way or another. Not according to principles of capitalist profitability!

Gracchus, have you even noticed that we're going through a worldwide crisis of capitalism? And that China for some reason seems just about immune to it? Doesn't that tell you something?

-M.H.-

[HEAD ICE]

Wisdom from the Spartacist League on China:

The fundamentally different purpose of China’s investments in Africa can be seen in the value of the commodities they generate. All commodities—from mined products to factory-produced goods—embody both use value (as desirable objects of consumption) and exchange value (broadly reflected in market prices). Under capitalism, the owners of industrial plants and other means of production amass profit by hiring labor to produce commodities, with the purpose of increasing exchange value. China’s overseas investments, which are financed by several of the mainland’s state banks, are driven not by the profit motive but by the need for raw materials for its collectivized industries at home—i.e., to extract use value.

[A Marxist Historian]

Very few people involved in left politics, and no serious contemporary scholars of the Soviet economy, dispute the fact that the Soviet Union did not have a "centrally planned" economy, where production and distribution operated according to a rational design. It was subject to the very same contradictions as every other capitalist society, which explains its tendency to stagnate (which was not, in case you are wondering, planned by the bureaucrats). Admittedly those contradictions were mediated by greater state intervention, but they were never eliminated.

Well, if you think Tony Cliff and Chris Harman are/were the only serious contemporary scholars of the Soviet economy and people involved in left politics, then you'd be right. But then, if pigs had wings they could fly.

Who are the most serious scholars of the Soviet economy? Try the late E. H. Carr and Robert Davies, I would suppose. I think most academic students of the USSR who are not stone cold reactionaries would tend to agree (admittedly, a diminishing number). Read what they have to say and learn something.

The idea that the Soviet Union was subject to the boom and bust cycle, stock market crashes, permanent mass unemployment, etc. etc. is, well, delusional.

Did it tend to stagnate? Of course. Why? Because it was mismanaged by the Soviet bureaucracy. Trotsky explained this all very well in the book he wrote 'way back in the 1930s, and nothing that happened ever afterwards was outside the framework of his analysis. Indeed, he predicted exactly how the final collapse happened in 1992, almost down to the T.


This is incorrect and completely ignores the extent to which Soviet bureaucrats and economists constantly compared the productivity of the Soviet economy as a whole, and in specific industries, with Western counterparts. It did this because it was in competition with the West. The Cold War was one giant competition -- military, economic, scientific. And to ignore this is to render incomprehensible what was going on in both the United States and in the Soviet Union. The fact that the Soviet Union failed to compete does not mean that it did not try to compete.

Cliffism at its most cultist and bizarre.

Of coursev the Cold War was a giant "competition," all wars are. Fortunately, it didn't ever go nuclear, so you never had a competition to see how quickly the human race could be exterminated.

Had the Soviet Union not tried to compete militarily with the West, at least in the nuclear field, Truman would have turned the whole country into irradiated rubble.

Who was the great advocate of the Soviet Union "competing" with the West? Trotsky of course. Just read anything he wrote about England or America during the 1920s when he was a top Soviet official.

As he explained repeatedly, the whole reason you couldn't have socialism in one country was that the Soviet Union was competing with the capitalist world, so that if you didn't have world revolution sooner or later, the USSR would ultimately lose the race and go under.

Which is pretty much what happened. In Eastern Europe especially, it was the failure of the Eastern European economies to successfully compete with Western Europe that led to their collapse.



Where in any of Marx's or Engels' texts do you see any reference to the idea that socialism/communism takes generations to build after the overthrow of capitalism? Socialism is the result of the revolutionary overthrow of class society. Class does not gradually wither away, and the idea that it does sounds more Bernsteinian than Marxian.

How long it takes is hard to say. Generations is my particular guess.

But yes, classes gradually wither away after the workers take the power and overthrow the old capitalist state in non-Bernsteinian fashion. As does the state itself, as Lenin emphasized. That is very elementary Marx, Engels and Lenin. Just read what they have to say on the subject of the idea that Marx thought was his most important political contribution, namely the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

This is semantics. "Profit" differs from accumulation in what meaningful sense in the context of this debate? Not one iota. Capitalism is production for the sake of expanding production, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, as a way of competing with other outlays of capital -- whatever the relationship of those outlays to the state, or whether they constitute states. You have to remember Marx's definition of capital as self-expanding value. This is basic Marxian economics.

No, capitalism isn't production for the sake of expanding production, i.e. for the benefit of society. It is production for the sake of profit, for the benefit of the capitalists, not society.

This should be particularly obvious right now, with capitalists losing interest in the productive process altogether and investing everything in useless speculation.

You see capitalism as some sort of abstract system, which works according to abstract rules. Well, it is that at one level, and when capitalism is working properly, capital is self-expanding value.

But it doesn't work properly, which is why the human race has to get rid of it and replace it with socialism.

The capitalist system is run for the benefit of a particular class in society, the capitalist class. That is what is wrong with it.


If you honestly believe this, your username on this forum must be a joke. Soviet economists, bureaucrats, and their hangers-on were constantly analyzing the internal workings of their economy and comparing those workings with Western capitalism. These comparisons did not occur because of sheer curiosity. It occurred because of competition with the West. I almost feel embarrassed that I need to spell this out to a self-described historian, but that competition included competing for recently decolonized states that were looking for efficient ways to "modernize" by re-investing accumulated capital.

So yo think that when Khrushchev lent money to India to build factories, this was investment seeking a profit? Really? Do you know anything about the Soviet role in the world at all?

Ecept for a couple very brief experiments in the mid-late '40s, at the height of the Soviet alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill, Soviet investments abroad were *always* political, with the objective of getting Egypt or India or whatever country to side with the USSR in the Cold War, and *always* at a loss. The USSR never made a dime out of any of them. They wer, quite simply, foreign aid.

If anybody was being exploited in this process, it was the Soviet Union being exploited by treacherous nationalist demagogues like Nasser and his successors Sadat and Mubaraq.

Were Soviet economists always analyzing the internal workings of their economy and comparing those workings with Western capitalism? Of course. Lenin and Trotsky started that trend. Preobrazhensky was the guy in the Left Opposition who put the most effort into that, but Trotsky was not far behind. Indeed if anything, Preobrazhensky didn't do quite enough of that, and Trotsky emphasized it more.


This is like saying the U.S. government operates according to the U.S. Constitution. Plans were made, adjusted, abandoned, rewritten after the fact. Things did not operate according to any plan. As I wrote above, no serious scholar of the Soviet economy, including historians, disputes this. I am amazed that you do. Presumably for ideological reasons.

I don't know how to respond, except that you simply have it backwards. No serious scholar of the Soviet economy would agree with you. And yes, I am extremely familiar with what serious scholars have to say.

Of course plans were made, adjusted, abandoned and rewritten after the fact. I should certainly hope so! If you don't allow your plans to be corrected by the real world, you are an idiot. If anything, Soviet planners were insufficiently flexible, rather than adopting the kind of insane rigidity you seem to advocate as the only "real" way of planning an economy.

For your own benefit, I'd suggest you actually read some serious scholars not beating particular sectarian drums, like Cliff or Harman or Ticktin.

The most generally recognized and respected scholar of the Soviet economy these days in the world is Robert Davies. Go read some of his books before you make a fool of yourself any further.

-M.H.-


So a stock market is necessary for capitalism to exist? :blushing:

Since I was not basing my argument on the veracity of Trotsky's quote, and was actually challenging it, I fail to see how impugning its accuracy to throw its veracity in to question affects my argument at all.

[A Marxist Historian]

Wisdom from the Spartacist League on China:

The full article, which like the particular quote Head Ice pointed out, is excellent, is at

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/987/china-africa.html

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

No, capitalism isn't production for the sake of expanding production, i.e. for the benefit of society. It is production for the sake of profit, for the benefit of the capitalists, not society.

Sorry, but production for the sake of production isn't production for the sake of society. It's just the opposite. It is blind to society's needs. Where do you get the idea that the two are equivalent?

As for my definition of capitalism as production for the sake of production, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, I didn't just invent this definition. Marx did. He observed that the capitalist imperative is: "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ... Therefore, save, save, ie reconvert the greatest portion of surplus value, or surplus product, into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake."

Notice that the word "profit," which is one potential way surplus value can be realized, is completely absent from this definition. Again, this is not some extreme reworking of Marx. All of this is straight from Marx himself.


This should be particularly obvious right now, with capitalists losing interest in the productive process altogether and investing everything in useless speculation.

Speculation is the result of a declining rate of profit due to the rising organic composition of capital. It has nothing to do with whether surplus value must be realized in the form of a private firm's profit, in order for the social system in which that unit of capital exists to be termed capitalism.


You see capitalism as some sort of abstract system, which works according to abstract rules. Well, it is that at one level, and when capitalism is working properly, capital is self-expanding value.

I see capitalism as some sort of abstract system? Marx saw capitalism as a process that was developing and expanding in various societies of his day. He used a method called abstraction to delineate the essential processes from those societies which made them capitalist rather than, say, feudal. And that process was self-expanding value through the sale of labor power by people who had been dispossessed from the means of production. The USSR from roughly the first Five Year Plan onward meets all these criteria. Ergo it is capitalist.


So yo think that when Khrushchev lent money to India to build factories, this was investment seeking a profit? Really? Do you know anything about the Soviet role in the world at all?

Again, apart from some boilerplate remarks about the bourgeoisie being bad and capitalism not working, you don't understand capitalism, at least from a Marxian perspective. You seem to think that capitalism depends upon individual people being motivated by greed to become wealthy. Such people existed long before capitalism, and nowhere in Marx's texts do I see him saying that this is a defining feature of capitalism. What I do see is him saying that capitalism is characterized by a blind drive to accumulate. Some capitalists might be greedy. Some, like Engels, might be compassionate. But the mindset of the individual capitalist is not relevant. The system of production for the sake of production is.


Ecept for a couple very brief experiments in the mid-late '40s, at the height of the Soviet alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill, Soviet investments abroad were *always* political, with the objective of getting Egypt or India or whatever country to side with the USSR in the Cold War, and *always* at a loss. The USSR never made a dime out of any of them. They wer, quite simply, foreign aid.

Now you seem to be reading my statements with about as much care (none at all) as you seem to have read Marx. I didn't say that the Soviet Union invested money in overseas ventures, like modern-day multinationals, with the intention of making profit. I said that the USSR was in a life-or-death competition with capitalist countries in virtually every aspect of social life -- economic, scientific, educational, etc etc. This often meant lending supplies, food, or other forms of aid to foreign governments at a huge loss. The point I was making, which you seem not to comprehend, is that one aspect of economic competition was who could demonstrate a more rapid means of improving technology and the like. Part of the pressure on the Soviet Union to accumulate as much as possible, and to reinvest that accumulated capital into developing more capital, was to build up military capabilities, as Kidron noted decades ago, but also to woo potential allies from the recently decolonized world.


Were Soviet economists always analyzing the internal workings of their economy and comparing those workings with Western capitalism? Of course. Lenin and Trotsky started that trend. Preobrazhensky was the guy in the Left Opposition who put the most effort into that, but Trotsky was not far behind. Indeed if anything, Preobrazhensky didn't do quite enough of that, and Trotsky emphasized it more.

So you admit that Soviet economists were judging the workings of their economic system on the basis of other economies that were subject to the law of value. The Soviet economy was, in other words, being tailored around the law of value, albeit in a mediated way. Which was my exact point.


I don't know how to respond, except that you simply have it backwards. No serious scholar of the Soviet economy would agree with you. And yes, I am extremely familiar with what serious scholars have to say.

Really. Name me one contemporary scholar who says that the Soviet economy functioned fully in accordance with the centrally drawn up plans. Just one.


Of course plans were made, adjusted, abandoned and rewritten after the fact. I should certainly hope so! If you don't allow your plans to be corrected by the real world, you are an idiot. If anything, Soviet planners were insufficiently flexible, rather than adopting the kind of insane rigidity you seem to advocate as the only "real" way of planning an economy.

Once you concede that the economy did not function according to any central plan, but that rather various plans were tailored around what the economy was doing, you must necessarily concede at least the possibility that part of what the economy was doing, which the bureaucrat plans could not account for or plan for, was systemically mirroring bottlenecks and contradictions prevalent throughout other capitalist economies.


For your own benefit, I'd suggest you actually read some serious scholars not beating particular sectarian drums, like Cliff or Harman or Ticktin.

Oh, joy. The sectarian label again. I knew it would just be matter of time. Just like I knew I would be labelled "sectarian" for taking the ISO to task for its latest issue of the ISR. You remember the ISO, don't you? It's the Cliffite sect I am supposedly banging the drum for. :rolleyes:


The most generally recognized and respected scholar of the Soviet economy these days in the world is Robert Davies. Go read some of his books before you make a fool of yourself any further.

-M.H.-

I have read Robert Davies. I know for a fact he does not cling to the ridiculous subjectivist theory that the Soviet economy was explicable entirely in terms of bureaucratic decisions and plans.

[Lucretia]

How long it takes is hard to say. Generations is my particular guess.

But yes, classes gradually wither away after the workers take the power and overthrow the old capitalist state in non-Bernsteinian fashion. As does the state itself, as Lenin emphasized. That is very elementary Marx, Engels and Lenin. Just read what they have to say on the subject of the idea that Marx thought was his most important political contribution, namely the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

-M.H.-

I noticed you didn't answer my question, which was where in any of Marx's or Engels' texts you saw any indication that classes will wither away gradually over generations after a socialist revolution.

The reason you didn't answer it is that you are not aware of any such place in their writings. And the reason you are not aware of any such place is that there is no such place.

The reason there is no such place is because the idea that classes will gradually disappear is flatly contradicted by what Marx and Engels repeatedly wrote. Classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production. When the means of production are controlled by a minority who in turn use that control to exploit the majority, that society is a class society. Socialism, according to Marx and Engels, is the result of the revolutionary overthrow of class society by the working class. It is not the result of a "growing over" process of the kind described by Bernstein, which you unwittingly seem to be parroting.

[A Marxist Historian]

Sorry, but production for the sake of production isn't production for the sake of society. It's just the opposite. It is blind to society's needs. Where do you get the idea that the two are equivalent?

As for my definition of capitalism as production for the sake of production, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, I didn't just invent this definition. Marx did. He observed that the capitalist imperative is: "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ... Therefore, save, save, ie reconvert the greatest portion of surplus value, or surplus product, into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake."

Notice that the word "profit," which is one potential way surplus value can be realized, is completely absent from this definition. Again, this is not some extreme reworking of Marx. All of this is straight from Marx himself.

That is merely out-of-context quote mongering, in the fashion of a Soviet "Marxist-Leninist" or a Bible scholar. That was the farthest thing from Marx's *definition* of capitalism, but rather just a description of one aspect of how the system works.

If you think capitalism is not about profit, maybe you should talk to an actual capitalist, who will set you straight.

The realization of surplus value is a function of the system. The individual capitalist doesn't want to realize surplus value, he wants to make a buck.



Speculation is the result of a declining rate of profit due to the rising organic composition of capital. It has nothing to do with whether surplus value must be realized in the form of a private firm's profit, in order for the social system in which that unit of capital exists to be termed capitalism.

I see capitalism as some sort of abstract system? Marx saw capitalism as a process that was developing and expanding in various societies of his day. He used a method called abstraction to delineate the essential processes from those societies which made them capitalist rather than, say, feudal. And that process was self-expanding value through the sale of labor power by people who had been dispossessed from the means of production. The USSR from roughly the first Five Year Plan onward meets all these criteria. Ergo it is capitalist.

You drag abstract criteria out of Marx's analysis of capitalism, wrenching them out of the real workings of the capitalist system into almost meaningless abstractions, and then try to shoehorn Soviet reality into it.

If your definition was valid, then any social system in which workers receive a paycheck and the value of the social product increases is, ipso facto, capitalist.

So workers had been dispossessed of the means of production? Then just who were the new possessors, and how did they possess it? Stocks? Bonds? Debentures? Could they pass down those means of production to their children? No such things existed, because all you had was bureaucrats *administering* the means of production, and not owning them. Society as a whole continued to be the owners of the means of production.

In fact, the result of the Soviet Five Year Plan was to physically wipe out the Soviet capitalist class that had begun to arise under the NEP, not put it in power.

This does not mean that Soviet society was "socialist," it was pretty obviously awful far from that, and Stalin was putting it further with every step he took. But describing it as "capitalist" was palpably absurd.

Yes, there was a Soviet capitalist class in the 1920s. Stalin physically exterminated it.

What makes a society capitalist? Very simple. If it is ruled by a capitalist class, which runs society in its interests and for its benefit, then it is a capitalist society. If a capitalist class does not even exist, then it cannot possibly be a capitalist society.

This is not a complicated question. In order to pretend that the Soviet Union was capitalist, you have to shroud this very simple question in a cloud of obscurity and dogmatic misquotation from Marxist "holy writ."




Again, apart from some boilerplate remarks about the bourgeoisie being bad and capitalism not working, you don't understand capitalism, at least from a Marxian perspective. You seem to think that capitalism depends upon individual people being motivated by greed to become wealthy. Such people existed long before capitalism, and nowhere in Marx's texts do I see him saying that this is a defining feature of capitalism. What I do see is him saying that capitalism is characterized by a blind drive to accumulate. Some capitalists might be greedy. Some, like Engels, might be compassionate. But the mindset of the individual capitalist is not relevant. The system of production for the sake of production is.

A blind drive to accumulate ... for whom? For the profit of the capitalist class, or to increase society's wealth in general? You don't make any distinction between the two.

For a society to accumulate wealth is a good thing, not a bad thing. This seems a rather elementary point.

In all class societies, capitalist or whatever, surplus value is extracted from the toilers for the benefit of the ruling classes. In a capitalist society, this is done through the wage labor nexus. Extraction of surplus value, not to "accumulate" in general, but to accumulate wealth in the hands of the capitalist class, is what capitalism is all about. And that is what Marx meant.

In the Soviet Union, damn right there was a drive to accumulate, and some of what was accumulated was skimmed off the top by the bureaucracy. But, fundamentally, the drive to accumulate was a necessary drive for social benefit, because the people of the USSR were poorer than in other countries, and the USSR needed to build up its industrial and military might to defend itself.

This would have been equally true if you had the purest of workers democracies in the USSR. You would have had exactly the same drive to accumulate as in the Stalinist USSR, the difference being that accumulation would have gone on more rapidly and more effectively.

You didn't have production for the sake of production in the USSR, you had production for the sake of tractors, steel mills, tanks, missiles and all the other things that the Soviet working class so desperately needed.

The only reason that you had a drive for accumulation was to be able to survive in a capitalist world. In a hypothetical all-Stalinist world, something that could never have happened, there would have been no drive for accumulation whatsoever.

About the closest one ever came to this was Czechoslovakia, where in the fifties the system seemed totally secure, and the working class was relatively content, high standard of living about on a plane with Western Europe, none of the working class protest movements you saw elsewhere in Eastern Europe in the fifties. The "drive for accumulation" came to a complete halt. From about 1950 to the mid sixties the Stalinists there simply stopped accumulating altogether. Didn't build any new factories or renovate old ones, the industrial stock gradually decayed, while bureaucrats lived off the fat of the land, workers' wages slowly went up, and society sank deeply into corruption and stupor. A Cliffite paradise of sorts.




Now you seem to be reading my statements with about as much care (none at all) as you seem to have read Marx. I didn't say that the Soviet Union invested money in overseas ventures, like modern-day multinationals, with the intention of making profit. I said that the USSR was in a life-or-death competition with capitalist countries in virtually every aspect of social life -- economic, scientific, educational, etc etc. This often meant lending supplies, food, or other forms of aid to foreign governments at a huge loss. The point I was making, which you seem not to comprehend, is that one aspect of economic competition was who could demonstrate a more rapid means of improving technology and the like. Part of the pressure on the Soviet Union to accumulate as much as possible, and to reinvest that accumulated capital into developing more capital, was to build up military capabilities, as Kidron noted decades ago, but also to woo potential allies from the recently decolonized world.

Well of course it was. This competition was *somewhat* moderated by Stalinist class collaboration and asskissing of the world capitalist class, selling out revolution in Spain and so forth. It would have been much fiercer and even more life and death were it not for the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

When Marx talked about capitalist competition, he meant competition between capitalists *for profit.* You are smearing this together with competition like in the Olympics or something. Bizarre word games.

Capitalists invest overseas to extract superprofits through superexploitation, as explained by Lenin in his pamphlet on imperialism, which you seem not even to have read.

Soviet loans at a loss are the exact opposite, and prove right then and there that the Soviet Union was not a capitalist country. For this is the era of imperialism, of monopoly capitalism. If the USSR were really a state capitalist monopoly system, Soviet investments would be even more exploitative and rapacious than those of smaller private capitalists. That is pretty elementary I should think.[/QUOTE]



So you admit that Soviet economists were judging the workings of their economic system on the basis of other economies that were subject to the law of value. The Soviet economy was, in other words, being tailored around the law of value, albeit in a mediated way. Which was my exact point.

Well of course. Read your Preobrazhensky. Since the USSR was *not* a socialist society but a transitional society, in a capitalist world, the Soviet economy was "tailored" by the conflict between the law of value and the laws of planning. That was true when Lenin was its leader, and was equally true when Stalin was its leader. And certainly that's the way it would have continued to be if the Left Opposition had won out and the USSR had returned to the path of Leninism.

In the '30s, at the time of those Five Year Plans you are so exercised about, Trotsky's criticism of Soviet economists was that they engaged in too many flights of fantasy and did not tailor the Soviet economy sufficiently to the laws of value of the world capitalist economy. Because they, like you I have the impression, suffered from the delusion that it is possible to build socialism in one country.



Really. Name me one contemporary scholar who says that the Soviet economy functioned fully in accordance with the centrally drawn up plans. Just one.

? That would be hard, being as there are no such people, and I am not one either.

It functioned *partially* in accordance with centrally drawn up plans. Too much so in fact.

A workers' state cannot and should not function according to the bourgeois caricature of a "command economy," which you buy into.

As Trotsky put it, what is needed is the mutual interaction between central planning, democratic input from below from the workers, and -- the market.

That's how things are done in a healthy workers' state, in the lengthy transition period between capitalism and socialism, that Marxists have always associated with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In a Stalinist state, with little or no input from the workers from below, you have schizophrenic wavering back and forth between Stalinist commandism and Bukharinist-Dengist "capitalist roadism." Which is the secret to understanding the Soviet economy, or the Chinese, or the Cuban.

By the way, do you argue that Cuba "state capitalist"? Or is that too cryingly absurd for you to admit to in public?



Once you concede that the economy did not function according to any central plan, but that rather various plans were tailored around what the economy was doing, you must necessarily concede at least the possibility that part of what the economy was doing, which the bureaucrat plans could not account for or plan for, was systemically mirroring bottlenecks and contradictions prevalent throughout other capitalist economies.

Suppose I did? Why would that mean anything?

Of course the USSR had some of the same problems other countries had. Would that be any less true if the workers were in charge?

If anything, in the bottleneck department the highly bureaucratized USSR was worse off than your average capitalist country. But, on the other hand, you had no unemployment, no boom bust cycle, no homelessness, free health care and education, and far less disparity even in income, to say nothing of "capital," between the upper and lower layers of society. That seems a lot more important than various economic contradictions and problems it had that did mirror those of surrounding societies.



Oh, joy. The sectarian label again. I knew it would just be matter of time. Just like I knew I would be labelled "sectarian" for taking the ISO to task for its latest issue of the ISR. You remember the ISO, don't you? It's the Cliffite sect I am supposedly banging the drum for. :rolleyes:

I don't know which of the several Cliffite sects you prefer to bang on for, or if perhaps you are an independent Cliffite who doesn't like any of them. Nor do I care. You have a sectarian disregard for the interests of the Soviet working class and their state, however friendly or unfriendly you may be with various components of the alphabet soup.



I have read Robert Davies. I know for a fact he does not cling to the ridiculous subjectivist theory that the Soviet economy was explicable entirely in terms of bureaucratic decisions and plans.

And neither does anyone else. Hell, Ismail wants everybody to read what Stalin has to say on the subject, in his pamphlet "Economic Problems of Socialism." I can't say I'm thrilled at the prospect, but I uspect that Stalin of all people, being intimately involved in it, would be the last person to make any such claims. Only a fool would, and Stalin whatever one wants to say of him was no fool.

But, back to a more pleasant reading prospect. You say you've read Davies. Does the idea that the Soviet Union was a capitalist society ever even cross his mind? Of course not.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I noticed you didn't answer my question, which was where in any of Marx's or Engels' texts you saw any indication that classes will wither away gradually over generations after a socialist revolution.

The reason you didn't answer it is that you are not aware of any such place in their writings. And the reason you are not aware of any such place is that there is no such place.

The reason there is no such place is because the idea that classes will gradually disappear is flatly contradicted by what Marx and Engels repeatedly wrote. Classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production. When the means of production are controlled by a minority who in turn use that control to exploit the majority, that society is a class society. Socialism, according to Marx and Engels, is the result of the revolutionary overthrow of class society by the working class. It is not the result of a "growing over" process of the kind described by Bernstein, which you unwittingly seem to be parroting.

Uh?

You are parrotting J. V. Stalin here, and all the Stalinists on Revleft.

Not only is this not what Marx and Engels have to say, but I very much doubt it is what Tony Cliff has to say.

In fact, here's my challenge to you. Try and find us a quote from Cliff saying what you say. I have just enough respect for Cliff to think you won't be able to find one. Though I suppose I could be disappointed...

As Marx made it clear over and over, the revolutionary overthrow, not of "capitalism," an abstract concept, but of the concrete capitalist class, leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

He deliberately avoided speculation about exactly how socialist society would arise or what exactly it would look like, and made no secret of the fact that he was deliberately avoiding it. Which is why you will never find any quote from Marx clarifying how long he thought it would take for a socialist society to arise.

He did, however, make it clear repeatedly that there would be a *transitional period* between capitalist and socialist society, during which you would continue to have class society, and indeed one of the classes in that society, the proletariat, would rule over the others. He called this "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Hey, I could give you page numbers from the Gotha Program and so forth, but really, you are an educated Marxist, that shouldn't be necessary.

You want to maintain that Marx thought that the overthrow of capitalism would instantly, hey presto, mean that society was socialist?

OK, there are two ways you can do this.

1) You can, like almost all Social Democrats, argue that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was a youthful foolishness of Marx which he dropped when he got older and wiser.

or,

2) you can, like your less sophisticated Stalinists here on Revleft (Stalin himself had slightly more sophisticated formulations) say that the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism are the same thing, and that socialism is still a class divided society, in which a still-existing proletariat rules over the rest of society. And that classes are abolished and the state withers away only in a *communist* society, and a socialist society still needs a state, and a rather powerful one at that, to keep the Trotskyites and revisionists and capitalists and whatnot at bay. A state like the one Stalin ruled in fact.

So which is it? Sheer logic gives you no third alternative.

Take your pick, and then we can continue this discussion more usefully.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

That is merely out-of-context quote mongering, in the fashion of a Soviet "Marxist-Leninist" or a Bible scholar. That was the farthest thing from Marx's *definition* of capitalism, but rather just a description of one aspect of how the system works.

If you think capitalism is not about profit, maybe you should talk to an actual capitalist, who will set you straight.

The realization of surplus value is a function of the system. The individual capitalist doesn't want to realize surplus value, he wants to make a buck.

So I've taken the quote out of context in a way that is misleading, huh? Please provide the context, then, and explain how it changes my point, which is that capitalism is about accumulation for the sake of accumulation, and production for the sake of production -- something you deny and are now trying to squirm out of since I provided a quote of Marx stating as much.

Realization of surplus value is indeed a function of a capitalist system. But that realization can occur in a number of empirical forms. If you think that surplus value must be realized in direct transfers of private wealth to specific capitalists, you are just once again exhibiting your ignorance of capitalism and Marxism in general.


You drag abstract criteria out of Marx's analysis of capitalism, wrenching them out of the real workings of the capitalist system into almost meaningless abstractions, and then try to shoehorn Soviet reality into it.No, you have it completely backwards. You take Marx's writings on capitalism, ignore the key abstractions he was making that allowed him to identify capitalism as unique mode of production, and then latch on incidental characteristics -- such as whether there are competitive private firms owned by greedy, top-hat wearing factory-owners aiming to make a private "profit" -- as grounds for rejecting outright the possibility that the USSR was capitalist.

Marx would have laughed at your empiricist understanding of capitalism as completely missing his point and ignoring his historical-retroductive method. He was totally attuned to the fact that capitalism doesn't necessarily have to exist within in the specific institutional and legal framework that existed in the societies he was analyzing (mainly early modern Britain). States can indeed function as units of capital, just as individual firms can.


If your definition was valid, then any social system in which workers receive a paycheck and the value of the social product increases is, ipso facto, capitalist.It's just one wrong, baseless statement after another with you. It seems you are just not thinking or reading carefully before you post your responses to me. I was very clear about my understanding of how Marx defined capitalism. Exploitation of labor power (which requires lack of workers' control) paired with a drive re-invest for the sake of competitive accumulation are two necessary criteria. So, no, it is not "any system in which workers receive a paycheck and the value of the social product increases."

It is perfectly possible that in some socialist societies, workers might decide democratically to increase output. That is different than an economy in which competition is being managed by a largely unaccountable bureaucracy that makes production decisions by comparing its economy with economies directly subject to the law of value.


So workers had been dispossessed of the means of production? Then just who were the new possessors, and how did they possess it? Stocks? Bonds? Debentures?The bureaucracy possessed it in the sense that they had effective control over its operation. If the workers "possessed it," then they would have the ability to make decisions about how production was to take place. Guess what: they didn't.


Could they pass down those means of production to their children? No such things existed, because all you had was bureaucrats *administering* the means of production, and not owning them.This is once againt to make an overly empiricist mess of the point Marx was making when discussed "private property," mistaking the social relationship with a specific legal form. Marx was clear that modes of production were to be analyzed in terms of production relations, class relations, not legal relations. A class relationship is one in which an unequal distribution in the means of production enables one section of society to extort surplus labor or surplus production from the rest. There is nothing in this formulation that rules out the possibility that exploitation could be secured in the absence of the forms of property/inheritance forms you seem to think is a necessary criterion for capitalism.

This is a point that John Scott has eloquently summarized:

Marx tended to describe these relations of possession in legal terms, as being relations of 'property' or of 'ownership,' but it is clear that he did not mean to see these relations as exclusively legal in character. He was concerned with the actual social relations that structure production, and he recognized that these were only partly defined by institutionalized legal norms and their associated rights and obligations. Relations of possession are relations of effective control over the productive powers of a society. The virtue of using the word 'possession,' rather than 'ownership,' is that, despite its legal connotations, it strongly emphasizes the factual rather than normative nature of these legal relations. Legal norms operate alongside political, economic, and other social forms as necessary conditions for the actual 'underlying' relations of possession, which remain distinct from their 'surface' conditions."

Effective possession is key, and in the Soviet Union, effective possession was exercised by an unaccountable bureaucracy.


Society as a whole continued to be the owners of the means of production.This flatly ludicrous on even an elementary level of logic. A state controlling the means of production does not mean "Society as a whole" controls the means of production. Built into your assumption is that the state is under the control of the people. Actual control. Not a fictional, unenforced declaration at the beginning of some dusty document that has no relevance for how society actually operates. Marx would be turning over in his grave.


In fact, the result of the Soviet Five Year Plan was to physically wipe out the Soviet capitalist class that had begun to arise under the NEP, not put it in power.If you identify capitalist class with a very narrow historical form of how that class might appear, manage property, control production, etc., then yes, I suppose it makes sense to think that all of capitalist production was gone from that point onward. In reality, it just centralized, not democratized, control of the process of exploitative, competitive accumulation.


This does not mean that Soviet society was "socialist," it was pretty obviously awful far from that, and Stalin was putting it further with every step he took. But describing it as "capitalist" was palpably absurd.
What makes a society capitalist? Very simple. If it is ruled by a capitalist class, which runs society in its interests and for its benefit, then it is a capitalist society. If a capitalist class does not even exist, then it cannot possibly be a capitalist society.But the next step is to ask, what makes a capitalist class a capitalist class? Inheritance laws? Top hats? No. What makes a capitalist class a capitalist class is its effective control over a process of capitalist accumulation, and therefore its products, in a way that benefits itself.

And this is precisely what was taking place in the Soviet Union.


This is not a complicated question. In order to pretend that the Soviet Union was capitalist, you have to shroud this very simple question in a cloud of obscurity and dogmatic misquotation from Marxist "holy writ."You have still yet to show a single place where I have misquoted Marx by taking what he says out of context. You need to either substantiate this claim with a specific argument or stop saying it.


A blind drive to accumulate ... for whom? For the profit of the capitalist class, or to increase society's wealth in general? You don't make any distinction between the two.No, the issue is that you want to insist on an absolute distinction, with the USSR on one side of the binary, and the so-called "capitalist" nations on the other. In reality, this "profit benefit" you keep speaking of only applies to the unit of capital. Individual capitalists need not be driven by greed. This is just another example of your empiricist, subjectivist understanding of capitalism.

In the USA, some CEOs work for a $1 salary and donated a sizable percentage of their securities earnings to charity. It's a choice that individual capitalists can make, without their capitalist firm magically transforming into some other mode of production. Why? Because the motivations of capitalists are irrelevant in determining whether an economy is capitalist. What is relevant are the production relations. Marx was very clear on it. It's a mystery to me why you're having such a hard time grasping it.

BTW, I don't if this is a point you're trying to dispute, but the Soviet bureaucracy very much did benefit from a higher standard of living by skimming off the accumulated surplus.


In all class societies, capitalist or whatever, surplus value is extracted from the toilers for the benefit of the ruling classes. In a capitalist society, this is done through the wage labor nexus. Extraction of surplus value, not to "accumulate" in general, but to accumulate wealth in the hands of the capitalist class, is what capitalism is all about. And that is what Marx meant.Correct and incorrect. Capitalism is characterized by the unique form of social relationship entailed by its production process, in which a laborer dispossessed of the means of production must agree to work for a person (or a firm of persons) who does control the means of production. This has absolutely no bearing on the degree to which members of the capitalist class decide to convert part of the accumulated surplus into a private holding, or to reinvest it into increasing accumulation further.

The key, to repeat for the fifth time, is not the motivation of individual capitalists, but the systemic needs of the system to accumulation, and the fact that said drive functions not to meet a democratic demand, but rather the reflexive impulse to compete.


In the Soviet Union, damn right there was a drive to accumulate, and some of what was accumulated was skimmed off the top by the bureaucracy. But, fundamentally, the drive to accumulate was a necessary drive for social benefit, because the people of the USSR were poorer than in other countries, and the USSR needed to build up its industrial and military might to defend itself.You again keep muddling things in your conceptual framework. Whether workers in the long run benefit from a rising quality of life has absolutely no bearing on whether the society that yields that increasing quality of life is exploitative or capitalist. What is relevant for whether a society is a class society is whether the workers, not some state that claims to be operating in their name, decide how and in what ways to increase its quality of life.


You didn't have production for the sake of production in the USSR, you had production for the sake of tractors, steel mills, tanks, missiles and all the other things that the Soviet working class so desperately needed.That's like saying that because capitalist firms in the United States produce things that people need, you don't have production for the sake of production. Instead, you have production for the sake of "automobiles, bread, and refrigerators." Do I even need to bother knocking down this absurdity? If not, why do you think that replacing "United States" with "Soviet Union" makes any difference?

You are right, though, that you had production for the sake of things, not for the sake of people. :)


The only reason that you had a drive for accumulation was to be able to survive in a capitalist world.Correct. This is the exact point that those terrible Cliffites have been making for the past fifty years.


When Marx talked about capitalist competition, he meant competition between capitalists *for profit.* You are smearing this together with competition like in the Olympics or something. Bizarre word games.What is profit? Profit is surplus that is accumulated so it can be reinvested, some of which is appropriated by the ruling class. This existed in the USSR by your own definition. So I really fail to see what point you are making here, besides an inchoate aversion to the idea that a state can function as a unit of capital. But if you reject that idea, you must necessarily reject Lenin's understanding of imperialism, which hinges upon the growing integration of the state and private firms so that "capitalist" and "bureaucrat" become meaningless distinctions.


Capitalists invest overseas to extract superprofits through superexploitation, as explained by Lenin in his pamphlet on imperialism, which you seem not even to have read.Oh, you mean the Lenin who understood that states are often motivated by the drive for "profit"? That Lenin? Yes, it seems one of us has not read him. :rolleyes:

[Lucretia]

Uh?

You are parrotting J. V. Stalin here, and all the Stalinists on Revleft.

Not only is this not what Marx and Engels have to say, but I very much doubt it is what Tony Cliff has to say.

In fact, here's my challenge to you. Try and find us a quote from Cliff saying what you say. I have just enough respect for Cliff to think you won't be able to find one. Though I suppose I could be disappointed...

As Marx made it clear over and over, the revolutionary overthrow, not of "capitalism," an abstract concept, but of the concrete capitalist class, leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

He deliberately avoided speculation about exactly how socialist society would arise or what exactly it would look like, and made no secret of the fact that he was deliberately avoiding it. Which is why you will never find any quote from Marx clarifying how long he thought it would take for a socialist society to arise.

He did, however, make it clear repeatedly that there would be a *transitional period* between capitalist and socialist society, during which you would continue to have class society, and indeed one of the classes in that society, the proletariat, would rule over the others. He called this "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Hey, I could give you page numbers from the Gotha Program and so forth, but really, you are an educated Marxist, that shouldn't be necessary.

You want to maintain that Marx thought that the overthrow of capitalism would instantly, hey presto, mean that society was socialist?

OK, there are two ways you can do this.

1) You can, like almost all Social Democrats, argue that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was a youthful foolishness of Marx which he dropped when he got older and wiser.

or,

2) you can, like your less sophisticated Stalinists here on Revleft (Stalin himself had slightly more sophisticated formulations) say that the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism are the same thing, and that socialism is still a class divided society, in which a still-existing proletariat rules over the rest of society. And that classes are abolished and the state withers away only in a *communist* society, and a socialist society still needs a state, and a rather powerful one at that, to keep the Trotskyites and revisionists and capitalists and whatnot at bay. A state like the one Stalin ruled in fact.

So which is it? Sheer logic gives you no third alternative.

Take your pick, and then we can continue this discussion more usefully.

-M.H.-

It's a very simple request, MH. Show me where Marx, Engels, or Lenin said that it would take generations after a socialist revolution (which is the overthrow of class society) for the disappearance of classes.

Give me a specific citation here.

[A Marxist Historian]

We're getting in rather deep here, and my time to post is not infinite.

So, preliminarily, I will only point out the *key* error in all of the below, which knocks most of the posting into a cocked hat.

You confuse ownership with control. These are two totally different things.

Failing to make this distinction is both utterly unMarxcist and against common sense.

-M.H.-


So I've taken the quote out of context in a way that is misleading, huh? Please provide the context, then, and explain how it changes my point, which is that capitalism is about accumulation for the sake of accumulation, and production for the sake of production -- something you deny and are now trying to squirm out of since I provided a quote of Marx stating as much.

Realization of surplus value is indeed a function of a capitalist system. But that realization can occur in a number of empirical forms. If you think that surplus value must be realized in direct transfers of private wealth to specific capitalists, you are just once again exhibiting your ignorance of capitalism and Marxism in general.

No, you have it completely backwards. You take Marx's writings on capitalism, ignore the key abstractions he was making that allowed him to identify capitalism as unique mode of production, and then latch on incidental characteristics -- such as whether there are competitive private firms owned by greedy, top-hat wearing factory-owners aiming to make a private "profit" -- as grounds for rejecting outright the possibility that the USSR was capitalist.

Marx would have laughed at your empiricist understanding of capitalism as completely missing his point and ignoring his historical-retroductive method. He was totally attuned to the fact that capitalism doesn't necessarily have to exist within in the specific institutional and legal framework that existed in the societies he was analyzing (mainly early modern Britain). States can indeed function as units of capital, just as individual firms can.

It's just one wrong, baseless statement after another with you. It seems you are just not thinking or reading carefully before you post your responses to me. I was very clear about my understanding of how Marx defined capitalism. Exploitation of labor power (which requires lack of workers' control) paired with a drive re-invest for the sake of competitive accumulation are two necessary criteria. So, no, it is not "any system in which workers receive a paycheck and the value of the social product increases."

It is perfectly possible that in some socialist societies, workers might decide democratically to increase output. That is different than an economy in which competition is being managed by a largely unaccountable bureaucracy that makes production decisions by comparing its economy with economies directly subject to the law of value.

The bureaucracy possessed it in the sense that they had effective control over its operation. If the workers "possessed it," then they would have the ability to make decisions about how production was to take place. Guess what: they didn't.

This is once againt to make an overly empiricist mess of the point Marx was making when discussed "private property," mistaking the social relationship with a specific legal form. Marx was clear that modes of production were to be analyzed in terms of production relations, class relations, not legal relations. A class relationship is one in which an unequal distribution in the means of production enables one section of society to extort surplus labor or surplus production from the rest. There is nothing in this formulation that rules out the possibility that exploitation could be secured in the absence of the forms of property/inheritance forms you seem to think is a necessary criterion for capitalism.

This is a point that John Scott has eloquently summarized:

Marx tended to describe these relations of possession in legal terms, as being relations of 'property' or of 'ownership,' but it is clear that he did not mean to see these relations as exclusively legal in character. He was concerned with the actual social relations that structure production, and he recognized that these were only partly defined by institutionalized legal norms and their associated rights and obligations. Relations of possession are relations of effective control over the productive powers of a society. The virtue of using the word 'possession,' rather than 'ownership,' is that, despite its legal connotations, it strongly emphasizes the factual rather than normative nature of these legal relations. Legal norms operate alongside political, economic, and other social forms as necessary conditions for the actual 'underlying' relations of possession, which remain distinct from their 'surface' conditions."

Effective possession is key, and in the Soviet Union, effective possession was exercised by an unaccountable bureaucracy.

This flatly ludicrous on even an elementary level of logic. A state controlling the means of production does not mean "Society as a whole" controls the means of production. Built into your assumption is that the state is under the control of the people. Actual control. Not a fictional, unenforced declaration at the beginning of some dusty document that has no relevance for how society actually operates. Marx would be turning over in his grave.

If you identify capitalist class with a very narrow historical form of how that class might appear, manage property, control production, etc., then yes, I suppose it makes sense to think that all of capitalist production was gone from that point onward. In reality, it just centralized, not democratized, control of the process of exploitative, competitive accumulation.

But the next step is to ask, what makes a capitalist class a capitalist class? Inheritance laws? Top hats? No. What makes a capitalist class a capitalist class is its effective control over a process of capitalist accumulation, and therefore its products, in a way that benefits itself.

And this is precisely what was taking place in the Soviet Union.

You have still yet to show a single place where I have misquoted Marx by taking what he says out of context. You need to either substantiate this claim with a specific argument or stop saying it.

No, the issue is that you want to insist on an absolute distinction, with the USSR on one side of the binary, and the so-called "capitalist" nations on the other. In reality, this "profit benefit" you keep speaking of only applies to the unit of capital. Individual capitalists need not be driven by greed. This is just another example of your empiricist, subjectivist understanding of capitalism.

In the USA, some CEOs work for a $1 salary and donated a sizable percentage of their securities earnings to charity. It's a choice that individual capitalists can make, without their capitalist firm magically transforming into some other mode of production. Why? Because the motivations of capitalists are irrelevant in determining whether an economy is capitalist. What is relevant are the production relations. Marx was very clear on it. It's a mystery to me why you're having such a hard time grasping it.

BTW, I don't if this is a point you're trying to dispute, but the Soviet bureaucracy very much did benefit from a higher standard of living by skimming off the accumulated surplus.

Correct and incorrect. Capitalism is characterized by the unique form of social relationship entailed by its production process, in which a laborer dispossessed of the means of production must agree to work for a person (or a firm of persons) who does control the means of production. This has absolutely no bearing on the degree to which members of the capitalist class decide to convert part of the accumulated surplus into a private holding, or to reinvest it into increasing accumulation further.

The key, to repeat for the fifth time, is not the motivation of individual capitalists, but the systemic needs of the system to accumulation, and the fact that said drive functions not to meet a democratic demand, but rather the reflexive impulse to compete.

You again keep muddling things in your conceptual framework. Whether workers in the long run benefit from a rising quality of life has absolutely no bearing on whether the society that yields that increasing quality of life is exploitative or capitalist. What is relevant for whether a society is a class society is whether the workers, not some state that claims to be operating in their name, decide how and in what ways to increase its quality of life.

That's like saying that because capitalist firms in the United States produce things that people need, you don't have production for the sake of production. Instead, you have production for the sake of "automobiles, bread, and refrigerators." Do I even need to bother knocking down this absurdity? If not, why do you think that replacing "United States" with "Soviet Union" makes any difference?

You are right, though, that you had production for the sake of things, not for the sake of people. :)

Correct. This is the exact point that those terrible Cliffites have been making for the past fifty years.

What is profit? Profit is surplus that is accumulated so it can be reinvested, some of which is appropriated by the ruling class. This existed in the USSR by your own definition. So I really fail to see what point you are making here, besides an inchoate aversion to the idea that a state can function as a unit of capital. But if you reject that idea, you must necessarily reject Lenin's understanding of imperialism, which hinges upon the growing integration of the state and private firms so that "capitalist" and "bureaucrat" become meaningless distinctions.

Oh, you mean the Lenin who understood that states are often motivated by the drive for "profit"? That Lenin? Yes, it seems one of us has not read him. :rolleyes:

[robbo203]

We're getting in rather deep here, and my time to post is not infinite.

So, preliminarily, I will only point out the *key* error in all of the below, which knocks most of the posting into a cocked hat.

You confuse ownership with control. These are two totally different things.

Failing to make this distinction is both utterly unMarxcist and against common sense.

-M.H.-

Ownership and control are not totally different at all. In fact ownership is ultimate control over the disposal of what is "owned". Thats only common sense! How can you own something without being able to enforce your claim to it?

[Lucretia]

We're getting in rather deep here, and my time to post is not infinite.

So, preliminarily, I will only point out the *key* error in all of the below, which knocks most of the posting into a cocked hat.

You confuse ownership with control. These are two totally different things.

Failing to make this distinction is both utterly unMarxcist and against common sense.

-M.H.-

Far from confusing legal ownership with control, I am distinguishing between the two and noting that Marx's critique of political economy consists of his penetrating through superstructural, legal mystifications like the juridical subject, to expose the underlying relations of control, exploitation, and domination. The same mode of production is compatible with a variety of superstructural forms. Anways, the Soviet state -- detached from any democratic accountability -- had legal control over the operation of the Soviet economy, albeit in a form that differed from what is found in Western capitalist societies. To claim that the state represented the people, and that therefore the people exercised control, is risible. The fact that decisions about how much surplus product members of the ruling class were able to transfer to their own consumption was made collectively as a bureaucratic apparatus, rather than privately by an individual firm owner, does not alter in any meaningful way the underlying relations of production.

It is the relations of control, effective ownership, not legal title, that underpins Marx's definition, analysis, and critique of capitalism and indeed all class societies.

[A Marxist Historian]

Far from confusing legal ownership with control, I am distinguishing between the two and noting that Marx's critique of political economy consists of his penetrating through superstructural, legal mystifications like the juridical subject, to expose the underlying relations of control, exploitation, and domination. The same mode of production is compatible with a variety of superstructural forms. Anways, the Soviet state -- detached from any democratic accountability -- had legal control over the operation of the Soviet economy, albeit in a form that differed from what is found in Western capitalist societies. To claim that the state represented the people, and that therefore the people exercised control, is risible. The fact that decisions about how much surplus product members of the ruling class were able to transfer to their own consumption was made collectively as a bureaucratic apparatus, rather than privately by an individual firm owner, does not alter in any meaningful way the underlying relations of production.

It is the relations of control, effective ownership, not legal title, that underpins Marx's definition, analysis, and critique of capitalism and indeed all class societies.

So then, to you, control is the real relationship, and ownership just a legal sham.

In fact, this is exactly backwards, which is why Marx talks about who *owns* the means of production, not who controls them. Abnd even you have to recognize this, with your tortured formulation about "effective ownership."

In all modern societies, control and ownership are divorced from each other. This is pretty obvious in capitalist societies, where the stockholders, the owners, are usually sharply divided from the corporate managers.

Indeed, a major feature of American capitalism is stockholder "revolts" to demand corporate democracy, as capitalists do not in fact control production, rather their managers do, their employees.

The puropose of such revolts is, of course, to gain higher dividends etc. by increasing the rate of exploitation of the workers. Usually part and parcel of "hostile takeovers,' downsizing, union busting etc.

Quite parallel to workers' revolts in Soviet society vs. Stalinist bureaucrats.

The difference of course is that in a capitalist society, everything is regulated by Adam Smith's invisible hand, the quest for profit and expanding profit through increasing the rate of exploitation. This was simply not the case in the Soviet Union, and trying to claim otherwise is just silly. As you realize that would be silly, you engage in mystifications about "accumulation."

I will separately get to your misuse and word games around the quote from Marx about accumulation.

-M.H.-

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Ownership and control are not totally different at all. In fact ownership is ultimate control over the disposal of what is "owned". Thats only common sense! How can you own something without being able to enforce your claim to it?

If you own stocks, you own capital and are a capitalist. In fact the best definition of what a stock is is that it is a membership ticket in the capitalist class, giving you the right to a small fraction of the surplus value extracted from the working class by the capitalist class.

And that gives you little or no control over the capital you own a piece of. In fact, many shares aren't even voting shares! So they don't even have any theoretical control.

And that is the primary form of capital ownership on the third planet revolving around that big ball of fire in the sky over there.

You have a petty bourgeois conception of ownership and control. Not as a slur, but in the most literal possible sense.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

So then, to you, control is the real relationship, and ownership just a legal sham.

I never said legal ownership, or the law, is just an unimportant sham. The law often acts to materialize relations of effective control. But that's the whole point. The law derives its importance from how it functions in establishing effective control. It has no independent relevance in terms of delineating one mode of production from another, which is the main topic we're discussing here. The law can say anything; it's how the law functions in establishing and maintaining relations of effective control that is of key relevance. Granting the law/state an independent metaphysical power, without seeking its roots in actual relations of production, relations of effective control, is precisely what Marx was arguing against in the Preface to his Critique of Political Economy.


In fact, this is exactly backwards, which is why Marx talks about who *owns* the means of production, not who controls them. Abnd even you have to recognize this, with your tortured formulation about "effective ownership."

In all modern societies, control and ownership are divorced from each other. This is pretty obvious in capitalist societies, where the stockholders, the owners, are usually sharply divided from the corporate managers.

Indeed, a major feature of American capitalism is stockholder "revolts" to demand corporate democracy, as capitalists do not in fact control production, rather their managers do, their employees.

The puropose of such revolts is, of course, to gain higher dividends etc. by increasing the rate of exploitation of the workers. Usually part and parcel of "hostile takeovers,' downsizing, union busting etc.

Quite parallel to workers' revolts in Soviet society vs. Stalinist bureaucrats.

The difference of course is that in a capitalist society, everything is regulated by Adam Smith's invisible hand, the quest for profit and expanding profit through increasing the rate of exploitation. This was simply not the case in the Soviet Union, and trying to claim otherwise is just silly. As you realize that would be silly, you engage in mystifications about "accumulation."

I will separately get to your misuse and word games around the quote from Marx about accumulation.

-M.H.-
You're doing a fine job of throwing labels like "mystifications" and "word games," but you aren't really substantively addressing any of what I've said.

Instead, you're playing your own word games, pretending that "profit" somehow must go to a private stockholder wearing a top-hat in order for the system in which that profit is produced to qualify as capitalist.

I have asked you repeatedly to explain how I took the Marx quote out of context, and how that context affects how we should interpret it. You have not done that, either.

You seem to be at the point where, unable to reason through ideas you've never felt comfortable confronting, you're just digging in and repeating talking points about these issues.

It's very simple really, and I would prefer you not dance around the issue. Capitalism is a system of forced competitive accumulation in which workers, dispossessed of the means of production, must labor on behalf those who control the means of production (whether as individuals or collectively) and therefore exploit the workers by compelling them to produce more than what they are being compensated for. There is no requirement that the exploiters must seek to maximize their personal enrichment. Rather, the requirement is that they seek to maximize the accumulation of the unit of capital they are directing - whether that unit of capital is a small corporation or a nation-state.

This doesn't magically cease to be capitalism when the goal of the competition is national survival rather than the hostile takeover of a firm. Which is what you can't seem to come to grips with. You keep referring to these non-essential empirical phenomena we associate with capitalism in the west (hostile takeovers, etc), note their absence in the Soviet Union, then scratch your head wondering why anybody could think it is capitalism. You're not operating at the correct level of abstraction.

[robbo203]

If you own stocks, you own capital and are a capitalist. In fact the best definition of what a stock is is that it is a membership ticket in the capitalist class, giving you the right to a small fraction of the surplus value extracted from the working class by the capitalist class.

And that gives you little or no control over the capital you own a piece of. In fact, many shares aren't even voting shares! So they don't even have any theoretical control.

And that is the primary form of capital ownership on the third planet revolving around that big ball of fire in the sky over there.

You have a petty bourgeois conception of ownership and control. Not as a slur, but in the most literal possible sense.

-M.H.-


A few shares here or there might not amount to much in the way of leverage but thats only because it represent a tiny fraction of a corporation's equity. Multiply that by several a thousand fold and a different picture emerges entirely. The more you own in relative and absolute terms the more clout you have. You are surely not trying to dispute that are you? The converse is also true . Control and, in particular, political control translates all too often into economic wealth as Ian Bremmer has shown in his recent work on state capitalism. All of which goes to prove the undeniable point I made - ownership and ultimate control are just two different ways of decribing the same thing. They are inseparable when it comes down to it

[Jose Gracchus]

Can't we just ban this fossil? Bad enough Sparts basically act in public events like this guy posts...

[A Marxist Historian]

I wrote a very long post, several in fact, and Lucretia responded with one even longer. So I will reply in separate bite-sized pieces. First:


So I've taken the quote out of context in a way that is misleading, huh? Please provide the context, then, and explain how it changes my point, which is that capitalism is about accumulation for the sake of accumulation, and production for the sake of production -- something you deny and are now trying to squirm out of since I provided a quote of Marx stating as much...

I'd seen the quote before, though I couldn't remember where. So I did a Google search for it. Turns out it is somewhere in one of Marx's three volume over three thousand page magnum opus, Das Kapital. Not exactly the most famous thing Marx ever said.

Proof being that you can't Google it directly. Rather, what pops up is others, usually state caps like Paul Mattick and Chris Harman, quoting it. (Mattick, a much better economist, uses it more carefully). And not giving page numbers, so it's rather tough to determine the exact context.

But fortunately that's not necessary, as your, or rather Chris Harman's, misuse of the quote is patent.

The paragraph of yours I quoted above, and indeed the entire post, showed that you basically fail to understand elementary Marxist economics. As state caps usually do.

I should express my gratitude here to Head Ice, whose very valuable excerpt from the Spartacist article on China and Africa is just what is needed to clarify this elementary point.

Like I asked before, accumulation of what? The fundamental elementary distinction in Marxist economics is between exchange value and use value.

What do capitalists "accumulate for the sake of accumulation"? Exchange value. Indeed that is what capital is, it is exchange value that reproduces itself and expands.

What do the economies of Stalinistically-bureaucratically deformed worker states accumulate? Exchange value? Of course not, they are isolationist and prefer not to exchange with others. So if they are in fact single state-monopoly capitalist entities, they sure don't act like it. The old Eastern European Stalinist states didn't even like to trade with the USSR and each other. The model, in fact the most successful model, was the East German "department store economy," which tried to produce absolutely everything East Germany needed in half a country. You had much, much less economic integration in COMECON than in the EEC and its successor the EU.

Sure, the USSR mined gold and so forth in Vorkuta etc. to sell it to others to buy things on the world market, but that was a subsidiary feature of the economy not essential, due to the fact that you can't after all build socialism in one country.

Instead, the USSR accumulated use values for useful purposes, not just "for the sake of accumulation." And didn't produce them for the sake of production, but because of the need to use them.

And they got used, not just stacked up in piles like unsold automobiles in Detroit and forgotten about. Or rather, when this does happen, not infrequently actually due to bureaucratic mismanagement, the bureaucrat responsible for that usually had bad things happen to him. Under Stalin, fatal things.

That's why this quote from Marx that you and Cliff and Harman drag out of context and worship like an ikon of the Virgin Mary just doesn't mean anything like what you want it to mean.

Honest state caps would just say, yeah, my conception of state capitalism isn't Marxist, but Marx was wrong. You guys, like the Stalinists, want to pose as orthodox Marxists, so have to engage in dogmatic quote-chopping and misrepresentation. Not deliberately, not necessarily deliberately in the case Stalinists either. You guys are deceiving yourselves as much as anybody else.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

It's a very simple request, MH. Show me where Marx, Engels, or Lenin said that it would take generations after a socialist revolution (which is the overthrow of class society) for the disappearance of classes.

Give me a specific citation here.

Why? What for?

It was strictly a speculation on my part, based on the historical experience of the actual Russian Revolution. Speculation in hindsight is always better than futuristic speculation, which is why I can say such things and M, E and L could not.

Marx and Engels avoided speculation about the future socialist society to the maximum degree possible. They did clearly say however that between capitalism and socialism you would have a transitional period, in which you'd have the dictatorship of the proletariat. They didn't say how long, why should they have? They weren't astrologers.

Lenin was in the middle of the process in Russia. He too avoided abstract speculation about the future, especially as to what would happen in other countries, but he did say repeatedly that that the Russian Soviet Republic was *not* a socialist society, and that building a socialist society there would take time. He too sensibly avoided letting himself get pinned down as to exactly how long it would take.

Do you really doubt this? If so, I could find you as many Lenin quotes as you like.

But you know that. You're just trying to avoid answering my challenge to you, when I asked you where Tony Cliff said that the victory of the socialist revolution means, hey presto, society is socialist. Because you know you can't.

And you are trying even harder to answer my other challenge to you, to pick one of the only two possible alternatives you have with respect to Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat which you either:

A: like a Social Democrat consider that Marx was wrong about that, or

B. Like your average Revleft Stalinist think that the D of the P and socialism are simply exactly the same thing, and that socialism is *not* a classless society. From which they draw the logical consequence that the state doesn't wither away, but in fact has to get stronger, with gulags and all that, top keep down all those capitalists running around in a socialist society and sabotaging things.

So, stop dancing around the issue. Pick one.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I noticed you didn't answer my question, which was where in any of Marx's or Engels' texts you saw any indication that classes will wither away gradually over generations after a socialist revolution.

The reason you didn't answer it is that you are not aware of any such place in their writings. And the reason you are not aware of any such place is that there is no such place.

The reason there is no such place is because the idea that classes will gradually disappear is flatly contradicted by what Marx and Engels repeatedly wrote. Classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production. When the means of production are controlled by a minority who in turn use that control to exploit the majority, that society is a class society. Socialism, according to Marx and Engels, is the result of the revolutionary overthrow of class society by the working class. It is not the result of a "growing over" process of the kind described by Bernstein, which you unwittingly seem to be parroting.

Oh please. You're just proving my point.

What is the dictatorship of the proletariat? It is one class ruling over the other classes of society. And socialism is, as you may recall, a classless society. Those are the basic definitions. So, unless you are a Stalinist confusionist, you can't have both of them at the same time.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a concept and topic you are strenuously avoiding as obviously you don't care for it, although you are not honest enough to admit it.

In Russia, it so happened that the proletariat was a small minority of society, less than a tenth. Did the workers use their control over society, their dictatorship, to extract surplus value from the peasantry to engage in what Left Oppositionist Preobrazhensky called "primitive socialist accumulation?" Of course. And they didn't start that in 1929 either, that was certainly going on during "war communism" in 1919 and 1920, that's why you had peasant revolts.

So therefore, by your line of argument Russia wasn't state capitalist in 1929, but state capitalist in 1917, and Lenin was a capitalist politician just like Stalin!

You noted before that you've been criticizing the ISO in ISR. Is this the basis of your criticism? If so, my sympathies are with the ISO.

Your position is, quite simply, Menshevik rather than Bolshevik, though I'm sure Martov would not go as far as you do. So Right Menshevik.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

A few shares here or there might not amount to much in the way of leverage but thats only because it represent a tiny fraction of a corporation's equity. Multiply that by several a thousand fold and a different picture emerges entirely. The more you own in relative and absolute terms the more clout you have. You are surely not trying to dispute that are you? The converse is also true . Control and, in particular, political control translates all too often into economic wealth as Ian Bremmer has shown in his recent work on state capitalism. All of which goes to prove the undeniable point I made - ownership and ultimate control are just two different ways of decribing the same thing. They are inseparable when it comes down to it

Your point about how the more you own the more clout you have is, of course, true. But finance capitalists have zero interest in what the companies do. Indeed nowadays they often don't even *know* what the companies do. All they care about is the revenue they get from them, dividends, sale of stock options, all that utterly complex and ridiculously boring stuff the bankers and other moneymen devote their lives to.

The same when you get right down to it with the workers in a bureacratically deformed workers' state. Some get interested in how their particular enterprises are run--and often end up getting promoted into the bureaucracy. Most just care about the results for them personally. Not necessarily a good thing, but that's a fact.

The USSR was a workers state because it delivered for the workers, in all the particular ways I've described here before and don't want to repeat again. And it was *ultimately* responsible to the working class. It existed on the basis of the working class believing that it was its very own state, not a capitalist state.

This belief was maintained by Soviet bureaucrats in different fashions. Stalin was into totalitarian mind control, "brainwashing" as the imperialists liked to call it, killing all dissenters, blaring propaganda, combined with the concrete results of his industrial revolution, which did transform society for the better, albeit at the cost of huge sacrifices.

Trotsky did not think that could last long, given popular outrage at the extreme privileges of the bureaucracy and the living legacy of the Revolution. And he would have been right, except for WWII, after which all of a sudden Stalin in particular and the Soviet bureaucracy in general took credit for the Soviet victory over fascism. When Stalin died in '53 you had genuine mass mourning, unfortunately.

But things were going unstuck, rebellions in the gulags, the Stalinist hypnosis wearing off, etc. So you had Khrushchev's "back to Lenin" reforms, a certain rebirth of early idealism, emptying the gulags, much more production for consumer needs, big wage increases etc. And the system gets popular again.

But this wears off too, with worker revolts in Eastern Europe, a miners' strike in the Donbass etc. So in comes Brezhnev, whose appeal is purely material, social welfare measures and increased standard of living.

But the economy stagnates, and in the '80s the workers finally stop believing. And you have a fullblown revolt in Stakhanovland in 1989, among the coal miners, historically the solidest base of working class support for Stalinism. Not just an economic strike, they took over mining towns and elected Soviets to run them. The Soviet working class elite, who had been much better paid than anybody else for generations. And that was it. Once the support of the Soviet working class disappeared, the USSR collapsed like a popped balloon.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Can't we just ban this fossil? Bad enough Sparts basically act in public events like this guy posts...

Heh.

Beneath the leftist, council communist, Trotskyoid surface the Stalinist comes out.

Since he can't answer me, he wants to shut me up.

Well, the goon squad approach doesn't work here, and you don't have an icepick handy. Hate to tell you this, but I don't have the impression the moderators here particularly want to ban me. There are rules here you know, pretty good ones actually. And you ain't a moderator, thank goodness.

-M.H.-

[Comrade Gwydion]

Example of state capitalism. All the countries in the EU.
That doesn't seem true. The EU countries are your run-of-the-mill liberal capitalist countries. Seeing the amount of privitisation and deregulation, it's going even further and further away from state-capitalism.
I really don't understand why you would say that,

[Lucretia]

Why? What for?

It was strictly a speculation on my part, based on the historical experience of the actual Russian Revolution. Speculation in hindsight is always better than futuristic speculation, which is why I can say such things and M, E and L could not.

Marx and Engels avoided speculation about the future socialist society to the maximum degree possible. They did clearly say however that between capitalism and socialism you would have a transitional period, in which you'd have the dictatorship of the proletariat. They didn't say how long, why should they have? They weren't astrologers.

Lenin was in the middle of the process in Russia. He too avoided abstract speculation about the future, especially as to what would happen in other countries, but he did say repeatedly that that the Russian Soviet Republic was *not* a socialist society, and that building a socialist society there would take time. He too sensibly avoided letting himself get pinned down as to exactly how long it would take.

Do you really doubt this? If so, I could find you as many Lenin quotes as you like.

But you know that. You're just trying to avoid answering my challenge to you, when I asked you where Tony Cliff said that the victory of the socialist revolution means, hey presto, society is socialist. Because you know you can't.

And you are trying even harder to answer my other challenge to you, to pick one of the only two possible alternatives you have with respect to Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat which you either:

A: like a Social Democrat consider that Marx was wrong about that, or

B. Like your average Revleft Stalinist think that the D of the P and socialism are simply exactly the same thing, and that socialism is *not* a classless society. From which they draw the logical consequence that the state doesn't wither away, but in fact has to get stronger, with gulags and all that, top keep down all those capitalists running around in a socialist society and sabotaging things.

So, stop dancing around the issue. Pick one.

-M.H.-

You must have a very strange idea of how Marx, Engels, Lenin, and I are defining socialism. It's not some highly specific utopian vision of how many wipes it takes to clean people's assholes. It's not a perfect society, so why would it take ages after a socialist revolution to establish? Every writer in the Marxist tradition, including Marx himself, is clear on what socialism is: it's a classless society, not a perfect society. That is, a society where the means or production are not under the control of a select minority in society, but instead are under the control of all of society. It literally makes no sense to say that, after a revolution in which the vast majority of people seize control over the means of production, it will take generations for classes to disappear. The process of appropriating the means of production, and suppressing the bourgeoisie, means that there are no classes. That's what makes it a socialist revolution, not a bourgeois revolution or a feudal revolution.

In mentioning the Russian revolution, I get the impression you are confusing a workers' revolution, with a socialist revolution. Lenin was very clear that the revolution that took place was not a socialist revolution that abolished all classes, but one in which workers -- a minority of the Russian population -- took control over the government.

Once again we have a very simple disagreement which demonstrates you haven't even a basic understanding of the texts of the great figures whose names you throw around like so many toys.

I'm not sure of why you're referencing Tony Cliff here, but my guess is that it has to do with your misinterpretation of something he wrote about the Russian Revolution, and that your misunderstanding is premised on your inability to distinguish between a socialist revolution and what Lenin and Trotsky called a workers' revolution. The workers' revolution in Russia was one in which the workers took control over the government, but in which the workers were not numerous enough to constitute anything resembling a democratic majority throughout the peasant-dominated country.

By the way, I'm still waiting for you to provide that additional context for the Marx quote to show me how I distorted its meaning. All I've seen so far is some rambling post about what your google results looked like. That's not context, comrade.

It's a very simple request. If you claim I distorted the meaning of the quote by taking it out of context, provide the relevant context and show me how that context changed the quote's meaning. Otherwise, it's clear your just lobbing basless accusations in the absence of actual argument.

[A Marxist Historian]

You must have a very strange idea of how Marx, Engels, Lenin, and I are defining socialism. It's not some highly specific utopian vision of how many wipes it takes to clean people's assholes. It's not a perfect society, so why would it take ages after a socialist revolution to establish? Every writer in the Marxist tradition, including Marx himself, is clear on what socialism is: it's a classless society, not a perfect society. That is, a society where the means or production are not under the control of a select minority in society, but instead are under the control of all of society. It literally makes no sense to say that, after a revolution in which the vast majority of people seize control over the means of production, it will take generations for classes to disappear. The process of appropriating the means of production, and suppressing the bourgeoisie, means that there are no classes. That's what makes it a socialist revolution, not a bourgeois revolution or a feudal revolution.

In mentioning the Russian revolution, I get the impression you are confusing a workers' revolution, with a socialist revolution. Lenin was very clear that the revolution that took place was not a socialist revolution that abolished all classes, but one in which workers -- a minority of the Russian population -- took control over the government.

Once again we have a very simple disagreement which demonstrates you haven't even a basic understanding of the texts of the great figures whose names you throw around like so many toys.

I'm not sure of why you're referencing Tony Cliff here, but my guess is that it has to do with your misinterpretation of something he wrote about the Russian Revolution, and that your misunderstanding is premised on your inability to distinguish between a socialist revolution and what Lenin and Trotsky called a workers' revolution. The workers' revolution in Russia was one in which the workers took control over the government, but in which the workers were not numerous enough to constitute anything resembling a democratic majority throughout the peasant-dominated country.

By the way, I'm still waiting for you to provide that additional context for the Marx quote to show me how I distorted its meaning. All I've seen so far is some rambling post about what your google results looked like. That's not context, comrade.

It's a very simple request. If you claim I distorted the meaning of the quote by taking it out of context, provide the relevant context and show me how that context changed the quote's meaning. Otherwise, it's clear your just lobbing basless accusations in the absence of actual argument.

Now here we have a fascinating new abandonment of all the traditions of the socialist movement, which is I think all your own. If you really mean that, you get to go into some sort of museum of political-theoretical oddities.

So, then, you think that the Russian Revolution was a workers revolution, but not a socialist revolution?

So how then were the socialists in Russia supposed to get socialism? By overthrowing that new oppressive ruling class, Lenin and his workers?

I find it difficult to believe you actually think that, although I suppose anything is possible. Perhaps you were posting late at night while drunk without thinking about what you were writing. So in the interests of an illuminating discussion, as opposed to a flame war, I hereby give you the opportunity to take that back, or at least explain yourself. I mean, hey, you seem like an intelligent person, surely that's not what you mean.

Maybe what you really meant was that the Russian Revolution was really a bourgeois revolution, whose only possible result, given the backwardness of Russia, was bourgeois democracy, implemented by the workers, since Russia just wasn't ready for socialism? That was the position of the Mensheviks, which at least made sense, even though it was wrong.

As for the "accumulation" quote, if you want me to go into context, give me a page number so I can take my copy of the book off my bookshelf and check it out. That is of course if you have any idea just where in Das Kapital the quote is. I have a suspicion that you don't, and that you don't even *know* what the context of the quote is.

But that's not even necessary, as you obviously misunderstand what Marx meant by accumulation in the first place, as I've explained already, no need to repeat myself.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I am once again getting back to Lucretia's very long post of the other day, because this is after all the Learning page, and his or her howlers offer an excellent opportunity to explain the very basic Marxist economics that Lucretia fails to understand. Marxist Economics for Dummies, as it were.


...
No, the issue is that you want to insist on an absolute distinction, with the USSR on one side of the binary, and the so-called "capitalist" nations on the other. In reality, this "profit benefit" you keep speaking of only applies to the unit of capital. Individual capitalists need not be driven by greed. This is just another example of your empiricist, subjectivist understanding of capitalism.

In the USA, some CEOs work for a $1 salary and donated a sizable percentage of their securities earnings to charity. It's a choice that individual capitalists can make, without their capitalist firm magically transforming into some other mode of production. Why? Because the motivations of capitalists are irrelevant in determining whether an economy is capitalist. What is relevant are the production relations. Marx was very clear on it. It's a mystery to me why you're having such a hard time grasping it...


Lucretia thinks that profit is about "greed." So you have nice capitalists that aren't greedy and donate their profits to charity, and others that are mean, and wear top hats, and just keep it all to themselves.

In fact, profit is basic to the workings of a capitalist economy, as everybody except armchair theorists dwelling on Cloud Nine are aware of already anyway. No profit, no capitalism.

According to Marx, there are two basic laws of the functioning of a capitalist economy. One of them is the labor theory of value, a law in common with all economies in which economic value is a category at all.

The other, the one that particularly characterizes a *capitalist* economy, is the law of the equalization of the rates of profit. Not greed, profit! Not accumulation, profit!

The interaction of these two laws explains the actual workings of a capitalist economy.

Now, Lucretia looks only at production, production is all and the purpose of production for capitalists is "accumulation," and Lucretia as previously explained overlooks the fundamental distinction of Marxist or indeed *any* serious economists between use value and exchange value, the accumulation of useful physical objects, as in the USSR, and the accumulation of exchange value so as to turn it into capital, self-expanding exchange value, as in a capitalist economy. Which indeed is Moses and the prophets for any capitalist.

I assume that Lucretia's favorite quote is from Vol. 1 of Capital, where Marx too is looking at Capital solely from the vantage point of production

OK, there's your context you were dragging it out of context from, Lucretia. Happy now?

But Marx also wrote Vol. 2, looking at capitalism from the standpoint of circulation, and then Vol. 3, integrating it into a whole. And that is where he explained the law of the equalization of the rate of profit, and how the intersection of these two laws, the so-called transformation problem, explains how capitalism actually works.

So Lucretia's dismissal of profit as an irrelevancy to determining whether an economy is capitalist or not shows a total misunderstanding of Marxist economics.

Next lesson will be about Lucretia's misunderstanding of "workers control." Hint for those who want to do some reading in advance: it's not a phrase you will ever find in Marx or Engels.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

I am once again getting back to Lucretia's very long post of the other day, because this is after all the Learning page, and his or her howlers offer an excellent opportunity to explain the very basic Marxist economics that Lucretia fails to understand. Marxist Economics for Dummies, as it were. Lucretia thinks that profit is about "greed." So you have nice capitalists that aren't greedy and donate their profits to charity, and others that are mean, and wear top hats, and just keep it all to themselves.You once again prove you aren't paying a bit of attention to what I am actually saying. I said that the greed motive of the individual capitalist is irrelevant, and that what is necessary for capitalism is the drive to accumulate for the unit of capital, not for one's personal enrichment.


In fact, profit is basic to the workings of a capitalist economy, as everybody except armchair theorists dwelling on Cloud Nine are aware of already anyway. No profit, no capitalism.You keep repeating this like a religious dogma, but it's simply non-sensical. You sneak in through the backdoor an implicit requirement that profit requires competition between firms and industries in a national economy, but have not proven this in any way or shown where Marx argues that this is a requirement for capitalism. Profit for a private firm competing against other private firms is only one form that surplus value can take. You are taking the empirical form and mistaking that for abstract function that constitutes capitalist production.


According to Marx, there are two basic laws of the functioning of a capitalist economy. One of them is the labor theory of value, a law in common with all economies in which economic value is a category at all.

The other, the one that particularly characterizes a *capitalist* economy, is the law of the equalization of the rates of profit. Not greed, profit! Not accumulation, profit!

The interaction of these two laws explains the actual workings of a capitalist economy.I'll reiterate that I don't understand why you keep emphasizing that greed has nothing to do with this, as if I ever said that it did. The equalization of rates of profit was not an empirical phenomenon that Marx ever claimed would manifest itself. Indeed, Marx realized that capitalist economies were always in motion and never in a state of equilibrium. What the equalization thesis indicates what Marx's observation of the underlying effects of competition between units of capital within a political territory (with all restrictions on trade, investment, etc., abstracted out of the picture).

Marx identified this as a tendential function resulting from the way capitalism functions in a particular context. He was not saying that this was how capitalism had to function in all its forms. You are again mistaking the empirical form for the economic mechanisms Marx identified as constituting capitalism.


Now, Lucretia looks only at production, production is all and the purpose of production for capitalists is "accumulation," and Lucretia as previously explained overlooks the fundamental distinction of Marxist or indeed *any* serious economists between use value and exchange value, the accumulation of useful physical objects, as in the USSR, and the accumulation of exchange value so as to turn it into capital, self-expanding exchange value, as in a capitalist economy. Which indeed is Moses and the prophets for any capitalist.For the sake of delineating one mode of production from another, you do look at production. You don't look at legal forms or distribution schemes. This is why Marx started with production in his first volume of Capital. Do you disagree with his statement that "the specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element"?


OK, there's your context you were dragging it out of context from, Lucretia. Happy now?That was a rather lame effort, MH. You haven't shown any context in the passage that the quote is drawn from, so how can you say that you've demonstrated that my omitting context has changed our understanding of the passage?


But Marx also wrote Vol. 2, looking at capitalism from the standpoint of circulation, and then Vol. 3, integrating it into a whole. And that is where he explained the law of the equalization of the rate of profit, and how the intersection of these two laws, the so-called transformation problem, explains how capitalism actually works.Oh, so is this supposed to be the "context" I am ignoring? Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital? How amusing. Your argument seems to be that if we don't base our definition of modes of production on distribution, circulation, and the like, then we must be ignoring these aspects of how an economy functions. This is a patently illogical accusation.


So Lucretia's dismissal of profit as an irrelevancy to determining whether an economy is capitalist or not shows a total misunderstanding of Marxist economics.I have never said that profit is irrelevant. I said that the profit of a private firm is one form that surplus value can take. There are other forms, which is why you can't simply say "LOOK! There are no profits for private firms! By definition, there cannot be capitalism there!"


Next lesson will be about Lucretia's misunderstanding of "workers control." Hint for those who want to do some reading in advance: it's not a phrase you will ever find in Marx or Engels.You'll find the concept functioning as the operational basis of everything they wrote, but sure, you won't find the exact quote "workers control." Then again, since the vast majority of the text were originally penned in German, you won't find a lot of English words. :rolleyes: Feel free to keep doing what Marx was arguing explicitly against, and mistaking the law with the underlying economic relations of control and exploitation.

[Lucretia]

Now here we have a fascinating new abandonment of all the traditions of the socialist movement, which is I think all your own. If you really mean that, you get to go into some sort of museum of political-theoretical oddities.

So, then, you think that the Russian Revolution was a workers revolution, but not a socialist revolution?

So how then were the socialists in Russia supposed to get socialism? By overthrowing that new oppressive ruling class, Lenin and his workers?

That you are shocked by this, and seem to think that it is a radical departure from the mainstream of socialist thought, shows just how uninformed you are about these issues. Lenin and Trotsky worried quite openly about the fact that Russia's majority-peasant population meant that Russia could not possibly become socialist without an internationalizing of their revolution (and attendant internationalizing of the forces of production and the classes governing them), not only because the large peasant population meant that the productive forces had not developed sufficiently, but also because it mean that the revolutionary class was not a majority class (which is what M&E insisted it had to be). This is why Trotsky developed his theory of permanent revolution, to try to fold two revolutionary tasks into one -- a democratic bourgeois revolution followed by a socialist revolution, both under the control of the workers. It's obvious that the permanent revolution failed in the Soviet Union. There was no socialist revolution, and at most the workers accomplished something resembling a bourgeois democratic revolution until Stalin's counter-revolution.

You, on the other hand, seem to cling to the idea that the Soviet Union was in fact socialism in one country, and that therefore the revolution of 1917 was a socialist revolution.



Maybe what you really meant was that the Russian Revolution was really a bourgeois revolution, whose only possible result, given the backwardness of Russia, was bourgeois democracy, implemented by the workers, since Russia just wasn't ready for socialism? That was the position of the Mensheviks, which at least made sense, even though it was wrong.That's not what I am saying. I am saying we don't identify the nature of revolutions by the intentions of the people leading them. We identify them by their objective consequences. By this standard, the October revolution was not a socialist revolution. It never established socialism. It established a workers' state.

Even Lenin acknowledge this when talking in 1926 about the current political situation in the Soviet Union: "The second victory will be the socialist revolution in Europe. The European workers will show us 'how to do it,' and then, together with them, we shall bring about the socialist revolution." Why would Lenin talk about "bringing about the socialist revolution" (i.e., it hasn't happened yet) if you are correct, and the October revolution was the socialist revolution? Oh, wait, let me guess: I took another quote out of context.


As for the "accumulation" quote, if you want me to go into context, give me a page number so I can take my copy of the book off my bookshelf and check it out. That is of course if you have any idea just where in Das Kapital the quote is. I have a suspicion that you don't, and that you don't even *know* what the context of the quote is.Reality is becoming more interesting by the post. Now it turns out we can see that you accused me of taking a quote out of context without even knowing what that context was. We now know this because you have no idea what part of Capital the quote is drawn from.

Your thinking seems to be: "The quote is being used to established a conclusion I disagree with. Therefore, the quote must be falsified or taken out of context."

This is not the way serious inquiry takes place, MH. And if you are indeed a historian, you should know this. Conclusions are to follow from evidence. We do not prejudge evidence based on whether or not they coincide with our preconceptions.