Bordiga's criticisms of the Soviet economy

[Die Neue Zeit]

In Bordiga's criticisms of the Soviet economy, especially his response to Stalin's Economic Problems, what did he have to say about the Soviet agriculture and defense industries, specifically?

Stalin acknowledged (very belatedly) that Soviet agriculture would have to move towards a wage labour model under state ownership, while the defense industry was definitely a sector whereby the ruble didn't function as money in a typical capitalist economy.

[Paulappaul]

Bordiga's writings on the capitalist nature of the Soviet economy, in contrast to those produced by the Trotskyists, focus to a great extent on the agrarian sector. He wanted to show how capitalist social relations existed in the kolkhoz and in the sovkhoz, one a cooperative farm and the other the straight wage-labour state farm. (13) He emphasized how much of agrarian production depended on the small privately owned plots (he was writing in 1950) and predicted quite accurately the rates at which the Soviet Union would start importing wheat after Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880's to 1914.


The reasons leading Bordiga to downplay the industrial sector and to emphasize agriculture, as I said, came from theoretical and strategic concerns that pre-dated the Russian revolution. Once again, for Bordiga, capitalism was first of all the agrarian revolution, the capitalization of agriculture.
Bordiga's idea that capitalism equals the agrarian revolution is the key to the 20th century; it's certainly the key to almost everything the left has called "revolutionary" in the 20th century, and it is the key to rethinking the history of Marxism and its entanglement with ideologies of industrializing backward regions of the world economy.
In sum, capitalism means first of all the agrarian revolution.

The agrarian question has had multiple meanings in the history of the international left. It has arisen in connection with the peasant revolutions that accompanied the French and Russian revolutions; the capitalization of agriculture in the U.S. South through the Civil War; the agrarian depression after 1873; the emptying of the European countrysides after World War II. Undoubtedly, these are seriously distinct phenomena that should not be lumped together cavalierly. But let us focus on intensive accumulation linked to the reduction of the agrarian workforce to 5-10% percent of the population as the definition of a "fully capitalist" society. A fully capitalist agriculture is an American-style mechanized agriculture. The "agrarian question" in this sense, was not solved in France in 1789 but in 1945-1973.The connection between agriculture and intensive accumulation in industry is the reduction of the cost of food as a percentage of the worker's bill of consumption, creating buying power for the consumer durables (such as the automobile) at the centre of 20th century mass production.



Let us summarize, and then return, one more time to Bordiga and the neo-Bordigists. Vulgar Marxism was an ideology of the Central and Eastern European intelligentsia linked to the workers' movement in a battle to complete the bourgeois revolution (Second and Third International Marxism). Its parallel to pre-Kantian, pre-1789 bourgeois materialism is not the result of an "error" ("they had the wrong ideas") but a precise expression of the real content of the movement that developed it. That content makes sense ultimately in the framework of a periodization of capitalist history that complements the Lenin/Trotsky "epoch of imperialist decay" with the concepts of extensive/formal domination and intensive/real accumulation. The whole Lenin/Hilferding 2nd International theory of "organized capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" is then, an occultation of the transition from extensive to intensive. The "official Marxist" outlook, therefore is the outlook of a nascent state elite, in or out of power, whose movement results in another form of capitalism (real domination) and calls it "socialism". What is compelling about such an analysis is that it avoids moralizing and offers a "sociological" explanation for an "epistemology". Once again it means that this social stratum that held an Aufklaerung form of materialism because it was a proto-state civil service in a development regime, and that its economics, codified in the Leninist theory of imperialism, were also the economics of that stratum. It is not real Marxism, because it tends to replace analyses of relations and forces of production with (ultimately Duehringian) analyses of "force". From Lenin and Bukharin via Baren and Sweezy to Bettleheim and Amin to Pol Pot (recognizing tremendous discontinuity and degeneration but also continuity) the 'monopoly capital" theory is the theory of state bureaucrats. It is fundamentally anti-working class. It sees the Western working class's reformism as the expression of super profits' from imperialism, and it obscures the difference of interests between the state bureaucratic elite and the peasant and working classes in the underdeveloped countries where it holds power.

Communism is the Material Human Community - Loren Goldner (http://libcom.org/library/communism-is-the-material-human-community-amadeo-bordiga-today)

[Die Neue Zeit]

And how did he approach socialist transition specifically with regards to agriculture? I'm quite sure that the wage labour model under public ownership would be a huge leap for agriculture in the most developed countries.

[Prometeo liberado]

Was it Bordiga that did a study on Soviet wheat output and predict the rate at which it would plummet?

[Paulappaul]

And how did he approach socialist transition specifically with regards to agriculture? I'm quite sure that the wage labour model under public ownership would be a huge leap for agriculture in the most developed countries.

Bordiga didn't regard the "agricultural question" as a centrality to a socialist revolution in contrast to medieval economy, it serves as an extremely minor piece of Industrial Economies. To the 3rd world I would imagine an International Revolution would imply a shrinking of the agricultural economy as all "nations" would become more self - sufficient with regards to growing and facilitating the distribution of food. Time/Labor saving models of growing food would be internationally provided as well.

I don't think a "Wage labour" model is either progressive, necessary, or communistic in any sense.

[Paulappaul]

Was it Bordiga that did a study on Soviet wheat output and predict the rate at which it would plummet?

yes