The key points of State Capitalist theory

[Peoples' War]

What exactly are the key points in support of the State Capitalist theory of Soviet Russia?

I know "commodity production" is one, but what are examples, and why does that make it capitalist?

[Prinskaj]

Do you mean the NEP, New Economic Policy?
This was the economic policy put in place by the Bolshevik party in 1921, which was a method of trying to achieve industrialization, since Russia at that time was technologically backwards.
Why this is considered capitalist? Primarily because it allowed for small businesses to operate and gain profits. And also because Lenin himself described it as "State-Capitalism".

[Psy]

What exactly are the key points in support of the State Capitalist theory of Soviet Russia?

I know "commodity production" is one, but what are examples, and why does that make it capitalist?

The fact that the USSR economy slowed down when global capital markets slowed down and could not break free of contradictions of capital accumulation. A non-capitalist economy in theory should be unaffected by cycles of capitalist markets, as the over production caused global capitalism to become sluggish in the 1980's a true communist Comecon would have been able to redirect production away from export and towards domestic consumption to solve uneven development in the Comecon nations.

[Peoples' War]

Do you mean the NEP, New Economic Policy?
This was the economic policy put in place by the Bolshevik party in 1921, which was a method of trying to achieve industrialization, since Russia at that time was technologically backwards.
Why this is considered capitalist? Primarily because it allowed for small businesses to operate and gain profits. And also because Lenin himself described it as "State-Capitalism".
No, no. I agree that the transitory phase, the DOTP, would manifest in the beginnings as a form of state-capitalism oriented to "benefit" the people.

However, I am referring to the theory of the USSR under Stalin, as being State Capitalist, as opposed to a Degenerated Workers' State, Socialist or Bureaucratic Collectivism.

I am not asking whether it is correct, or not, but what the key elements to it are.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Here is a good video by scholar Hillel Ticktin on the subject.

http://vimeo.com/29505740

He says that Russia under Stalin was essentially a "non-mode of production" and I agree.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

I am not asking whether it is correct, or not, but what the key elements to it are.

Existence of commodity production, wage labor, and things like that. Hillel Ticktin talks about them in that video but he also talks about why those views are wrong, so it is kinda biased.

[Prinskaj]

However, I am referring to the theory of the USSR under Stalin, as being State Capitalist, as opposed to a Degenerated Workers' State, Socialist or Bureaucratic Collectivism.
I am sorry for that slight misunderstanding.
Many people, such as myself, refer to the USSR as state-capitalist. And we do this because it still retained the capitalist mode of production, i.e. the relation to productions such as wage labour, commodity production and such. But only that the state had responsibility over this production.

[Lucretia]

From a post I made to another thread about basically the same question:


Pick up Tony Cliff's "State Capitalism in Russia," and Hobson and Tabor's "Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism."

The basic argument is that capitalism is a form of production in which one class has monopolized possession of the productive resources, but is unable to coerce directly specific workers into utilizing those means of production, such that a degree of de facto contractual freedom between owners and workers exists. The capitalist class uses its control over the means of production to extract the maximum amount of surplus value/labor from the workers in order to compete/keep pace with rival units of capital that are similarly trying to maximize exploitation of their workers. As capital concentrates, and small business evolve into larger multi-divisional or sometimes multi-industrial-sector economic units, complete with internal planning, the process of capitalist exploitation coincides with the development of a bureaucratic capitalist class that attempts to use its planning capabilities to compete effectively with rival units of capital.

The USSR, it is said, was an extreme example of this phenomenon -- one that was only able to develop the way it did because of the degeneration of a revolution that had already consolidated control of the means of production into the hands of a central agency -- the Soviet state. Once the state slipped from the control of society, the workers in particular, it became a capitalist class society where the bureaucracy came to play the role of capitalist enterprise managers responding to the dictates of the law of value as they competed with rivals states and economic formations.

[JPSartre12]

Here is a good video by scholar Hillel Ticktin on the subject.

He says that Russia under Stalin was essentially a "non-mode of production" and I agree.

Thanks for that link .... The videos great. I'm fairly new here, and the whole idea of the USSR actually having a decent economy but being knocked around by capitalist propaganda isn't something that I'd though of before. Makes sense though :)