lets learn about state capitalism!

[nihilust]

"Marx was for communism, but Lenin was for state capitalism; Marx was for working class interest , but Lenin was for peasants interest; Marx was against capitalist, but Lenin was for 'distressed' capitalist; Marx was for a communist revolution, but Lenin was for democratic revolution; Marx was for unity of workers of the world, but Lenin was for unity of workers, peasants and patriotic peoples of a country; and Marx was for a communist revolution, which range is universal, and which is only job of working class, but Lenin was for national liberation. Thus, both the persons are not same, but quite opposite. Therefore, Marx was discoverer of Science of socialism, but Leninism is corruption of science of socialism."

saw this online and was kinda surpassed by how orthodox marx it was, guess i just dont see it that often. can anyone explain state capitalism in a condensed manner please?

[Red Banana]

The state owns the means of production; a small class of bureaucrats and party bosses are/control the state and thus the means of production forming a de facto bourgeois capitalist class. The USSR, China and their satellites were all state capitalist, and China still is.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth. Basically Russia was in a horrendous situation after WWI and the Russian Civil War and it was thought necessary to back track and institute the New Economic Program. There was supposed to be two economies during this time, a collectivized state sector and a private sector.Eventually the socialist sector was supposed to fully take over.

The term "state capitalism" is usually used as a description of what the USSR and other "socialist" states were believed to be by unorthoox Trotskyists, anti-revisionist MLs and Maoists.It was developed by CLR James and later picked up by Tony Cliff.

[Ostrinski]

The state owns the means of production; a small class of bureaucrats and party bosses are/control the state and thus the means of production forming a de facto bourgeois capitalist class. The USSR, China and their satellites were all state capitalist, and China still is.By that definition China would be just plain ol' capitalist, not state capitalist. They have a market economy afterall. Unless you consider every other economy in the world state capitalist.

But I think state capitalism is horseshit anyway.

[Let's Get Free]

Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth.

Actually, Lenin himself desired, promoted and acknowledged the implementation of State Capitalism in Russia, but it was mostly confined to party debate and private letters. The destruction of soviet democracy and Trotsky's "militarization of labor" and the introduction of 'War Communism' was when the Bolsheviks introduced it in Russia, and it was solidified by the NEP.

Here are a few quotes by Lenin

"State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country."


"The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.
Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable."

[ed miliband]

Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth. Basically Russia was in a horrendous situation after WWI and the Russian Civil War and it was thought necessary to back track and institute the New Economic Program. There was supposed to be two economies during this time, a collectivized state sector and a private sector.Eventually the socialist sector was supposed to fully take over.

The term "state capitalism" is usually used as a description of what the USSR and other "socialist" states were believed to be by unorthoox Trotskyists, anti-revisionist MLs and Maoists.It was developed by CLR James and later picked up by Tony Cliff.

people were using the term long before james, and cliff's definition of state capitalism isn't quite the same a james'.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Actually, Lenin himself desired, promoted and acknowledged the implementation of State Capitalism in Russia, but it was mostly confined to party debate and private letters. The destruction of soviet democracy and Trotsky's "militarization of labor" and the introduction of 'War Communism' was when the Bolsheviks introduced it in Russia, and it was solidified by the NEP.

Here are a few quotes by Lenin

"State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country."


"The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.
Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable."

No Lenin was for communism, to claim otherwise regardless of agreeing with his ideas or not, is just not accurate.

As for the quotes above, Lenin says state-capitalism would be preferable to the situation they had. Is that socialism vs. state-capitalism? No. It's privite production vs. state-capitalism that he is comparing. More centralized production (done already by capitalism) is much better for workers to take over since we have already been collectivised in the production process, we just don't have any power. But he did not argue that this was socialism or communism: he argues in that article that workers have political power but not economic power (since much of production was done by small privite producers still despite a small number of very large industrial areas). He basically argued that state-capitalism was a way workers could use their political power to hold society together until the German Revolution could bolster Revolution in Russia by providing a much more economically powerful working class and one that was much more organized with longer tradditions of cooperation and consiousness.

So a lot of the policies in this time were about trying to deal with a growing fissure between working class interestes and the interests of the pesantry. They tried forced appropriation of food to bring to the armies and cities, they tried opening up space for the pesants to engage in market trade in order to keep them alligned to the worker's government.

But at this same time revolution in other places was being defeated and the Russian working class was dissolving and this opened up the space for a (IMO counter-revolutionary) alternative of not using state-capitalism as a sort of emergency measure, but as the basis for building up the national economy.

And this is the kind of "state-capitalism" that the OP was asking about I think. Not an economic policy, but a system in which the state stands in and acts as the capitalist class would (except for various histotical reasons the capitalists can not). For example, there was state-capitalism in 19th century Germany where the central state was used to modernize the country to compete with the more advanced capitalist countries.

In Russia, the original implementation of state-capitalism as Lenin argued was supposed to be organized by represenatives of worker's interests - so state capitalism was to be a way to keep production going and prevent production breaking into small independant capitalist producers by maintaining or increasing centralization of production. This assumes that the working class in Russia would remain confident and organized and that the revolution would spread to more advanced capitalist countries - neither of these things happened. In it's later form in the USSR, however, the goal is production in of itself and the class force was the beurocracy which had formed and become part of the Bolshevik party. These were often non-bolsheviks (in 1917) who were specialists and had burocratic skills needed initially but at any rate, building a strong "socialist" country became the goal, not worker's power.

[Manic Impressive]

Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth. Basically Russia was in a horrendous situation after WWI and the Russian Civil War and it was thought necessary to back track and institute the New Economic Program. There was supposed to be two economies during this time, a collectivized state sector and a private sector.Eventually the socialist sector was supposed to fully take over.
Russia was not industrialized when the Bolsheviks seized control. Lenin might not have wanted to introduce capitalism but he had no choice and freely admitted that.

The term "state capitalism" is usually used as a description of what the USSR and other "socialist" states were believed to be by unorthoox Trotskyists, anti-revisionist MLs and Maoists.It was developed by CLR James and later picked up by Tony Cliff.
That's just ridiculous and I think you know it to be untrue. Not least because Bordiga had written extensively about it way before Cliff and the SPGB had been calling Russia state capitalism within months of the Bolsheviks ascent to power. It's through the SPGB that Cliff learned his theory of state capitalism which he mangled and got wrong.

[Hit The North]

It's through the SPGB that Cliff learned his theory of state capitalism which he mangled and got wrong.

I'd like to see the evidence that Cliff learned this theory via the SPGB and for you to show how he mangled it and in what way he got it wrong.

Edit: It will also give you the opportunity to actually read Cliff's work :)

[Devrim]

I'd like to see the evidence that Cliff learned this theory via the SPGB

I am not sure where Cliff 'learned this theory' from, but it certainly wasn't his original creation. Ideas about state capitalism in Russia had been around since at least early 1918. Cliff certainly knew his Lenin, and it is inconceivable that he would have been ignorant of debates within the party which Lenin directly refers to in his pamphlets.

Personally, I think that Cliff's version of state capitalism is theoretically the weakest I have seen, and is contains major flaws.

Devrim

[Manic Impressive]

I'd like to see the evidence that Cliff learned this theory via the SPGB and for you to show how he mangled it and in what way he got it wrong.

Edit: It will also give you the opportunity to actually read Cliff's work :)
Well indirectly, Cliff got his state capitalism from Jock Haston, Jock Haston got his his stance on state capitalism from the SPGB. Cliff was originally asked by Mandel to "fight the state capitalist heresies" within the RCP. In the course of arguing against state capitalism Cliff changed his position.

And yes I have read Cliff and the most glaring mistake if I remember correctly is that he claims that the bolsheviks only introduced state capitalism after 1921. Which is frankly quite ridiculous and fairly obvious to anyone with an objective view point that he is clearly employing some mental gymnastics in order to discredit Stalin while staying loyal to Lenin and Trotsky.


When I first began to question the CP line I still sold the Daily Worker, but at Marble Arch I came into contact with the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and a guy who was then the Secretary of the SPGB called [K]ohn. He gave me a terrible hammering one night on my ‘Leninism’, and I spent the whole night reading, and when I went back the following night he gave me a bigger hammering. For some months after that I used to attend SPGB meetings, and learned a great deal from the SPGB over the course of the next eight or nine months. But then I came across Trotsky’s pamphlet What Next for Germany

[Let's Get Free]

No Lenin was for communism, to claim otherwise regardless of agreeing with his ideas or not, is just not accurate.

I'm not denying that Lenin wasn't emotionally for communism, even if he thought it could be brought about through state capitalism.


As for the quotes above, Lenin says state-capitalism would be preferable to the situation they had. Is that socialism vs. state-capitalism? No. It's privite production vs. state-capitalism that he is comparing. More centralized production (done already by capitalism) is much better for workers to take over since we have already been collectivised in the production process, we just don't have any power. But he did not argue that this was socialism or communism: he argues in that article that workers have political power but not economic power (since much of production was done by small privite producers still despite a small number of very large industrial areas). He basically argued that state-capitalism was a way workers could use their political power to hold society together until the German Revolution could bolster Revolution in Russia by providing a much more economically powerful working class and one that was much more organized with longer tradditions of cooperation and consiousness.

Soviet state capitalism wasn't about workers using their political power for anything. The Bolsheviks ignored the factory committees’ suggestions and instead utilized Tsarist structures as the framework for what they called "socialism." In workplace they urged and imposed “dictatorial” one-man management. The Bolsheviks became isolated from the masses (as they themselves admitted) while soviet executives accrued more power. The economy collapsed as bureaucracy mismanaged it. A strongly centralized state capitalist Government running the economy was undesirable and wildly Utopian. For example, the central economic body did not even know how many workplaces it was managing.





And this is the kind of "state-capitalism" that the OP was asking about I think. Not an economic policy, but a system in which the state stands in and acts as the capitalist class would (except for various histotical reasons the capitalists can not). For example, there was state-capitalism in 19th century Germany where the central state was used to modernize the country to compete with the more advanced capitalist countries.

In Russia, the original implementation of state-capitalism as Lenin argued was supposed to be organized by represenatives of worker's interests - so state capitalism was to be a way to keep production going and prevent production breaking into small independant capitalist producers by maintaining or increasing centralization of production. This assumes that the working class in Russia would remain confident and organized and that the revolution would spread to more advanced capitalist countries - neither of these things happened. In it's later form in the USSR, however, the goal is production in of itself and the class force was the beurocracy which had formed and become part of the Bolshevik party. These were often non-bolsheviks (in 1917) who were specialists and had burocratic skills needed initially but at any rate, building a strong "socialist" country became the goal, not worker's power.

Look, I'm not expecting Lenin to have been able to turn water into wine, nor could he have. When you have a political party that seizes power in advance to the population becoming socialist minded, you have no choice but to administer capitalism. The Bolshevik revolution was a complete failure form the standpoint of advancing the socialist cause and its outcome was the imposition of dictatorship over the proletariat, the harsh suppression of the workers and the rolling out of a programme state-administered capitalism. It is a not a model of revolution that any socialist would recommend and part of the reason for its failure was precisely the conspicuous lack of a majority of workers who understood what a genuine socialist society was about and sought to bring it about. And there's no such thing as state capitalism "in the interest of the workers," since capitalism can only really be run in the interests of capital.

[nihilust]

jimmie higgins has answered the question the best according to my original post and the insurrectionist has made a good rebuttal to that post by jimmie. what i want to know is that, although i understand you cannot go from the tsarist nation they had to communism, did lenin understand this when introducing state capital and hoped to move on to socialism etc? what was the point of the state capitalism, what role did it play in moving towards socialism?

[l'Enfermé]

Ermm, by Lenin's definition, the model of state-(monopoly)capitalism was Kaiser Wilhelm II's German Empire/Deutsches Kaiserreich.

According to Lenin, state-capitalism was, in his time, the final(because he believed that the overthrow of bourgeoisie supremacy and it's replacement by working-class supremacy was imminent in the entire capitalist world) stage of capitalism, and the most progressive, because by the time it kicks in, the means of production have been developed to such an extent, that socialism has finally become feasible, all of it's prerequisites are already there. I.e, the fastest road to socialism is from state-capitalism.

[Dave B]

The SPGB in fact ‘got’ the idea that Bolshevik Russia is/was state capitalism, or to quote Grant from 1948;


……that state capitalism has been in existence since the Russian Revolution and the function of the revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society…..
http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm

From a pamphlet called ‘The Chief Task Our Times” which was printed by Pankhurst’s ‘anarchist’;

THE WORKERS' SOCIALIST FEDERATION in 1918.

Published as an uncritical endorsement of the Bolshevik experiment.


Probably provided by the then ;THE PEOPLE'S RUSSIAN INFORMATION BUREAU 152, Fleet Street, E.C.4.

The second part of which is a slightly amended version of;

V. I. Lenin SESSION OF THE ALL-RUSSIA C.E.C. APRIL 29, 1918.

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/SAR18.html



Some of the ‘state capitalism’ quotes in the original had been changed to ‘state socialism’.

The SPGB continued to use that pamphlet, including in debates with Trots uptothe 1950’s; but we appear to have lost it from our library soon after.

We recovered a scanned electronic copy of it from the Australian national library and digitalised it.

The Australian copy was original owned by an ‘Australian’ Trot Baracchi, Guido; lets presume he had also read it.

Actually there was no debate at all before say 1925 about whether or not Bolshevik Russia was/or had been state capitalism.


It was not contested and everybody accepted it, then .

Including Lenin (obviously) as well as Trotsky, Bukharin, Ruhle and People's Commissariat of Finance Sokolnikov etc;who had studied economics at the Sorbonne for what it matters.

If Cliff hadn’t read Lenin’s “Leftwing Childishness” in 1948, in which Lenin unequivocally stated that, to quote Grant again that;


……the function of the revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society…
Then you would have thought that he would have read it after Grant’s ‘rebuttal’ of Cliff’s thesis; as Ted ‘helpfully’ directed his attention to it when he quoted from it, albeit with a ‘Incorrect Usage of Quotations’.

In fact all the members of the magic circle of Trot intellectuals, including Trotsky, Cliff and Grant knew about Lenin’s leftwing childishness pamphlet, and what was in it, before 1948.

James Burnham said so.

Trotsky also, apart from saying that that Bolshevik Russia was state capitalism himself in 1922, quoted Lenin saying so from Leftwing Childishness in Trotsky’s own seminal anti Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ essay of 1928?

A must read for any budding Trot intellectual.

As Grant pointed out; Cliff’s idea that Russia became state capitalism after 1928 would mean that it went from its original Leninist path of state capitalism to “something else” (after Lenin and under Stalin ie 1924-8) and back to state capitalism again.



So even according to Lenin at the end of 1922;


……we are still making progress along the path of state capitalism, a path that leads us forward to socialism and communism..

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/05.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/05.htm)


Can anyone provide a quotation that anybody thought before 1925 that Russia was not state capitalist?

We are being flattered, and for some aggrandizing ourselves, for having ‘discovered’ the idea.




.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm not denying that Lenin wasn't emotionally for communism, even if he thought it could be brought about through state capitalism.That is a misleading way to put it. He thought socialism could be brought about through revolution in Germany - he thought state-capitalist policies under the policical control of workers (though this is where problems of substitutionism lead to much bigger problems down the road, but I think this was a development out of coditions at the time, not by design or intent and not ienvitable) would keep the revolution progressing in the meantime. Coversely, state capitalism as a system as it developed in the USSR was not temporary, it was the basis of how the country produced and it was backed by a group of beurocrats who owed their position not the the revolution and the power of the working class revolt, but owed their position to the sucess of state-capitalism as an economic end to itself.


Soviet state capitalism wasn't about workers using their political power for anything. The Bolsheviks ignored the factory committees’ suggestions and instead utilized Tsarist structures as the framework for what they called "socialism." In workplace they urged and imposed “dictatorial” one-man management. The Bolsheviks became isolated from the masses (as they themselves admitted) while soviet executives accrued more power. The economy collapsed as bureaucracy mismanaged it. A strongly centralized state capitalist Government running the economy was undesirable and wildly Utopian. For example, the central economic body did not even know how many workplaces it was managing.The isolation and substitutionism were indeed problems and while Lenin saw state-capitalism as a way for workers to protect their gains from the country petty-bourgoise whose interests if not tied and subordinate to working class interests are in induvidual small capitalist poduction, utlimately it was the urban petty-bougroise, who pushed things back. This is an important lesson, but I don't buy the arguments that this was inevitable or by design, rather than due to circumstances and a long process.


Look, I'm not expecting Lenin to have been able to turn water into wine, nor could he have. When you have a political party that seizes power in advance to the population becoming socialist minded, you have no choice but to administer capitalism.I think this is the opposite of Lenin's thinking on this. The population, the workers engaged in struggle specifically, were socialist minded. This is why "All power to the Soviets" became the rallying cry for the Bolsheviks. The problem in the view of almost all socialists either Bolshevik or Menshevik was that the economic conditions were not present in Russia alone. This led the Menshiviks to conclude as you stated that there is no choice but capitalism. The Bolsheviks developed a different view and counted on a Russian Revolution creating working class policial power which would then inspire and be joined by Revolutions in places where there could be real working class economic as well as political power.

Lenin's view of "State capitalism" was that this was the step forward from small petty-bourgoise production, not a step forward from fully developed capitalism. In Germany there would be no purpose for state-capitalism because capitalism was already hightly industrialized and centralized and so the system had already done the work of putting economic power in the hands of workers - they just needed to take it into their own hands. In Russia though, while there were some large industries, these were often geared for export and so workers couldn't produce what they need alone, most Russian production was still done by small farmers and small shops and so on.

To quote Lenin on State-Capitalism and the misconceptions by other revolutionaries:


It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both state capitalism and socialism. The petty bourgeoisie oppose every kind of state interference, accounting and control, whether it be state capitalist or state socialist. This is an absolutely unquestionable fact of reality, and the root of the economic mistake of the “Left Communists” is that they have failed to understand it. The profiteer, the commercial racketeer, the disrupter of monopoly—these are our principal “internal” enemies, the enemies of the economic measures of Soviet power.


The Bolshevik revolution was a complete failure form the standpoint of advancing the socialist cause and its outcome was the imposition of dictatorship over the proletariat, the harsh suppression of the workers and the rolling out of a programme state-administered capitalism.The Bolshevik revolution was a huge advance and the most important thing for socialism since the Paris Commune and here we are still debating it. The counter-revolution was the set-back, the failure of Revolution in Germany was a set-back, that the counter-revolution kept the language and theories of marxism and used them for their opposite was the set-back IMO.


It is a not a model of revolution that any socialist would recommend and part of the reason for its failure was precisely the conspicuous lack of a majority of workers who understood what a genuine socialist society was about and sought to bring it about. And there's no such thing as state capitalism "in the interest of the workers," since capitalism can only really be run in the interests of capital.The specific policies after the Revolution are specific to the conditions and time so yes, we probably will not have to deal with a situation where small production is more common than industrial processes in a region because capitalism has established it's links everywhere and there are large working classes all over the world whereas 100 years ago much of the world still had small farm production (even in the US until the 1920s or so, most people were rural and not part of industrial production).

[nihilust]

would you say that the ussr was state capitalist for sometime and then made the transition to socialism, or it remained state capitalist until its downfall?

[Red Banana]

By that definition China would be just plain ol' capitalist, not state capitalist. They have a market economy afterall. Unless you consider every other economy in the world state capitalist.

But I think state capitalism is horseshit anyway.

Almost all Chinese companies are owned by China, so by said definition China would be state capitalist. The role of markets is near irrelevant, I'm talking about ownership. They have however been integrating traditional capitalist corporations into their economy which, I think, would be the only basis for your argument.

[Prof. Oblivion]

Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth. Basically Russia was in a horrendous situation after WWI and the Russian Civil War and it was thought necessary to back track and institute the New Economic Program. There was supposed to be two economies during this time, a collectivized state sector and a private sector.Eventually the socialist sector was supposed to fully take over.

The term "state capitalism" is usually used as a description of what the USSR and other "socialist" states were believed to be by unorthoox Trotskyists, anti-revisionist MLs and Maoists.It was developed by CLR James and later picked up by Tony Cliff.

Actually the term has three different meaning, one of which being the Cliffite definition and another being that which Lenin used.

[Prof. Oblivion]

Russia was not industrialized when the Bolsheviks seized control. Lenin might not have wanted to introduce capitalism but he had no choice and freely admitted that.

That's just ridiculous and I think you know it to be untrue. Not least because Bordiga had written extensively about it way before Cliff and the SPGB had been calling Russia state capitalism within months of the Bolsheviks ascent to power. It's through the SPGB that Cliff learned his theory of state capitalism which he mangled and got wrong.


Russia was one of the largest industrial powerhouses in the world at the time. If my memory serves correctly it was the largest producer of iron in the world a few years before the revolution.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Russia was one of the largest industrial powerhouses in the world at the time. If my memory serves correctly it was the largest producer of iron in the world a few years before the revolution.Russia, really just a few areas actually, had some of the largest factories in the world, but it's industry was pretty small and narrowly focused. Germany was the industrial powerhouse of the capitalist world at the time.


would you say that the ussr was state capitalist for sometime and then made the transition to socialism, or it remained state capitalist until its downfall? Personally I'd say that early state capitalist policies in Russia were headed by a revolutionary but increasingly substitutionist party. The shift would be not in state capitalism to socialism or vica versa but that in the first few years it was still the residual revolutionary movement that was driving force whereas in short order, without a working class power in the political lead, a beurocratic social force filled the vaccume and then they drove state capitalism, not as a way to increase the power of the workers, but to increase industry and modernization. So rather than being a sort of temporary or butressing measure, it became a reason in of itself; the way the economy could be managed in Russia alone and then ensure that the small people who gained positions of power under this set-up remained there.

[Manic Impressive]

Russia was one of the largest industrial powerhouses in the world at the time. If my memory serves correctly it was the largest producer of iron in the world a few years before the revolution.
The population of Russia was 80% peasant at the time of the revolution. It's not total out put that determines how advanced capitalism is it's how developed it is in all industries. While Russia may have been exploiting it's rich natural resources it was not an "industrial powerhouse".

[Manic Impressive]

would you say that the ussr was state capitalist for sometime and then made the transition to socialism, or it remained state capitalist until its downfall?
It was feudal then capitalist and remained capitalist. What you've got to ask is was there money, markets, commodity production, exploitation of surplus value and accumulation of capital.

[nihilust]

so the ussr didnt adhere to any socialist values?

[Manic Impressive]

values? hmm I'd say it probably did adhere to some values or the conception of values at times. But economically it was never socialism as defined by Marx and Engels. It's like that quote I used in the other thread.


The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed, from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in a unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interest of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.
That's Engels talking about Thomas Munzer but I think the general principle relates to Lenin's position. Socialism was not possible in Russia due to not being industrialized and not having a class conscious majority. The famous slogan that the bolshevik party was built on was "peace, land, and bread" this is a reform. It says nothing of common ownership of the means of production or the abolition of capitalism or even from each according his ability to each according their need. It is a slogan, as Lenin would say for "trade union consciousness".
Once capitalism had been established in the soviet union the party leaders then found themselves bound to the laws of capital. In other words and I think someone else already said this capitalism cannot be made to work in the interests of workers.

[Dave B]

There was an interesting comment from Cliff in on emergent pre fully industrialized nations, intellectuals and state capitalism.

As a concluding statement of;

Tony Cliff Deflected Permanent Revolution (1963)




They are great believers in efficiency, including efficiency in social engineering. They hope for reform from above and would dearly love to hand the new world over to a grateful people, rather than see the liberating struggle of a self-conscious and freely associated people result in a new world for themselves. They care a lot for measures to drag their nation out of stagnation, but very little for democracy. They embody the drive for industrialisation, for capital accumulation, for national resurgence. Their power is in direct relation to the feebleness of other classes, and their political nullity.


All this makes totalitarian state capitalism a very attractive goal for intellectuals. And indeed they are the main banner-bearers of communism in the emergent nations. “Communism has found acceptance in Latin America among students and the middle class”, writes a Latin American specialist. [46] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm#n46#n46) In India, at the Congress of the Communist Party in Amritsar (March/April 1958), “approximately 67 per cent of the delegates were from classes other than the proletariat and peasantry (middle class, land-owning class, and ‘small traders’). 72 per cent had some college education.” [47] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm#n47#n47)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm

From that; and knowing as Cliff did that Russian revolution was state capitalism from the beginning and that it was introduced by the Bolshevik ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’

(As from; What is to be Done).

And following Cliff’s thesis; you would have to conclude that the Russian revolution was the original ‘deflected permanent revolution’.

The alternative conclusion, posed by Grant, which is more sound I think; is that the Russian revolution was just another standard/theoretical bourgeois revolution (history repeating itself- in the Russian case as farce rather than tragedy) in a different guise (form or appearance as opposed to fundamental content) with the ‘actors’ merely wearing different costumes.

Those ‘actors’, ie the Bolsheviks, being a ‘new class’ forcing through the inevitable economic change and transition ie capitalism.

Eg from Karl’s opening passage;


The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm


Thus from Grant who presents that thesis is a ‘reasonable’ way;



Cliff himself points to the fact that in the bourgeois revolution the masses did the fighting and the bourgeois got the fruits. The masses did not know what they were fighting for, but they fought in reality for the rule of the bourgeoisie. Take the French Revolution. It was prepared and had its ideology in the works of the philosophers of the enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc.



However, they really did believe in the idealisation of bourgeois society. They believed the codicils of liberty, equality and fraternity which they preached. As is well known, and as Cliff himself quotes Marx to prove, the French Revolution went beyond its social base. It resulted in the revolutionary dictatorship of the sans culottes which went beyond the bounds of bourgeois society.

As Marx explained, this had the salutory effect of completing in a few months what would otherwise have taken the bourgeois decades to do. The leaders of the revolutionary wing of the petty bourgeoisie which wielded this dictatorship - Robespierre, Danton, etc, sincerely believed in the doctrines of the philosophers and attempted to put them into practice. They could not do so because it was impossible to go beyond the economic base of the given society.



They inevitably had to lose power and merely paved the way for bourgeois society. If Cliff’s argument is correct, one could only conclude that the same thing happened with the Russian as with the French Revolution. Marx was the prophet of the new state capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky were the Robespierres and Carnots of the Russian Revolution. The fact that Lenin and Trotsky had good intentions is beside the point, as were the good intentions of the leaders of the bourgeois revolution. They merely paved the way for the rule of the new state capitalist class.


http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm

That argument was circulating around pre 1948 from some other leftist critics.

And sort of related to that there is also an early example of Milovan Đilas ‘New Class’ theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milovan_%C4%90ilas

From Lenin’s own;


V. I. Lenin New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise 1921




Everybody knows that the October Revolution actually brought new forces, a new class, to the forefront, that the best representatives of the proletariat are now governing Russia, built up an army, led that army, set up local government, etc., are running industry, and so on.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/20.htm

[there are some more state capitalism quotes in that as well.]

The Bolshevik programme was basically to reform state capitalism towards communism just as Bernstienist wished to reform capitalism to socialism.

They both ended up in the same place; their ideology didn’t reform capitalism rather capitalism and state capitalism reformed their ideology.




.

[Grenzer]

God, why do you have to type in that stupid font? Just use the same one as everyone else; it's much easier.

[Nihilist Scud Missile]

Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth. Basically Russia was in a horrendous situation after WWI and the Russian Civil War and it was thought necessary to back track and institute the New Economic Program.

Russia wasn't ready for socialism pre WW1. War or no war capitalists/capitalism had not yet developed Russia so Lenin and Stalin did under the name of socialism. Seeing I have -20 reputation and you 3000 anything I say will be wrong. LOL.

The Russian population by in large was not an industrial proletariat population pre WW1 or post WW1. Lenin thought it necessary to back track? To what? Hunter gatherer society? There was no base in the first place to build socialism on. No foundation of large industry and majority proletariat class. Lenin and Stalin had to create all of it under the name of socialism when all along socialists have known thats the job of capitalism.

[nihilust]

Russia wasn't ready for socialism pre WW1. War or no war capitalists/capitalism had not yet developed Russia so Lenin and Stalin did under the name of socialism. Seeing I have -20 reputation and you 3000 anything I say will be wrong. LOL.

The Russian population by in large was not an industrial proletariat population pre WW1 or post WW1. Lenin thought it necessary to back track? To what? Hunter gatherer society? There was no base in the first place to build socialism on. No foundation of large industry and majority proletariat class. Lenin and Stalin had to create all of it under the name of socialism when all along socialists have known thats the job of capitalism.

i see what you're saying, that they had to follow the "stages" as marx previously said but did lenin and stalin develop what was had in the ussr abiding this future transition to socialism?

[Prof. Oblivion]

Russia, really just a few areas actually, had some of the largest factories in the world, but it's industry was pretty small and narrowly focused. Germany was the industrial powerhouse of the capitalist world at the time.

Its industry wasn't "pretty small". I also never said that it was the industrial powerhouse but rather a powerhouse. I agree that Germany was one as well.


The population of Russia was 80% peasant at the time of the revolution. It's not total out put that determines how advanced capitalism is it's how developed it is in all industries. While Russia may have been exploiting it's rich natural resources it was not an "industrial powerhouse".

Level of development can be gauged by a wide variety of metrics, mostly depending on your purpose for inquiry. However, this is irrelevant as it is unquestionable that Russia was industrialized in 1917.

The fact that Russia was one of the largest producers of one of the largest commodities in the world at the time, indeed makes it an "industrial powerhouse". Now, you can argue with this but it'd just be silly semantics.

[Manic Impressive]

Bill I'm not sure we have the same definition of industrialized. I think industrialized means that industry is the primary mode of production within a country. You seem to think it is having a few factories. No one is denying that there were factories. I'm not even challenging you on Russia being one of the worlds highest iron producers despite you providing no evidence, it is plausible. However, this does not negate the fact that Russia had a proletarian population of around 20% meaning that 80% of the population were not engaged in a capitalist mode of production. I mean by 1939, census records show that 52.5% were industrial workers while 44.9% were collective farmers. The collective farmers at this point were still not waged workers, the proletariat was still being recruited from the peasantry. Now to me and many others that indicates that Russia was not industrialized let alone an industrial powerhouse in 1917.

[Dave B]

In general in Marxist terms Russia as a whole was considered to be a backward country.

Lenin even said that in 1920, as well as describing it then as still ‘capitalism’;


But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm


‘Backward Russia’ was certainly the standard orthodox position of the 2nd international and thus the Bolshevik position in 1905, as in for instance Lenin’s own Two Tactics essay.

Some time around 1910 Lenin I think even said it was more backward than China.

Some people use data that Russia was the fifth largest economy in the world.

But on a per capita basis it slides down the scale considerably.

It was however significant provider of raw agricultural materials eg grain and timber which were still mostly produced in a ‘feudal’ economy.

But there were concentrated pockets of capitalism proper in mining and mineral extraction eg gold and oil etc, as well as industrial manufacturing ‘proper’.

Some of the industrial manufacturing ‘proper’ was quite modern and the result of importation of concentrated ‘foreign’ capitalist investment.

So there were huge modern factories in Russia, by anybodies standards, at the time

However, to switch back again, many of the proletariat proper, in say 1910, were still at the most second generation workers but mainly first generation and even still half peasant.

Agricultural production in much of Russia was highly seasonal and a significant proportion of industrial workers were in fact peasants working in factories and mines etc as seasonal economic migrants.

The point being perhaps, that even the industrial workers in Russia had been catapulted into capitalism at an accelerated rate and still had a cultural heritage and peasant consciousness and economic base.

To which they would rather return.

It depends ‘sociologically’ on your view on how long it takes for people to shed the idea, dreams and aspirations of just wanting to own your own little family farm and be a little Proudhonist businessman.

Owning and working your own means of production and a general disinterest in employing and exploiting people for profit.

And not wanting to be a wage worker under capitalism for that matter.


Karl and Fred said that Proudhonism was popular in peasant economies eg Southern Europe because it fitted in with their economic cultural aspirations.

The old and ‘established’ working class in Russia were disproportionately represented by those who had previously been artisans and small scale manufacturers.

Thrown out of that economic niche and proletarianised as the dispossessed by the cheaper products of mass production of international and ‘imported’ capitalism.