Economic Nature of the Soviet Union II [Archive]

Let's Get Free

29th December 2012, 05:57

look broody, every economy without fail entails planning. Ludwig Von Mises, Milton Friedmans, and Freidrich Hayeks free market dystopias are full to the brim with plans. Every businessman makes plans.

if by "planned economy" you mean the amalgamation of all the little plans into one big super mega plan, otherwise known as 'central planning' then no, that was not the case in the USSR either. There was much more decentralized decision making then is commonly supposed, without which the USSR would have collapsed much sooner than it did. Not only that, GOSPLANS "plans" were more or less a complete farce, a lie, a charade. No plan was ever strictly fulfilled . What happened was that the plan's targets were constantly changed to make it appear as if they had been successfully fulfilled. That is what I meant when I said the plans were guided by the economy.

oh wow, now you're making this breathtaking claim that there wasn't any private property and no profit motive.

Actually, capitalism doesn't depend on private ownership of the means of production in the sense of individual capitalists having some legally enshrined right to their property. Here's an Engels quote

"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

Note that phrase: " the capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. So state ownership is fully compatible with capitalism. Inwardly digest what this means!

as for there not being a profit motive; what nonsense! Of course there was a profit motive, in fact enterprises were legally obliged to make a profit and could be punished if they didnt

Astarte

29th December 2012, 06:24

The mode of the USSR was unique to history. It would have been socialistic if the working class had control over the surplus it was producing since the means of production and property were indeed collectively owned, and it would have been a form of modern Asiatic Despotism if the bureaucracy had been able to establish complete control over the surplus product of labor and freedom as a class of individuals to dispose of that surplus product as they personally saw fit - rather the bureaucracy only had partial control over the surplus, so they were not even an actual "ruling class" but rather a kind of political elite. The complete surplus product of society was not at the disposal of the bureaucracy since there was so much waste, "creativity" in record-keeping and over all mismanagement in the production process. Individually the bureaucrat had no control whatsoever over disposing of the surplus value society produced in the way a capitalist, feudal lord, paterfamilias or ancient Egyptian nomarch could have. Even collectively the bureaucracy could not specifically appropriate the surplus to their own benefit and reproduction as a class, since the situation at the base of collective ownership demanded the constant growth of the productive forces towards increasing living standards and increasing production levels which could at least pass for socialism - something which began to unravel during the years of Brezhnev and stagnation, which soon after lead to the collapse of the whole system.

Delenda Carthago

29th December 2012, 07:58

With all the condradictions, all the mistakes, all the opportunistic turns, socialist.

Le Socialiste

29th December 2012, 08:15

With all the condradictions, all the mistakes, all the opportunistic turns, socialist.

Could you expand on this, please? How exactly did the USSR's economy correspond with socialism, or socialist 'model(s)' of production? How would you explain the role, state, and nature of the working-class in relation to the economic and political organization of the Soviet state? What were either's characteristics in this particular period? Where did the states of Eastern and Central Europe fit in this specific model? Perhaps just as importantly, what was the nature of their relationship(s) with the USSR, within the context of the latter's economic and political organization? I think these are all questions that bear answering, and I'd like to know what you think.

robbo203

29th December 2012, 11:58

It does describe the economic nature. There was a planned economy, which is completely different than capitalism, with a bureaucracy in charge, which didn't have the rights to any profits. This was evident seeing as the minimum status of living was having a job that you were paid a medium living standard for, which didn't create any wealth or value. The U.S.S.R. didn't have any currency that was worth anything, it was basically worth anything inside of the fSU because of how worthless in capitalists eyes the economy was. They didn't contribute at all to markets outside of the fSU where the rules weren't run for profit, but in a fortress, utilitarian, spartan way, which put heavy emphasis on the military. Everything was state thus publicly owned, so work with that.

Straight away on this new thread all the old delusions come tumbling forth:rolleyes:

Sorry but the SU was not a "planned" economy in that sense - no GOSPLAN plan was ever technically met. The plans were just routinely modifed as circumstaces changed. The economy guided the plan not the othe way round In short, the plans were just a vague wish list of production targets and there was far more in the way of decentralised decision making at the state enterprise level than such superficial and naive commentry suggests

Moreover state enterprises were legally required to make a profit - where on earth did you get your strange idea to the contrary from? People dont seem to grasp this and think it was just a "bookkeeping exercise". It was not The reversion of profits as the monetary expression of surplus value to the state was actually crucial to the whole reproduction process of accumulating capital. That is why physical inputs allowed for in the plan had to be priced. They had to be budgetted for and bought/sold. You could not just magic them into existence

As for the currency not being worth anything it is true the rouble was not used for international transactions but that does not mean it had no worth. Commdities were priced in roubles, were they not? Wages were paid in roubles, were they not? Means of production were bought and sold between state enterprises and financed by GOSBANK in roubles, were they not? So what on earth are you on about?

Red Economist

29th December 2012, 12:12

I voted that the USSR was 'socialist'. This isen't so much because I believe that it was socialist but that it would have to be socialist in order for marxism to be true.

In response to what people have already said, their is reason to be sceptical about whether the USSR was socialist because of the increased role of commodity production and exchange (money). These did however exist in contradiction with planning structures rather than in harmony with it, so a trotskyist 'degenerated bureaucratic state' or stalinist 'socialist' description is probably the best fit because of the imperfections of the planning system.

The option for bureaucratic collectivism implies that marxism is a form of false consciousness, used by a bureaucracy to decieve the proletariat into establishing it's rule. This is tantamount of arguing that it was 'totalitarianism' and is in essence an extremely liberal/libertarian position which rejects the role of the state in socialism.
If you (can get your hands on a copy of and) read James Burnharms The Managerial Revolution (1941) it provides a description of planning very similiar to Hayek's Road to Serfdom. equally, many of the ideas in that book were used by Orwell (including the idea of the three regional superpowers) in 1984.

Arguing that the USSR was a form of 'state-capitalism' throws up similar problems. I am not totally certain what the theory is, but my grasp of it is that the state is the capitalist, but in a collective sense. I think the argument is that the soviet state, by turnover tax (any revenue greater than cost and therefore effectively profit) constitutes a form of surplus appropriation and exploitation. For the most part, Soviet planners didn't take monetary values very seriously and looked at the quantities of goods and raw materials produced and hence often firms made (by capitalist terms) significant losses which required 'subsidies' to balance the books.
again, this rests on the idea that the state (as a ruling class) exists independently of an economic basis. this would be 'idealist' and Marxism would fall flat on it's face as a philosophical system.

Both of the above 'non-socialist' options require a different mode of production to understand the USSR, which would almost by definition falsify the prediction of communism, and marxism in general, since its fundamental conclusions would not prove to be correct.

robbo203

29th December 2012, 13:25

[/I]Arguing that the USSR was a form of 'state-capitalism' throws up similar problems. I am not totally certain what the theory is, but my grasp of it is that the state is the capitalist, but in a collective sense. I think the argument is that the soviet state, by turnover tax (any revenue greater than cost and therefore effectively profit) constitutes a form of surplus appropriation and exploitation. For the most part, Soviet planners didn't take monetary values very seriously and looked at the quantities of goods and raw materials produced and hence often firms made (by capitalist terms) significant losses which required 'subsidies' to balance the books.
again, this rests on the idea that the state (as a ruling class) exists independently of an economic basis. this would be 'idealist' and Marxism would fall flat on it's face as a philosophical system.

No this is implausible for all sorts of reasons - not the least of which is that the subsidies you refer to which would cover the losses made some state enterprises would have to come out of the profits made by others. While there was admittedly more leeway in a state capitalist economy to do this sort of thing than in a western-style mixed or private capitalist economy, that does not detract from the point that for the system as a whole the overriding imperative was, and had to be, the pursuit of prpfit. Indeed that explains why loss making enterprises were penalised in the SU. It was part of an overall carrot and stick policy on the the part of the ruling class to influence economic activity in a way that would ensure the flow of surplus value from state enterprises to the central state and then back again in an reproductive process of capital accumulation

It is for the same reason that I question your claim that "For the most part, Soviet planners didn't take monetary values very seriously and looked at the quantities of goods and raw materials produce" Physical planning in that sense is not unknown in the West but, at the end of the day, it had to be budgetted for in the SU and for which reason monetary values *which applied at every level, had to be taken seriously. There is a case for saying that the type of capitalist develpment model that existed in the SU, while possibly having certain advantages over other models at an early stage of development, proved increasing unwieldly and nresponsive at a latter stage when the economy became more diversified. But saying that, does not mean the basic economy was not a capitaist one; it just means that that particular model of running capitalism proved less efficient than some rival model at a comparable stage of develoipment

In any event, even it could be demonstrated that the SU was not state capitalist - and I have yet to see any credible argument to support this - it would not in any way lend support to the claim that it was "socialist". It was self evdiently not a socialist economy by a Marxist reckoning of the term "socialism". Not in the slightest

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Dave B

29th December 2012, 15:33

In order to decide whether or not Russia was capitalist or not we would probably need to first decide what is capitalism, define it, is and what are its distinctive features by which it can be recognised and categorised.

Actually that in reality is not as straight forward as it seems, eg as commodity production, the law of value and exploitation (surplus labour) are not unique to capitalism.

However before we begin we could do a brief historical survey or appraisal on what the attitudes of various key individuals was towards the idea of state capitalist Russia.

Lenin from November 1917 The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It to The Russian Colony in North America November 1922 said the Soviet Russia was State Capitalism.

There is a compilation of state capitalist quotations on the matter from Lenin at;

http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-and-state-t118579/index.html?p=1578190

Others agreed eg famously Trotsky;

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

[later people like Grant who attacked the thesis that Russia was state capitalist and never was state capitalism were consciously and deliberately lying-as can be simply demonstrated]

It was Stalin who ‘first’ introduced the idea and argument that Russia was no longer ‘but that was in the past’ State capitalist at the end of 1925 from page 311;

http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/FC25.html

{not everyone agreed to that even then eg; Sokolnikov The People's Commissariat of Finance

"Our foreign trade is being conducted as a state-capitalist enterprise. . . . Our internal trading companies are also state-capitalist enterprises. And I must say, comrades, that the State Bank is just as much a state-capitalist enterprise. What about our monetary system? Our monetary system is based on the fact that in Soviet economy, under the conditions in which socialism is being built, there has been adopted a monetary system which is permeated with the principles of capitalist economy."
}

Trotsky adopted the same argument as Stalin in 1933

The Economy of the USSR

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm

Except he introduced a lie when he said that;

….Lenin came out with this very term [ eg state capitalism] at the time of the transition to the NEP,As Lenin had clearly ‘come out with the term’ in April 1918, before NEP in;

“……..On Left Wing Childishness and Petty Bourgeois Tendencies directed against Bukharin…….”

Which in fact Trotsky himself had already quoted from five years earliar.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti02.htm

Cliff in 1948, just to complicate the issue, inverted the argument by saying that Russia had passed from ‘God knows what’ to state capitalism in 1925, as opposed to the other way around.

So then what are the palpable ‘defining’ features of capitalism?

We could say that it is;

the obsessive and rapacious development of industrial production with machines, factories and infra structure (working capital- means of production) using mostly the wages system as the medium of exploitation and accumulation of ‘wealth’, in the form of said means of production, by a minority ruling class.

The material motivation underpinning it, being the increase in the productivity of labour power and expanding the scope of commodities that can be produced etc

That accumulation of ‘wealth’, and control thereof by a minority ruling class, or the ‘rich’, being protected from the economically envious and oppressed, or ‘poor’ by the ‘political power’ of its own state.

This definition at least excludes socialism as in Stalin’s own ANARCHISM or SOCIALISM?

Eg;

Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need either for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power…..

And;

…. the genuine communist principle will prevail: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Here there is no room for wage-labour……..
http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html#c3

And it would also exclude previous economic systems eg feudalism and simple commodity production etc.

However there are perhaps some differences between how capitalism, by that definition, operated in the soviet system and the private capitalism of orthodox capitalism.

In private capitalism it mostly 'proceeds' as a uncontrolled and unplanned 'anarchic' process by the economic competition between individually owned capitals.

[Unless the collective ‘private’ national capitalist class decided to nationalise and usually monopolise a particular branch of production and run it as a state capitalist enterprise.]

Also in private capitalism the wage labourer not being a slave was free to sell his commodity labour power to the highest bidder and purchase with his wages as a money commodity (as opposed to a scrip) what he pleased with it .

It could be argued that in the so called planned soviet economy the accumulation of productive capital (and exploitation of wage labour) did not proceed totally as a result of the ‘anarchic’ economic competition between individual ‘productive enterprises’.

And that possibly the workers were less free to sell their labour power to the highest bidder as there was ultimately only one monopoly state buyer of labour power.

And that the wages system operated on a kind of ‘Truck System’ with a state scrip worthless elsewhere eg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system

Both those are features in one way or another of slavery rather than free wage workers in capitalism.

[The ruling class and state protected ‘rich’ party nomenklatura of course had their own shops and holiday resorts etc from which the working class and thus non party members were excluded even if they could have afforded it.]

Bukharin, who at this time had also accepted that Russia was state capitalist, had something interesting to say on the symptoms and possibility for state capitalism to 'degenerate' or progress and develop into a higher form, depending on your viewpoint;

We see that State capitalism, far from putting an end to exploitation, actually increases the power of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless the Scheidemannites in Germany, and social solidarians in other lands, have contended that this forced labour is socialism. As soon, they say, as everything is in the hands of the State, socialism will be realized. They fail to see that in such a system the State is not a proletarian State, since it is in the hands of those who are the malicious and deadly enemies of the proletariat.

State capitalism uniting and organizing the bourgeoisie, increasing the power of capitalism, has, of course, greatly weakened the working class. Under State capitalism the workers became the white slaves of the capitalist State. They were deprived of the right to strike; they were mobilized and militarized; everyone who raised his voice against the war was hauled before the courts and sentenced as a traitor. In many countries the workers were deprived of all freedom of movement, being forbidden to transfer from one enterprise to another. ' Free' wage workers were reduced to serfdom; they were doomed to perish on the battlefields, not on behalf of their own cause but on behalf of that of their enemies. They were doomed to work themselves to death, not for their own sake or for that of their comrades or their children, but for the sake of their oppressors.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/04.htm

And;

Here I must raise another question. If the working class does not regard industry as its own, but as State capitalism, if it regards the factory management as a hostile force, and the building up of industry as a matter outside its concerns, and feels itself to be exploited, what is to happen? Shall we then be in a position, let us say, to carry on a campaign for higher production? “What the devil!” the workers would say, “are we to drudge for the capitalists? Only fools would do that.” How could we draw workers into the process of building up industry “What!” they would say, “shall we help the capitalist and build up the system? Only opportunists would do that.” If we say our industry is State capitalism, we shall completely disarm the working class. We dare not then speak of raising productive capacity, because that is the affair of the exploiters and not of the workers. To what end then shall we get larger and larger numbers to take part in our production conferences, if the workers are exploited, and when all that has nothing to do with them? Let the exploiter look after that! If we put the matter in this light, not only shall we be threatened with the danger of estrangement from the masses, but we shall not be in a position to build up our industries. That is as clear as daylight. http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1926/01/x01.htm

For interest there is a passage from Karl in volume III on;

Capitalist production is distinguished from the outset by two characteristic features……..

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch51.htm

l'EnfermÃ©

29th December 2012, 15:45

The law of value didn't exactly operate in the USSR. There were no markets. There was no wage-labour in the Soviet Union, it was more akin to forced-labour really. Even money, both in the Marxist definition and the bourgeois sense, didn't exist(it was abolished in the 30s due to economic shortages).

It wasn't anything-capitalist or anything-socialist. It was state-capitalist in the 20s, yes, but after the Stalin-era, not so much.

I voted for the last option.

Red Banana

29th December 2012, 16:23

I voted that the USSR was 'socialist'. This isen't so much because I believe that it was socialist but that it would have to be socialist in order for marxism to be true.

Firstly, the USSR was not socialist. They had commodity production, money, a state, and most importantly the class antagonism between wage labor and capital, so by definition the USSR could not have been socialist.

Secondly, the history and economic nature of the Soviet Union, like any other capitalist state, has nothing to do with the validity of Marxism. You might as well say that if the US wasn't socialist in the 20th century, then Marxism can't be true.

Thirdly, if, anything that is objectively true were to prove Marxism (or anything else for that matter) wrong, the answer would not be to hide your eyes from the evidence to preserve your way of thinking, but to bin it as soon as possible.

In fact, as Marxism is materialist, it would be inherently un-Marxist to ignore newly found material evidence that would render Marxism useless. If Marxism were proven false, any true Marxist would cease to be such upon discovery of that proof.

Zulu

29th December 2012, 16:25

Any discussion "about the nature of the USSR" with the participation of these people – and there are no other discussions of this topic – is trivial and of little interest for the communists and very quickly turns into a kind of Catholic canonization process. Highly initiated theologians waving kilometer-long sheets of quotations from the Fathers of the Church thoughtfully discuss whether or not the subject the dispute - the USSR, that is - is worthy of the High Title of Socialism, or there are some Dark Spots on its biography that prevent canonization. (http://marxistleninist.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=learning&action=display&thread=688)

Jack

29th December 2012, 17:14

You should add an option that it was fundamentally socialist before Khrushchev/Brezhnev (Kosigyn reform and all that jazz).

Let's Get Free

29th December 2012, 18:03

You should add an option that it was fundamentally socialist before Khrushchev/Brezhnev (Kosigyn reform and all that jazz).

Did the workers all of a sudden decide to hand their means of production back over to the capitalists when Khrushchev/Brezhnev came to power?

Red Banana

29th December 2012, 18:30

No, the only thing standing between the working class having their means of production and those dastardly revisionists stealing them from the working class was glorious comrade Stalin! It was his mere existence that made it possible for Socialism to exist in one country, and then suddenly disappear after his death.

Geiseric

29th December 2012, 19:26

Straight away on this new thread all the old delusions come tumbling forth:rolleyes:

Sorry but the SU was not a "planned" economy in that sense - no GOSPLAN plan was ever technically met. The plans were just routinely modifed as circumstaces changed. The economy guided the plan not the othe way round In short, the plans were just a vague wish list of production targets and there was far more in the way of decentralised decision making at the state enterprise level than such superficial and naive commentry suggests

Moreover state enterprises were legally required to make a profit - where on earth did you get your strange idea to the contrary from? People dont seem to grasp this and think it was just a "bookkeeping exercise". It was not The reversion of profits as the monetary expression of surplus value to the state was actually crucial to the whole reproduction process of accumulating capital. That is why physical inputs allowed for in the plan had to be priced. They had to be budgetted for and bought/sold. You could not just magic them into existence

As for the currency not being worth anything it is true the rouble was not used for international transactions but that does not mean it had no worth. Commdities were priced in roubles, were they not? Wages were paid in roubles, were they not? Means of production were bought and sold between state enterprises and financed by GOSBANK in roubles, were they not? So what on earth are you on about?

Great regardless it was still publicly owned, making it a planned economy. You can't get around the small thing, ownership of surplus, that makes capitalism what it is. Also don't condescend, I really don't like that.

Geiseric

29th December 2012, 19:45

Paul Cockshott

29th December 2012, 20:20

Of course the USSR had essentially a system of state run capitalism, no other explanation even remotely makes sense.

Well this view may be the only one that makes sense to you but it is a very minority one. The world in general, both within the USSR and outside of it considered the USSR to be the paradigm of a socialist economy. This was the overwhelming consensus opinion of economists.
They concluded this both because the Soviet Union lacked most of what have been taken to be distnguishing features of capitalism and because the Soviet economic system was set up with the explicit intention of creating a socialist economy following the general prescriptions that the socialist movement had developed in the period up to the 1930s.

The soviet economy lacked private entrepreneurs, functioning commodity markets and capital markets, revenue streams to capital, secure private property rights. These have traditionally been viewed by economists both left and right wing, as the distinguishing features of a capitalist economy. In their place the USSR had many features which had traditionally been established as the key goals of the socialist economic policy: a system of economic planning, a substantial part of the necessities of life were provided either free or at very subsidised prices, education and health care were completely free, no unemployment, no unearned income.

The idea that it was 'state capitalism' was a view originally developed by Kautsky in whose hands it served to justify the hostile position of German Social Democracy towards the communist movement. But in using this terminology Kautsky revised what had been the previous usage of the term state capitalism by marxists. The term had been used to describe the Imperial German war economy, one in which the greater part of industrial output was directed towards state needs and subject to considerable regulation. But two key differences between the USSR and the economy of the Kaiserreich was that a) the economy of the Kaiserreich remained privately owned even if it was state directed, in the USSR it was publicly owned
b) the state remained the old Junker/capitalist absolute monarchy, in the USSR the equivalent state - the Czarist absolute monarchy had be smashed.

Applying the term 'state capitalism' to the USSR meant a complete redefinition of state capitalism so that the term now became broad enough to encompass an economy ( the Russian one ) which by the 1930s featured most of the classic programmatic demands of the SPD.

Kautsky's views had very little influence on economists and the socialist movement generally at the time. In the period after 1945 and with the onset of the cold war variants of them were taken up by left social patriots like Tony Cliff and in a somewhat more radical and sophisticated form by the former leader of the Italian Communist Party Amadeo Bordiga in his book Struttura economica e sociale della Russia d'oggi.

Cliff got round the obvious differences between the USSR and capitalist economies by claiming that the essence of capitalism was that it was 'production for the sake of production' and that therefore the Soviet economy, directed as it was to a rapid growth rate with a high output of means of production was thus typically capitalist. The idea that capitalism is 'production for the sake of production', rather than production for the sake of private profit, was entirely an invention of Cliff and had no purchase on reality. In historically existing capitalist economies, the property owning classes goal was to live a life of luxury and by far the greater part of the surplus product was expended on their luxurious life style. In the the USA for example the share of profit that is actually transformed into accumulated means of production is typically only in the region of 20%. For the UK, up to the point when Cliff invented his theory the percentage was much lower.

In Bordiga's case he argued that the Soviet economy was capitalist because he said that the law of value operated there. This argument by him was made easier because of general ambiguity that surrounds the term 'law of value', in marxist discourse. Bordiga said it is easy to see if the law of value operates - simply observe products being bought for money - there we have the equivalent form of value described by Marx in the begining of Capital. In so doing Bordiga was taking a relatively clever and sophisticated reading of of the term 'law of value', as being simply the law of equivalent exchange, with the very act of exchange establishing the equivalence - this is essentially the argument in Bordiga. But this position of Bordiga is closer to that of Bailey than Marx. Bordiga is reducing value to just relative value and as such doing exactly what Marx critiques in Bailey in chapter xx or theories of Surplus Value.

The great advantage that Bordiga had in his argument was that other marxist economists did not give any precise definition to what the law of value meant, so that he was more or less at liberty to define it as he wanted - as the exchange of equivalents.

At a later stage after the sino soviet split, some other marxist economists sympathetic to Maoism like Bettleheim also started to argue that the Soviet economy, which they had previously taken as being socialist, was actually a form of state capitalism. This idea was first developed in his 'Calcul Economique et Formes de Propriete', and then in his unfinished history of the USSR 'Les Luttes de Class en URSS'.

But what is striking about Cliff, Bordiga and Bettleheim is that one can go through their books and not come out with any coherent alternative model for how a socialist economy ought to operate in order to avoid the label state capitalist - no coherent theory for how commodity production can vanish - though Bettleheim sees part of the problem that has to be overcome, he has no answers.

My own feeling is that the current prevalence of state capitalism theory on the left, something which was very limited in the past, has to be understood on Darwinian grounds. The ideology of state capitalism functions as a means of deflecting from their heads the calumnies that the bourgeoisie pour onto the memory of socialism. It is purely defensive among stategy people who do not have, and are unlikely ever to have the responsibility for working out economic policy in a real socialist economy. It is an adaptation to survival by small socialist sects faced by an overwhelming vilification of socialism and socialist economics by the ideological apparatus of the capitalist state.

Tim Cornelis

29th December 2012, 20:41

Well this view may be the only one that makes sense to you but it is a very minority one. The world in general, both within the USSR and outside of it considered the USSR to be the paradigm of a socialist economy. This was the overwhelming consensus opinion of economists.

Because the overwhelming majority of economists have a bourgeois paradigm.

Paul Cockshott

29th December 2012, 21:12

Because the overwhelming majority of economists have a bourgeois paradigm.

That may be true now, but I was talking about the past. It is by no means clear that this was true say in the 50s or 60s when a very significant portion of academic economists worked in the eastern block and had a Marxist paradigm, as did many economists in the third world. But even if it was true, that is no substantial argument. The bourgeois economists are advocates of and experts in capitalist economy, if the USSR was a capitalist economy they would have had no difficulty recognising it. And they would have supported it rather than attacked it.

Geiseric

29th December 2012, 21:13

Because the overwhelming majority of economists have a bourgeois paradigm.

Right so bourgeois economists have something to gain by saying the USSR wasn't socialism, nor a planned economy, but capitalist, which is why they also call it communism.

Red Enemy

29th December 2012, 21:27

I already said what it was, it was a planned economy run by an undemocratic state bureaucracy. Call if whatever you want, but that's what it was. The term that was first applied to that definition was a degenerated workers state, since the bureaucracy grew in extraordinary conditions, leeching off of a unique, state planned, non for profit, utilitarian economy. The amount of resources sent to help other countries like cuba in exchange for things like sugar were astounding. Same as the amount of economic development into the military, which was one of the largest institutions in the fSU, because of how often other countries tried to invade or support others who wanted to privatize the resources in the fSU, which the bureaucracy was waiting for its chance to do itself.
So, contrary to Marx, you say there is an economic mode that comes between capitalism and socialism?

Dave B

29th December 2012, 21:59

The idea that it was 'state capitalism' was a view originally developed by Lenin, not Kautsky.

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. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm)

our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism.

At present…………. it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”. Those who fail to understand this are committing an unpardonable mistake in economics. Either they do not know the facts of life, do not see what actually exists and are unable to look the truth in the face, or they confine themselves to abstractly comparing “capitalism” with “socialism” and fail to study the concrete forms and stages of the transition that is taking place in our country.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm)

That was from 1918. After 1918 in 1919 Kautsky, un-originally following Lenin's line and looking truth in the face agreed that soviet Russia was state capitalism.

The absolutism of the old bureaucracy has come again to life in a new but, as we have seen, by no means improved form; and also alongside of this absolutism are being formed the seeds of a new capitalism, which is responsible for direct criminal practices, and which in reality stands on a much lower level than the industrial capitalism of former days.

It is only the ancient feudal land estate which exists no more. For its abolition conditions in Russia were ripe. But they were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism. This latter system is now undergoing resuscitation, nevertheless in forms which, for the proletariat, are more oppressive and more harmful than those of yore.

Private capitalism has now taken on, in place of the higher industrial forms, the most wretched and corrupt form of smuggling, of profiteering, and of money speculation. Industrial capitalism, from being a private system, has now become a State capitalism. Formerly the bureaucrats of the State and those of private capital were often very critical, if not directly hostile, towards one another. In consequence the working-man found advantage sometimes with the one, and sometimes with the other.

To-day, however, both State and capitalist bureaucracy have merged into one system. That is the final result of the great Socialist upheaval, which the Bolsheviks have introduced. It represents the most oppressive of all forms of despotism that Russia has ever had.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1919/terrcomm/ch08b.htm

I think when Lenin talked about 'state capitalism under communism' in 1922 he had a point.

There was a kind of communism amongst the ruling state capitalist class as for them, the vanguard, the means of production and surplus value were held and received in common; and there was no private property in the means of production.

On the question of state capitalism, I think that generally our press and our Party make the mistake of dropping into intellectualism, into liberalism; we philosophise about how state capitalism is to be interpreted, and look into old books. But in those old books you will not find what we are discussing; they deal with the state capitalism that exists under capitalism.

Not a single book has been written about state capitalism under communism. It did not occur even to Marx to write a word on this subject; and he died without leaving a single precise statement or definite instruction on it. That is why we must overcome the difficulty entirely by ourselves.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm)

Delenda Carthago

29th December 2012, 22:05

Could you expand on this, please? How exactly did the USSR's economy correspond with socialism, or socialist 'model(s)' of production? How would you explain the role, state, and nature of the working-class in relation to the economic and political organization of the Soviet state? What were either's characteristics in this particular period? Where did the states of Eastern and Central Europe fit in this specific model? Perhaps just as importantly, what was the nature of their relationship(s) with the USSR, within the context of the latter's economic and political organization? I think these are all questions that bear answering, and I'd like to know what you think.

USSR until around 1941 was constructing the socialism, fighting all of the society's/economy's contradictions towards a communist direction. It had Central Design of the economy, and workers control. It also tended to centralize and put under social control the petit bourgeois bussineses, mostly the farms. And the main problem begun after the war, when the then contradictions of the economy first got answered in a revisionist(ie back to capitalism) solutions, with the re-introduction of market in the economy. Something that lead to all the negative things we know about the USSR after 1956.

Now, without the need to skip conversation, I believe it would be more productive instead of me telling you in a short text such issues that require a long study, to suggest to you a longer(not very though) text on the subject.

KKE's 18th congress's "Resolution on Socialism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/kkes-18th-congress-t174489/index.html?t=174489)", which was the aftermath of a 20 year study on the reasons of the fall of socialism. For me, the only study that I have read that actually puts the finger on the wound. Something that neither trots or "stalinists/ m-ls" have managed to do very well.

Ostrinski

29th December 2012, 22:44

Dave B, please do not turn this into a thread on Lenin. Good god you people are obsessed.

Tim Cornelis

29th December 2012, 22:56

That may be true now, but I was talking about the past. It is by no means clear that this was true say in the 50s or 60s when a very significant portion of academic economists worked in the eastern block and had a Marxist paradigm, as did many economists in the third world. But even if it was true, that is no substantial argument. The bourgeois economists are advocates of and experts in capitalist economy, if the USSR was a capitalist economy they would have had no difficulty recognising it. And they would have supported it rather than attacked it.

That is very faulty logic. Precisely because they had a bourgeois paradigm (including those so-called "Marxists") they did not see that the mode of production of the Soviet Union was capitalistic. Only a Marxist analysis will reveal this.

USSR until around 1941 was constructing the socialism, fighting all of the society's/economy's contradictions towards a communist direction. It had Central Design of the economy, and workers control. It also tended to centralize and put under social control the petit bourgeois bussineses, mostly the farms. And the main problem begun after the war, when the then contradictions of the economy first got answered in a revisionist(ie back to capitalism) solutions, with the re-introduction of market in the economy. Something that lead to all the negative things we know about the USSR after 1956.

Now, without the need to skip conversation, I believe it would be more productive instead of me telling you in a short text such issues that require a long study, to suggest to you a longer(not very though) text on the subject.

KKE's 18th congress's "Resolution on Socialism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/kkes-18th-congress-t174489/index.html?t=174489)", which was the aftermath of a 20 year study on the reasons of the fall of socialism. For me, the only study that I have read that actually puts the finger on the wound. Something that neither trots or "stalinists/ m-ls" have managed to do very well.

I wanted to start a thread with the title "the most ridiculous pile of political garbage" when I read that resolution a few days ago, but feared it would be too sectarian. It ignores historical fact utterly. Claims it makes:

- There was no oppression in the USSR (which is odd for two reasons: Marxist-Leninists define the state as an oppressive organ; and there was widespread crack downs on dissent, free speech was suspended, etc.).
- There was workers' control (only nominally existed).
- wage-labour was abolished (yet workers worked for managers).
- abolition of exploitation by man of man (yet millions lived in wage slave and forced labour conditions).

It flat out denies the true nature of the Soviet Union to conceal its utter failure. If we choose to believe all those myths of democratic workers control and so forth, I might have been a Marxist-Leninist myself.

EDIT: Misinterpreted: There was no oppression in the USSR (which is odd for two reasons: Marxist-Leninists define the state as an oppressive organ; and there was widespread crack downs on dissent, free speech was suspended, etc.). Never mind that.

Geiseric

29th December 2012, 23:02

So, contrary to Marx, you say there is an economic mode that comes between capitalism and socialism?

Obviously. Socialism and Capitalism aren't the only modes that have existed, there was feudalism which had the same prerequisites for it as left communists think the USSR had which made it capitalism. Did Napoleon's economy not reflect the capitalism that spawned it in the first place? Yes it did. It was a bourgeois regime, and set up the first necessities for a bourgeois economy. The same principle applies to the USSR, there was no private ownership. Prove me contrary, now, and give me an example of private ownership in the USSR. If you can't there was no capitalism. I cannot give you an example of private ownership in 1300s Feudalist france, neither can you for the USSR.

Tim Cornelis

29th December 2012, 23:12

Obviously. Socialism and Capitalism aren't the only modes that have existed, there was feudalism which had the same prerequisites for it as left communists think the USSR had which made it capitalism. Did Napoleon's economy not reflect the capitalism that spawned it in the first place? Yes it did. It was a bourgeois regime, and set up the first necessities for a bourgeois economy. The same principle applies to the USSR, there was no private ownership. Prove me contrary, now, and give me an example of private ownership in the USSR. If you can't there was no capitalism. I cannot give you an example of private ownership in 1300s Holy Roman Empire, neither can you for the USSR.

If the absence of private ownership implies socialism, then the Holy Roman Empire was socialistic, surely.

But here's a question for you is the ABN Ambro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABN_AMRO) bank socialist? By extension of your logic it is.

Paul Cockshott

29th December 2012, 23:12

Right so bourgeois economists have something to gain by saying the USSR wasn't socialism, nor a planned economy, but capitalist, which is why they also call it communism.

No they don't they describe it as socialist, the term communist is almost unused in the bourgeois economic literature ( as opposed to the speeches of politicians ). But I am afraid I can not follow quite what point you are trying to make.

Let's Get Free

29th December 2012, 23:15

The same principle applies to the USSR, there was no private ownership. Prove me contrary, now, and give me an example of private ownership in the USSR. If you can't there was no capitalism. I cannot give you an example of private ownership in 1300s Holy Roman Empire, neither can you for the USSR.

There was most definitely private ownership. In the USSR the state largely owned the means of production, but who owned the state? Lacking democracy, the workers could not have owned it. It is not vital to capitalism that there should be de jure legal ownership of capital by private individuals. This is a bourgeois concept of what capitalism is about. Marxists do not hold this narrow legalistic notion. We look at what holds on the ground - the de facto situation. It was a tiny section of the population - the nomenklatura, the bosses of state firms, the military top brass - who basically controlled the state and owned it. The state was their property. The Soviet capitalist class collectively exploited the Soviet workers and created an unequal capitalist society. for example, a major Russian politician, a manager of industry, a popular playwright or ballerina, or a successful scientist enjoyed command over material wealth that made it essentially as much as a society of economic inequality of actual income as any "traditional" capitalist society.

Paul Cockshott

29th December 2012, 23:47

Dave B you are completely confusing things by bringing in the pre socialist economy of the 1920s and remarks the Lenin made about that in the early 20s. What the literature means by the Soviet Economic model was the system that ran from the early 30s to the late 80s. Kautsky's criticisms of the early 20s Russia can not sensibly be applied to the very different economy of the 1960s or 70s. In the early 20s you had a market regulated economy with private capitalism and private farmin co-existing with a state sector that employed only a small portion of the total labour power of society, and in this state sector the state factories were not subject to any national plan.

Tim - the Holy Roman Empire was not an example of an economy without private ownership, if you had cited the Inca Empire you might have been onto something.

You say that only a marxist analysis will show that the USSR was state capitalist. This is begging the question since you are defining marxists to be people who agree with your view of the USSR, all the rest, you say, are bourgeois and to be disregarded. But why do you think that the bourgeoisie should be so blind to their own class interest as to mistake a capitalist economy for a socialist one. They were not blind. They were highly class concious and saw in the Soviet system an existential threat to the economic system on which their wealth depended.

Delenda Carthago

29th December 2012, 23:47

I wanted to start a thread with the title "the most ridiculous pile of political garbage" when I read that resolution a few days ago, but feared it would be too sectarian. It ignores historical fact utterly. Claims it makes:

- There was no oppression in the USSR (which is odd for two reasons: Marxist-Leninists define the state as an oppressive organ; and there was widespread crack downs on dissent, free speech was suspended, etc.).
- There was workers' control (only nominally existed).
- wage-labour was abolished (yet workers worked for managers).
- abolition of exploitation by man of man (yet millions lived in wage slave and forced labour conditions).

It flat out denies the true nature of the Soviet Union to conceal its utter failure. If we choose to believe all those myths of democratic workers control and so forth, I might have been a Marxist-Leninist myself.

EDIT: Misinterpreted: There was no oppression in the USSR (which is odd for two reasons: Marxist-Leninists define the state as an oppressive organ; and there was widespread crack downs on dissent, free speech was suspended, etc.). Never mind that.
Seriously, the only thing more BORING right now than starting a conversation with an anarchist on USSR, would be watching an all night marathon of "The Bold And The Beautiful". And its almost 2 in the morning anyway.

edit: Ok, that was rude, I m sorry.
Look, this text is the outcome, as I said, of a study that begun in 1991 and "ended" in 2008. A study that thousands of communists participated, some of them even outside of the party. Open and public. Having nothing but smart ass things to say like "ow, these idiots doesnt know that there were no working class control" or "they dont even know that m-ls are pro-state repression" dont really help anyone. Unfortunatly these are only the conclusions and not the whole study behind them. But thats all I got in English.

Paul Cockshott

29th December 2012, 23:57

There was most definitely private ownership. In the USSR the state largely owned the means of production, but who owned the state?

This is a silly question. States are not owned. Ownership is a relation between an agent - the subject of right, and a thing, the object of right, which is established by a system of laws which are themselves part of the state. It is the state which creates and sustains ownership rights, the system of ownership rights can not itself be owned.

What does the relation of ownership consist of?

It consists of the rights to

a) use something,
b) alienate something to another property owner, either as a gift or by sale
c) pass on something to descendants

Not all property relations involve all these sub relations. Full bourgeois right involves all of them, but there is no way that these basic relations could apply to a state.

Paul Cockshott

30th December 2012, 00:23

Gladiator: it essentially as much as a society of economic inequality of actual income as any "traditional" capitalist society.

No. The Gini coefficient for the USSR was in the low 20s and shot up into the high 40s as soon as Yeltsin established a capitalist economy.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/russia/gini-index-wb-data.html
The USA has a GINI coefficient in the mid to high 40s

There was substantial inequality in wage rates and inequality between male and female workers and between workers and retired people, but there was not the inequality that arises from property income. Marx envisaged that inequalities due to difference in working ability would be characteristic of the initial stages of communist society, so the mere existence of inequality is not evidence that an economy is not in Marx's terms communist.

Let's Get Free

30th December 2012, 01:07

In regards to inequality, here is something the user Robbo 203 wrote a couple months back

Indeed, the Soviet Union was an extremely unequal society by any standards and as every Marxist knows the mode of distribution is dependent on the mode of production. In other words, gross inequality of wealth distribution is itself a good indication that we are talking about a class society
John Fleming and John Micklewright in their paper "Income Distribution, Economic Systems and Transition" cite the work of researchers like Morrison who, using data from the 1970s, found that countries like Poland and the Soviet Union had relatively high levels of income inequality, registering gini coefficients of 0.31 in both case, which put them on a par with Canada (0.30) and the USA (0.34) ( http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/eps70.pdf). According to Roy Medvedev (Khrushchev: The Years in Power ,Columbia University Press. 1976, 540), taking into account not only their inflated and (something which is often overlooked ) multiple "salaries" (disguised share of the profits) but also the many payments -in-kind, privileges and numerous perks enjoyed by the Soviet elite (who even had access to their own retail outlets stocking western goods and various other facilities from which the general public was physically excluded) the ratio between low and high earners was more like 1:100.

Geiseric

30th December 2012, 01:47

There weren't bureaucrats who took profits and re invested them, the income was all disposable. "The state" owned everything? So the army recruits and secretaries in the party offices also had a share, right? In fact by "the state," you're talking about the instution in the USSR which was the sole employer, not an inclusive group of property owners, who de facto and de jure possessed wealth and income on a level on the level of government employees everywhere else in the world, including the U.S. where career politicians are mostly millionares.

There was no right to invest and no right to ownership of any state owned enterprise, like it is everywhere else in the world with the bourgeois state, so what we saw was a bourgeois state apparatus survive the revolution, seeing as most of the bureaucracy would of had the same jobs before the revolution even happened, due to the country's backwardness, and become the manager of not only the bourgeois state as we see in the U.S. or Germany today, but also the economy as a whole.

Jack

30th December 2012, 01:54

Did the workers all of a sudden decide to hand their means of production back over to the capitalists when Khrushchev/Brezhnev came to power?

Right, god forbid somebody make an honest suggestion for the poll without you hopping on it to see what kind of clever commentary and insults you can make out of it.

How's highschool?

Dave B

30th December 2012, 02:59

So the position of Paul Cockshott, which is were I was hoping to get to eventually is that Stalin was correct.

And that Stalin himself had guided soviet Russia to the end of Lenin’s state capitalist road to socialism, to the economic system of socialism itself.

Arriving there, for arguments sake sometime, in the 1930’s.

as an economic system, of 1932, presumably.]

Thus

Upon the ruins of democracy, for which he had fought until 1917, he erected his political power. Upon these ruins he set up a new militarist-bureaucratic, police machinery of state, the new autocracy. This gave him weapons against the other socialists even more potent than shameless lies.

He now had in his hands all the instruments of repression which czarism had used, adding to these weapons also those instruments of oppression which the capitalist, as the owner of the means of production, was against wage slaves. Lenin now commanded all the means of production, in utilizing his state power for the erection of his state capitalism, which is best characterized as state slavery.

No form of capitalism makes the workers so absolutely dependent upon it as centralized state capitalism in a state without an effective democracy.

And no political police is so powerful and omnipresent as the Tcheka or G.P.U., created by men who had spent many years in fighting the czarist police and, knowing its methods as well as its weaknesses and shortcomings, knew also how to improve upon them.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1932/commsoc/ch04.htm

There are elements in that of Bukharins prediction of where or what 1926 Russian state capitalism might end up.

However if I bend over backwards here to accommodate the idea that1930’s Russia had a 'socialist economy', with wage labour, ‘money’ and commodity production and with the ‘abolition of private production and of private competition’ etc.

Then in fact Kautsky’s 1924 revisionist and reformist economic concept of a ‘socialist society’ is not that much different to Paul Cockshott’s and the Stalinist one.

Eg

We may therefore anticipate that the law of labour-value would on the whole assert itself in a socialist society, in spite of the abolition of private production and of private competition.

If the institutions of price and money continue to exist under a socialist mode of production, and if socialist prices are grafted on to the historical form of price, it would also be necessary to adhere to the historical form of money, and to retain gold as the money commodity.

Actual gold need not be used.

As measure of value, only an imaginary gold is necessary, or rather the value of gold. In order to calculate how many gold marks will constitute the price of a pair of boots, no gold mark need be in actual existence.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1924/labour/ch03_j.htm

I think it is no accident that Kautsky was somewhat taciturn and reserved in criticising re Lenin over;

his state capitalism and ‘his’, ie Lenin’s, centralized state capitalism.

Because from an economic perspective Kautsky’s;

………socialized municipalities with their undertakings, and the enterprises which are socialized by the State………Complete with wage labour, imaginary gold money and commodity production organised according to a plan or the market or both.

Economically are only a shade different from Lenin’s , Stalin’s, and of course Paul Cockshott’s.

For the reformist and revisionist Kautsky’s own commodity producing and wage labour “state capitalism”; it is best left un-compared to Lenin’s and Stalin’s, Vis-à-vis the economic aspect, as there is nothing to choose between them.

Thus Kautsky prefers to ‘politically’ criticizes Lenin’s and Stalin’s undemocratic, police state andcentralized “state capitalism”.

For Kautsky the state in Stalinist Russia protects and enforces the rule of a bureaucratic ruling class of exploiters.

Kautsky’s own un-degenerated workers ‘state’ or ‘socialist society’ of nationalised industry organises socialised production based on wage labour and commodity production complete with imaginary gold money exchanging at its 'value' for the un-imaginary real labour time value of boots and shoes etc.

This was a kind of re-emergence of the ideas of John Gray that Karl criticised.

The general point for Paul Cockshott is that there is no ‘coherent’ economic system beyond the ‘bourgeois limitations’ of Kautsky’s immediate own 'coherent' economic model, and the other.

……….. form of Socialism without money ……….. the Leninite interpretation of what Marx described as the second phase of communism: each to produce of his own accord as much as he can, the productivity of labour being so high and the quantity and variety of products so immense that everyone may be trusted to take what he needs. For this purpose money would not be needed.

We have not yet progressed so far as this. At present we are unable to divine whether we shall ever reach this state. But that Socialism with which we are alone concerned to-day, whose features we can discern with some precision from the indications that already exist, will unfortunately not have this enviable freedom and abundance at its disposal, and will therefore not be able to do without money.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1924/labour/ch03_j.htm

Ostrinski

30th December 2012, 03:11

Right, god forbid somebody make an honest suggestion for the poll without you hopping on it to see what kind of clever commentary and insults you can make out of it.

How's highschool?It might be an "honest" suggestion but still a rather unreasonable one. Whatever the mode of production was after the first five year plan, that was the mode of production until the 80's.

There was in fact nothing insulting about Gladiator's comment as it wasn't unreasonable at all. When the question is posited how the hell the Soviet economy went from socialist to capitalist through a matter of policy, all we are offered is "something something something revisionist."

Also, there is nothing wrong with being in high school. Many of the users on revleft are in fact in high school and there is no reason to take up an ageist attitude toward them.

Jack

30th December 2012, 03:35

It might be an "honest" suggestion but still a rather unreasonable one. Whatever the mode of production was after the first five year plan, that was the mode of production until the 80's.

That's simply not true. Here is the one I mentioned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform

Also, there is nothing wrong with being in high school. Many of the users on revleft are in fact in high school and there is no reason to take up an ageist attitude toward them.

"Ageism" does not exist, I'm wondering what else would cause him to act so immature in literally every thread where he has an opportunity to make some kind of swipe at Marxism-Leninism instead of actually having a normal conversation or ignoring things.

Comrade Bong

30th December 2012, 04:12

The soviet union suffered from terrible production rate. Based upon a chart i saw some time ago, the average soviet production rate lagged very far behind the average US production rate. In some cases the US is beating the USSR 3 times to one.

Red Economist

30th December 2012, 11:45

Original Posted by Red Banana
Thirdly, if, anything that is objectively true were to prove Marxism (or anything else for that matter) wrong, the answer would not be to hide your eyes from the evidence to preserve your way of thinking, but to bin it as soon as possible. In fact, as Marxism is materialist, it would be inherently un-Marxist to ignore newly found material evidence that would render Marxism useless. If Marxism were proven false, any true Marxist would cease to be such upon discovery of that proof.

Very eloquently put.

Paul Cockshott

30th December 2012, 15:50

So the position of Paul Cockshott, which is were I was hoping to get to eventually is that Stalin was correct.

And that Stalin himself had guided soviet Russia to the end of Lenin’s state capitalist road to socialism, to the economic system of socialism itself.

Arriving there, for arguments sake sometime, in the 1930’s.

That is what I would say and most economic historians would say.

as an economic system, of 1932, presumably.]

Thus

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1932/commsoc/ch04.htm

However if I bend over backwards here to accommodate the idea that1930’s Russia had a 'socialist economy', with wage labour, ‘money’ and commodity production and with the ‘abolition of private production and of private competition’ etc.

Then in fact Kautsky’s 1924 revisionist and reformist economic concept of a ‘socialist society’ is not that much different to Paul Cockshott’s and the Stalinist one.

You confuse what I advocate myself with my assesment of what happened in history. If you read the book 'Towards a New Socialism' that I wrote with Allin Cottrell you will see that I advocate the abolition of money and a labour account system based on the Critique of the Gotha Programme. But this was not what the socialist movement of the 20th century generally advocated, and it is a mistake for you or I to project back the policies we advocate as the criterion of socialism. We have to take words as they were historically generally understood. A labour token system was not accepted by the 20th century socialist movement other than by a few left communists. Kautsky, the SPD, Lenin and bulk of the socialist movement assumed that money and wages would be necessary under socialism. This was not a new position that Kautsky adopted in the 20s, but something that he had held to constitently through the 20th century.

The prevalence of money and wages in the USSR could not be held up as an objection by Kautsky to the USSR since in retaining these, the Soviet government was entirely orthodox. Kautsky's criticism had instead to center on the lack of democracy in the USSR, but contemporary communists could quite reasonably retort that on the question of the state Kautsky had long been a renegade supporter of the bourgeois state and cite Lenin's criticisms of him on this count.

My point in talking about the failure of most critics of the USSR to come up with a coherent alternative mechanism, is that those who critique the existence of money do not really face up to the conditions necessary for the abolition of money and the process by which this can be brought about. The only position from the pre war period that comes close is that of the dutch left communists which I reproduce on my web site here http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/gik1.htm But the large agricultural sector in the USSR, organised on a combination of cooperative and small scale private farming, means that the model above would have been hard to apply to the USSR until perhaps the late 60s.

This stuff disappeared politically for 40 years. If you look at the criticisms in the 50s and 60s they were a long way from having anything as coherent as this - even the stuff written by critics with the economic sophistication of Bettleheim.

Far more influential than this long forgotten left communist position, was the position of Langehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_R._Lange, which essentially argued for a more comprehensive use of market mechanisms within a state owned economy, a position which also seems to have been the Trotskyist orthodoxy if 'The Soviet Economy in Danger', is anything to go by. Lange was the most influential economic theorist of a different model of socialism than the then prevalent Soviet model and influential in many of the reforms introduced in the Comecon economies during the 60s. Brus, Sik etc followed in his footsteps.

Paul Cockshott

30th December 2012, 16:03

In regards to inequality, here is something the user Robbo 203 wrote a couple months back

The study that Robbo quotes is an outlier, most other sources give a gini coefficient that is much higher for the USA and much lower for the USSR.

One should also bear in mind that a Gini coefficient calculated solely on money terms will overstate the degree of inequality in the USSR where a significant part of worker's consumption was either free or provided at very subsidised prices : public transport, housing, education, healthcare, essential foodstuffs like bread. These subsidies were used to mitigate the inequalities that arose from following their interpretation of Marx's dictum that payment should be according to labour, which was interpreted as meaning that male manual workers in the energy sector got paid a lot more than women textile workers for example. The subsidies were necessary to compensate from these inequalities in wage rates.

I think that this was a mistaken policy. It would, in my opinion, have been better to use a labour account system with social security deductions as advocated by Marx using social labour credits to compensate those with large families etc rather than using subsidies. The big issue that would have to be faced though was the gender inequality of wage rates - there would have had to be an absolutely massive social and ideological upheaval to establish the principle that an hour of female and an hour of male work were equivalent, since male workers in 'heavy' industry were the ideological stereotype of the working class, and tended to be higher paid than sectors that women predominated in, even skilled sectors like medicine.

Dave B

30th December 2012, 20:54

The only thing that was possible in Russia after 1917 according to uncontested predictive Marxist theory of the time was; capitalism with an associated capitalist class.

What the Russian Marxist workers party ‘should’ have done is quite simply what in theory they eg Stalin(1906) said they would do .

Permit the convocation of the constituent assembly and let the petty bourgeois SR elements perhaps in cahoots with the capitalist class introduce capitalism.

Without involving Marxism and dragging it through the mud backwards like Lenin and Stalin did.

It is difficult to conceive how things could have turned out worse than they did; even for most of the old Bolsheviks who got what they deserved as far as I am concerned.

The SR’s, particularly the left, may have in fact done what the Bolsheviks did do as many of them had a similar viewpoint to modern Leninists ie that Russia had passed through the capitalist stage and was ripe for the expropriation of the means of production from the ruling class(es) and the introduction of a ‘socialist society’.

In that more attractive parallel universe our modern Leninists would be SR-ists and non, or very heterodox Marxists.

It could have happened as Lenin’s seizure of power in October and closure of the constituent assembly wasn’t exactly a unanimous position in the Bolshevik Party itself.

Not one for recommending books but there is one by Theodore Dan (not my favourite Menshevik) translated by Joel Carmichael called the Origins of Bolshevism.

It is a bit dense and intellectual but does give I think an interesting theoretical and historical viewpoint of issues involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dan

What probably happened from a theoretical Marxist perspective is that laid out by Ted Grant.

Thus the Bolsheviks, or at least later Stalin’s bureaucratic caste, assumed the historical role and position of the revolutionary capitalist class and bourgeoisie.

Eg.

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 salutary 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

A ‘secret’ theoretical position worked out by a magic circle of Trot theoreticians, including Cliff and Grant, in the 1930-40’s.

Ted was sort of saying; OK honest half truth Tony, why don't we all break ranks and tell them everything?

Or in other words the Bolsheviks were in fact Jacobins, and ghosts of bourgeois revolutions past; an old Menshevik idea going back to Trotsky of 1905.

And that there was sort of in 1924 a;

…..transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard (Jacobins) into the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class (acting as historical substitutes for the capitalist class) .

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm

You can overdo it a bit I suppose, however in 1917 Lenin seemed quite happy to don the costume of the Jacobins.

Can “Jacobinism” Frighten the Working Class?

The class-conscious workers and working people generally put their trust in the transfer of power to the revolutionary, oppressed class for that is the essence of Jacobinism, the only way out of the present crisis, and the only remedy for economic dislocation and the war.http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/07a.htm

And even Trotsky.

Leon Trotsky Twenty Years After 1905 ( and Trotsky’s- Bolsheviks are Jacobins pamphlet )

….1793 has remained in the memory of humanity as one of those years, when under the leadership of the Jacobins, those Bolsheviks of the 18th century, plebeians, sans-culottes, artisans and semi-proletarians, the ragamuffins of the Paris suburbs, established an iron dictatorship and meted out unforgettable punishment to the crowned and privileged rulers of the old society.http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/12/1905.htm

Paul Cockshott

30th December 2012, 21:50

Well it is unusual to get someone here to openly advocate counter revolution in 1917.

In your view then the whole 20th century socialist movement was just a movement for state capitalism since you label the economic system it aimed for: expropriation of the bourgeoisie and its replacement with a system of nationalised production as being capitalist. And do you view Marx himself as just being the 'profit of state capitalism'.

robbo203

30th December 2012, 22:47

The study that Robbo quotes is an outlier, most other sources give a gini coefficient that is much higher for the USA and much lower for the USSR.

One should also bear in mind that a Gini coefficient calculated solely on money terms will overstate the degree of inequality in the USSR where a significant part of worker's consumption was either free or provided at very subsidised prices : public transport, housing, education, healthcare, essential foodstuffs like bread. These subsidies were used to mitigate the inequalities that arose from following their interpretation of Marx's dictum that payment should be according to labour, which was interpreted as meaning that male manual workers in the energy sector got paid a lot more than women textile workers for example. The subsidies were necessary to compensate from these inequalities in wage rates..

I think you are wrong on this because, in fact, if anything, a GINI coefficent calculated solely in money terms would tend to understate the degree of inequality in soviet state capitalism. This is becuase payments in kind tended to disproportionately benefit the Soviet elite vis a vis ordinary Russia workers (Matthews, M., Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-styles under Communism, G. Allen & Unwin, London, 1978)

There is another factor to bear in mind too - namely corruption. In the post war era there was a growing tendency for some members of Soviet elite to capitalise on their political position for personal gain, for instance "by teaming up with parallel economy businesses in what became known as the 'Soviet mafia' " ("The Rise and Fall of Post-Communist Oligarchs: Legitimate and Illegitimate Children of Praetorian Communism" Serguey Braguinsky, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTINVTCLI/Resources/JUNE7&8PAPERBraguinsky.pdf)

All in all, there was not much difference in levels of economic inequalities in countries under state capitalist forms of governance such as the Soviet Union and and those under western style form of capitalist goiverment and I think you wiull find most commentators on the subject will bear this out

robbo203

30th December 2012, 22:49

Geiseric

30th December 2012, 23:02

Dave B

30th December 2012, 23:10

Well I am a counter-revolutionary re Russia, only in the same sort of sense as Otto Rühle was;

It was an historical error to believe that the Russian Revolution was the start of a social revolution. And it amounts to a demagogic fraud to awaken and maintain this belief in the heads of workers.

When the socialists in the Russian government, after the victory over tsarism, imagined that a phase of historical development could be skipped and socialism structurally realised, they had forgotten the ABC of Marxist knowledge according to which socialism can only be the outcome of an organic development which has capitalism developed to the limits of its maturity as its indispensable presupposition. They had to pay for this forgetfulness by a wide, troublesome and victim-strewn detour which brings them in a space of time to capitalism.

To institute capitalism and to organise the bourgeois state is the historical function of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian Revolution was and is a bourgeois revolution, no more and no less: the strong socialist admixture changes nothing in this essence. So it will fulfil its task by throwing away, sooner or later, the last remnants of its "War-Communism" and revealing the face of a real, genuine capitalism.

The struggles within the Bolshevik party are preparing this conclusion, and with it the end of the Bolshevik party dictatorship. The line of development - whether that of a party coalition which hastens and alleviates the launching phase of capitalism, or that of a Bonaparte who protracts and aggravates it - is not yet clear; both are possible.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1924/revolution.htm

Although Rühle’s victim-strewn detour turned out to be somewhat longer and more extensive than he could have ever imagined.

So much for the slogan “Long Live the Revolutionary Provisional Government!”

The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry

This argument is based on a misconception; it confounds the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, the struggle for the republic (including our entire minimum programme) with the struggle for socialism. If Social-Democracy sought to make the socialist revolution its immediate aim, it would assuredly discredit itself. It is precisely such vague and hazy ideas of our “Socialists—Revolutionaries” that Social-Democracy has always combated.

For this reason Social-Democracy has constantly stressed the bourgeois nature of the impending revolution in Russia and insisted on a clear line of demarcation between the democratic minimum programme and the socialist maximum programme. Some Social-Democrats, who are inclined to yield to spontaneity, might forget all this in time of revolution, but not the Party as a whole.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm

Never mind Trotsky’s Long live the constituent assembly proclaimed on the eve of the Bolshevik October coup.

Provided by Tony Cliff, who just couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

I am resisting the temptation to derail the thread further by moving onto socialist revolutions in advanced countries. But an experiment in class conscious democratic ‘state capitalism’ in one country might have been an interesting one.

According to some it was sort of allegedly attempted in Yugoslavia at one stage, but I don’t really know anything about it.

I myself do have some 'appreciation' with the 'related' Deleonists take on things.

Dave B

31st December 2012, 00:08

I am not a Menshevik, even if I wanted to be.

Because I am an ultra leftists imppossibilist opposed to the RSDLP’s own Second International reformist claptrap of minimum programmes and Bernstienist reformism by the back door etc etc.

I share the stagiest theory with old Bolshevism and Menshevism.

But that common ground is based on shared and common old theoretical Marxism.

It is more a matter of I am an old Marxists and so were the RSDLP and Mensheviks.

I am no more a Menshevik than I am an old Bolshevik.

I am not accusing neo Leninists of Kautskyism and SR-ism, much.

Lev Bronsteinovich

31st December 2012, 01:03

Fair enough. What was the mode of production?
It was the mode of production established by a dictatorship of the proletariat under extremely dicey circumstances. It is hard to imagine how so many of you try to argue that this was capitalism. No private ownership of signficant capital, monopoly on foreign trade, production was not for profit. How the fuck is that capitalism? Calling it "State Capitalism" is not a great idea, kind of like calling capitalism, "feudalism updated", but with possessive individualism, no guilds, and the aristocracy not in charge.

robbo203

31st December 2012, 09:32

It was the mode of production established by a dictatorship of the proletariat under extremely dicey circumstances. It is hard to imagine how so many of you try to argue that this was capitalism. No private ownership of signficant capital, monopoly on foreign trade, production was not for profit. How the fuck is that capitalism? Calling it "State Capitalism" is not a great idea, kind of like calling capitalism, "feudalism updated", but with possessive individualism, no guilds, and the aristocracy not in charge.

How can it NOT be capitalism? The proletariat by definition is the exploited class of capitalism. Therefore the DOTP (so called) is an instance of the capitalist mode of production.

Private ownership of the means of production by individuals is clearly NOT essential to capitalism. This is basic Marxism . As Engels points out

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)

Flying Purple People Eater

31st December 2012, 09:48

Private ownership of the means of production by individuals is clearly NOT essential to capitalism. This is basic Marxism . As Engels points out

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)

Does Engels give any evidence or examples in order to support this claim? I'm not claiming that he or you are wrong but the reason Marx and co. were so highly regarded as compared to other politicians and philosophers of the time was because their words were carried behind heavy reasoning and explanation. How exactly is this quote backed up, and what position is it in comparison to the rest of the work?

Ostrinski

31st December 2012, 10:07

Okay, how the hell did bureaucratic collectivist get four votes? I can't say I have ever seen anyone on this site defend the theory of bureaucratic collectivism. The only reason I put it on the poll in the first place is because I knew that if I didn't some asshole would bring it up.

But if there genuinely are people on this board who uphold this approach to the Soviet economy then please expound on them in the thread because I would like to hear more about your views.

Paul Cockshott

31st December 2012, 16:22

Marx and Engels were at least clear on the point that state capitalism was NOT socialism. In your case you quite obviously dont seem to understand the difference

Well it is possible that Marx and Engels were clear on this, but that can not be said for the historical socialist movement. The 20th century socialist movement interpreted it in terms of nationalised production with money retained, but many social services provided free. The difference between Kautskian social democracy and the communists was mainly of the constitutional form of the state with the social democrats attacking the communists for setting up a one party dictatorship and the communists attacking the social democrats for loyalty to the bourgeois state.

Incidentally I am unaware of any discussion by Marx of the difference between socialism and state capitalism. There are some remarks by Engels about the German Postal System not being an example of socialism, but the Social Democrats and the Leninist would not have seen this as a rejection of what they proposed since they intended to get rid of the German Imperial State in the first case replacing it with a democratic republic, and in the second case would have claimed that they had smashed the old state and replaced it with the political power of the working class. In which case the Communist Manifesto enjoined them to centralise the means of production in the hands of the state, which is what they did. Since neither Marx nor Engels explicitly rejected this demand of the Communist Manifesto, it is understandable that the Social Democrats and 20th century Communists assumed that this was an essential part of socialism.

Paul Cockshott

31st December 2012, 16:29

I think you are wrong on this because, in fact, if anything, a GINI coefficent calculated solely in money terms would tend to understate the degree of inequality in soviet state capitalism. This is becuase payments in kind tended to disproportionately benefit the Soviet elite vis a vis ordinary Russia workers (Matthews, M., Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Study of Elite Life-styles under Communism, G. Allen & Unwin, London, 1978)

Well this depends on what the ratio between the subsidised parts of the working class income were and the monetary parts. For people on low money
wages the subsidised price of basic foodstuffs, energy, healthcare and rent made a big differnce.

There is another factor to bear in mind too - namely corruption. In the post war era there was a growing tendency for some members of Soviet elite to capitalise on their political position for personal gain, for instance "by teaming up with parallel economy businesses in what became known as the 'Soviet mafia' " ("The Rise and Fall of Post-Communist Oligarchs: Legitimate and Illegitimate Children of Praetorian Communism" Serguey Braguinsky, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTINVTCLI/Resources/JUNE7&8PAPERBraguinsky.pdf)

All in all, there was not much difference in levels of economic inequalities in countries under state capitalist forms of governance such as the Soviet Union and and those under western style form of capitalist goiverment and I think you wiull find most commentators on the subject will bear this out
Well in the days when there was a sociological literature on the USSR I used to read a fair bit, and the impression I got was that the general view was that the GINI coef was down at the lower end of the European range, which of course was near the bottom of the world capitalist range. The key factor obviously was the male female income differential which was addressed more seriously in north western europe by the 80s than in the USSR.

Paul Cockshott

31st December 2012, 16:37

How can it NOT be capitalism? The proletariat by definition is the exploited class of capitalism. Therefore the DOTP (so called) is an instance of the capitalist mode of production.

Private ownership of the means of production by individuals is clearly NOT essential to capitalism. This is basic Marxism . As Engels points out

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)

Yes but he was describing the capitalist states of the 19th century in which the poperty of the capitalist class and landlord class remained intact. Extension of state property under those circumstances might lead to the exploitation of the wage workers employed by the state to the benefit of the propertyowning class because profit of state industry would allow taxes on the property owners to be reduced. But in the absence of a propertyowning class how was this supposed to operate? There is no analysis in that statement by Engels only an assertion. I have been obliged above, to fill in the economic mechanism that he left out.

You also know that the USSR from the 60s claimed to be a state of the whole people not a dictatorship of the proletariat - more or less on the basis of the argument you give above - since there was no longer an exploited class there was no class dictatorship.

Dave B

31st December 2012, 17:52

Preface to The 1872 German Edition communist manifesto

The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm). That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm

Geiseric

31st December 2012, 18:26

So the only arguments i've seen are misquotes, with phrases by Lenin, Marx, or Engels about a bourgeois state's interferance in the economy taken out of context and applied to the fSU, which was completely different, it doesn't take a harvard educated economist to realize that there was no market interactions in the fSU.

You're wrong to think that Marx and Engels, at any point, theorized about "what if the revolution degenerates, but the workers government manages to own and collectivize all property," since that's, regardless of what you say or think, happened, and capitalism or not I don't think Marx and Engels would of talked about that.

But Dave_B is a menshevik, are those allowed on the forum? It's openly counter revolutionary.

Grenzer

31st December 2012, 19:05

The former Soviet Union is capitalist, this is beyond all dispute. I think it is commonly acknowledged by everyone that the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Georgia, Azberbaijan, and the others are at the present capitalist. The phrase former Soviet Union can only refer to those extant states today which collectively comprise what was the former Soviet Union, hence the phrase former Soviet Union. If you mean the Soviet Union, then just say the Soviet Union. If you are using the term the former Soviet Union, then you are not actually talking about the Soviet Union at all, but the contemporary states that exist in the geographic region formerly occupied by the Soviet Union.

It seems that the banned user S. Artesian's blatant abuse of the term of has somehow reached beyond the grave.

robbo203

31st December 2012, 19:27

. In which case the Communist Manifesto enjoined them to centralise the means of production in the hands of the state, which is what they did. Since neither Marx nor Engels explicitly rejected this demand of the Communist Manifesto, it is understandable that the Social Democrats and 20th century Communists assumed that this was an essential part of socialism.

The Manifesto did indeed call for the centralisation of the means of production in the hands of the state but in no sense did Marx and Engels regard this as socialism - only as an (alleged) means to socialism - and as DaveB has pointed out that they later came to reconsider that section of the Manifesto in which this was mentioned

To suggest that it is "understandabe" that (some) Social Democrats and 20th century Communists assumed nartionalisatiuon was an essential part of socialism is to miss the point. The term socialism had already begun to be radically redefiined in the hands of people like Lenin and Kautsky and in a way that was totally at variance with the traditional Marxian concept of socialism as a synonym for comunism - a moneyless stateless and classless commonwealth

Dave B

31st December 2012, 19:28

Dave B’ position is the ‘same’ as Lenin’s Bolshevik one of 1905, minus the minimum programme;

The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry ('In Geneva'?)

If Social-Democracy sought to make the socialist revolution its immediate aim, it would assuredly discredit itself. It is precisely such vague and hazy ideas of our “Socialists—Revolutionaries” that Social-Democracy has always combated.

For this reason Social-Democracy has constantly stressed the bourgeois nature of the impending revolution in Russia and insisted on a clear line of demarcation between the democratic minimum programme and the socialist maximum programme.

Some Social-Democrats, who are inclined to yield to spontaneity, might forget all this in time of revolution, but not the Party as a whole.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm

This is one of my favorite ones and is loaded with historical irony.

As the person who ‘forgot all this in time of revolution’ was the author himself Lenin.

‘But the Party as a whole’ did not forget it including the party of the Bolsheviks, but to no avail.

The question is;

If the “Socialists—Revolutionaries”, with their ‘vague and hazy ideas of making the socialist revolution’, had seized power to attempt it would ‘Social-Democracy, which had always combated it’ on that very precise point, have been counter revolutionary in opposing them for ‘yielding to spontaneity’?

Lets play Bolsheviks and Mensheviks then shall we?

V. I. Lenin

Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.)

March 27-April 2, 1922

we say in reply, “For the public manifestations of Menshevism our revolutionary courts must pass the death sentence, otherwise they are not our courts, but God knows what.”

They cannot understand this and exclaim: “What dictatorial manners these people have!” They still think we are persecuting the Mensheviks because they fought us in Geneva............But we say in reply:

“Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements.” We must never forget this.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

That is for saying what?;

“There, they are now retreating to capitalism! We have always said that it was a bourgeois revolution.”

Happy New Year.

robbo203

31st December 2012, 19:44

Well this depends on what the ratio between the subsidised parts of the working class income were and the monetary parts. For people on low money
wages the subsidised price of basic foodstuffs, energy, healthcare and rent made a big differnce.

You miss the point. The point is the ratio of payments in kind to monetary to payment was actually higher in the case of the well off in Russia compared to the Russian working class according to researchers like Matthews. This is why I say a purely monetary comparsion would, if anything, tend to underestimate the degree of inequality. It needs also to be pointed out that many in the upper reaches of Soviet society enjoyed not just grossly inflated wages but multiple wages and this was a common practice throughout the Soviet bloc. This is not to mention undeclared income
- corruption etc which was pretty widespread

Well in the days when there was a sociological literature on the USSR I used to read a fair bit, and the impression I got was that the general view was that the GINI coef was down at the lower end of the European range, which of course was near the bottom of the world capitalist range. The key factor obviously was the male female income differential which was addressed more seriously in north western europe by the 80s than in the USSR.

Well, my impression is that most commentators on Soviet matters consider that wage differentials in the SU were roughly comparable to certain other capitalist countries such as the UK. In fact the comparison with the UK is one that crops quite frequently

Paul Cockshott

31st December 2012, 20:11

Preface to The 1872 German Edition communist manifesto

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm

Of course I know that text but it is of little help since a) it does not say which parts would have to be differently worded, b) it does not say how it should be reworded.
Given the context of late 19th century programmes the implication could be that an updated set of demands would be much more timidly reformist - minimum programme style stuff like the programme of the French Worker's Party.

Paul Cockshott

31st December 2012, 20:32

Well, my impression is that most commentators on Soviet matters consider that wage differentials in the SU were roughly comparable to certain other capitalist countries such as the UK. In fact the comparison with the UK is one that crops quite frequently

That is what I said, comparable to north western europe, which at the time was at the low end of inequality in the capitalist world due to the strong labour movement and its political influence. If one looked at capitalist countries with a gnp per head comparable to the USSR the level of inequality tended to be significantly higher. As soon as the the socialist economy was replaced under Yeltsin the Russian Gini index jumped to over 40% which put it on a par with South American capitalist countries. Given that the pre -revolutionary level of development of Russia was sub South American, if you look at the condition of Columbia or Peru in 1988 you get a fair idea of what a capitalist Russia would have been like.

robbo203

31st December 2012, 21:00

Yes but he was describing the capitalist states of the 19th century in which the poperty of the capitalist class and landlord class remained intact. Extension of state property under those circumstances might lead to the exploitation of the wage workers employed by the state to the benefit of the propertyowning class because profit of state industry would allow taxes on the property owners to be reduced. But in the absence of a propertyowning class how was this supposed to operate? There is no analysis in that statement by Engels only an assertion. I have been obliged above, to fill in the economic mechanism that he left out.

This is a common enough ploy by the defenders of state capitalism such as yourself to distinguish between nationalisation in a system in which private capitalist still exists and one wherwe they do not. Lenin used this ploy as well but it wont wash. Capitalism does not depend on legal private entitlement by individuals to capital. Nor does the existence of a capitalist class depend on this. It is entirely possible for a capitalist class to own the means of prpduction collectively and not as private individuals, via their ultimate control over the economy and their disposal of the economic surplus. Those who control the state through which economic decisions are made are in this sense the de facto property owning class except that they do not own means of production separately as individual constituent members of this property owning class

Somebody had to own the means of production in the Soviet Union, after all, and as any Marxist would know this could not be the Russian workers whose relation to the means of prpoduction was precisely the same as that of their counterparts in the West. They were alienated from the means of production and had therefore to sell their labour power for a wage . To whom did they sell this laboue power? They sold it nominally to the state - or more concretely, the state enterprises and the like that employed them. So by inference if the workers did not own the means of production, then it was the state and by extension those who controlled the state apparatus to whom they sold their labour poiwer who were effectively the owners of these means

You also know that the USSR from the 60s claimed to be a state of the whole people not a dictatorship of the proletariat - more or less on the basis of the argument you give above - since there was no longer an exploited class there was no class dictatorship.

Apologists for Soviet state capitalism may claim all sorts of things but that doesnt make it true. No doubt that British workers who voted Mrs Thatcher into power believed they lived in a "property owning democracy" but that doesnt make it true either.

If there was no longer an exploited class in the SU then that would mean the SU was a classless society which would mean of course a communist society. I think even you must recognise the crass stupidty of such a claim or do you consider that the SU was the moneyless wageless stateless commonwealth that Marxists mean by communism?

TheOneWhoKnocks

31st December 2012, 21:31

Marx's definition of capital is the production of surplus value and its realization as profit through the circulation of commodities as described in his formula for capital: M-(LP+MP)-C-M'. If that was not taking place, the USSR was not capitalist. That doesn't mean it was socialist or a "deformed workers' state" either.

Lord Hargreaves

31st December 2012, 21:38

This is an impossible debate, because the terms "socialism" and "capitalism" are far too broad and general and no two people will ever agree on both definitions.

If how to precisely describe the USSR ever mattered, it would have been when socialists had to decide whether to support it or oppose it (or something else) while it still existed. But now it doesn't, so the heated vitriol on both main sides of the debate just seems wholly antiquated, sectarian and boorish.

Let's Get Free

31st December 2012, 21:39

Marx's definition of capital is the production of surplus value and its realization as profit through the circulation of commodities as described in his formula for capital: M-(LP+MP)-C-M'.

All that existed in the USSR. By the 1950s there were reputedly hundreds of rouble millionaires among the ruling elite which a supporter of the regime named Reg Bishop actually took pride in bragging about. There was always inequality from the the beginning but under Stalin in the 1930s the old Bolshevik policy of wage leveling was done away with while Stalin himself railed against the "evil of equality". The Soviet capitalist class pocketed surplus value collectively as a class not just through the camouflage of bloated salaries but less visibly via a huge array of perks. For example, they had their own private shops stocking western goodies from which ordinary Russian workers were denied entry.

Lord Hargreaves

31st December 2012, 22:19

Whether or not there was a planned economy doesn't change the fact that there still existed the contradiction between wage labor and capital, which is the defining characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. Planned capital is still capital.

This presupposes that capital existed in the USSR, and by using "wage labour" in this particular way you presuppose a distinct class of labour. So your argument assumes everything you need to prove.

The soviet economy lacked private entrepreneurs, functioning commodity markets and capital markets, revenue streams to capital, secure private property rights. These have traditionally been viewed by economists both left and right wing, as the distinguishing features of a capitalist economy. In their place the USSR had many features which had traditionally been established as the key goals of the socialist economic policy: a system of economic planning, a substantial part of the necessities of life were provided either free or at very subsidised prices, education and health care were completely free, no unemployment, no unearned income.

I find this generally convincing. The USSR lacked the trappings of a modern financial system to manage capital, and this became more obvious by comparison with the western economies post Bretton Woods.

Also sociologically, the importance of substantial price controls, full employment, and social spending should not be underestimated.

Sorry but the SU was not a "planned" economy in that sense - no GOSPLAN plan was ever technically met. The plans were just routinely modifed as circumstaces changed. The economy guided the plan not the othe way round In short, the plans were just a vague wish list of production targets and there was far more in the way of decentralised decision making at the state enterprise level than such superficial and naive commentry suggests

Moreover state enterprises were legally required to make a profit - where on earth did you get your strange idea to the contrary from? People dont seem to grasp this and think it was just a "bookkeeping exercise". It was not The reversion of profits as the monetary expression of surplus value to the state was actually crucial to the whole reproduction process of accumulating capital. That is why physical inputs allowed for in the plan had to be priced. They had to be budgetted for and bought/sold. You could not just magic them into existence

Trotsky's own analysis best captures the truly contradictory nature of the USSR. The Soviet Union undoubtedly retained and developed elements of capitalism within its economy, though it is a question of whether these were really over-determining and dominant as you say. It was both socialism and capitalism, somehow. This simply shows the problems of traditional Marxist categories imho.

The orthodox Trotskyists failed to develop Trotsky's own highly ambivalent and nuanced analysis of the USSR, turning the idea of "degenerated workers state" into unhelpful sectarian dogma. The state capitalist alternative theory at least brought some new ideas to the table, although I personally don't find it that convincing either. Each to their own I guess.

Red Enemy

31st December 2012, 22:31

One major aspect of the debate missing:

Was the SU, and if so at what point did it cease to be, a proletarian dictatorship/workers' state/DOTP?

Rafiq

1st January 2013, 02:55

One major aspect of the debate missing:

Was the SU, and if so at what point did it cease to be, a proletarian dictatorship/workers' state/DOTP?

There wasn't an abrupt point which "put the final nail in the coffin". It was a complex and slow degeneration. I would say, though, that this degeneration was signified around the beggining of the civil war and solidified as early as 1920. That doesn't mean the proletarian dictatorship was extinguished that early, though.

Zulu

1st January 2013, 06:55

This is a common enough ploy by the defenders of state capitalism such as yourself to distinguish between nationalisation in a system in which private capitalist still exists and one wherwe they do not. Lenin used this ploy

Hands off Lenin, please. In fact, Lenin openly stated that the truly state capitalist sector begins where the enterprises are nationalized and he advocated it as a means to get the industry in the Soviet Union up and running so that an actual socialist construction could begin.

If there was no longer an exploited class in the SU then that would mean the SU was a classless society which would mean of course a communist society. I think even you must recognise the crass stupidty of such a claim or do you consider that the SU was the moneyless wageless stateless commonwealth that Marxists mean by communism?

Of course it would mean a communist society, but socialism is in no way a communist society. It's no more a communist society than an aircraft carrier under construction is an aircraft carrier. Because it's under goddamn construction!!! That's why it can't sail yet and can't launch planes to bomb the crap out of people! Of course, there was inequality, classes, money and state in the Soviet Union, but that doesn't mean it wasn't socialist.

Hell, I think it does deserve a capslock'd clarification...

SOCIALISM MEANS "UNDER CONSTRUCTION"!!!

.

Zulu

1st January 2013, 07:09

And by the way, @OP

The trotskyist term "Degenerated worker's state" has no place in this poll and discussion, because it refers to the superstructure, not to the "economic nature", be it Soviet Union or Zimbabwe. That is, a "workers' state" can "degenerate" all it wants, or even not "degenerate" at all, but its basis will still have to be defined in terms of economy, not politics. A "degenerated workers' state" may be defined as socialist, and an "OK workers' state" may be defined as capitalist, depending on the prevalent relations of production within that state's territory. Why people calling themselves Marxist can't see that?

robbo203

1st January 2013, 13:01

Of course it would mean a communist society, but socialism is in no way a communist society. It's no more a communist society than an aircraft carrier under construction is an aircraft carrier. Because it's under goddamn construction!!! That's why it can't sail yet and can't launch planes to bomb the crap out of people! Of course, there was inequality, classes, money and state in the Soviet Union, but that doesn't mean it wasn't socialist.

.

Thats of course how Leninists would see things - that socialism is somehow different from communism. It is not the way Marxists see things. In the traditional Marxian usage, SOCIALISM = COMMUNISM. Comprende?

And there is no way, to use your daft analogy of an aircraft carrier , that what you call socialism can lead to communism. It is actually a sure fire way of making sure we DON'T get to communism in my book. State capitalism in no sense facilitates the movement towards communism/socialism. It is a DEAD END that goes nowhere as far as the socialist movement is concerned and one would have thought by now that the penny would have dropped.

Does one really have to point out the obvious to people like you that the Soviet Union , that supposedly epitomised the illusory road-to-socialism-via- state-capitalism was a FAILURE? A complete and utter failure. And it brought descredit on the very name of socialism by identifying it with one party dictatorship , a grim barrack like existence for the majority (Ive seen it myself having been to Russia twice in thr 1980/ early 1990s) and all the other cliches that seems to attach themselves to the word like shit to a wall.

And who, pray, brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why , the very heirs of Lenins glorious vanguard party who were supposed to triumphantly " lead" the workers to communism - the pseudo Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the obscenely privileged collection of red fat cats that populated it who, growing weary of the unwieldiness and inefficiencies of state run capitalism as a means of exploiting the Russian workers, hankered after the more robust disciplines of the "free" market represented by corporate capitalism. Which is precisely what they conspired to bring about in their so called "revolution from above".

Read people like Boris Kagarlitsky or David Kotz who wrote an interesting book (with Fred Weir) called Revolution from Above: Demise of the Soviet System, (Routledge; London 1997). Its all there in all its gory details

Its just astonishing to me that we still have conservative backwoodsmen on this forum reminiscing nostaligically, and not a little pathetically, about the gigantic failure that was of the Soviet Union as if is had anything whatsoever to do with a establishment of a decent humane socialist society. The only thing we have to learn from this failure is how NOT to establish socialism and some people here, it seems, still do not want to heed that lesson

Zulu

1st January 2013, 15:00

... DEAD END...

... illusory road...

... A complete and utter failure...

... a grim barrack like existence...

... Ive seen it myself...

... obscenely privileged collection of red fat cats...

... Boris Kagarlitsky...

... gory details...

... and bla-bla bla, bla... bla...

bla...

We have yet to hear your alternatives to all those horrors though. Every time you dodge the questions:

1) How do you achieve abundance - so that there'd be enough goods and services available to satisfy the material needs of everybody?

2) How do you allocate labor?

3) How do you build and maintain infrastructure above local level?

4) How do you send men to Mars?

5) How do you prevent abuse and misuse of power and resources?

Lev Bronsteinovich

1st January 2013, 16:09

How can it NOT be capitalism? The proletariat by definition is the exploited class of capitalism. Therefore the DOTP (so called) is an instance of the capitalist mode of production.

Private ownership of the means of production by individuals is clearly NOT essential to capitalism. This is basic Marxism . As Engels points out

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
Good quote, but Engels was talking about the rise of monopoly capitalism. It is doubtful that he would have applied this to the USSR. And so much of what Marx wrote about the defining aspects of capitalism do not apply to the USSR. What about production that is not for profit? Doesn't sound like any type of capitalism to me. I have a bit more respect for the argument that the USSR was a something entirely different (i.e. bureaucratic collectivist). I don't agree with it, but it is far more consistent. That proletarians were politically disenfranchised in a worker's state is no more impossible to imagine than the bourgeoisie being disenfranchised in a capitalist state. This has happened many times in the past hundred and fifty years.

Private ownership of the means of production is a key aspect of capitalism. There are no examples that state otherwise, unless you use the USSR and the deformed worker's states.

I think it is easy to fall into the trap of "state capitalism" if one takes a static and ahistorical view of the history of the USSR. It is easy not to like what happened under the Triumvirate and the Duumvirate and later just Stalin. But Trotsky's warnings that we must start by defending that which we have won is an important point.

TheOneWhoKnocks

1st January 2013, 16:50

All that existed in the USSR. By the 1950s there were reputedly hundreds of rouble millionaires among the ruling elite which a supporter of the regime named Reg Bishop actually took pride in bragging about. There was always inequality from the the beginning but under Stalin in the 1930s the old Bolshevik policy of wage leveling was done away with while Stalin himself railed against the "evil of equality". The Soviet capitalist class pocketed surplus value collectively as a class not just through the camouflage of bloated salaries but less visibly via a huge array of perks. For example, they had their own private shops stocking western goodies from which ordinary Russian workers were denied entry.
That isn't necessarily capitalist either though. Wage labor and massive inequality existed in pre-capitalist modes of production as well. Rather, it was only capitalism if the surplus was circulated as capital. If the Soviet ruling class simply consumed most of the wealth it extracted from the exploited classes, then it was more similar to feudalism than capitalism. The raison d'etre of the surplus under capitalism is to create more surplus, not personal consumption.

Really, all of these issues about centralized planning are irrelevant. Every corporation engages in very centralized and planned production decisions but still are fully capitalist.

robbo203

1st January 2013, 19:02

... and bla-bla bla, bla... bla...

bla...

We have yet to hear your alternatives to all those horrors though. Every time you dodge the questions:

1) How do you achieve abundance - so that there'd be enough goods and services available to satisfy the material needs of everybody?

2) How do you allocate labor?

3) How do you build and maintain infrastructure above local level?

4) How do you send men to Mars?

5) How do you prevent abuse and misuse of power and resources?

Yawn . Weve been through all this before umpteen times bar no 4) and Im not quite sure what the immediate appeal of that would be or why you should list it as some kind of important goal for humanity to achieve. It would even figure on my top 100 list

We already have the means to produce enough to satisfy the material needs of everyone. It is capitalism - production for the market with a view to profit - that gets in the way and the most obvious way in which it gets in the way is the horrendous waste of resources it commits to an ever increasing share of economic activity that produces nothing of worth that would satisfy human needs but instead detracts from or draws resources away from the same merely to keep the money system ticking over

In a moneyless communist economy where the driect appropriation of the products of society would prevail, the same amount of real wealth could be produced with a fraction of the resources and labour we use today or, to put it differently, with the same amount of resources and labour used today we could easily produce vastly more real wealth if the purpose of production was altered to one of producing solely and directly to satisfy human needs and not for market exchange. Thats how we would realise abundance

However, thats for another thread; this thread is about the economic nature of the Soviet Union. The point Im making is a simple one. The notion that you reach socialism via state capitalism is quite simply completely untenable and the fate of the Soviet Union has once and for all demonstrated the truth of this claim

robbo203

1st January 2013, 19:20

That isn't necessarily capitalist either though. Wage labor and massive inequality existed in pre-capitalist modes of production as well. Rather, it was only capitalism if the surplus was circulated as capital. If the Soviet ruling class simply consumed most of the wealth it extracted from the exploited classes, then it was more similar to feudalism than capitalism. The raison d'etre of the surplus under capitalism is to create more surplus, not personal consumption..

While it is true that the Soviet capitalist class - those who ultimately controlled and therefore owned the Soviet economy as a collective olass - only consumed directly, as personal consumption, a small portion of the surplus value produced by the Russian workers, it needs to be said that this is equally true of other capitalist countries as well - such as the United States or Great Britain. The bulk of the economic surplus in Soviet state capitalism went into the reproduction and accumulation of capital

Peter Binns has something to say about this in his peice on "State Capitalism" in Marxism and the Modern World, (1986):

"In Russia, the subordination of consumption to the needs of accumulation took an extreme form. From the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan capital accumulation absorbed more than 20 per cent of national income, and it increased in subsequent Plans. This was higher than any of the developed capitalist countries outside Russia (but about the same as the USA and Japan in their equivalent periods of development), and shows clearly that this most characteristic symptom of capitalism – the domination of society by capital accumulation – was fully developed in Russia"

Such was the obsessive preoccupation with capital accumulation under Soviet state capitalism that it had a ruinous impact on the exploited Russian working class. For instance, Stalin claimed in 1933 that the material conditions of workers and peasants had steadily improved and cited as evidence for this the fact that money wages had risen by 67percent. What he conveniently omitted to point out, however, was that prices had risen far more sharply with the consequence that that year marked, what Alec Nove has dramatically characterised as the "culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history" (Nove A An Economic History of the USSR Allen Lane 1972, p.207)

TheOneWhoKnocks

2nd January 2013, 00:53

While it is true that the Soviet capitalist class - those who ultimately controlled and therefore owned the Soviet economy as a collective olass - only consumed directly, as personal consumption, a small portion of the surplus value produced by the Russian workers, it needs to be said that this is equally true of other capitalist countries as well - such as the United States or Great Britain. The bulk of the economic surplus in Soviet state capitalism went into the reproduction and accumulation of capital

Peter Binns has something to say about this in his peice on "State Capitalism" in Marxism and the Modern World, (1986):

"In Russia, the subordination of consumption to the needs of accumulation took an extreme form. From the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan capital accumulation absorbed more than 20 per cent of national income, and it increased in subsequent Plans. This was higher than any of the developed capitalist countries outside Russia (but about the same as the USA and Japan in their equivalent periods of development), and shows clearly that this most characteristic symptom of capitalism – the domination of society by capital accumulation – was fully developed in Russia"

Such was the obsessive preoccupation with capital accumulation under Soviet state capitalism that it had a ruinous impact on the exploited Russian working class. For instance, Stalin claimed in 1933 that the material conditions of workers and peasants had steadily improved and cited as evidence for this the fact that money wages had risen by 67percent. What he conveniently omitted to point out, however, was that prices had risen far more sharply with the consequence that that year marked, what Alec Nove has dramatically characterised as the "culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history" (Nove A An Economic History of the USSR Allen Lane 1972, p.207)

I completely agree. If we are working within the framework of Marxist political economy, it seems apparent to me that the USSR was capitalist, even though it differed significantly in appearance from the liberal capitalism that characterized the West at that time. If we are defining capitalism as a system of competition between utility-maximizing, private entrepreneurs, then we are not operating within a Marxist but a bourgeois framework. Marx's work shows that capitalism can take significantly different forms at different periods.

Lev Bronsteinovich

2nd January 2013, 01:50

While it is true that the Soviet capitalist class - those who ultimately controlled and therefore owned the Soviet economy as a collective olass - only consumed directly, as personal consumption, a small portion of the surplus value produced by the Russian workers, it needs to be said that this is equally true of other capitalist countries as well - such as the United States or Great Britain. The bulk of the economic surplus in Soviet state capitalism went into the reproduction and accumulation of capital

Peter Binns has something to say about this in his peice on "State Capitalism" in Marxism and the Modern World, (1986):

"In Russia, the subordination of consumption to the needs of accumulation took an extreme form. From the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan capital accumulation absorbed more than 20 per cent of national income, and it increased in subsequent Plans. This was higher than any of the developed capitalist countries outside Russia (but about the same as the USA and Japan in their equivalent periods of development), and shows clearly that this most characteristic symptom of capitalism – the domination of society by capital accumulation – was fully developed in Russia"

Such was the obsessive preoccupation with capital accumulation under Soviet state capitalism that it had a ruinous impact on the exploited Russian working class. For instance, Stalin claimed in 1933 that the material conditions of workers and peasants had steadily improved and cited as evidence for this the fact that money wages had risen by 67percent. What he conveniently omitted to point out, however, was that prices had risen far more sharply with the consequence that that year marked, what Alec Nove has dramatically characterised as the "culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history" (Nove A An Economic History of the USSR Allen Lane 1972, p.207)
WHO accumulated? The state. So instead of competing capital, there was a single capital owned not by a person but by the state. Production not for profit. No inheritance, no capacity to sell the capital, no ability of individuals to engage in foreign trade. A planned economy. Remember the concept that quantity, at some point, turns into quality? Well here it is. It is so different from capitalism that it is something different. State capitalism is an anti-dialectic and illogical construction.

TheOneWhoKnocks

2nd January 2013, 02:13

Lev Bronsteinovich

2nd January 2013, 02:47

I'm not following. Competition is not necessarily dominant during all periods of capitalist development -- indeed, Marx wrote about the tendency for capital to consolidate into oligopolies and monopolies. How is state capitalism significantly different from monopoly capitalism? And again, capitalism involves significant planning as well.
Because in capitalism individuals OWN the means of production. And if they want to sell it and take the money and stuff it up their bums, they can. And production is for PROFIT. The tendency toward monopoly is one thing. Having ONE "company" only, in ALL industries and finance, in this case the state, is something quite different. From capitalism, that is.

Let's Get Free

2nd January 2013, 03:03

Because in capitalism individuals OWN the means of production.
In the ussr, the nomenklatura, the capitalist class in question collectively owned the means of production, which is is no way incompatable with capitalism. It is not vital to capitalism that there should be de jure legal ownership of capital by private individuals, this is a bourgeois definition of capitalism. The nomenklatura exercised de facto control over the means of production and were effectively owners of the MOP - the Soviet capitalist class. It is an idealist and nonsensical interpretation of history to say that in order for capitalism to exist, individual capitalist must have some legally enshrined right to own capital in their own right.

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 03:13

If there was no longer an exploited class in the SU then that would mean the SU was a classless society which would mean of course a communist society. I think even you must recognise the crass stupidty of such a claim or do you consider that the SU was the moneyless wageless stateless commonwealth that Marxists mean by communism?

There may have been no exploited class in the Soviet Union, at least in the later stages, but the elimination of exploitation is not the purpose of a state. A state exists for the purpose of suppressing a particular class, thereby making it possible for a ruling class to insure its exploitation of an underclass.

The Soviet Union was concerned principally and ruthlessly with the suppression and extinction of the capitalist class. Stalin killed as many as he could, including millions whom he suspected of being capitalist or petit bourgeois, for instance, millions of Kulaks.

By the 1970's the Soviet state had successfully suppressed the Russian capitalist or semi-capitalist class. Thus, there was no further class to suppress. By 1989 the Soviet bureacracy had no reason for existence. And the Soviet state collapsed, just as Marx and Engels predicted. However, the Soviet state did not collapse in a socialist world; the classless Soviet society was surrounded by hostile capitalism, which, not surprisingly, rushed in at the invitation of Boris Yeltsin.

The Soviet Union was never a wageless, moneyless state. It was a state in the early stages of communism. As a state it followed the historical laws of what a state is. The Chinese have apparently learned the lesson of the Soviet Union: in a capitalist world a socialist state will collapse unless there is enough internal suppression and exploitation to maintain the existence of the state. Socialism in one state is possible, but it won't last long.

The next world wide economic collapse could bring into existence several socialist countries, which might then make the permanent transition to world socialism possible.

Red Banana

2nd January 2013, 03:43

The rulers of the Soviet Union didn't suppress, let alone exterminate the Russian capitalist class, they were the Russian capitalist class.

Zulu

2nd January 2013, 05:11

Yawn . Weve been through all this before umpteen times

No, umpteen times we've been through your bad-mouthing of central planning, but as far as your proposed alternative is concerned, we've never been past the can of beans in a supermarket.

bar no 4) and Im not quite sure what the immediate appeal of that would be or why you should list it as some kind of important goal for humanity to achieve. It would even figure on my top 100 list

And this is quite telling, because it's got to be first priority on everybody's list. The passionate "yay for red terror!" part of me even suggests that anyone who so much as has a slightest doubt about it must be shot without trial. But of course I realize that such an approach would not be adequate. Which brings me to the question #1, namely, abundance, which, as I realize (unlike you), can not be limited just to the daily rations of beans, but has also something to do with the abundance of, let's say, educational services that will tend to everybody's material need to learn why sending people to Mars is so important. Which brings me to question #2, the core question needing to be answered before the rest of them.

In short, it's a little bit more complicated than a can of beans, so I don't really expect you to answer those questions all at once, so let's start with the most obvious one, namely, #3, particularly as an answer to it is bound to be kind of similar to that to #4.

So, please kindly tell us, how, in your opinion, infrastructure above local level (including, but not limited to railroads, orbital satellites and strategic emergency supply depots) should be maintained and improved in communism?

robbo203

2nd January 2013, 08:25

WHO accumulated? The state. So instead of competing capital, there was a single capital owned not by a person but by the state. Production not for profit. No inheritance, no capacity to sell the capital, no ability of individuals to engage in foreign trade. A planned economy. Remember the concept that quantity, at some point, turns into quality? Well here it is. It is so different from capitalism that it is something different. State capitalism is an anti-dialectic and illogical construction.

Sorry but you are talking tripe here. State enterprises were legal enterprises in their own right and legally obliged to pursue profit. They could and were heavily penalised if they did not. They could not be bankrupted and economically compelled to cease operations - that is true and this is where a superficial difference arises between Soviet capitalism and Westren style capitalism (although western capitalist countries have also subsidised loss making concerns so it is not unique to the Soviet Union) . Neverthless, losses had to be paid for and this had to come out of the profits made by other state enterprises- all profits and losses reverting to the state ultimately

Means of production - capital - were most definitely bought and sold between enterprises and subject to legally binding commercial contracts with state agencies like GOSSNAP (State Commission for Materials and Equipment Supply) acting as intermediaries

The Soviet Union as has been pointed out numerous times was not a planned system in the sense that some people here persist in thinking. GOSPLANs so called "plans" were largely a joke, a mere wishlist of production targets. None of GOSPLAN's plans were ever strictly met. Of sheer necessity, a large array of decisions had to be devolved downwards onto the state enterrprises themselves. There was simply no way in which they could be made in a priori fashion by the planners. Ironically it was the very system of planning and the imposition of production targets on state enterrpises that effectively put state enterprises in fierce competitition with one another for state funding. So that too is a myth - that there was "no competition" in the Soviet Union. There certainly was in de facto terms and not only that, there was external commercial competition between the different state capitalist regimes themselves

While such targets set by GOSPLAN might have been "consciously planned" in the sense that they were formulated by the planners, it is a complete illusion to imagine that the planners had carte blanche in the way the planned things. Ther were subject to precisely the same set of pressures arising out of the law of value, that western capitalist societies are subject to. Capital accumulation had to be funded and budgeted for and this could only come out of state revenues which in turn derived from such sources as turnover taxes and retained profits

The Soviet economy in its fundamentals was thus a capitalist economy through and through, being based on generalised wage labour , commodity production and capital accumulation out of surplus value. It differed superficially from other capitalist economies inasmuch as de jure legal ownership of capital by private individuals was not permitted. But even so, means of production were owned - obviously not by the workers whose status was no different to that of their counterparts in the west - but by that tiny, extremely wealthy and powerful class of economic parasites, the Soviet capitalist class, who owned the means of prpduction in a de facto sense through their ultimate control of it ("ultimate control" and "ownership" meaning the sme thing) and. most significantly from a Marxian viewpoint, their complete complete control over the surplus product That in the end is what defines an owning class in Marxian terms and that is why the Soviet red capitalists were most definitely a fully fledged capitalist class

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 09:53

To Robbo two questions:

1. What is property.

2. What level of GNP per head in Euros would you say constitutes abundance, ie, an economy where you think all material needs of people are met.

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 09:59

This quote from Binns "In Russia, the subordination of consumption to the needs of accumulation took an extreme form. From the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan capital accumulation absorbed more than 20 per cent of national income, and it increased in subsequent Plans. This was higher than any of the developed capitalist countries outside Russia (but about the same as the USA and Japan in their equivalent periods of development), and shows clearly that this most characteristic symptom of capitalism – the domination of society by capital accumulation – was fully developed in Russia"

shows a certain double think. The very high level of accumulation in the USSR was possible because of the socialist economy. If there were an exploiting class a large part of the surplus would have been consumed unproductively. If you look at the USA or the UK, rarely did more than 20% of profit let alone 20% of gnp go in accumulation, the rich spend the rest themselves. The aim of being rich is not to live in poverty but to live in luxury.

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 10:02

The Soviet Union as has been pointed out numerous times was not a planned system in the sense that some people here persist in thinking.

Well in that case why did the removal of GOSPLAN after 1989 lead to the immediate and precipitate collapse of the economy.

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 14:11

The rulers of the Soviet Union didn't suppress, let alone exterminate the Russian capitalist class, they were the Russian capitalist class.

So, Gorbachev was a capitalist? Sort of a Russian J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Vanderbilt, Mitt Romney?

The inability to distinguish between capitalism and the early stages of communism is probably some sort of dialectical-economic law. There must have been early bourgeois progressives who believed that the early stages of capitalism were only another form of feudalism.

Red Banana

2nd January 2013, 14:40

Yes, Gorbachev was a member of the ruling capitalist class. He was certainly no worker, let alone a socialist.

The USSR was not in any way, shape, or form 'the early stages of communism'.

And what the hell do you mean by 'some sort of dialectical-economic law'? You can't refute someone's argument by saying some vaguely Marxist sounding phrase and then insisting that it must be true, without providing any evidence to support it.

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 14:52

most significantly from a Marxian viewpoint, their complete complete control over the surplus product That in the end is what defines an owning class in Marxian terms and that is why the Soviet red capitalists were most definitely a fully fledged capitalist class

You fail to make a distinction between private and state ownership of the means of production or surplus product. The essence of capitalism is the private ownership of social property. This is why Marx demanded the abolition of private property. He wasn't talking about the private ownership of a bottle of vodka, but the private ownership of the factory, land and capital which produced the vodka.

If a few wealthy capitalists owned all the capital in the SU, then who was the vodka czar, the space czar, the gold czar, the oil and gas czar? Gazprom, the Russian oil and gas producer, is still owned by the Russian state. Does this make Putin the Russian Rockefeller?

This inability to distinguish between two different types of economic development can still be seen in the US. A giant agribusiness still describes itself as a traditional family farm; a hedge fund is a small business.

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 15:06

Yes, Gorbachev was a member of the ruling capitalist class. He was certainly no worker, let alone a socialist.

Gorbachev was a capitalist. How much, specifically, of Soviet production and profit did he own?

And what the hell do you mean by 'some sort of dialectical-economic law'? You can't refute someone's argument by saying some vaguely Marxist sounding phrase and then insisting that it must be true, without providing any evidence to support it.

It is a law revealed by people like you who cannot distinguish between state ownership and private ownership; dialectical in the sense of being historically developed, economic in the sense of being related to economic development. In the US there are lots of people who deny the existence of gigantic monopolies and who insist that competition between small businesses is still the best way to describe a modern economy.

It's a sort of economic-historical-dialectical myopia.

Dave B

2nd January 2013, 15:29

In the first place, as Karl pointed out in Capital, the proportion of the surplus value set aside by the capitalist classes for their consumption fund is no accurate or relevant measure of whether or not capitalism is occurring or not.

If the bourgeois capitalist class, as handmaidens of capitalism and accumulation of capital, were scrooge like misers and accumulating/ reinvesting nearly all their surplus value they would be no less capitalists than their more profligate brothers.

Merely more ‘successful’.

And as Karl said somewhere there was at one time an ideological Calvinistic/even ‘puritan’ culture within some sections of the capitalist class of abstinence and frugality, for themselves.

In fact with the concentration of massive amounts of productive capital and thus surplus value into the ownership smaller and smaller numbers of people, a theoretical trend of capitalism.

Then an even very small proportion of that surplus value, set aside as a consumption fund, becomes so enormous that no matter how profligate they are they can’t spend it, on themselves anyway.

So you had the Rockefeller Foundations etc.

Anyway; regarding the actual consumption fund of the Russia state capitalist class, as has been pointed out, it cannot be accurately monetarily assessed statistically; as most of it was inevitably 'hidden' and received in the form of free state villa’s ,and absurdly subsidised, Bolshevik Party only, Harrods and Fortnum & Mason’s etc.

The Bolshevik party as less than 1% of the population circa 1922, also started off with an enviable concentration of ownership of [state] capital; a level that western bourgeois capitalism has only just about caught up with today.

[The Bolshevik party membership crept up under Stalin in the 1930’s, as it could afford to, as the ‘communist egalitarianism’ amongst and for the ruling class Bolshevik party themselves became more hierarchally structured with its Orwellian inner and outer party members.]

As to with some massive corporations, and parts of it nominally making large profits and others losses, that is quite common, one subsidising the other. That is often accepted in Western corporate capitalism for a variety of reasons to complex to go into, involving a redistribution of profits/surplus value across the group.

[We had a Starbucks issue on this in the UK recently; in that case it was to minimise corporation tax/ tax on profit.]

Someone mentioned the "Holy Roman Empire" a while back ie non private property based production.

The Holy Roman Catholic church up until at least the 16th century was operated as a financially independent commodity producing European corporation with its own fat cat cardinals/bishops/Abbots, and labouring monks and lay monks on the monastic ‘enterprises’ etc.

The property of the means of production was not privately owned by individuals of the Roman catholic church ruling class and couldn’t sold or alienated by individual members of the roman catholic ruling class or for that matter bequeathed or inherited.

Despite nepotism; no more or less rife their than in Bolshevik state capitalism.

Was that socialism or building socialism then?

In England, at least under Henry VIII, the monastic production was so much beginning to operate with a 'capitalistic orientation'.

That they were privatised and sold off to private capitalists as ‘going concerns’.

As to ‘state capitalism’ building or laying the foundations for socialism by accumulating the means of production and increasing the productivity of labour; well yes so it does, just like private capitalism does.

That was one reason why capitalism is ‘progressive’ according to Lenin’s own stagiest theory.

But that is best left to the capitalist and state capitalist class without working class parties ‘identifying’ themselves with it and calling it a ‘transition stage’.

By that count you could even argue that imperialism as an economic invasion of capitalism into feudal areas is a transition stage to socialism!

V. I. Lenin; MATERIALS RELATING TO THE REVISIONOF THE PARTY PROGRAMME

As now worded, the preamble contains a description and analysis of the main and essential features of capitalism as a social and economic system. Fundamentally, these features have not been changed by imperialism, by the era of finance capital. Imperialism is a continuation of the development of capitalism, its highest stage -- in a sense, a transition stage to socialism.

page 464

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/MRPP17.html

Brosa Luxemburg

2nd January 2013, 16:00

You fail to make a distinction between private and state ownership of the means of production or surplus product.

Nationalized property is in no way an indicator of socialism, a proletarian dictatorship, etc. Nationalized property has existed within a bourgeois framework, right alongside the exchange of equivalent values, surplus value production, generalized commodity production, etc. etc.

Would you really argue that nationalized property under FDR's New Deal represented a proletarian dictatorship?

Red Banana

2nd January 2013, 16:00

Gorbachev was a capitalist. How much, specifically, of Soviet production and profit did he own?

It is a law revealed by people like you who cannot distinguish between state ownership and private ownership; dialectical in the sense of being historically developed, economic in the sense of being related to economic development. In the US there are lots of people who deny the existence of gigantic monopolies and who insist that competition between small businesses is still the best way to describe a modern economy.

It's a sort of economic-historical-dialectical myopia.

There is no distinction between private and state ownership when the state is controlled by a class of private individuals!

And what you describe is in no such way a law, you pulled it out of your ass a couple hours ago and now act as if it is objective fact. You're essentially saying "I'm right because it is a law that you are wrong *wipes hands*".

By the way, everything is 'historically developed' so if that is your definition of the word 'dialectical' then you can just slap that term on anything, rendering it completely useless as an adjective.

hetz

2nd January 2013, 16:09

There is no distinction between private and state ownership when the state is controlled by a class of private individuals!
Show me one such state.
Better yet show one state that isn't like that.

Zulu

2nd January 2013, 16:11

Nationalized property is in no way an indicator of socialism, a proletarian dictatorship, etc. Nationalized property has existed within a bourgeois framework, right alongside the exchange of equivalent values, surplus value production, generalized commodity production, etc. etc.

Would you really argue that nationalized property under FDR's New Deal represented a proletarian dictatorship?

That's right.

Here was have what is most essential in the theoretical appraisal of the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, namely, that capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism. The latter must be emphasized because the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common. The trusts, of course, never provided, do not now provide, and cannot provide complete planning. But however much they do plan, however much the capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of production on a national and even on an international scale, and however much they systematically regulate it, we still remain under capitalism - at its new stage, it is true, but still capitalism, without a doubt. The "proximity" of such capitalism to socialism should serve genuine representatives of the proletariat as an argument proving the proximity, facility, feasibility, and urgency of the socialist revolution, and not at all as an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do.

This is Lenin, "The State and Revolution". In "The Tax in Kind" he defended state capitalism as the next best thing to socialism, yet he clearly distinguished between the two. So when does state capitalism end and socialism begin? When the DotP begins society-wide planning with the ultimate regard not to monetary profit, but to certain concrete goals on its path to complete communism.

Zulu

2nd January 2013, 16:16

There is no distinction between private and state ownership when the state is controlled by a class of private individuals!

Yeah... And Joe Stalin was an anarcho-capitalist on steroids! I think I've seen a thread about this somewhere around here...

http://www.meh.ro/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/meh.ro7684.jpg

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 19:15

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 19:41

There is
And what you describe is in no such way a law, you pulled it out of your ass a couple hours ago and now act as if it is objective fact. You're essentially saying "I'm right because it is a law that you are wrong *wipes hands*".

By the way, everything is 'historically developed' so if that is your definition of the word 'dialectical' then you can just slap that term on anything, rendering it completely useless as an adjective.

You never explained how much of the Soviet Union Gorbachev owned as a Soviet capitalist.

According to your theory, the ownership of Walmart by the U.S. government is the same as the ownership of Walmart by the Walton family. A toll highway in the U.S. is privately owned; the U.S. interstate system (a partial centralization of the means of transport advocated by Marx) is owned by the U.S. government.

"Abolish all private property."

robbo203

2nd January 2013, 19:48

You fail to make a distinction between private and state ownership of the means of production or surplus product. The essence of capitalism is the private ownership of social property. This is why Marx demanded the abolition of private property. He wasn't talking about the private ownership of a bottle of vodka, but the private ownership of the factory, land and capital which produced the vodka.

If a few wealthy capitalists owned all the capital in the SU, then who was the vodka czar, the space czar, the gold czar, the oil and gas czar? Gazprom, the Russian oil and gas producer, is still owned by the Russian state. Does this make Putin the Russian Rockefeller?

This inability to distinguish between two different types of economic development can still be seen in the US. A giant agribusiness still describes itself as a traditional family farm; a hedge fund is a small business.

I disagree. The essense of capitalism is NOT private ownership by individuals in their own right of specific means of production. This is a ludicrously narrow interpretation of what is meant the essence of capitalism which even back in the 19th century was becoming outdated. See for example Engels commentary in Socialism Utopian and Scientific on the rise of the joint stock company and trustification

Ive referred to this quote many times before but its worth mentioning it again from the same source - Socialism Utopian and Scientific

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head

Of course, predictably the Leninists and their assorted allies here here will come out in knee jerk fashion with same old bogus argument that this is referring to state ownership in a capitalist society and not what they absurdly presume to call a "socialist" society. All the same that is besides the point in this particular instance since Engels is clearly saying that state ownership does not do away with the capitalist nature of the nationalised industry. In other words, the fact that a nationalised industry is not owned owned by private individual capitalists but by the state, does emphatically not mean it is not capitalist.

However you look at it, your argument is clearly false

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 19:54

So, Gorbachev was a capitalist? Sort of a Russian J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Vanderbilt, Mitt Romney?

The inability to distinguish between capitalism and the early stages of communism is probably some sort of dialectical-economic law. There must have been early bourgeois progressives who believed that the early stages of capitalism were only another form of feudalism.

Indeed it is only with the benefit of historical hindsight that we see a nascent bourgoisie at all. This is one of Althusser's points, what we now call an infant bourgeoisie was actually one of the classes of a feudal social formation.

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 20:01

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head

What modern states does Robbo think Engels had in mind given that this was some time before the USSR existed?

And as was pointed out earlier, this is a very weak passage. It gives no argument as to why what he states is the case should be believed.

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 20:03

Nationalization not an indication of socialism? Marx advised doing these things to establish socialism:

"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."

From the Communist Manifesto

FDR expanded the welfare state. What industry did he nationalize?

The position of most people on this list is that when the CPSU followed the measures in the Communist Manifesto they were 'self evidently' not socialist. I think this indicates that there is actually more sympathy for anarchism on this site than for communism.

Paul Cockshott

2nd January 2013, 20:04

Incidentally it is an open question who wrote the Communist Manifesto. Nobody seems to know which parts Marx wrote and which parts old Fred wrote.

TheOneWhoKnocks

2nd January 2013, 20:09

Capitalism is capitalism regardless of who owns the capital. I really don't understand why so many people are getting hung up on that.

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 20:33

Indeed it is only with the benefit of historical hindsight that we see a nascent bourgoisie at all. This is one of Althusser's points, what we now call an infant bourgeoisie was actually one of the classes of a feudal social formation.

Interesting. The early burghers must have seen themselves as landlords of factories. And our early communists see themselves as monopoly capitalists or "state-capitalists."

RedMaterialist

2nd January 2013, 20:45

Of course, predictably the Leninists and their assorted allies...

However you look at it, your argument is clearly false

Well, I don't mind being allied with Lenin, one of the great minds of the 20th century.

By the way, Paul Cockshott says that Althusser has already explained my "historico-economic-dialectic" law. I didn't know that. I would have cited him.

Zulu

3rd January 2013, 00:17

"Abolish all private property."

"Division of labour and private property are identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity."
K. Marx & F. Engels. The German Ideology.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Therefore, the "expropriation of the expropriators" is just the beginning of the elimination of private property, but not by any means the whole process. The formal abolition of private property, its conversion into a socialist state's property only creates the necessary conditions and prerequisites. The full elimination of private property is identical with the elimination of the social division of labor, and matches the timeframe of what we call socialism, that is, the transition from capitalism to complete communism. Thus, the essence of socialism is the elimination of the social division of labor, as the basis for existence of classes, exploitation, etc.

The conversion of all people into workers of the total public capital is just the first step of socialism. Then follows the phasing out of various forms of alienated activity. In the USSR they stopped after the first step and got the restoration.
http://marxistleninist.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=learning&action=display&thread=689

Incidentally it is an open question who wrote the Communist Manifesto. Nobody seems to know which parts Marx wrote and which parts old Fred wrote.

Well, there is an indication that Engels might deserve more credit for the Manifesto than Marx, namely, this nice FAQ (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm) Engels wrote one year prior and which obviously contains the main groundwork for the Manifesto, which comes across more like a literary and somewhat more emotional expansion of it. But then again, it could just as well have been a result of M&E's collaborative effort too.

Brosa Luxemburg

3rd January 2013, 15:51

Nationalization not an indication of socialism? Marx advised doing these things to establish socialism:

"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."

From the Communist Manifesto

FDR expanded the welfare state. What industry did he nationalize?

1. Marx and Engels said that the above goals would differ country by country. These really aren't goals for the proletariat in industrialized nations like the United States.

2. Really, you deny there was nationalized property in the United States....during the New Deal and World War 2? So, what was the Tennessee Valley Authority doing when it nationalized facilities from the former Tennessee Electric Power Company? Seriously, that is a ridiculous claim.

These arguments are sooooo repetitive on revleft, and i'm getting really sick of having this debate over and over again.

Paul Cockshott

3rd January 2013, 15:52

"Division of labour and private property are identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity."
K. Marx & F. Engels. The German Ideology.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Therefore, the "expropriation of the expropriators" is just the beginning of the elimination of private property, but not by any means the whole process. The formal abolition of private property, its conversion into a socialist state's property only creates the necessary conditions and prerequisites. The full elimination of private property is identical with the elimination of the social division of labor, and matches the timeframe of what we call socialism, that is, the transition from capitalism to complete communism. Thus, the essence of socialism is the elimination of the social division of labor, as the basis for existence of classes, exploitation, etc.

The conversion of all people into workers of the total public capital is just the first step of socialism. Then follows the phasing out of various forms of alienated activity. In the USSR they stopped after the first step and got the restoration.
http://marxistleninist.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=learning&action=display&thread=689

Well, there is an indication that Engels might deserve more credit for the Manifesto than Marx, namely, this nice FAQ (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm) Engels wrote one year prior and which obviously contains the main groundwork for the Manifesto, which comes across more like a literary and somewhat more emotional expansion of it. But then again, it could just as well have been a result of M&E's collaborative effort too.
Hopefully one of the Postgrads in Glasgow University will have the answer soon using algorithms based on word pair frequency which are apparently very good at identifying authors of texts.

Brosa Luxemburg

3rd January 2013, 15:55

This is Lenin, "The State and Revolution". In "The Tax in Kind" he defended state capitalism as the next best thing to socialism, yet he clearly distinguished between the two. So when does state capitalism end and socialism begin? When the DotP begins society-wide planning with the ultimate regard not to monetary profit, but to certain concrete goals on its path to complete communism.

Again, this discussion is happening over and over again and I am burnt out on having it to be honest. I think communism and socialism are interchangeable terms, etc. etc. Here is a post recently made about this.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2557566&postcount=199

Paul Cockshott

4th January 2013, 09:49

Again, this discussion is happening over and over again and I am burnt out on having it to be honest. I think communism and socialism are interchangeable terms, etc. etc. Here is a post recently made about this.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2557566&postcount=199

Interesting article I just read which contains a summary of Bukharin and Preobrazenskys view of money under socialism:

— Le dernier point concerne la monnaie, et né
cessite de distinguer entre socialisme et communisme.
Dans la société socialiste, « intermédiaire inévitable entre le
capitalisme et le communisme», la monnaie est nécessaire.
Elle a un rôle à jouer dans une économie qui connaît encore
des marchandises, car elle est l'équivalent général. Les
échanges restent monétaires, notamment dans la mesure
où, même si la bourgeoisie a été éliminée, le paysan de
meure un producteur de marchandises. Les auteurs
ajoutent cette précision justifiant le bien-fondé de la
« planche à billets » : « II serait désavantageux de supprimer
entièrement la monnaie, aussi longtemps que l'émission de
papier-monnaie est un substitut de l'imposition, aussi long
temps que cela aide l'Etat prolétarien à affronter les condi
tions extrêmement difficiles qui prévalent à ce moment»
(p. 38). Arrous Jean. Socialisme et planification : O. Lange et F.A. von Hayek. In: Revue française d'économie. Volume 5 N°2, 1990. pp. 61-84.

from this it is clear that they had completely repudiated Marx's proposals on the abolition of money and its replacement with labour accounts. This makes their views the same as Kautsky's emphasising the continuity between communist and social democratic ideas of socialism.

Dave B

4th January 2013, 14:02

Well that is a summary in French with no Bukharin source or date etc.

So why don’t we go to the man himself and read Bukharin’s own “incoherent” take on moneyless society.

Nikolai Bukharin Programme of the World Revolution
Chapter XV The End of the Power of Money.

“State Finances” and Financial Economy in the Soviet Republic

We have seen, on the other hand, that when production and distribution are thoroughly organised, money will play no part whatever, and as a matter of course no kind of money dues will be demanded from anyone. Money will have generally become unnecessary. finance will become extinct.

We repeat that that time is a long way off yet. There can be no talk of it in the near future. For the present we must find means for public finance. But we are already taking steps leading to the abolition of the money system. Society is being transformed into one huge labour organisation or company to produce and distribute what is already produced without the agency of gold coinage or paper money. The end of the power of money is imminent.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1918/worldrev/ch15.html

N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky: The ABC of Communism; 1920

Chapter 3: Communism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

§ 19 Characteristics of the communist system. Production unde communism

20 Distribution in the communist system

The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. Under com munism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic cooperative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products.

These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the com munal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them. In such conditions, money will no longer be re quired. 'How can that be?' some of you will ask. 'In that case one person will get too much and another too little. What sense is there in such a method of distribution?' The answer is as follows. At first, doubtless, and perhaps for twenty or thirty years, it will be necessary to have various regulations.

Maybe certain products will only be supplied to those persons who have a special entry in their work-book or on their work-card. Subsequently, when communist society has been consolidated and fully developed, no such regulations will be needed. There will be an ample quantity of all products, our present wounds will long since have been healed, and everyone will be able to get just as much as he needs.

'But will not people find it to their interest to take more than they need?' Certainly not. Today, for example, no one thinks it worth while when he wants one seat in a tram, to take three tickets and keep two places empty. It will be just the same in the case of all products. A person will take from the communal storehouse precisely as much as he needs, no more.

No one will have any interest in taking more than he wants in order to sell the surplus to others, since all these others can satisfy their needs whenever they please. Money will then have no value. Our meaning is that at the outset, in the first days of communist society, products will probably be distributed in accordance with the amount of work done by the applicant; at a later stage, however, they will simply be supplied according to the needs of the comrades.

It has often been contended that in the future society everyone will have the right to the full product of his labour. 'What you have made by your labour, that you will receive.' This is false. It would never be possible to realize it fully. Why not? For this reason, that if everyone were to receive the full product of his labour, there would never be any possibility of developing, expanding, and improving production.

Part of the work done must always be devoted to the development and improvement of production. If we had to consume and to use up everything we have produced, then we could never produce machines, for these cannot be eaten or worn. But it is obvious that the bettering of life will go hand in hand with the extension and improvement of machinery.

It is plain that more and more machines must continually be produced. Now this implies that part of the labour which has been incorporated in the machines will not be returned to the person who has done the work. It implies that no one can ever receive the full product of his labour. But nothing of the kind is necessary. With the aid of good machinery, production will be so arranged that all needs will be satisfied.

To sum up, at the outset products will be distributed in proportion to the work done (which does not mean that the worker will receive 'the full product of his labour'); subsequently, products will be distributed according to need, for there will be an abundance of everything.
§ 21 Administration in the communist system

In a communist society there will be no classes. But if there will be no classes, this implies that in communist society there will likewise be no State.
We have previously seen that the State is a class organization of the rulers. The State is always directed by one class against the other. A bourgeois State………..
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/03.htm

Obviously Bukharin has a similar take on the state as Robbo.

One reason why capitalism is progressive hence Lenin’s stagiest theory is that it forces the accumulation of industrial capital and raises the productivity of labour so that makes the production of the ‘ample quantity of all products’ possible.

That forced accumulation of industrial capital was the;

‘historical function of the bourgeois revolution’.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1924/revolution.htm

And not the workers party or the socialist revolution.

Presumably the forced (primitive?) accumulation of industrial capitalism in Stalin’s labour camps and gulags was part of Paul Cockshotts ‘socialist mode of production’ as well!

Cajo Brendel Council Communism & The Critique of Bolshevism

At the same time the Council Communists grew up. They had learned that the Russian Revolution was nothing more than a bourgeois revolution and that the Russian economy was nothing more than state capitalism. They had a clearer understanding of things which were ripe for new research. Other things not analyzed before, stood now in a clearer light.

The most important analysis in this respect was completed by Pannekoek in 1938. He published a pamphlet on Lenin's philosophy and produced a more profound analysis of Bolshevism. Pannekoek pointed to the fact that Lenin's Marxism was nothing more than a legend and contradicted real Marxism. At the same time he explained the cause: "In Russia," he said "the struggle against Czarism resembled in many aspects the struggle against feudalism in Europe long before. In Russia church and religion supported the existing power.

For that reason a struggle against religion was a social necessity." For this reason what Lenin regarded as historical materialism hardly distinguished itself from the French bourgeois materialism of the 18th century, a materialism that, in those times, was used as a spiritual weapon against the church and religion. In the same way, that is to say, pointing to the similarities of the social relations in Russia before the revolution and those in the pre-revolutionary France, the Council Communists pointed to the fact that Lenin and the members of his party claimed the name Jacobins for themselves. They meant that their party in the Russian bourgeois revolution had the same function as the French Jacobins.

That Bolshevism in March 1918, only five months after October 1917, robbed the Soviets from their already minimalized power was - as the Council Communists said - a logical consequence of the October Revolution. Soviets were not suitable with a system that was the political superstructure of state capitalist productive relations.

What the council Communist movement mean by communism is a completely different thing from that system. The dictatorship of a party doesn't fit with social relations based on the abolition of wage-labour and the end of exploitation of the workers. A society in which the producers are free and equal can't be something different from the democracy of the producers.

Paul Cockshott

4th January 2013, 15:07

The paradox is that I am the one advocating the Dutch/German council communist policy of labour tokens and you who adheres to the Bukharin Khruschev idea ofcommunism as free distribition. When I have access to a computer I will get you the english version of the passage quoted in rhe french text on money and socialism.

Dave B

4th January 2013, 15:10

I can read french well enough to understand it

Paul Cockshott

4th January 2013, 23:31

Le dernier point concerne la monnaie, et né
cessite de distinguer entre socialisme et communisme.
Dans la société socialiste, « intermédiaire inévitable entre le
capitalisme et le communisme», la monnaie est nécessaire.
Elle a un rôle à jouer dans une économie qui connaît encore
des marchandises, car elle est l'équivalent général. Les
échanges restent monétaires, notamment dans la mesure
où, même si la bourgeoisie a été éliminée, le paysan de
meure un producteur de marchandises. Les auteurs
ajoutent cette précision justifiant le bien-fondé de la
« planche à billets » : « II serait désavantageux de supprimer
entièrement la monnaie, aussi longtemps que l'émission de
papier-monnaie est un substitut de l'imposition, aussi long
temps que cela aide l'Etat prolétarien à affronter les condi
tions extrêmement difficiles qui prévalent à ce moment»
My translation:

The last point concerns money and necessitates a distinction between
socialism and communism. In socialist societ "an inevitable
intermediary between capitalism and communism", money is necessary.
It has a role to play in an economy which still knows commodities,
since it is the genral equivalent. Exchange is still monetary, notably
to the degree, that even if the bourgeoisie has been eliminated, the
peasant remains a producre of commodities. The authors make this
distinction justifying the "printing of money" : "it would be disadvantageous
to entirely suppress money, fol long as the the issue of paper money is a
substitute for taxes, so long as that helps the worker's state to face
the very difficult conditions that presently exist.

RedMaterialist

5th January 2013, 17:27

1.

2. Really, you deny there was nationalized property in the United t
States....during the New Deal and World War 2? So, what was the Tennessee Valley Authority doing when it nationalized facilities from the former Tennessee Electric Power Company? Seriously, that is a ridiculous claim.

.

Roosevelt did not nationalize the tenn electric company, he bought it. then created the tva. However, state ownership of some sectors of the economy does not make that economy a socialist state. The U.S. government owns the Social Security system, probably the most successful pension system in history. It is well run, well funded, and has save millions of the elderly from the worst kind of poverty. Its success is one reason Wall St. would love to get their hands on its assets.

The U.S. is not socialist because of social security, medicare, or because of government bailout of banks and car manufacturers. The best you can say is that the U.S. is a capitalist state in transition, one hopes, to a socialist society.

RedMaterialist

5th January 2013, 17:33

The authors make this
distinction justifying the "printing of money" : "it would be disadvantageous
to entirely suppress money, fol long as the the issue of paper money is a
substitute for taxes, so long as that helps the worker's state to face
the very difficult conditions that presently exist.

Even the printing of money is becoming increasingly less necessary. Paychecks are direct deposited; payments which used to be made in cash are now made by debit card. Money is becoming an abstraction, a computer byte.

Zulu

5th January 2013, 21:16

Interesting article I just read which contains a summary of Bukharin and Preobrazenskys view of money under socialism:

from this it is clear that they had completely repudiated Marx's proposals on the abolition of money and its replacement with labour accounts. This makes their views the same as Kautsky's emphasising the continuity between communist and social democratic ideas of socialism.

Not exactly:

§ 121. Money and withering away of the monetary system

Communist society will not know money. In it, every worker will make goods for the common stock and will not receive any certificate that he procured produce to society, i. e., will not receive money. Similarly, he will not pay any money to society, when he needs to get something from the common stock. Another matter in the socialist system, which is to be a system transitional from capitalism to communism. Money inevitably appear and play their part in a commodity economy. When I, being a shoemaker, want to get a jacket, I convert my commodity, i. e. boots, first into money, i. e. the commodity in return for which I get any other commodity, including the jacket that interests me in this case. So does every commodity producer. In socialist society, commodity economy will partly still exist.

Suppose we have successfully suppressed the resistance of the bourgeoisie and turned the former ruling classes into workers. We still have the peasantry, which does not work for the common stock. Each peasant will try to sell his surplus to the state, to exchange it for the industrial products he needs. The peasant will remain a commodity producer. And for settling his bills with his neighbors and the state he will still need money. Just as they will be needed by the state for payments with all the members of society that have not joined the productive commune yet. It is also impossible to abolish money at once, particularly because of the vast amount of private commerce that is still practiced, which the Soviet government is unable to fully replace with socialist distribution yet. Finally, it is not expedient to abolish money at once, because issuing paper money replaces taxation and allows the proletarian state to hold under incredibly difficult circumstances.

But socialism is communism in construction, an unfinished communism. As the success of construction progress, money should go out of use, and, perhaps, the state at one point will have to strangle the dying currency. This is particularly important for the actual destruction of the remnants of the bourgeois classes, that use their hoarded money to continue consuming values, created by the laboring classes in the very society that proclaims: "One who doesn’t labor shall not eat".

Gradually, money has been losing its importance since the very beginning of the socialist revolution. All the nationalized enterprises, like an enterprise of a big owner (in this case, the proletarian state), have common funds, and they do not have to buy from or sell to one another for money. Gradually, cashless payments are introduced. due to this, money is pushed out from a huge domain of the people’s economy. In relation to the peasantry, money more and more lose their importance as well, and the exchange of goods comes to the forefront. Even in private commerce with the peasants money recede further into the background, and the buyer can get bread only for some natural products, like clothing, fabrics, dishes, furniture, etc. Gradual abolition of money is also assisted by the vast issue of paper money by the state, coupled with a vast contraction of the commodity circulation, caused by the disorder in the industry. Increasingly growing depreciation of money is in fact their spontaneous abolition.

But the most severe blow will be dealt to the existence of money by the introduction of the account books and payments in goods to the workers. In the worker’s book it will be written down how much has he worked, i. e. how much the state owes him, and by the same book he will acquire goods in the consumer store. In this system, non-workers will not be able to get anything for money. But this can only exist when the state will be able to concentrate in its hands such an amount of consumer goods, as will be enough to supply all the working members of the socialist society. Without the restoration of the dilapidated industry and without its expansion this is not feasible.

In general, the process of abolition of money circulation appears at present as follows:
First, money is driven out of the field of exchange of products within the nationalized enterprises (factories, railroads, the soviet farms, etc.). Then money disappears from the field of payments between the state and the employees of the socialist state (i. e. between the Soviet government, office and factory workers). Then money disappears replaced by barter in trade between the state and the small-scale production (peasants, craftsmen). Then money disappears from the commodity exchange within the small farm sector; perhaps, it will disappear completely only once the very small farms disappear.

So you can see (in the paragraph one up from the bottom), they didn't abandon the idea of remuneration of workers based on labor time, they just had to take into account the actual situation in Russia of 1920, most importantly the fact that most of the economy consisted of the small-scale agricultural production. And the "ABC of Communism" was written primarily as a likbez kind of instruction for the lower ranking party functionaries at that particular time, and not so much as something meant to be universally applicable. Which they learned all too well soon after it was published, as it became clear they had mistaken the looming hyperinflation-induced breakdown of the bread market that led to the 1921-22 famine for the advent of the abolition of money.

Still, the general idea that the money circulation should be phased out step by step, and while it still remains, it should be used quite cynically to manipulate the economy to the favor of the socialist state, survived into the post-war Stalin period (see: Zverev's monetary reform of 1947 & "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR").

Vladimir Innit Lenin

5th January 2013, 21:36

It has often been contended that in the future society everyone will have the right to the full product of his labour. 'What you have made by your labour, that you will receive.' This is false. It would never be possible to realize it fully. Why not? For this reason, that if everyone were to receive the full product of his labour, there would never be any possibility of developing, expanding, and improving production.

Part of the work done must always be devoted to the development and improvement of production. If we had to consume and to use up everything we have produced, then we could never produce machines, for these cannot be eaten or worn. But it is obvious that the bettering of life will go hand in hand with the extension and improvement of machinery.

The above Bukharin quote shows exactly why Russia was not ready for Socialism. When I say not ready, I don't mean this from some Mensheviki defeatist, liberal point of view. I mean that it was not possible at the time. In general, we can see today that, unlike what Bukharin says above, surplus is not necessary to expand production. In other words, production can be expanded (i.e the economy can grow) and workers can also receive the full product of their labour. The key to this is mechanisation, automisation and technical, technological and scientific innovation. However, Russia was clearly not in such a place in 1920. It was clearly so under-developed, within the realm of the capitalist mode of production, that even this was not possible. In other words, at the time, as Bukharin admits, the only way to grow the Russian economy was for a surplus to exist; a surplus created by denying the worker the full fruits of his/her labour. Capitalism. Be the exploiter the capitalist behind the state or the private bourgeois, capitalism. And, as Lenin ordained, the Bolsheviked managed Capitalism in Russia through the 1920s and beyond.