question about state-capitalism

[Ostrinski]

We acknowledge that the proletarian dictatorship still retains vestiges of the capitalist mode of production, obviously because socialism cannot exist in one country for reasons that have been discussed plentifully.

My question, though, is this: what is the concrete difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and an economy run by a state-capitalist class. It seems like a dumb question but I've been thinking about this a lot lately. At what specific point did the state-capitalist class come into being in the Soviet Union? Was it during the first five year plan? Earlier, in the early 20's?

It seems like the historical basis of the state-capitalist class is strictly political. Meaning, the only process of it coming into being was that of the deprivation of the working class of political power, the crushing of worker's democracy, which happened in the early 20's.

Plainly it is impossible to ascribe a specific date or cutting off point to the exact degeneration of the revolution, because that takes into account many different factors that developed unevenly and under different conditions. I think, though, that it should be easier to remark on the exact occasion of the state-capitalist class's first breaths of life taking into account the institutional, social, and political conditions that gave rise to it.

Hopefully this isn't too much of a noob question, and hopefully it can facilitate some good discussion. Thanks in advance for answers.

[JPSartre12]

I've had several discussion with friends who argue that state capitalism is the dictatorship of the proletariat (although, personally I dissent somewhat from this) - that it will be the centralization of power under the control of the vanguard party that has seized control of the State apparatus, and that it will be the transitory phase between "free market" capitalism under the control of bourgeois parties and socialism under the control of the workers. My Chomsky-loving roommate argues that a state capitalist phase is necessary because it's a means through which the vanguard-controlled State can use immense legal authority to expropriate property from the hands of private capitalists so that it can eventually be socialized.

My concern with this is the possibility of staying in state capitalism, rather than simply passing through it. I've asked him to get me some excerpts, quotes, etc to back up what he is saying, and if I get them I'll post them here.

[Rational Radical]

Lenin wrote:
The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.
Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable.
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/14b.htm due to material conditions and all

[Art Vandelay]

We acknowledge that the proletarian dictatorship still retains vestiges of the capitalist mode of production, obviously because socialism cannot exist in one country for reasons that have been discussed plentifully.

My question, though, is this: what is the concrete difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and an economy run by a state-capitalist class. It seems like a dumb question but I've been thinking about this a lot lately. At what specific point did the state-capitalist class come into being in the Soviet Union? Was it during the first five year plan? Earlier, in the early 20's?

It seems like the historical basis of the state-capitalist class is strictly political. Meaning, the only process of it coming into being was that of the deprivation of the working class of political power, the crushing of worker's democracy, which happened in the early 20's.

Plainly it is impossible to ascribe a specific date or cutting off point to the exact degeneration of the revolution, because that takes into account many different factors that developed unevenly and under different conditions. I think, though, that it should be easier to remark on the exact occasion of the state-capitalist class's first breaths of life taking into account the institutional, social, and political conditions that gave rise to it.

Hopefully this isn't too much of a noob question, and hopefully it can facilitate some good discussion. Thanks in advance for answers.

This isn't a noob question at all and actually think it could result in some very interesting discussion. The issue you raise up here, is precisely why I am a supporter of the DWS theory, however I don't believe the USSR remained a DWS until its demise, let alone 1940 when Trotsky was murdered. The October revolution established a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat, which due to unfavorable material conditions, 'retained vestiges of the capitalist mode of production.' At what point does this dotp become something quantitatively different (be it state-capitalism, or a non-mode of production for those who are fans of Hillel Ticktin's theory)? Like you said I think that this is impossible to pinpoint, due to how many different factors were in play.

When it comes down to it, the Bolshevik revolution was the most radical break with traditional property relations that the world has ever seen and ultimately the experiment failed and what was created is somewhat of a mystery. I almost compare is to a block of stone being chipped away at to create a statue. Each of the theories the radical left has at its disposal plays a part in chipping further away at the mystery of what shape lies at the core. However , ultimately I don't know if we'll ever be able to fully comprehend the manifestation that the degeneration of the dotp took.

For those who are subscribers to the traditional state-capitalist paradigm of the USSR (and are not those who believe the Bolsheviks carried out a bourgeois revolution) this question has some serious ramifications for their theory. I'm interested in seeing others responses.

[Ostrinski]

Lenin wrote:
The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.
Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable.
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/14b.htm due to material conditions and allYes, this has been discussed ad nauseum. The state-capitalism Lenin was referring to was an arrangement of a limited degree of private ownership over smaller parts of industry and land.

What this thread is addressing is state-capitalism as theorised by Marxists later in the twentieth century, whereby it is posited that the bureaucracy becomes the manager of capital and thereby assumes the traditional economic function of the capitalist class and shares an identical relationship with the proletariat as the capitalist class in the market economy.

[Blake's Baby]

But the two things are related and ultimately related to what 9mm glosses over as 'unfavourable material conditions' (sorry 9mm, but it seems to me you do).

In the Critique, Marx says “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”.

So, for Marx, the DotP is a 'political transition period' which corresponds to a transition in the economy.

But as socialism in one country is not possible, the DotP can only be a period of political transition corresponding to an economic transition if the world revolution succeeds. If there is no possibility of the transition to socialism - because of 9mm's 'unfavourable material conditions' (ie the defeat of the world revolution) - then what becomes of the DotP? It's a political form that doesn't correspond to any kind of material reality, a 'political transition period' that doesn't correspond with an economic transition period. All that the dictatorship can do, isolated in one revolutionary territory, is seek to organise capitalism (not transform it) in order to defend any 'gains' of the revolution, though of course, as we have seen in the 20th century, it is at the same time dying on its feet as it is deprived of any material basis other than the continued existence of capitalism. A revolutionary political form cannot survive in a non-revolutionary period, because the basis of the revolutionary political form is the suppression of capitalism; and by the early 1920s the revolution was in retreat and the capitalist powers once more on the attack. The 'unfavourable material conditions' did not allow the revolution to extend and thus what came out of the defeat of the revolution was a - I hesitate to use the word - 'deformed' version of the DotP, which had not begun the transition to socialist society because it had been prevented from doing so.

[Art Vandelay]

But the two things are related and ultimately related to what 9mm glosses over as 'unfavourable material conditions' (sorry 9mm, but it seems to me you do).

No worries comrade.


In the Critique, Marx says “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”.

So, for Marx, the DotP is a 'political transition period' which corresponds to a transition in the economy.

But as socialism in one country is not possible, the DotP can only be a period of political transition corresponding to an economic transition if the world revolution succeeds. If there is no possibility of the transition to socialism - because of 9mm's 'unfavourable material conditions' (ie the defeat of the world revolution) - then what becomes of the DotP? It's a political form that doesn't correspond to any kind of material reality, a 'political transition period' that doesn't correspond with an economic transition period. All that the dictatorship can do, isolated in one revolutionary territory, is seek to organise capitalism (not transform it) in order to defend any 'gains' of the revolution, though of course, as we have seen in the 20th century, it is at the same time dying on its feet as it is deprived of any material basis other than the continued existence of capitalism. A revolutionary political form cannot survive in a non-revolutionary period, because the basis of the revolutionary political form is the suppression of capitalism; and by the early 1920s the revolution was in retreat and the capitalist powers once more on the attack. The 'unfavourable material conditions' did not allow the revolution to extend and thus what came out of the defeat of the revolution was a - I hesitate to use the word - 'deformed' version of the DotP, which had not begun the transition to socialist society because it had been prevented from doing so.

Great post. I'm going to do some thinking about this and maybe come back later and make a comment.

[Astarte]

In my opinion, the USSR was technically a proletarian dictatorship right up to its very end as collectivized property continued to be the base property formation - I do not see the elite as "owning" the means of production or the surplus extracted because they could not use either with the kind of autonomy from the rest of society either the capitalist class or any other past ruling classes could. I believe the USSR began to slide into a non-production mode during the time of Brezhnev and "stagnation" as the contradictions in production reached such a height that the economy could no longer expand - socialism demands for production levels, living standards and the quality of life to continue to expand on a basis of collective proletarian property - throughout the lifespan of the USSR the political bureaucracy had no choice but to reinvest the surplus into delivering on this promise of socialism - when it no longer could, owing to the contradiction of a political elite riding roughshod over a collectivized economic base, the whole thing unraveled, and rather quickly.

[Die Neue Zeit]

There are several historical points for the state-capitalist argument, whether one agrees or disagrees with it, to be made. What are Trotskyist and left-coms of the Kosygin reforms, for example (legal property relations and tying these explicitly to the enterprise manager)?

[Luís Henrique]

But as socialism in one country is not possible, the DotP can only be a period of political transition corresponding to an economic transition if the world revolution succeeds.

That's a good insight, but it does not go all the way.

The DotP can only operate a successful economic transition if the world revolution succeeds - or, at least, if revolution succeeds in as much of the capitalist world to make the remains of capitalism the isolated, inviable, "small half" of the world.

But this doesn't mean that the DotP won't attempt to perform such transition - indeed, it cannot but try. This will result in superstructural conditions that prevent a "normal" development of capitalism.


If there is no possibility of the transition to socialism - because of 9mm's 'unfavourable material conditions' (ie the defeat of the world revolution) - then what becomes of the DotP? It's a political form that doesn't correspond to any kind of material reality, a 'political transition period' that doesn't correspond with an economic transition period.

Exactly. It becomes a completely contradictory phenomenon; yet, as someone who mounts a tiger cannot simply dismount, it must insist in an impossible task - which will necessarily imply getting more and more delusional on what is actually happen.


All that the dictatorship can do, isolated in one revolutionary territory, is seek to organise capitalism (not transform it) in order to defend any 'gains' of the revolution, though of course, as we have seen in the 20th century, it is at the same time dying on its feet as it is deprived of any material basis other than the continued existence of capitalism.

Ah, it will certainly seek to transform it, even though it cannot succeed in doing it; the result however won't be a semi-socialist economy, but rather a mangled capitalist one.


A revolutionary political form cannot survive in a non-revolutionary period, because the basis of the revolutionary political form is the suppression of capitalism; and by the early 1920s the revolution was in retreat and the capitalist powers once more on the attack. The 'unfavourable material conditions' did not allow the revolution to extend and thus what came out of the defeat of the revolution was a - I hesitate to use the word - 'deformed' version of the DotP, which had not begun the transition to socialist society because it had been prevented from doing so.

Yes, I think you hit the nail here: a deformed, and increasingly so, dictatorship of the proletariat, until it becomes something that can no longer reasonably be considered a dictatorship of the proletariat, but is also not a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie - a kind of Bonapartism perhaps. But such regime owes whatever legitimacy it has from the revolution, so it cannot undo the initial conquests that would allow for a normal, healthy, development of capitalism, so it entrenches itself into its delusions, which become disasters, such as Soviet "collectivisation" (which, evidently, is not a measure to restore capitalism, and indeed very much hampers its development). In the especific Russian conditions, in which economic development was much needed, since the country lagged behind the capitalist centre by much, moreover, the DotP has to quickly degenerate because a central condition for the survival of the revolution is economic development at all costs at the fastest possible pace - which in turn demands the return of the proletariat to full time production, completely undermining any possibility of workers' power, be it at State level, be it at workplace level.

So, maybe a degenerate DotP, presiding not over a degenerate form of socialism, but over a mangled form of capitalism, mangled exactly by the "socialist" delusions of the workers' vanguard, then the party, then finally the leading clique within the party, in a systematic and destructive shrinking of the dictatorship's base and representativity.

Luís Henrique

[tuwix]

I do not see the elite as "owning" the means of production or the surplus extracted because they could not use either with the kind of autonomy from the rest of society either the capitalist class or any other past ruling classes could.



And I do. There was a ruling party that owned in fact the means of productions. The party nominated the directors of enterprises in the Soviet Union. The party wasn't a DotP. In fact, the proletarians were a minority there. The majority was a bureaucracy that have taken a place of a bourgeoisie in the classic capitalism. And in the party there was no internal democracy. The list of its management was decided from levels above. And any critique or disobedience to decisions made by authorities were severely punished.

[Jimmie Higgins]

At what specific point did the state-capitalist class come into being in the Soviet Union? Was it during the first five year plan? Earlier, in the early 20's?The adoption of Socialism in One Country is sort of the observable maker of this change; by that point the world revolutionary period had passed and now the question became, so what do we do? Socialism in One Country appealed to an alternative sort of support in Russia, uniting some of the pesantry and some of the technical experts and beurocrats... these interests existed to some degree even in the early revolutionary months and had developed through the ups and downs of crisis.

With revolutionary possibilities receeding and with hardships on the population and decline in worker power and organization came Bolshevik substitutionism and then with that the potential for careerists who could "volunteer for the revolution" and take on some kind of official position in a workplace or some office as a path to a career! They identified the party/government as their source of mobility and so substitutionism that was out of necissity at first became a means to a totally different end over time. All this began to happen pretty early on in Russia after the Revolution and there may have been some subjective things that the Revolutionaries could have done that might have altered some of the ways that things played out, but really it would have taken another revolutionary upsurge somewhere to revive the sense that a different way was tangable and possible.

[subcp]

My question, though, is this: what is the concrete difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and an economy run by a state-capitalist class. It seems like a dumb question but I've been thinking about this a lot lately. At what specific point did the state-capitalist class come into being in the Soviet Union? Was it during the first five year plan? Earlier, in the early 20's?

Only a weak version of state capitalism theory considers the bureaucracy a new class. I'd guess that the DotP will take a form that is not capitalist (which I'd argue in this era we are living in means state capitalism) or communism, but simply 'post-capitalist'. There were numerous 'kinds' of economic relationships going on when revolution broke out all over the world 1917-1936; some resembled capitalism, some communism, most were somewhere in-between. Some workplaces were taken over and operated like 'Wobbly Shops', commune's established, something like 12 different currencies were circulating the former Russian Empire from October-the end of the civil war (possibly later)- issued by different white generals, the Bolsheviks, etc. Spontaneous forms of economic barter, trade or co-op's with or without currency have developed: in Russia (they were supported by the Bolsheviks until the '20s at least- under the Commissariat of Trade I think) they were spontaneous formations to allow goods and food to be exchanged between city and country without state or Party mediation; same with farmer's co-ops and barter centers established in the US during the Great Depression. All of which is not capitalist and not communist in the context of a generalized revolutionary upheaval internationally, just post-capitalist.

[CyM]

The bureaucracy was not a new class, but a degenerate caste or layer within society. The stalinist economy was not new either, but simply the degeneration of the transitional economy. It was not capitalist, because the anarchy of capitalism was abolished. Throughout its existence, the nationalized planned economy never had cyclical boom and bust based on overproduction as you have with the unplanned nature of capitalism. Instead, you had crises based on bad planning and the parasitic skimming of the bloated bureaucracy.

What the soviet union needed was a revolution, but a political, not a social one. The workers would not have needed to change the nationalized property relations, they would have only needed to change the political regime overseeing the nationalized property.

Proletarian Bonapartism is what existed in russia
until the bureaucrats made themselves capitalists during the collapse.

Capitalism can take on peculiar and imperfect political expressions for its property relations, republic, democracy, monarchy, bonapartism and fascist dictatorship. It is unreasonable to think the transition would not have its own diversity in peculiar conditions. The isolation of the revolution, the paralysis of the workers and the inability of the capitalists to overthrow them gave rise to bonapartism, but based on the state property form. They proceeded to carry out a political counterrevolution, destroying the last vestiges of workers' democracy without reinstating capitalism until 1989. Just as the isolation of france and the paralysis between revolution and counterrevolution gave rise to Napoleon, who destroyed parliamentarism without destroying the capitalist private property form which was the basis of his dictatorship.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Obviously I don't agree with the idea that SiOC is impossible, however since it has been discussed Ad Nauseum I probably should derail the discussion by bringing it up. So could a comrade link me to these threads?

[subcp]

The stalinist economy was not new either, but simply the degeneration of the transitional economy. It was not capitalist, because the anarchy of capitalism was abolished. Throughout its existence, the nationalized planned economy never had cyclical boom and bust based on overproduction as you have with the unplanned nature of capitalism. Instead, you had crises based on bad planning and the parasitic skimming of the bloated bureaucracy.

Despite the attempt to institute a 'command economy', even one that is largely nationalized, competition indicative of capitalism is still apparent- between state firms and industries. The interplay between rural and urban workforces played into this dynamic, where the Soviet state played a role not much different than Western capitalist states: the attempt to regulate and referee market forces. The Scissor's Crisis is a good example, comparable to measures taken by the US during the Great Depression (elements of which exist today). The bureaucrats of the USSR were just a managerial strata, no different than their Western counter-parts. The interplay between the Soviet state and the world market, competing Soviet firms, don't suggest a transitional economy or society, just capitalism without private legal ownership of individual businesses- otherwise all of the aspects of capitalism are intact.

That's important to this discussion; I think the biggest danger in the future transitional period, when the world is going through a wave of revolutionary crisis, are going to be those who want a 'self-managed capitalism without capitalists', to maintain the working-class identity (and thus its class position), to 'protect the gains of the revolution' by codifying whatever crisis activities or measures are undertaken during the revolutionary upheaval (such as consumer co-ops, bartering centers, Wobbly Shop type organization of workplaces, etc.). Otherwise, we know what capitalism looks like without a bunch of individual bourgeoisie, but instead a state that performs that function.

[CyM]

Only when the state owns everything and plans what is to be produced not on the basis of private profit, there is a qualitative difference between that and the capitalist state intervening in the market.

The scissors crisis is simply the symptom of the specific transitional problems of soviet Russia: a not very industrialized urban economy vs. a fairly backward agriculture. The city gave little to the peasant, for the industrial products were too little developed to be cheap enough for him, yet the grain was bought cheaply. The solution was industrialization and modernization of agriculture.

This was primarily a problem because of the lack of a revolution in the industrialized west. Without that perspective for international revolution, the degeneration cannot be understood.

This contradiction between town and country, between different strata and even classes in soviet society (which you falsely identify as competition), is an inevitable reality in the transitional period. In Russia it was particularly pronounced because of the frightful backwardness of the country and its international isolation. It eventually gave rise to different tendencies and factions within the ruling party: the proletarian wing in the left opposition, even a petty-bourgeois capitalist restoration faction. And the bureaucratic centrist wing behind Stalin.

These differing interests coalesced behind the political consolidation of the bureaucracy, smashing the open restoration of private property, as well as the workers' democracy.

Planning of the economy, though it was done in a contradictory manner, was still a qualitatively different system than capitalism, and we shouldn't redefine capitalism so much as to make a square peg fit a round hole. It simply makes the word mean nothing. Private property was abolished, hiring wage labour was abolished, profit was abolished, the market mechanism was replaced by bureaucratic planning, and the boom bust cycle was abolished. I don't see how capitalism could still be a word with any meaning at all if that was still capitalism.

[Blake's Baby]

The bureaucracy was not a new class, but a degenerate caste or layer within society. The stalinist economy was not new either, but simply the degeneration of the transitional economy. It was not capitalist, because the anarchy of capitalism was abolished. Throughout its existence, the nationalized planned economy never had cyclical boom and bust based on overproduction as you have with the unplanned nature of capitalism. Instead, you had crises based on bad planning and the parasitic skimming of the bloated bureaucracy.

What the soviet union needed was a revolution, but a political, not a social one. The workers would not have needed to change the nationalized property relations, they would have only needed to change the political regime overseeing the nationalized property.

Proletarian Bonapartism is what existed in russia
until the bureaucrats made themselves capitalists during the collapse...

This is all about political forms and makes no reference whatsoever to the economy. What economic form existed under this 'proletarian bonapartism'? Was it a) socialist (in which case socialism in one country is possible; b) capitalist (in which case, what are you arguing about?); c) some other form of economy unknown to Marxism?

[CyM]

If you read more carefully, I made clear the economic form. If the working class in the USSR had risen up, as they did in Hungary in 1956 for example, they would have only needed to overthrow the political regime without changing the property forms at all. The economy was nationalized and planned, this would not need to change in order to create a healthy workers' state. Only the introduction of democracy into the planning by a political, not a social revolution would have been necessary.

That is an important concrete factor that the "state capitalist" ideologues ignore.

As for naming what it was, it was a transitional economy, which inevitably has contradictory elements and leftovers from capitalism, which because of isolation and backwardness gave rise to a bonapartist bureaucracy which fed off the nationalized economy like a parasite until it killed its host. Transitional between capitalism and socialism.

[Blake's Baby]

If you read more carefully, I made clear the economic form...

If you made clear what the economic form is, I wouldn't need to ask you to make clear what the economic form is.


...
As for naming what it was, it was a transitional economy, which inevitably has contradictory elements and leftovers from capitalism, which because of isolation and backwardness gave rise to a bonapartist bureaucracy which fed off the nationalized economy like a parasite until it killed its host. Transitional between capitalism and socialism.

Oh, right. The revoltionary transformation of capitalist society to communist society, as Marx outlines in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, you mean?

Do you think socialism in one country is possible? If it is, then I'd agree. But it isn't, so I don't. You can't have a 'transformation' of capitalism to capitalism, that isn't a transformation. On the other hand you can't have a transformation of capitalism to socialism if the material conditions for socialism (ie, successful world revolution) don't exist. You cannot even begin the transformation to socialism when the revolution is isolated in one country. The material conditions don't allow it.

So, no, it wasn't 'transitional between capitalism and socialism', it started with capitalism and ended with capitalism and didn't become socialism at any time between, so it remained capitalism and didn't 'transform' anything.

[Red Enemy]

CyM, this is a problem with the Ortho-Trotsykists who think the DWS is a legitimate theory. The problem lies in that they do not recognize whether or not the proletariat is the ruling class in society. Obviously, they were not in the USSR. You claims it was a caste, but I don't remember Marx writing about the various ruling castes of each epoch. So we focus on what the economy was, what mode of production was present, etc.

Either it was socialist, capitalist, or you follow the nonsense of Hillel Ticktin, and claim it was neither. Regarsless, you have to ask yourself:

Was the working class alienated from the means of production?

Who had control of the means of production?

What was the mode of production?

Who was the ruling class?

To be very blunt, Lenin claimed that the form the economy would take under a proletarian dictatorship in Russia would be "State Capitalist".

[CyM]

That's an out-of context quoting of Lenin, but I'll ignore it and go to the real question.

Napoleon Bonaparte took all political power into his own hands, so did Louis Bonaparte, and both were relatively independent of the economic "ruling class". In fact, that ruling class was brutalized by the dictatorship. Did it cease to be the ruling class simply because a bureaucratic-military caste/clique took power?

I would recommend reading The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis bonaparte (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/)if you'd like to understand Marx's concept on how a ruling class can be disempowered politically by a caste/clique without losing economic power.


Was the working class alienated from the means of production?You mean, was the USSR economy not communist? Of course it wasn't communist.


Who had control of the means of production?The state that the workers' revolution brought into being, which then gained a certain independence from the workers due to the failure of the world revolution, in classic bonapartist fashion.


What was the mode of production?A transitional economy between capitalism and socialism, which could not transition because of the failure of the world revolution, hence giving rise to the contradictions that led to a bonapartist bureaucracy, and eventually going fully into reverse.


Who was the ruling class?The working class. Just as Hitler putting many capitalists in death camps did not change the fact that they were still the economic ruling class, just politically usurped by a ferocious bonapartist clique with their own interests.


If you made clear what the economic form is, I wouldn't need to ask you to make clear what the economic form is.
Not being clear is different from saying something you disagree with, please be honest in your arguments.


Oh, right. The revoltionary transformation of capitalist society to communist society, as Marx outlines in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, you mean?That is the purpose of the working class taking power, is it not? To begin the socialist revolution across the world?


Do you think socialism in one country is possible? If it is, then I'd agree. But it isn't, so I don't. You can't have a 'transformation' of capitalism to capitalism, that isn't a transformation. On the other hand you can't have a transformation of capitalism to socialism if the material conditions for socialism (ie, successful world revolution) don't exist. You cannot even begin the transformation to socialism when the revolution is isolated in one country. The material conditions don't allow it.You see, life is not so straightforward. The working class took power in the USSR and began the work of transforming society, it was meant to be finished in Germany and other advanced capitalist countries, but it wasn't. What that means, is this was an interrupted and isolated transitional economy in peculiar and unfavourable conditions.

But that doesn't immediately return it to capitalism, or create a new magical fairyland capitalism that is fully nationalized, has planning, has no profit, has 100% employment and no boom and bust overproduction cycle.

Again, square peg, round hole.

The interruption of the transition created an unstable equilibrium between proletariat and peasantry, between workers' state and imperialism, where a bonapartist clique could raise itself far above society by balancing one class against the other. But bonapartism does not change the property forms of production, which remained nationalized and planned. This is the key to understanding the soviet union.


So, no, it wasn't 'transitional between capitalism and socialism', it started with capitalism and ended with capitalism and didn't become socialism at any time between, so it remained capitalism and didn't 'transform' anything.The baby starts "not-alive" and ends "not-alive", so it must have been dead for the whole 74 years of its existence.

This is a childish logical method comrade.

No one at all is claiming that it was socialism, or that it became socialism. The revolution began the transition to socialism, which would not have been possible within the limits of the soviet union. The failure of the world revolution piled on contradiction after contradiction, deformity after deformity on the isolated revolution, until it produced a political counterrevolution within the revolution. A bureaucratic clique took power, with Stalin as the embodiment of its interests, and gained enormously from illicit power and privileges.

Trotsky makes the point that if you take a store where all the shelves are stocked and the goods are plenty, the customers come and go peacefully and in an orderly fashion. Start a bit of a shortage, and a lineup will start. Make the shortage big enough, the shelves bare enough, and the line long enough, and you will have people hitting each other to get ahead in line. A long enough line will require a security guard or a policeman to keep order.

That policeman gains a power of arbitration over disputes, and a power to sneak people in line, to favour his friends and family, to be bribed, etc... He still does not own the store, or the goods on the shelves. He skims off the top, illegally.

At no point did this clique own the means of production, all its privileges came from its capacity as state manager of the collective property.

This was not enough for them, so when the time came, they liquidated the state assets and transformed themselves into capitalists.

This led to the greatest peacetime economic collapse in human history, which makes no sense if no change in system occurred in 1991.

[CyM]

" The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/u.htm#lumpenproletariat) to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never tired of crying out to the revolution what St. Arsenius cried out to the Christians: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!” [“Flee, be silent, keep still!”] Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!" "
-The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852, chapter VII

If we took the same purely political look at the class situation in France as you are taking towards the USSR, we'd have to come to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie was no longer the ruling class.

[subcp]

Engels and Trotsky wrote clearly that the political expressions of society are dictated by economic shifts and needs- even those that are 'subterranean'. Containing the class struggle is a subjective aspect of capitalism- but the economic laws that govern human intervention are objective, and are only interrupted in revolutionary crisis.

It's not the case that the bourgeoisie always acts as a unified class- it is always engaged in competition: between new and old forms of production/distribution/consumption, the commercial vs industrial bourgeoisie, etc. Fascism was not an attack on the bourgeoisie- many factions of the bourgeoisie did quite well (explaining their support for the embryonic fascist groups).

[Blake's Baby]

...

Not being clear is different from saying something you disagree with, please be honest in your arguments...

People who accuse me of dishonesty usually get one chance to retract what they've said. So, either demonstrate that I am being dishonest (by showing how you clearly explained the point I asked you to explain, and then showing that I deliberately ignored it), or retract the accusation of dishonesty on my part. This is your one clear warning.

[CyM]

Engels and Trotsky wrote clearly that the political expressions of society are dictated by economic shifts and needs- even those that are 'subterranean'. Containing the class struggle is a subjective aspect of capitalism- but the economic laws that govern human intervention are objective, and are only interrupted in revolutionary crisis.

It's not the case that the bourgeoisie always acts as a unified class- it is always engaged in competition: between new and old forms of production/distribution/consumption, the commercial vs industrial bourgeoisie, etc. Fascism was not an attack on the bourgeoisie- many factions of the bourgeoisie did quite well (explaining their support for the embryonic fascist groups).
I agree with you, but while the capitalist class as a whole was economically protected by Fascism, each individual capitalist was politically completely subservient to the clique around Hitler, and subject to complete annihilation at a whim. The capitalist class was politically not in power, solely the clique around Hitler was, and yet we know the ruling class was still the capitalist class.

Fascism and Stalinism, as political systems, are identical, if you remove the economic basis behind them. Hence, China after the transition to Capitalism, or Yugoslavia after the collapse.

If a Fascist clique could usurp political power from the bourgeois and still remain the usurpers of a capitalist economic system, so too could a Stalinist clique without abolishing the workers' form of economic property: the nationalized planned economy.

[Blake's Baby]

...

That is the purpose of the working class taking power, is it not? To begin the socialist revolution across the world?...

So what? The purpose of getting drunk is to make yourself more attractive. Does that mean every time I have a beer, everyone has to sleep with me?

What one intends is not always the same as what is possible.


...
You see, life is not so straightforward. The working class took power in the USSR and began the work of transforming society, it was meant to be finished in Germany and other advanced capitalist countries, but it wasn't. What that means, is this was an interrupted and isolated transitional economy in peculiar and unfavourable conditions...

So you agree; the material conditions for the transition to socialism didn't exist. You could have stopped here.


...But that doesn't immediately return it to capitalism, or create a new magical fairyland capitalism that is fully nationalized, has planning, has no profit, has 100% employment and no boom and bust overproduction cycle.

Again, square peg, round hole...

So, because capitalism can't become socialism, it isn't capitalism? Is that what you're claiming?


...The interruption of the transition created an unstable equilibrium between proletariat and peasantry, between workers' state and imperialism, where a bonapartist clique could raise itself far above society by balancing one class against the other. But bonapartism does not change the property forms of production, which remained nationalized and planned. This is the key to understanding the soviet union...

These aren't economic forms. The working class, and then the Bolshevik Party, ended up administering capitalism. I agree there was a tension - between what was intended and what was possible.


...The baby starts "not-alive" and ends "not-alive", so it must have been dead for the whole 74 years of its existence.

This is a childish logical method comrade...

Cute. If the baby (read economy) starts "not alive" (read capitalist) and ends "not alive" (read capitalist) and, putting in the part that you mysteriously missed out (not that I'm accusing you of 'dishonesty' here comrade) if the baby (read economy) fails to become alive (read socialist) then yes it must have been dead (read capitalist) for 74 years. There are no other states of being. If it isn't and never ha been alive (and you agree the USSR was never socialist) yes, it was capitalist.


...No one at all is claiming that it was socialism, or that it became socialism. The revolution began the transition to socialism, which would not have been possible within the limits of the soviet union...

But it didn't 'begin the transition'. It couldn't. The transition doesn't begin until after the world revolution is successful. The political revolution of the working class, to take state power, only becomes the transition to communist society when it takes place on a world-wide scale. To return to your baby analogy, giving birth to a leg (read an isolated revolutionary territory) is not the same as giving birth to a baby, and in such circumstances, the argument about whether the leg is alive or dead is moot.


... The failure of the world revolution piled on contradiction after contradiction, deformity after deformity on the isolated revolution, until it produced a political counterrevolution within the revolution. A bureaucratic clique took power, with Stalin as the embodiment of its interests, and gained enormously from illicit power and privileges.

Trotsky makes the point that if you take a store where all the shelves are stocked and the goods are plenty, the customers come and go peacefully and in an orderly fashion. Start a bit of a shortage, and a lineup will start. Make the shortage big enough, the shelves bare enough, and the line long enough, and you will have people hitting each other to get ahead in line. A long enough line will require a security guard or a policeman to keep order.

That policeman gains a power of arbitration over disputes, and a power to sneak people in line, to favour his friends and family, to be bribed, etc... He still does not own the store, or the goods on the shelves. He skims off the top, illegally.

At no point did this clique own the means of production, all its privileges came from its capacity as state manager of the collective property.

This was not enough for them, so when the time came, they liquidated the state assets and transformed themselves into capitalists.

This led to the greatest peacetime economic collapse in human history, which makes no sense if no change in system occurred in 1991.

The economic collapse happened before 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed as a result of its inability to restructure its inefficient capitalism in the wake of the economic downturn of the late 1960s-early 1970s. It was a political collapse in 1991 due to the inability of the Soviet Union to adapt.

[CyM]

People who accuse me of dishonesty usually get one chance to retract what they've said. So, either demonstrate that I am being dishonest (by showing how you clearly explained the point I asked you to explain, and then showing that I deliberately ignored it), or retract the accusation of dishonesty on my part. This is your one clear warning.
I did not intend to offend you, but don't threaten me, you are not a mod, and my criticism was respectful and justified.


If you made clear what the economic form is, I wouldn't need to ask you to make clear what the economic form is.

Oh, right. The revoltionary transformation of capitalist society to communist society, as Marx outlines in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, you mean?

Do you think socialism in one country is possible? If it is, then I'd agree. But it isn't, so I don't. You can't have a 'transformation' of capitalism to capitalism, that isn't a transformation. On the other hand you can't have a transformation of capitalism to socialism if the material conditions for socialism (ie, successful world revolution) don't exist. You cannot even begin the transformation to socialism when the revolution is isolated in one country. The material conditions don't allow it.

So, no, it wasn't 'transitional between capitalism and socialism', it started with capitalism and ended with capitalism and didn't become socialism at any time between, so it remained capitalism and didn't 'transform' anything.
Here, you don't think it is possible that this was a transitional economy between capitalist and socialist economics, but you argue against my position. Therefore, you already know clearly what I think this is, and simply disagree.

The transition can and does begin in one country, though failure is inevitable without worldwide revolution. Socialism in one country is impossible, but the proletariat taking power in one country and beginning to tear down capitalism to set an example for other revolutions to join is not impossible.

The specific difficulties of the Soviet Union are precisely because this transition is supposed to cross borders and become an international phenomenon, but did not. This led to stagnation, the political (not social) counterrevolution and the rise of a ferocious bureaucracy on the back of the socialized planned economy, and eventually the kicking of the whole process into reverse culminating in this bureaucracy killing the planned economy and transforming itself into a capitalist class in 1989-1991.

This may not be something you agree with, but it is something I have clearly stated several times in the thread. Simply because you don't agree that such a thing can exist does not mean you get to set out multiple choices that don't include it and then ask me to "pick one" to be "clear" about what I think. (Like you did: 1. socialism 2. capitalism 3. something new).

I.e. stop telling me I'm not being clear, tell me you don't agree and how and why.

Questions for all of those who believe it was state capitalism, including you:

1. Were Fascism and Bonapartism capitalist?
2. Can a proletarian Bonapartism not exist, in the short term when certain negative circumstances arise?
3. If the Soviet Union had seen a successful workers' revolution in Hungary in 1956, which would have sparked world revolution beginning in the USSR, would they have had to liquidate the nationalized planned economy to begin the transition to socialism? Or only to liquidate the bureaucracy and change the political system which managed the planned economy?

[Lucretia]

The whole point of calling the dictatorship of the proletariat (presiding over a transitional economy) a REVOLUTIONARY dictatorship of the proletariat -- which is what M&E called it every single time they wrote about it, was that the economy was in motion, was actually transitioning, going forward to socialism or backward to capitalism. It is a contradiction to talk about a workers' state presiding over a "transitional economy" that has been put on pause, moving neither forward nor backward.

Actually it does make a little sense, as the result of the temporary balance of class forces permitting a bonapartist type regime to fill the power vacuum. But they keyword there is temporary, as in Trotsky's image of a sphere balanced on the point of a pyramid, where even a slight gust of wind could send it tumbling down in any direction. The whole idea that prolonged political power, power extending as long as 60+ years in the Soviet Union, and potentially even longer now in other supposed "workers' states" does not have to be rooted in class power, either directly by the regime becoming a class itself or indirectly by drawing some measure of support from multiple competing classes (as in the absolutist states of 17th century Europe, which balanced between the support of feudal lords and the nascent capitalists of the towns) is fundamentally anti-Marxist, and has no basis in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky.

What made the location of the Soviet bureaucratic caste (when it was a caste) so precarious was that it could not balance support from the bourgeoisie and the workers. It was counter-revolutionary, and had interests that directly contradicted the abolition of private property. In other words, the bureaucracy could not play the role of mediator of antagonistic modes of appropriating private property in the way that previous Bonapartist regimes could. It was a group whose continued existence depended entirely upon the victory of one group and the defeat of the other. Its position was that much more precarious, because only ONE outcome could permit its continued survival.

[Conscript]

The transition can and does begin in one country, though failure is inevitable without worldwide revolution. Socialism in one country is impossible, but the proletariat taking power in one country and beginning to tear down capitalism to set an example for other revolutions to join is not impossible.

This transition you're talking about is just a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is still within the boundaries of capitalism, and subsequently can exist in one country.

And if the DOTP is destroyed, regardless of where or how, all that's left is state capitalism, and by the stalinist period, the USSR was exactly that.

Perhaps the real question is when and where the DOTP dissolved into a mere party dictatorship, no longer revolutionary, but instead performing the role any other bourgeois state has (and thus has no special, 'salvageable' character). Was it in the party, a result of political shifts, or because of the party's actions against the soviets, or in kronstadt? Did it just fall over from sheer destruction in the civil war?

[CyM]

So what? The purpose of getting drunk is to make yourself more attractive. Does that mean every time I have a beer, everyone has to sleep with me?

What one intends is not always the same as what is possible.
I don't know why you need to get drunk to get more attractive... Or what this has to do with the workers' revolution being the beginnings of the transition towards socialism...


So you agree; the material conditions for the transition to socialism didn't exist. You could have stopped here.
Again with the manipulative and dishonest method, the conditions for the completion of the transition did not exist, that does not mean the transition itself could not exist.


So, because capitalism can't become socialism, it isn't capitalism? Is that what you're claiming?
This is getting boring, let's rephrase what you were referencing and see if you can give me a straight answer: is it possible to have a magical fairyland capitalism that is fully nationalized, has planning, has no profit, has 100% employment and no boom and bust overproduction cycle? Because that is what the Soviet Union's economy was. Only the most absurd redefinition of the term capitalism can still call that capitalist.

Let's repeat that one more time:
1. Fully nationalized economy
2. Fully planned without the anarchy of the market
3. No production for profit
4. 100% employment
5. No boom and bust cycle based on overproduction

This cannot be logically described as capitalism.



These aren't economic forms. The working class, and then the Bolshevik Party, ended up administering capitalism. I agree there was a tension - between what was intended and what was possible
Expropriating the entire bourgeois class and abolishing private property in the means of production and beginning to plan production itself on the basis of social need is not "administering capitalism".

It would be exactly what the next revolutionary uprising would need to begin to do. Since it needs to be global to fully arrive at socialism, this would be a beginning, hence transition. Transitions go at different speeds, and can even be interrupted, as it was in the USSR, which could not advance without the rest of the world, or even go into reverse.


Cute. If the baby (read economy) starts "not alive" (read capitalist) and ends "not alive" (read capitalist) and, putting in the part that you mysteriously missed out (not that I'm accusing you of 'dishonesty' here comrade) if the baby (read economy) fails to become alive (read socialist) then yes it must have been dead (read capitalist) for 74 years. There are no other states of being. If it isn't and never ha been alive (and you agree the USSR was never socialist) yes, it was capitalist.
It is one thing to mistake the first month of pregnancy with the ninth, I agree, but to ignore that the act of conception has taken place is just as much of a mistake.

Things are not simply "A" or "B" as in bourgeois philosophy, everything is in flux and there is such a thing as a contradictory state in between, hence transition. And not magical land where one day it is capitalist and the next it is socialist, and there are "no other states of being".


But it didn't 'begin the transition'. It couldn't. The transition doesn't begin until after the world revolution is successful. The political revolution of the working class, to take state power, only becomes the transition to communist society when it takes place on a world-wide scale. To return to your baby analogy, giving birth to a leg (read an isolated revolutionary territory) is not the same as giving birth to a baby, and in such circumstances, the argument about whether the leg is alive or dead is moot.
It is not about birth, it is about pregnancy, and deformation and eventually miscarriage during pregnancy. You seem to think, if there is no birth, the girl was never pregnant to begin with. This is an anti-scientific attitude that will never allow us to identify the cause of the miscarriage and find a way to allow her to carry the baby to term the next time around.


The economic collapse happened before 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed as a result of its inability to restructure its inefficient capitalism in the wake of the economic downturn of the late 1960s-early 1970s. It was a political collapse in 1991 due to the inability of the Soviet Union to adapt.
The economic stagnation and the beginnings of reversal began earlier, yes, when the bureaucracy became an absolute fetter on the planned economy. Contrast this to China.

The plan needs democracy to function, but the bureaucracy could do it inefficiently for a period. Once the number of different kinds of products reached into the millions and sufficiently high-tech industries were built, the bureaucracy simply could not keep up with the demands of planning, and their parasitic cut was strangling the economy.

The crisis which ensued was not a cyclical crisis of overproduction, but a terminal crisis of mismanagement which lasted until the collapse of the system. In spite of all of this, the collapse of the system in 1989-1991 still led to the largest fall in living standards and economic catastrophe in peace time in human history. Even the terminally ill nationalized bureaucratic plan still guaranteed the working class what capitalism could not provide. How can you explain the collapse without a transition of systems?

[subcp]

1. Were Fascism and Bonapartism capitalist?
2. Can a proletarian Bonapartism not exist, in the short term when certain negative circumstances arise?
3. If the Soviet Union had seen a successful workers' revolution in Hungary in 1956, which would have sparked world revolution beginning in the USSR, would they have had to liquidate the nationalized planned economy to begin the transition to socialism? Or only to liquidate the bureaucracy and change the political system which managed the planned economy?

Lucretia just posted what I was getting at; specifically this:


The whole point of calling the dictatorship of the proletariat (presiding over a transitional economy) a REVOLUTIONARY dictatorship of the proletariat -- which is what M&E called it every single time they wrote about it, was that the economy was in motion, was actually transitioning, going forward to socialism or backward to capitalism. It is a contradiction to talk about a workers' state presiding over a "transitional economy" that has been put on pause, moving neither forward nor backward.

The content of the DotP is the 'transformation of all things', the movement of the working-class exersizing it's dominance over all other classes and strata and moving towards the forms necessary for communism. It's a messy affair; revolutionary activity one 1 nation is not an isolated phenomenon- it is part of a global generalized movement, due to the working-class and bourgeoisie being international classes and capitalism (and future communism) as necessarily world systems. The working-class of particular nations will by nature of being first (or accomplishing deeper levels of transformation) will be the vanguard of a generalized international wave of revolutionary activity, but the question is an international one that cannot and won't be decided in the boundaries of a nation-state.


Actually it does make a little sense, as the result of the temporary balance of class forces permitting a bonapartist type regime to fill the power vacuum. But they keyword there is temporary

I agree that the most extreme forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie are by nature temporary (until the subjective aspects, the class struggle, is dealt with) just through a different basis. Phenomenon like Fascism and Stalinism (the recuperation of the ideas and forms of the international revolutionary wave- the counter-revolution) are weapons against revolutionary workers, against the uncertainty of continued capital accumulation in such periods. They are not efficient political expressions to organize society. Examples like the union sacree's, the Grand Compromises after WWII, Italian state theory and the strategy of tension during the years of lead, are examples of the elasticity that a bourgeois state must have to properly handle the subjective elements of capitalism: the class struggle. Rigid forms of organizing production (command economies a la Stalinism) and society (fascism) are not up to this task, whereas we have seen what the successful reform of such state organization looks like (exactly like all other capitalist states with a democratic regime in the epoch of state capitalism- compare Franco's Spain to Yugoslavia after the 1950's-1990's to China after Deng Xiaoping to post-war Italy, France, US in terms of state intervention, regulation, etc.).

To answer your questions directly:

1) Yes

2) No. Anything other than the working-class exersizing its class power directly and en masse is not proletarian in content, and thus still on the terrain of normal bourgeois politics (within the acceptable realm of bourgeois politics- which includes terrorist groups, extra-parliamentary groups, trade unions, 'revolutionary' political parties, etc.).

Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, were just as capitalist the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, etc. The period between the 1870's and 1914 was a period of a generalized tendency toward centralization, a massive growth of the public sector in the advanced capitalist countries, a movement toward state capitalism. With the onset of WWI and the first total war economy in modern history, the general tendency toward state capitalism was a defining aspect of the era from then on internationally (and is so especially today: look at the debt-crisis terrorism phenomenon going on since 2008 across the world, the attacks on the living standards and social wage of the working-class since the return of crisis in the late 60's-early 70's: carried out by the state directly).

3). This is complicated. That time period was one of the victorious counter-revolution; the Hungarian workers defeat was probably not avoidable under any conditions. If political expressions are the result of economic shifts and needs, it was a period of a rising rate of profit, the transition to mediated extraction of relative surplus value, over a decade away from the return of capitalist crisis after the post-war boom.

Regarding whether or not the working-class must liquidate a command economy before starting their movement toward communism: they must liquidate all aspects of the international economy to do so while under the DotP; there aren't many command economies left in the world because they are inefficient and necessarily temporary as the history of the 20th century teaches us. There do not appear to be anymore 'preconditions for communism' that act as hurdles for communists to apply theory and practice to the class struggle- the struggle and revolution for communism, not setting the groundwork for the future transition to communism.

[Lucretia]

Let's repeat that one more time:
1. Fully nationalized economy
2. Fully planned without the anarchy of the market
3. No production for profit
4. 100% employment
5. No boom and bust cycle based on overproduction

This cannot be logically described as capitalism.


Nobody disputes the Soviet Union was #1 (though there was a sizable black market). The rest is a highly idealized myth of the way the Soviet economy worked. Plans were targets that had to be revised constantly in response to the anarchy of separate and juridically independent industries producing for one another in a context of fierce competition, hoarding of resources and labor, etc. The goal of this type of "planning" was, of course, the production of surplus (what you might call "profit"), most of which was reinvested for the process of additional accumulation, but much of which was also skimmed by the privileged top layers of bureaucrats. And, yes, there was de facto unemployment (not to mention underemployment) in the Soviet Union, despite official denials to the contrary. Research from a very long time ago established this to be the case. Would you like the sources?

[CyM]

The whole point of calling the dictatorship of the proletariat (presiding over a transitional economy) a REVOLUTIONARY dictatorship of the proletariat -- which is what M&E called it every single time they wrote about it, was that the economy was in motion, was actually transitioning, going forward to socialism or backward to capitalism. It is a contradiction to talk about a workers' state presiding over a "transitional economy" that has been put on pause, moving neither forward nor backward.
A healthy workers' revolution anywhere in the world would have led to a political revolution against the bureaucracy, and the transition would have begun moving forward again. But if you look at the actual developments in the USSR, within this transition there were periods of reversal and advance. Because of the bureaucracy, even the periods of advance were dangerous and contradictory, hence the shit way they collectivized the farms.


Actually it does make a little sense, as the result of the temporary balance of class forces permitting a bonapartist type regime to fill the power vacuum. But they keyword there is temporary, as in Trotsky's image of a sphere balanced on the point of a pyramid, where even a slight gust of wind could send it tumbling down in any direction. The whole idea that prolonged political power, power extending as long as 60+ years in the Soviet Union, and potentially even longer now in other supposed "workers' states" does not have to be rooted in class power, either directly by the regime becoming a class itself or indirectly by drawing some measure of support from multiple competing classes (as in the absolutist states of 17th century Europe, which balanced between the support of feudal lords and the nascent capitalists of the towns) is fundamentally anti-Marxist, and has no basis in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky.
Thank you for this. There are a few issues here.

1. The Soviet economy had no big capitalists after Stalin's left turn after crushing the left opposition, but before that, the NEP had created a layer of NEPmen which actually represented a real and present danger of full restoration that reflected itself in a strong faction within the bureaucracy and the party even.

2. There was still another class in the USSR even if we don't take into account the capitalists Stalin crushed after he had finished with Trotsky, the peasantry and the Kulaks. These are petit-bourgeois and upper petit-bourgeois layers which are constantly recreating capitalist relations at an elementary level.

3. There is the pressure of world imperialism, and the hobnobbing of Soviet diplomats with the bourgeois in the rest of the world.

With the failure of the socialist revolution in the rest of the world, the transition is stuck, and this bureaucracy takes on a big role playing that balancing between the classes you spoke of.

This is a temporary bonapartism, but temporary is a relative term. First, this is the first bonapartist phenomenon presiding over a totally statized economy which it can base itself on. This is the most deeply entrenched bureaucracy known in human history. Second, there are a whole series of historical factors that renew the bureaucracy, the rise of bonapartist cliques looking to the soviet model in whole swaths of the planet for one, the conquest of eastern europe for another. The bureaucracy was able to strengthen itself for a whole historical period.

Until it couldn't anymore. Then it promptly collapsed.

But it is not true that bonapartism has to be short by the way, look at caeserism and how long it lasted.


What made the location of the Soviet bureaucratic caste (when it was a caste) so precarious was that it could not balance support from the bourgeoisie and the workers. It was counter-revolutionary, and had interests that directly contradicted the abolition of private property. In other words, the bureaucracy could not play the role of mediator of antagonistic modes of appropriating private property in the way that previous Bonapartist regimes could. It was a group whose continued existence depended entirely upon the victory of one group and the defeat of the other. Its position was that much more precarious, because only ONE outcome could permit its continued survival.
Yes and no, the bureaucracy moved towards that conclusion, but its privileges were drawn from the nationalized planned economy. So at first, so long as that was advancing, their interests were in maintaining the minimum of the gains of the revolution but not extending it through new revolutions which threatened to give an example to the soviet workers, hence why they killed the spanish revolution. But later on, when their privileges were no longer expanding because the economy was no longer expanding, more and more of them openly looked towards market mechanisms as a solution, and their transformation into capitalists as a solution.

You are correct though that the proletarian bonapartism could only, in the long run, fall and be replaced by workers' democracy, or transform themselves into capitalists. This was what Trotsky predicted, but he could not predict just how long it would last before the prediction bore out.

[Blake's Baby]

I did not intend to offend you, but don't threaten me, you are not a mod, and my criticism was respectful and justified...

And are you going to withdraw the implication that I'm lying, or are you not? It's not a very good way of conducting a debate and if you think that insinuating someone is a liar is 'respectful', or in this case is 'justified', then you better prove it.


...
Here, you don't think it is possible that this was a transitional economy between capitalist and socialist economics, but you argue against my position. Therefore, you already know clearly what I think this is, and simply disagree....

Something I said afterwards in response to your clarification, means that I already know what you were going to say before you said it? Yes, you're right, I am a mind-reader.


...
The transition can and does begin in one country, though failure is inevitable without worldwide revolution. Socialism in one country is impossible, but the proletariat taking power in one country and beginning to tear down capitalism to set an example for other revolutions to join is not impossible...

The proletariat taking power is possible, 'beginning to tear down capitalism' is not possible. Unless you believe giving birth to a leg is the same as giving birth to a healthy baby.


...The specific difficulties of the Soviet Union are precisely because this transition is supposed to cross borders and become an international phenomenon, but did not...

No, I think you misunderstand the process. It wasn't the transition that failed to cross borders, it was the political revolution that failed to cross borders. The working class can't abolish capitalism (begin the economic transformation) until it controls capitalism. It didn't control capitalism, capitalism is a world system and the working class 'begining to tear down capitalism' (nice phrase, I shall continue to use that) can only take place after the political seizure of power. This is why the world revolution is necessary. If capitalism could be abolished in one locality then socialism would be possible in one locality, because like the baby that is either alive or dead, there is no other state. Once capitalism is abolished then socialist society is what follows it - if the Soviet Union wasn't socialism, as you say it wasn't, was else could it be but capitalism?


... This led to stagnation, the political (not social) counterrevolution and the rise of a ferocious bureaucracy on the back of the socialized planned economy, and eventually the kicking of the whole process into reverse culminating in this bureaucracy killing the planned economy and transforming itself into a capitalist class in 1989-1991.

This may not be something you agree with, but it is something I have clearly stated several times in the thread. Simply because you don't agree that such a thing can exist does not mean you get to set out multiple choices that don't include it and then ask me to "pick one" to be "clear" about what I think. (Like you did: 1. socialism 2. capitalism 3. something new).

I.e. stop telling me I'm not being clear, tell me you don't agree and how and why...

But it's a reasonable question. Is it socialism? Is it capitalism? Is it something else? I'm just trying to get you to be clear about what it is that your claiming. Partly, of course, because I want you to lay it out as simply as possible, because that makes my job of demolishing the illogcalities of it easier.


...Questions for all of those who believe it was state capitalism, including you:

1. Were Fascism and Bonapartism capitalist?...

Of course.


...
2. Can a proletarian Bonapartism not exist, in the short term when certain negative circumstances arise?...

You'll have to define 'proletarian bonapartism' for me I'm afraid. But it isn't an economic system, so very probably. Capitalism doesn't really care whether the state is a bourgeois democracy, a military dictatorship or a constitutional monarchy. The superstructure is in the end only an outgrowth of the economic base of society. A proletarian revolution that intends to do away with capitalism, and can't, is (to return to the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy) a political form that is divorced from its economic base. Without the extension of the world revolution, which leads to the situation where the working class can begin to tear down capitalism, there is no 'transition'. An uncompleted transition is no transition at all, much as a bridge that only goes 1/3 of a way across a river isn't a bridge.


..3. If the Soviet Union had seen a successful workers' revolution in Hungary in 1956, which would have sparked world revolution beginning in the USSR...

I think you might be over-estimating the case there...


..would they have had to liquidate the nationalized planned economy to begin the transition to socialism? Or only to liquidate the bureaucracy and change the political system which managed the planned economy?

If something that didn't happen had happened, and had an effect that I don't think could happen had resulted, what would have happened then? I dunno, it's your game, you tell me.

[Lucretia]

A healthy workers' revolution anywhere in the world would have led to a political revolution against the bureaucracy, and the transition would have begun moving forward again. But if you look at the actual developments in the USSR, within this transition there were periods of reversal and advance. Because of the bureaucracy, even the periods of advance were dangerous and contradictory, hence the shit way they collectivized the farms.

You're talking past my point. I wasn't discussing the conditions necessary for a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist caste (when it was still a caste). I said that a transitional economy between a class and a classless society is one riven by the most fundamental of contradictions and therefore, barring very brief and anomalous periods of stalemate tantamount to spheres balancing on pyramid points, is going to be in motion, not frozen in a state of relative immobility and stability for decade upon decade.


Thank you for this. There are a few issues here.

1. The Soviet economy had no big capitalists after Stalin's left turn after crushing the left opposition, but before that, the NEP had created a layer of NEPmen which actually represented a real and present danger of full restoration that reflected itself in a strong faction within the bureaucracy and the party even.And? Again, you're raising points that are unrelated to my argument. Yes, the NEP represented a desperate step backward, followed by a period of rapid collectivization and industrialization. None of this alters the fact that any kind of bonapartist detachment from the ruling class was bound to be the most temporary of episodes in light of the fact that the ruling class were workers whose interest was to abolish private property and privilege.


2. There was still another class in the USSR even if we don't take into account the capitalists Stalin crushed after he had finished with Trotsky, the peasantry and the Kulaks. These are petit-bourgeois and upper petit-bourgeois layers which are constantly recreating capitalist relations at an elementary level.

3. There is the pressure of world imperialism, and the hobnobbing of Soviet diplomats with the bourgeois in the rest of the world.And? Once more, I fail to see how any of this orthogonal material is relevant as a response to my points. Nobody disputes these things. What I am disputing is the (class) nature of the reaction to these events, as well as your sense of the possible range of responses that could occur in a situation where a ruling bureaucratic clique was presiding over a state structured to eliminate bureaucracy in the first place. The only way to resolve the contradiction is either a rapid overthrow of the clique, or their transformation into a class through restructuring the state into a mechanism consonant with their interests -- thereby rendering it no longer a workers' state.


With the failure of the socialist revolution in the rest of the world, the transition is stuck, and this bureaucracy takes on a big role playing that balancing between the classes you spoke of.

This is a temporary bonapartism, but temporary is a relative term. First, this is the first bonapartist phenomenon presiding over a totally statized economy which it can base itself on. This is the most deeply entrenched bureaucracy known in human history. Second, there are a whole series of historical factors that renew the bureaucracy, the rise of bonapartist cliques looking to the soviet model in whole swaths of the planet for one, the conquest of eastern europe for another. The bureaucracy was able to strengthen itself for a whole historical period.I am not about to engage in a Clintonian debate what the meaning of "temporary" is. I'll just say that, whatever your definition, Trotsky's definition led him to believe that the bureaucracy could not possibly survive WWII without either being swept away by workers' revolutions or transformed into a new class.


Yes and no, the bureaucracy moved towards that conclusion, but its privileges were drawn from the nationalized planned economy. So at first, so long as that was advancing, their interests were in maintaining the minimum of the gains of the revolution but not extending it through new revolutions which threatened to give an example to the soviet workers, hence why they killed the spanish revolution. But later on, when their privileges were no longer expanding because the economy was no longer expanding, more and more of them openly looked towards market mechanisms as a solution, and their transformation into capitalists as a solution.Nobody is disputing that the top bureaucrats had an interest in maintaining a nationalized economy. What I am contesting is that this nationalized property form is synonymous with a workers' state, enshrining a proletarian logic of state power in a way that renders the bureaucrats little more than a parasitic "caste."

[Blake's Baby]

I don't know why you need to get drunk to get more attractive... Or what this has to do with the workers' revolution being the beginnings of the transition towards socialism...

Really? Despite the fact that you quoted the part of the post where I said 'what one intends is not always the same as what is possible'? Are you implying that sometimes, what seems perfectly clear to the person who posted it is not always perfectly clear to their intended audience? Watch out, someone might accuse you of being dishonest.



...Again with the manipulative and dishonest method...

Ah, now you see, there you go again. I warned you not to continue implying I was being dishonest, you've just demonstrated yourself that you don't even read the things you're quoting and yet you have the brass neck to call me dishonest?



... the conditions for the completion of the transition did not exist, that does not mean the transition itself could not exist...

Half a bridge isn't a bridge. Half a transition isn't a transition.


...
This is getting boring, let's rephrase what you were referencing and see if you can give me a straight answer: is it possible to have a magical fairyland capitalism that is fully nationalized, has planning, has no profit, has 100% employment and no boom and bust overproduction cycle? Because that is what the Soviet Union's economy was. Only the most absurd redefinition of the term capitalism can still call that capitalist.

Let's repeat that one more time:
1. Fully nationalized economy
2. Fully planned without the anarchy of the market
3. No production for profit
4. 100% employment
5. No boom and bust cycle based on overproduction

This cannot be logically described as capitalism...

Capitalism is generalised wage labour and commodity production. The Soviet Union had both, therefore it was capitalist. It wasn't socialist. It was, therefore, capitalist.



...
Expropriating the entire bourgeois class and abolishing private property in the means of production and beginning to plan production itself on the basis of social need is not "administering capitalism"...

I'm sorry, if you believe that you may as well believe in fairies or Santa Claus.


...It would be exactly what the next revolutionary uprising would need to begin to do. Since it needs to be global to fully arrive at socialism, this would be a beginning, hence transition. Transitions go at different speeds, and can even be interrupted, as it was in the USSR, which could not advance without the rest of the world, or even go into reverse...

It did go into reverse. The revolution was over by 1921.


...
It is one thing to mistake the first month of pregnancy with the ninth, I agree, but to ignore that the act of conception has taken place is just as much of a mistake...

That isn't your metaphor. You were trying to prove that the baby was alive for 74 years. But in terms of the metaphor, that means it was socialist. It wasn't.


...Things are not simply "A" or "B" as in bourgeois philosophy, everything is in flux and there is such a thing as a contradictory state in between, hence transition. And not magical land where one day it is capitalist and the next it is socialist, and there are "no other states of being"...

Take it up with Marx. There is no 'transition' from possible to impossible. transition is only possible when the conditions for that transition allow it. Half a bridge again. If you build a bridge half way, it isn't a bridge.


...
It is not about birth, it is about pregnancy, and deformation and eventually miscarriage during pregnancy. You seem to think, if there is no birth, the girl was never pregnant to begin with. This is an anti-scientific attitude that will never allow us to identify the cause of the miscarriage and find a way to allow her to carry the baby to term the next time around...

So, your attempt to prove the baby was alive (ie socialst) for 74 was wrong you mean? I agree.


...
The economic stagnation and the beginnings of reversal began earlier, yes, when the bureaucracy became an absolute fetter on the planned economy. Contrast this to China.

The plan needs democracy to function, but the bureaucracy could do it inefficiently for a period. Once the number of different kinds of products reached into the millions and sufficiently high-tech industries were built, the bureaucracy simply could not keep up with the demands of planning, and their parasitic cut was strangling the economy.

The crisis which ensued was not a cyclical crisis of overproduction, but a terminal crisis of mismanagement which lasted until the collapse of the system. In spite of all of this, the collapse of the system in 1989-1991 still led to the largest fall in living standards and economic catastrophe in peace time in human history. Even the terminally ill nationalized bureaucratic plan still guaranteed the working class what capitalism could not provide. How can you explain the collapse without a transition of systems?

Because the capitalism of the Eastern Bloc was hideously hidebound. You do know that 'deregulation' (Thatcherism, Reaganomics) in the West from the mid-70s also saw catastrophic falls in living standards for the workers in the West in the previous 15 years, don't you? The rise of TB in Britain (virtually irradicated for decades, it returned in the 1980s); long-term unemployment in the UK reaching millions (which it's never recovered from); the errosion of wages in Germany that saw real living standards halved in 30 years. The collapse in the East was sudden, the collapse in the West more gradual, because in the West 'restructuring' was begun earlier, but both saw massive changes as a result of the crisis.

[subcp]

Yes, the NEP represented a desperate step backward, followed by a period of rapid collectivization and industrialization. None of this alters the fact that any kind of bonapartist detachment from the ruling class was bound to be the most temporary of episodes in light of the fact that the ruling class were workers whose interest was to abolish private property and privilege.Isn't the human experience of what you call a bureaucratic caste/'Bonapartism' that a largely nationalized economy and the most sophisticated methods of economic planning accomplishes 1 thing: allows an undeveloped or underdeveloped nation-state the route to quickly changing social relations and class composition to match that of the advanced capitalist nations [in the period of capitalist decadence :)], and not much else? I'd argue the reason it is temporary is because the task of such regimes is limited, and once it fulfills that function, it must liberalize to the same extent of state intervention, regulation and planning as that of all other capitalist states [in the period of capitalist decadence-epoch of generalized state capitalism]- or perish. The speed at which 5 year plans and Great Leaps Forward consolidate social relations and development of the productive forces creates numerous internal political contradictions, which have often been at the heart of collapse in these nations (the Glacis, USSR, Yugoslavia).

Since the world today bears little resemblance to that of 1917-1936, or 1968, are we in doubt that the forces of production have been developed and are mature enough to create the potential for international communism? That very question is why Lenin and Bukharin and numerous apparatchiks and even militant socialists of the day embraced an extreme form of state capitalism- Lenin notes the difference between 'his' or 'Russias' state capitalism vs that of central capitalist nations in the degree to which the state would become involved in the national economy. That Russia did not have the productive forces and class composition for communism. This has been trotted out throughout the 20th century to excuse all manner of deviations and degenerations of Marxism - in the name of advancing the productive forces by supporting capitalist measures. If the potential for world communism is no longer in doubt, what reason would there be for a political regime of technocrats and managers (bureaucrats) over a command economy? If the economic conditions for the appearance of such a political expression are no longer dominant on Earth, why would the next revolutionary wave have a counter-revolution in that form?

[commieathighnoon]

Marx was wrong. The Second Empire was in little doubt a bourgeois state in the modern sense. The problem is there simply is not a close analogy between the forms of rule and dynamics intrinsic to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie can rule as a class even where the political establishment is dictatorial (and even if it is exercised against its own quarters to a degree), by simply being the financial (tax and banking) basis of the state, by bribing directly state-officials as well as indirectly presenting themselves socially as the only basis for upwardly mobile officialdom to consolidate their social position hereditarily, and because the state's essential policy foundation is controlling the supply and availability of labor-power and ensuring accumulation may progress.

The proletariat is propertyless per definitionem. It does not operate bond markets a state apparatus which does not consult it institutionally need rely on to finance expenditures. The proletariat does not "rule" in the same sense as the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie's state is tasked with very simple charges: promote and ensure capital accumulation at all costs. This does not require the political institutionalization of bourgeois rule. In fact, I would say in "developing states" the fragmentary pressures between relatively 'fixed' and 'domestic' moments of capital and 'cosmopolitan', 'world' moments of capital often require the imposition of a firm political rule to ensure the stability of the state and to lend primacy to the "national" bourgeoisie. There are other, 'path-dependent' and 'contingent' aspects to consider: on the European continent the problem of land invasion necessitated an extremely large permanent military apparatus, which naturally would have a 'specific weight' in the political balance of power which would differ from capitalist nations like the UK and the US. One need recall Marx's categories are conceptual abstractions designed to provide an understanding of real concrete historical conditions and movements, not Scriptural writs to be applied formalistically.

[commieathighnoon]

A healthy workers' revolution anywhere in the world would have led to a political revolution against the bureaucracy, and the transition would have begun moving forward again. But if you look at the actual developments in the USSR, within this transition there were periods of reversal and advance. Because of the bureaucracy, even the periods of advance were dangerous and contradictory, hence the shit way they collectivized the farms.

Yeah yeah, I know that the Trotskyite de fide divina et ecclesiastica as revealed by St. Leon of Petrograd (Peace Be Upon Him), but it really has no basis. This incidentally is why I am so opposed to Trotskyism--it is essentially a gigantic "what if" history conjecture based on supposed hair's breadth splits the wrong way in the 1920s, which if only St. Leon had carried the day, would have turned out totally differently. Perhaps one can forgive the Apostle Trotsky for his errors, but his monastics in 2013? I think not.

There was -no basis- for collective political organization against the dictatorship of the nomenklatura in the USSR. The qualitatively level of political and social atomization under the apparatus was worse than any bourgeois dictatorship. Worse yet, the economic 'turn' by Stalin and co. depended on the Russian Left Opposition's theorization to substantiate it, and was in large part implemented with the help of virtually every Left Oppositionist besides Trotsky, who dutifully "capitulated" to Stalin in 1928 (Trotsky's words, not mine) and were useful idiots of the First Five-Year Plan. There was nothing about the First Five-Year Plan which substantively advanced socialist construction. The quality and dynamicism of the labor-process in industry and agriculture was largely destroyed, the rationalization of economic balance and proportion was similarly eradicated, and the basis for any subjectively active collectivity by the laboring classes was demolished. Real assets were destroyed during the FFYP, the "collectivization" reduced the productivity of agriculture, rather than improving it. I could go on. Trotsky's take is part wishful thinking, part apologetics for his own role in the lead up to this. It is not historically serious looking back in retrospect.


Thank you for this. There are a few issues here.

1. The Soviet economy had no big capitalists after Stalin's left turn after crushing the left opposition, but before that, the NEP had created a layer of NEPmen which actually represented a real and present danger of full restoration that reflected itself in a strong faction within the bureaucracy and the party even.

The truth is there were no big capitalists in the USSR after 1918, and to be honest they were extraordinarily weak as a social group before 1914 and extremely dependent on the state even then.

The whole Trot line of "Left-Center-Right" in the factional struggles of the 1920s is pretty empty of content. There were no "kulaks" as a socially and functionally distinctive layer of the peasant household cultivator population, and the NEPmen, while they did have social interests, were hardly a strong force besides the various layers of "petty proprietors of intellectual property" including cadres, specialist professionals and technocrats which were absorbed into the State apparatus and given primacy by the productivistic politics of the Party-State and the political expropriation of the working-class.

You simply have not consulted the real history well enough. Trot polemics and Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution do not cut the cake. Sorry.


2. There was still another class in the USSR even if we don't take into account the capitalists Stalin crushed after he had finished with Trotsky, the peasantry and the Kulaks. These are petit-bourgeois and upper petit-bourgeois layers which are constantly recreating capitalist relations at an elementary level.

Again, as said above, this is just bullshit. There was no real way to distinguish the post-1918 so-called "kulaks" from the so-called "middle peasants" or "serednyaks": hence the chaos of the collectivization and the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" which was pretty straightforwardly a war against the whole peasantry as a social group.

You can tell when people have read nothing but brain-dead sect polemics when they say something like this. A "class" is not arbitrary income lines drawn by some bureaucrat or theorist in an office--it is a real world dynamic of subjectively and objectively differentiated social groups acting according to class dynamics. The fact is the post-1918 peasantry in the former Russian Empire was extremely weakly differentiated, and was, as a whole, extremely poor in relative terms across the board. The best-off kulak would have looked to a US family farmer as an impoverished and primitive creature. This kind of rhetoric was self-delusion by Trotsky and co. which imagined distinct layers of the peasantry and peasant wealth to make their utopian top-down programs plausible. The fact was peasants, especially vis-a-vis the state, subjectively acted as a single social organism, and a piece of paper from a clueless bureaucrat claiming some guy with a shed and a horse instead of an outhouse and a donkey was a distinct class didn't prove shit.


[snip blah blah blah if you've read a Trot before you've heard the Gospel according to St. Leon blah blah blah]

Yeah yeah yeah, this is just stating your conclusion as a description. Its not even an argument. You are providing no compelling reason you dynamic model is novel, descriptive, and superior to alternatives.


But it is not true that bonapartism has to be short by the way, look at caeserism and how long it lasted.

How can you possibly identify the rule of the Caesars with Napoleon I and III? This is the least Marxist thing I've ever heard. Only in the most remote analogies is this sustainable.



Yes and no, the bureaucracy moved towards that conclusion, but its privileges were drawn from the nationalized planned economy. So at first, so long as that was advancing, their interests were in maintaining the minimum of the gains of the revolution but not extending it through new revolutions which threatened to give an example to the soviet workers, hence why they killed the spanish revolution. But later on, when their privileges were no longer expanding because the economy was no longer expanding, more and more of them openly looked towards market mechanisms as a solution, and their transformation into capitalists as a solution.

You are correct though that the proletarian bonapartism could only, in the long run, fall and be replaced by workers' democracy, or transform themselves into capitalists. This was what Trotsky predicted, but he could not predict just how long it would last before the prediction bore out.

Trotsky pretty openly implied that under his model the Stalinist system would have to undergo a trial by fire to do or die in World War II. The complete failure of his theoretical abstractions contributes to the total collapse and irrelevance of the Fourth International after the war. Why is the juridical organization of industrial property as "State property" a "gain" of the revolution? Says who? Why?

[CyM]

The nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy is the first blow against capitalism that any workers' revolution would have to carry out.

It is this nationalization that eliminates the bourgeois economically, leavung behind only the petty -bourgeois (of which the peasantry is a part) to deal with as a competing social class that tends to organically recreate capitalist relations.

It is this nationalization that allows the working class to embark on the planning of the economy, which is an essential measure to end the anarchy of the capitalist market and production by private individuals for profit.

Of course, this cannot be fully unfurled until after the decisive section of the world economy has had their own revolutions and joined together in a socialist federation.

The democratic planning of the world economy opens up a boom unlike any other, and develops the material basis for overcoming the contradictions we inherited from capitalism: the gradual flattening of wage differentials within the working class and with specialists, the voluntary dissolution of the petty-bourgeois into collective industry and their transformation into workers, the elimination of the contradictions between town and country and the rapid development of the third world, etc...

As these contradictions melt away, the struggle for wants does too, and the state mechanism becomes more and more an anachronism. Less and less is force needed, and habit and routine begin to recreate socialist instead of capitalist culture.

It is on the basis of this general raising of the level of wealth that the state disappears and we see communism.

This is the essence of Marx and Lenin's views on the tasks of the transitional period.

But suppose the transition begun in one country, by nationalization of the commanding heights under workers' control, stops there. Suppose no other country joins the revolution, because of defeat after defeat.

Well, clearly that country is no longer capitalist, it eliminated its capitalists. But is not socialist either, for socialism is a worldwide system.

The very fact of the losses in the world revolution does not automatically restore capitalism in that country. That first, most important measure still
exists: the nationalization and planning and the monopoly of foreign trade.

But clearly, all the contradictions which are supposed to melt away will not, they will acquire explosive force precisely because of the isolation of this country, and the stalling of the revolution in one country.

So, the struggle for wants begins again, and "all the old crap" begins again, to paraphrase Marx.

Instead of melting away, the state takes on monstrous proportions. Bureaucratic officialdom develops into a cancer on the nationalized economy. The officials and specialists who are considered a necessary evil until we can make do without them thanks to the coming world revolution begin to take on a larger and larger role in the life of the country.

What is the basis for this? Generalized want, and the struggle over the surplus, which socialism would solve, but we can't have socialism yet because the world revolution has failed.

So a struggle between town and country, peasant/petty-bourgeois and worker builds. And this struggle is reflected in political struggle as well. Different factions based on different classes (bukharin said to the peasants "get rich!") and even different layers within the same class.

On the basis of the inability of petty-bourgeois to defeat the workers and reestablish capitalism, and on the basis of the inability of the workers to move towards socialism, bonapartism develops balancing between the classes.

The bureaucratic layer that has developed begins to search its own interests, it has gained privileges and a comfortable position in society, and for it, the revolution has achieved its aims. So this layer would like to settle down and enjoy these newfound privileges. Its first task is to end this silly business about permanent revolution and worldwide revolution. It wants to develop the economy in this country, which would develop its privileges, not go around rocking the boat.

So it leans on the petty-bourgeois class (including the peasants, particularly that LAYER of rich kulaks within the peasantry) against the workers. It carries out a campaign to smash the revolutionaries who call
themselves bolsheviks, round up thousands, exile others, etc... in order to say "our rule is socialism, we have it already, no need for any world revolution". It also wipes out the last remaining traces of workers' democracy and cements its rule.

In its role as arbiter of the division of the national surplus, between the competing factions and classes, it has become all-powerful. Like classical bonapartism, the state raises itself far above society thanks to the unnatural paralysis between the classes.

And of course a social stratum of arbiters cannot make do without producing an ultimate arbiter of arbiters, a Caeser, a Bonaparte, a Hitler, a Stalin, who will even put many of them to the sword in order to maintain the interests of all of them.

So now that the workers have been put down, the petty-bourgeois restorationists have been enormously strengthened. Only one problem, this bonapartist bureaucracy draws its enormous privileges from managing the nationalized economy. If this restorationist wave had happened during a period when capitalism was developing the productive forces, the restorationists would
have won then and there.

But the bureaucracy as a whole was not attracted by what capitalism had to offer the country at that time. It could not have developed the economy and therefore could not have developed the privileges of the bureaucracy, in fact, the restoration of capitalism would have meant the loss of their privileges.

And so the bureaucracy also had one single progressive aspect, their greed was based on the nationalized economy, and they defended it so long as no better possibility was open to them to satisfy it.

Having leaned on the petty-bourgeois and peasantry to smash the workers on the left, they now leaned on the workers to smash the petty-bourgeois and kulaks on the right.

In classical bonapartist fashion they alternated and balanced like this.

So, during the attack on the left opposition they had argued that the proposal of five year plans, voluntary collectivization and a hydroelectric dam to rapidly electrify the country were ridiculous. When they turned to attack the right, they proposed the "five year plan in four years" with even higher projected growth, they collectivized by force and they built
the dam anyways.

The most important example of how they actually really did take a "left turn" and used left demagogy to fight the right is the fact that so many left oppositionists were fooled and capitulated. Trotsky warned them that this would not lead to the restoration of workers' control, and the bureaucracy would just as easily turn back to the right tomorrow.

Regardless, for a time, they developed the nationalized economy in spite of themselves and the parasitic role they played. In spite of their privileges, the nationalized economy doubled and tripled from where it was in 1917, and soon was only matched by America.

The growth rates were something never seen in capitalism, and this nationalized planned economy allowed Russia to win the war, against all odds.

Even Trotsky did not predict this, and the people left in charge in the 4th when he died had lost the Marxist method and could not adjust. I would recommend you look into the debates from that period, because a certain layer did see and adjust.

Regardless, the victory in Europe gave an enormous boost to the position of the bureaucracy. In eastern europe they nationalized the economy, carried out the revolution on the land, and eliminated capitalism and landlordism. They leaned on the workers and unleashed a popular mass movement to crush the capitalists, and then they leaned back
on the right to put the eastern european worker back
in his place and end any independent movement of the workers.

The unusual balance of forces in the world which developed after the second world war gave stability to the situation, Ussr vs. Usa and no real immediate threat of direct war between them. The us was able
to dominate its weak allies and force world trade on its terms. The bureaucracy killed the revolution in western europe because it had deals with the us about dividing up the spheres of influence and wanted to prove they were not after world revolution.

This provided the political stability which allowed the postwar boom to happen. It also gained the bureaucracy an enormous political authority. Honest militants in europe would join the communist party because they "were getting it done".

It wasn't them of course, it was the nationalized economy they had taken over, but all that people saw was free education, free healthcare, zero unemployment, more doctors and scientists and teachers and olympians per capita than any country on the planet, etc...

From famine to space in a half century, quite the achievement, and not possible under capitalism.

But this could only last so long.

The bureaucracy planned the nationalized economy, it was not a democratic plan. Planning a developing economy is very different from planning a developed economy.

A developed economy has far more kinds of products, more sensitive to quality control issues, etc... Producing computers is not the same as producing tractors. From double-digit growth numbers, the economy slows down the closer it gets to the level of the USA. It falls to single digits, and then to zero percent.

Now the crisis begins. Is it a capitalist crisis of overproduction? No, absolutely not, what we see is shortages. The bureaucracy could not manage the nationalized economy any longer, its own waste, corruption and mismanagement was clogging its every pore.

[CyM]

Had to break this up into two parts. The question is, would you have advocated for the change of the economic basis? The nationalized economy was not the problem, it was the only good thing left from the revolution.

The question was a political question of who would manage that? What was needed was democracy while keeping the nationalization and the plan.

A political, not a social revolution.

Is the bureaucracy a class? No. They had to convert themselves into a class when they saw that the nationalized economy could not develop anymore. Marxists understand that that was because of the lack of democracy and the world revolution, but for them that would have meant abolishing their own privileges. Out of the question.

And so a struggle developed again within the bureaucracy itself, only this time on the basis of a failing planned economy and a booming capitalism. This time, capitalism was attractive enough as an option to enough bureaucrats to make restorationism the majority amongst this layer.

The orgy of privatization that followed the tank showdown between those wings of the bureaucracy for and against rapid restoration collapsed the economy.

The largest peacetime economic collapse in human history. But through this the bureaucrats became billionaires, became actual capitalists.

Actual owners of the means of production.

There is a qualitative, systemic difference between what exists today in the post-soviet states and what existed in the USSR, and anyone who doesn't see that has missed the most important factor. Who owns the means of production is not a mere juridical question. It is the fundamental defining feature of the property form of an economy, and defines the difference between the private property of capitalism and the collective property of a nationalized economy in transition, even a degenerated one.

[commieathighnoon]

So you're going to ignore every concrete assertion and claim I made in the previous post and recite your (lack of) education on the topic. I replied to every essential point made here already.

[subcp]

The orgy of privatization that followed the tank showdown between those wings of the bureaucracy for and against rapid restoration collapsed the economy.What Lenin proposed was to undertake state capitalist measures, but extend them to encompass as much of the national economy as possible- state capitalism as intervention in the economy by the state (regulation, ownership or operation of industries and businesses, etc.) starting with the increasing size of the public sector of the central capitalist economies at the end of the 19th century (the close of the 'rush to the colonies' and division of the world by imperialism). Since 1945, we've seen increased state ownership and intervention in the central capitalist countries (a turn going the other way now in the era of neo-liberalism). Does this mean that the nationalization of the coal industry in the UK, or government sponsored monopolies like the deal between Bell Systems and the US government, etc. are gains of the working-class?

The Soviet economy tanked because a command economy is not efficient at organizing production and consumption- the crisis of the late 1960's and early 1970's was an international return of crisis- the USSR was unable to reform in relation to it (unlike China, which successfully liberalized to meet the new needs of international capital).

The collapse of the USSR was not a primarily political event, it was primarily grounded in the return of crisis after the post-war boom, and the internal contradictions which made reform difficult- the political crisis of the old guard vs. reformers is just an extreme example of this economic need corresponding into political phenomenon.

Nationalization ('socialization' in the old German social-democracy) is a phenomenon acceptable to capitalism. The GM-Chrysler restructuring and bailout is a prime example. If I remember correctly, 70% of Chrysler is still owned by the US state (10% still held by Daimler, 20% by the owners of Fiat- the latter of which was given managerial control by the US state). Was this a gain of the working-class? Since this 'socialization' of the auto-industry, a new feature has entered the auto factories in the American rust belt: the anklet used to keep probationers monitored on house arrest, or a dog from crossing property lines. A sensor, attached to the workers (wrist or leg, I forget), alerts the line foreman when a worker steps over taped-off areas around their section of the assembly line: scientific management qua atomization at its most extreme in modern capitalism. Not much different from the conditions of state industries in the Soviet Union (particularly in the early 1920's- when piecework and Taylorism, along with 1-man management, were all introduced).

Nationalization, self-management, 'radical autonomy', whether speaking of the Russian or Spanish revolution, was the counter-revolution; the means through which capitalist social relations maintained or re-took control from a revolutionary proletariat.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

But the two things are related and ultimately related to what 9mm glosses over as 'unfavourable material conditions' (sorry 9mm, but it seems to me you do).

In the Critique, Marx says “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”.

So, for Marx, the DotP is a 'political transition period' which corresponds to a transition in the economy.

But as socialism in one country is not possible, the DotP can only be a period of political transition corresponding to an economic transition if the world revolution succeeds. If there is no possibility of the transition to socialism - because of 9mm's 'unfavourable material conditions' (ie the defeat of the world revolution) - then what becomes of the DotP? It's a political form that doesn't correspond to any kind of material reality, a 'political transition period' that doesn't correspond with an economic transition period. All that the dictatorship can do, isolated in one revolutionary territory, is seek to organise capitalism (not transform it) in order to defend any 'gains' of the revolution, though of course, as we have seen in the 20th century, it is at the same time dying on its feet as it is deprived of any material basis other than the continued existence of capitalism. A revolutionary political form cannot survive in a non-revolutionary period, because the basis of the revolutionary political form is the suppression of capitalism; and by the early 1920s the revolution was in retreat and the capitalist powers once more on the attack. The 'unfavourable material conditions' did not allow the revolution to extend and thus what came out of the defeat of the revolution was a - I hesitate to use the word - 'deformed' version of the DotP, which had not begun the transition to socialist society because it had been prevented from doing so.
But you do not allow for the possibility that this "transitional" society can be in limbo for a long period. Eventually, even this orthodox Trotskyist admits, the inherent contradiction between a D of the P and the status of the world revolution have to be resolved. In the case of the USSR, it was resolved. Capitalism was restored, but not in the freaking 1930s, in the 1990s. It seems to me that the leftcomm and state capppers don't like what happened due to the Soviet Thermidor, so they simply reject the whole project. It ignores the amazing economic and social success of the USSR, despite Stalinist misrule.

In China, the contradiction still exists, although the CCCP has gone very far down the road toward capitalist restoration. They believe that they can either walk the tightrope forever, or become the new capitalists, like the section of the Soviet Bureaucracy that looted the nationalized economy. They probably will do worse, ultimately, because there actually is a real Chinese bourgeoisie in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Unlike the dead-for-a-generation Russian bourgeoisie in 1992 they can step in with no connections to anything even labelled "Communist." Or, the Chinese workers can rise up and throw out the fucking bureaucracy and start a new revolutionary wave in the world.

The Russian bourgeoisie was routed and eliminated after the revolution. It is crude and idealistic to say the bureaucracy became a new ruling class. New classes in society, especially new ruling classes, according to Marx have some kind of necessary and constructive role. The Soviet Bureaucracy was neither necessary nor constructive. Also, the existed for the blink of an historical eye. Not the stuff of new classes. Did the oppress workers and intellectuals and oppositionists? Yes. Does that make them a new class? Or somehow capitalists? No.

[subcp]

The Russian bourgeoisie was routed and eliminated after the revolution. It is crude and idealistic to say the bureaucracy became a new ruling class. New classes in society, especially new ruling classes, according to Marx have some kind of necessary and constructive role. The Soviet Bureaucracy was neither necessary nor constructive. Also, the existed for the blink of an historical eye. Not the stuff of new classes. Did the oppress workers and intellectuals and oppositionists? Yes. Does that make them a new class? Or somehow capitalists? No.The state owning, operating, managing, engaging in joint-public/private ventures, heavily regulating, 'business' in the broad sense (productive and/or un-productive industry) is state capitalism: a phenomenon which exists today and can be traced back to the late 19th century. This does not mean there is or ever was such a class- a 'state capitalist class'; and you've already said why this is so.

I don't understand what makes nationalized industries and enterprises a gain of the working-class, or anything other than a modern capitalist state- what the supposed qualitative difference is between nationalized industry and enterprises in fSU and nationalized industry and enterprises in Western nations in the same period (thinking specifically of Trotskyism here):

If it's a nominal worker's party, the numerous social democratic regimes, as well as those including or being dominated by Communist Party's, fit that bill in Western Europe and Asia- are Nepal, France, worker's states presiding over the working-class gains of nationalized industries or enterprises?

In the end it is just a quantitative difference- heavier state involvement in managing, regulating, owning and operating industries and businesses compared to contemporary Western states (something that since the 1970's has equalized among states and is no longer even an illusion of a difference). If heavier state involvement in the national economy is a 'gain of the working-class' how can you explain SEZ's in China (since they are 'walking the tight rope') without acknowledging it is thoroughly a capitalist state acting as a capitalist state?

There was once a proletarian revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe and Russia, which had its revolutionary content strangled out with the rest of the international revolutionary wave of that period- I don't see how a once revolutionary movement lays dormant for nearly a century, hanging onto state power (under various guises of degeneration and deformity), until finally succumbing to capitalist restoration.

[CyM]

What Lenin proposed was to undertake state capitalist measures, but extend them to encompass as much of the national economy as possible- state capitalism as intervention in the economy by the state (regulation, ownership or operation of industries and businesses, etc.) starting with the increasing size of the public sector of the central capitalist economies at the end of the 19th century (the close of the 'rush to the colonies' and division of the world by imperialism). Since 1945, we've seen increased state ownership and intervention in the central capitalist countries (a turn going the other way now in the era of neo-liberalism). Does this mean that the nationalization of the coal industry in the UK, or government sponsored monopolies like the deal between Bell Systems and the US government, etc. are gains of the working-class?
It's a ridiculous comparison. There is a fundamental, qualitative difference between an economy that is entirely nationalized and a capitalist economy which has nationalized some sectors that are subordinated to the more important private economy.

Private property is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and state capitalism in the sense of the post office is only there to support the more important private sector by taking things which the capitalists need developed but would be unprofitable and developing them through the state.

There is a reason why, however, the working class fights against the privatization of these industries which have been nationalized under capitalism. Ask the coal miners what they think of privatization, or the train workers in britain.


The Soviet economy tanked because a command economy is not efficient at organizing production and consumption- the crisis of the late 1960's and early 1970's was an international return of crisis- the USSR was unable to reform in relation to it (unlike China, which successfully liberalized to meet the new needs of international capital).

The collapse of the USSR was not a primarily political event, it was primarily grounded in the return of crisis after the post-war boom, and the internal contradictions which made reform difficult- the political crisis of the old guard vs. reformers is just an extreme example of this economic need corresponding into political phenomenon.

Nationalization ('socialization' in the old German social-democracy) is a phenomenon acceptable to capitalism. The GM-Chrysler restructuring and bailout is a prime example. If I remember correctly, 70% of Chrysler is still owned by the US state (10% still held by Daimler, 20% by the owners of Fiat- the latter of which was given managerial control by the US state). Was this a gain of the working-class? Since this 'socialization' of the auto-industry, a new feature has entered the auto factories in the American rust belt: the anklet used to keep probationers monitored on house arrest, or a dog from crossing property lines. A sensor, attached to the workers (wrist or leg, I forget), alerts the line foreman when a worker steps over taped-off areas around their section of the assembly line: scientific management qua atomization at its most extreme in modern capitalism. Not much different from the conditions of state industries in the Soviet Union (particularly in the early 1920's- when piecework and Taylorism, along with 1-man management, were all introduced).

Nationalization, self-management, 'radical autonomy', whether speaking of the Russian or Spanish revolution, was the counter-revolution; the means through which capitalist social relations maintained or re-took control from a revolutionary proletariat.
So nationalization is overall a bad thing.

I think we have come to a radically different conclusion than even the worst theorists of the state capitalism analysis would have ever dared to take.

Are you saying privatization in the 90's was a progressive thing?

Are you saying that if the Hungarian revolution against the bureaucracy had been successful, they would have had to break up the nationalized economy and privatize it in order to go forward?

Do you argue that a healthy revolution would not nationalize the property of the capitalist class? That the working class should not institute what you refer to as a "command economy"? I call that a planned economy, are you saying that the workers cannot democratically plan and decide production?

[Blake's Baby]

But you do not allow for the possibility that this "transitional" society can be in limbo for a long period. Eventually, even this orthodox Trotskyist admits, the inherent contradiction between a D of the P and the status of the world revolution have to be resolved. In the case of the USSR, it was resolved. Capitalism was restored, but not in the freaking 1930s, in the 1990s...

No, because (as seems to be something of a disease with Trotskyists) you mistake political forms for economic forms. Can the DotP last for a 'long time' with no economic basis? No, the DotP was dead within 3 years (some would argue more like 6 months). Can a 'caste' remain a 'caste' for 74 years, without ever becoming a class, even though it functions as one? I doubt it - if it looks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I'm pretty sure it's a duck. Not a dog that happens to find itself in water.

Capitalism was never done away with in the USSR. So it was never 'restored' because it never went away. It was only the political superstructure that changed. Unless you realise that, this conversation can never go anywhere. You'll insist that nationalisations is a 'step to socialism', we'll insist it's still capitalism (read Chapter 3 of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, if you want the background to this), and neither position will have advanced an inch. Though, to be honest, I'm not trying to convince you, I'm trying to convince all the other people who might be reading.



... It seems to me that the leftcomm and state capppers don't like what happened due to the Soviet Thermidor, so they simply reject the whole project. It ignores the amazing economic and social success of the USSR, despite Stalinist misrule...

Unlike the Trotskyists, who have to alibi the Stalinist misrule because their idol Trotsky was so heavily involved in establishing it, and so tied to its continued success, that they can't criticise it without throwing their whole theoretical superstructure out.

There is a Trotskyist baby in the Stalinist bathwater; but you can't even find it if you remain trapped in the prison of Trotskyism. Stop lauding the man's mistakes and start learning from him instead, is my advice.


...In China, the contradiction still exists, although the CCCP has gone very far down the road toward capitalist restoration. They believe that they can either walk the tightrope forever, or become the new capitalists, like the section of the Soviet Bureaucracy that looted the nationalized economy. They probably will do worse, ultimately, because there actually is a real Chinese bourgeoisie in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Unlike the dead-for-a-generation Russian bourgeoisie in 1992 they can step in with no connections to anything even labelled "Communist." Or, the Chinese workers can rise up and throw out the fucking bureaucracy and start a new revolutionary wave in the world.

The Russian bourgeoisie was routed and eliminated after the revolution. It is crude and idealistic to say the bureaucracy became a new ruling class. New classes in society, especially new ruling classes, according to Marx have some kind of necessary and constructive role. The Soviet Bureaucracy was neither necessary nor constructive. Also, the existed for the blink of an historical eye. Not the stuff of new classes. Did the oppress workers and intellectuals and oppositionists? Yes. Does that make them a new class? Or somehow capitalists? No.

Rubbish, of course the bureaucracy was necessary, who else was going to be the 'national cpaitalist' and administer Russian state capitalism? Tsarist Russia was the world's largest state and the world's 5th biggest economy in 1913. Even with Poland, the Baltic States and Finland hived off and handed over as satellites of German imperialism, how is that massive territory and economy going to be administered if not by a 'new' class ('same as the old class')? It can't, especially as it's capitalism, so it needs a new capitalist class to replace the capitalists who've just been dispossessed.

[CyM]

So to summarize the list of assumptions you are making:

1. Who owns the means of production does not matter, that is a political superstructure question and not an economic base question.

2. There is a new kind of capitalism possible, a capitalism without capitalists (who after all, are supposed to own capital), which can plan the entire economy, however inefficiently, and thereby unleash enormous growth unlike anything capitalism has ever seen.

And that raises two questions the supporters of the "state capitalism" fallacy continue to refuse to answer:

1. If the workers took power in Hungary 1956, would they have privatized the nationalized economy? Should they have?

2. Is private property the property base of capitalism or not?

[subcp]

It's a ridiculous comparison. There is a fundamental, qualitative difference between an economy that is entirely nationalized and a capitalist economy which has nationalized some sectors that are subordinated to the more important private economy.

Private property is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and state capitalism in the sense of the post office is only there to support the more important private sector by taking things which the capitalists need developed but would be unprofitable and developing them through the state.

There is a reason why, however, the working class fights against the privatization of these industries which have been nationalized under capitalism. Ask the coal miners what they think of privatization, or the train workers in britain.Perhaps you should ask the public sector workers in the UK and the US (and Greece and Italy and Spain etc.) what they think of the reorganizations of their workplaces, with the consent of 'their' unions.

This is a very old assumption- going back to social democracy and before that the Communist Manifesto- that nationalized industry is qualitatively 'better' for the working-class. However, you and the rest of the defenders of 'the good old days' (Keynesian post-war era) seem to forget that 'standards of living' and wages rose with productivity until the 1970's, in the private and public sector. How do you explain the erosion of both public and private sector workers' standards of living, working conditions, wages and benefits, etc. in the same time period? You claim that it is privatization, the instrumental choice of politicians and business leaders which is to blame for this erosion of conditions in the public sector, and that it can be stopped and/or reversed if only pro-Keynesian politicians and leaders enacted widespread re-nationalization or halted further privatization. But this doesn't account for the erosion of living standards, wages and benefits across all sectors of the economy in the UK, the US, etc.

If privatization and the choices of 'greedy' politicians via neo-liberalism or 'capitalist restorationists' in former People's Republics and fSU is to blame for taking away these 'gains of the working-class' (nationalized and quasi-nationalized industries and enterprises of the public sector), how do you explain trends which cut across private and public sectors since the '70s?


So nationalization is overall a bad thing.No- and I'm trying to be very clear on this since after this statement you make a strange false dichotomy argument:

Nationalization and privatization are acceptable practices in modern capitalism: one is no more 'progressive' than the other- if we are talking about the revolutionary movement to abolish capital and build communism. I'm saying that communists should have no political commitment to either one. The USSR and the former command economies have shown us that the law of value, the commodity form, the use of money as an expression of exchange-value, commodity production, alienation from production, etc. still operate in an environment where the state is the primary owner, regulator, referee of the national economy. Therefore- like Pannekoek's articles on 'socialization' in the time of the November Revolution, where he argued against Otto Bauer and right-wing socialists calling for 'socialization' (nationalization) but maintaining all of the characteristics of capitalism (listed in the previous sentence)- the revolutionary content of the proletarian movement to abolish capital and establish communism makes questions of 'how will we best manage/run capitalism without capitalists?' counter-revolutionary and irrelevant to the task of abolishing capital and building communism.

I don't care how to run a 'capitalism with a human face', what the most efficient means of accumulation is, and neither should any other communist. The voices that say 'we must be defend our gains!' in revolutionary ferment are counter-revolutionary. Whether a unionized workforce in a public sector business or industry has a slightly better chance at having a more stable and comfortable life or not is irrelevant to the question of abolishing capitalism and establishing communism.

I answered your question on Hungary earlier but will reiterate:


Are you saying that if the Hungarian revolution against the bureaucracy had been successful, they would have had to break up the nationalized economy and privatize it in order to go forward?No- those are not the only 2 choices comrade. Neither is the answer either: private and public sector should be abolished equally. This whole thread is asking about the time between capitalism and communism. You're saying that we should build on state capitalism as it has existed and as it currently exists, that an international command economy is the first step in a long process of transition. I think this is counter-revolutionary and will only re-create capitalist social relations just as they did in the 20th century. Attacking the economy as a whole means destroying the basis of exploitation in both private and nationalized industries- it won't be a choice of 1 or the other.

The textile workers in Egypt are a case in point of what I'm talking about. Their constant mass strikes, uniting both public and private sector textile workers (who work next to eachother in the industrial city Mahalla) in the same struggle against the owners and the state. That is the kind of struggle that gives us a hint today what a future revolutionary crisis will look like: a glimpse at a struggle against public and private sector, against politicians (like the Egyptian Trotskyists calling for minimum programme demands), against unions and the state.

But like the Hungarian revolt, isolation is doomed to failure.

Are you saying workers there should count their blessings that some of them work for state owned textile mills and go home? Or fight to make the state nationalize the private sector mills and that this would be a gain?

Edit:


Do you argue that a healthy revolution would not nationalize the property of the capitalist class? That the working class should not institute what you refer to as a "command economy"? I call that a planned economy, are you saying that the workers cannot democratically plan and decide production?

Yes to all. No nationalization, no command economy, no continued existence of classes under illusions of workers self-management.

[Blake's Baby]

So to summarize the list of assumptions you are making:

1. Who owns the means of production does not matter, that is a political superstructure question and not an economic base question...

It's a meaningless question unless you define what you mean by 'owns'.

Classicaly, there are three parts of ownership - usus, abusus and fructus, meaning 'use', 'abuse' and 'fruits', which is best translated as 'products'.

If workers in Russia did not have the rights and opportunities to a) use (and command the use of); b) destroy or disposses and c) take and dispose of the products of, the means of production, they did not 'own' them and all your talk of workers' control is just cant. The working class in Russia did not 'own' anything. Anything to the contrary is just a legal fiction and therefore yes, a superstructural question.



...
2. There is a new kind of capitalism possible, a capitalism without capitalists (who after all, are supposed to own capital)...

Capitalism creates capitalists, not the other way around. The capitalists who existed in Antique Slave societies could not 'create' capitalism as a system; the fact that capitalism continued was enough to create the capitalists. Dispossesing individuals of their capital (as happened in the early Soviet Republic) doesn't get rid of capitalism. You can disposses, exile, imprison or shoot all the capitalists you like, if people go to work and get paid to make stuff that is sold, capitalism will continue.


... which can plan the entire economy, however inefficiently, and thereby unleash enormous growth unlike anything capitalism has ever seen...

I bet you love it when the bourgeois state gors to war as well, and starts to command the economy. That's what socialism is comrade! A vast prison built to wage war! Hurrah for the bright new future of barracks socialism and industrialised death!


...And that raises two questions the supporters of the "state capitalism" fallacy continue to refuse to answer:

1. If the workers took power in Hungary 1956, would they have privatized the nationalized economy? Should they have?

2. Is private property the property base of capitalism or not?

1 - the question makes no sense. Would or should the Hungarian workers have privitiseed the economy if they'd taken power? How could one tell? The Hungarian Uprising was a mix of genuine workers' uprising with a nationalist movement supported by the western powers. It was also doomed to isolation in Hungary. What difference would it have made if they privitised, nationalised, co-operativised or whatever else? They would remain an islated revolutionary territorey in a cpaitalist world. Without world revolution the Hungarian Uprising was doomed. Is it better to be shot or stabbed? That's the choice you're offering.

2 - the basis? What do mean? Do you mean 'the defining characteristic'? In which case, no, it isn't. Wage labour and commodity production are the defining characteristics of capitalism. Many previous forms of society have had 'private property' without being capitalism. Capitalism also has 'non-private' forms of property. So, no, property forms are not a defining characteristic of capitalism, it's the generalisation of commodity production and wage labour that defines whether an economic system is capitalist.

[Lord Hargreaves]

No, I think you misunderstand the process. It wasn't the transition that failed to cross borders, it was the political revolution that failed to cross borders. The working class can't abolish capitalism (begin the economic transformation) until it controls capitalism. It didn't control capitalism, capitalism is a world system and the working class 'begining to tear down capitalism' (nice phrase, I shall continue to use that) can only take place after the political seizure of power. This is why the world revolution is necessary. If capitalism could be abolished in one locality then socialism would be possible in one locality, because like the baby that is either alive or dead, there is no other state. Once capitalism is abolished then socialist society is what follows it - if the Soviet Union wasn't socialism, as you say it wasn't, was else could it be but capitalism?

I think the fact of capitalism being a "world system" can be overemphasized. It is and always was a world system, since its origins, but this term never really meant it was a world system but that it was a world system.

The term isn't intended to mean, at least in my opinion, that capitalism has no power centre, no material grounding in particular parts of the wold, or that it doesn't rely on certain nation states (typically the US in the 20th century) and therefore that there can't in any sense be an "outside" to capitalism. In some countries, the financial system is entirely capitalist but the wage-labour-as-commodity is not the dominant form of labour, etc.

The relevance? You seem to be arguing - by deduction, since there can only be two categories, two world systems, binary opposites - that the USSR must have been fully fledged capitalism because it was not socialism. But clearly, the real world is a lot more complex than that, and it often refuses the logical categories of "capitalism" and "socialism" that theorists construct for it.

I think anyone who doesn't see the USSR as a deeply contradictory, hybrid phenomenon, as something that tends to refuse most categories applied to it, and which causes problems for the most orthodox Marxist theorising which simply reads everything off the Critique, is going to end up deeply mistaken.

The USSR was "half in, half out" of capitalism imo, pursuing its own semi-independent economic path which ultimately failed. As a kind of half way house post-revolutionary state, it made social and economic gains not to be sniffed at - as the absolutely catastrophic collapse in living standards that befell its people after its collapse goes some way to proving.

[Blake's Baby]

I think the fact of capitalism being a "world system" can be overemphasized. It is and always was a world system, since its origins, but this term never really meant it was a world system but that it was a world system...

It absolutely wasn't a world system at any point before the late 19th century at the earliest. As it's possible to see capitalism developing in Europe from the 14th century at the latest, it wasn't a world system for at least 500 years - and for at least 200 of those it was at the very least a local hegemonic system. So, no, I entirely reject every aspect of that argument.


...The term isn't intended to mean, at least in my opinion, that capitalism has no power centre, no material grounding in particular parts of the wold, or that it doesn't rely on certain nation states (typically the US in the 20th century) and therefore that there can't in any sense be an "outside" to capitalism. In some countries, the financial system is entirely capitalist but the wage-labour-as-commodity is not the dominant form of labour, etc...

I agree that there is a lot of simple commodity production in the world. Even in capitalist countries artisan production continues. Doesn't mean that the economy isn't capitalist.


...
The relevance? You seem to be arguing - by deduction, since there can only be two categories, two world systems, binary opposites - that the USSR must have been fully fledged capitalism because it was not socialism. But clearly, the real world is a lot more complex than that, and it often refuses the logical categories of "capitalism" and "socialism" that theorists construct for it...

No, it doesn't.


...I think anyone who doesn't see the USSR as a deeply contradictory, hybrid phenomenon, as something that tends to refuse most categories applied to it, and which causes problems for the most orthodox Marxist theorising which simply reads everything off the Critique, is going to end up deeply mistaken...

Fair enough. I don't. I think anyone who tries to invent new categories for the Soviet Union is going to end up supporting capitalism under a red flag.


...The USSR was "half in, half out" of capitalism imo, pursuing its own semi-independent economic path which ultimately failed. As a kind of half way house post-revolutionary state, it made social and economic gains not to be sniffed at - as the absolutely catastrophic collapse in living standards that befell its people after its collapse goes some way to proving.

But the west had massive gains in living standards after WWII that have since been erroded. Which part of the western economies do you think was 'socialism'?

[CyM]

Perhaps you should ask the public sector workers in the UK and the US (and Greece and Italy and Spain etc.) what they think of the reorganizations of their workplaces, with the consent of 'their' unions.
Unions whose primarily betrayal has been accepting privatization.


This is a very old assumption- going back to social democracy and before that the Communist Manifesto- that nationalized industry is qualitatively 'better' for the working-class. However, you and the rest of the defenders of 'the good old days' (Keynesian post-war era) seem to forget that 'standards of living' and wages rose with productivity until the 1970's, in the private and public sector. How do you explain the erosion of both public and private sector workers' standards of living, working conditions, wages and benefits, etc. in the same time period? You claim that it is privatization, the instrumental choice of politicians and business leaders which is to blame for this erosion of conditions in the public sector, and that it can be stopped and/or reversed if only pro-Keynesian politicians and leaders enacted widespread re-nationalization or halted further privatization. But this doesn't account for the erosion of living standards, wages and benefits across all sectors of the economy in the UK, the US, etc.I am not a Keynsian. Nationalization within capitalism does not do away with the private sector, which remains the fundamental part of the economy, and cannot do away with the market and the profit motive.

But nationalization is a gain for the working class. Even if you only want to talk about the living standards of the workers, it is the public sector where the working class has the best conditions compared to the private sector.

The other thing is the logic of nationalization. Nationalization of the healthcare industry for example is a fundamental gain for the working class, even under capitalism, which was forced on the capitalists by the workers. Here the workers' movement forced the creation of a public industry run not for private profit but for social needs.

Would you argue that the capitalists' clear desire to privatize healthcare and return to market pricing makes no difference, because it is still capitalism either way?


If privatization and the choices of 'greedy' politicians via neo-liberalism or 'capitalist restorationists' in former People's Republics and fSU is to blame for taking away these 'gains of the working-class' (nationalized and quasi-nationalized industries and enterprises of the public sector), how do you explain trends which cut across private and public sectors since the '70s?Would you support the nationalization of the medical industry in the US, and the institution of a state-owned, free healthcare industry? Would that not be a gain for the working class?

Because the privatization that happened in the USSR, even if you consider it to have been from capitalism to capitalism, included the privatization of healthcare and the dismantlement of those reforms. Do you think that did not matter to the living standards of the workers?


No- and I'm trying to be very clear on this since after this statement you make a strange false dichotomy argument:

Nationalization and privatization are acceptable practices in modern capitalism: one is no more 'progressive' than the other- if we are talking about the revolutionary movement to abolish capital and build communism. I'm saying that communists should have no political commitment to either one. The USSR and the former command economies have shown us that the law of value, the commodity form, the use of money as an expression of exchange-value, commodity production, alienation from production, etc. still operate in an environment where the state is the primary owner, regulator, referee of the national economy. Therefore- like Pannekoek's articles on 'socialization' in the time of the November Revolution, where he argued against Otto Bauer and right-wing socialists calling for 'socialization' (nationalization) but maintaining all of the characteristics of capitalism (listed in the previous sentence)- the revolutionary content of the proletarian movement to abolish capital and establish communism makes questions of 'how will we best manage/run capitalism without capitalists?' counter-revolutionary and irrelevant to the task of abolishing capital and building communism.There is no capitalism without capitalists. It is clear, however, that the elements of capitalist exchange still continue without capitalism until we have achieved full communism where money itself ceases to exist.

Are you proposing skipping expropriating the capitalists through the dictatorship of the proletariat and passing straight to a moneyless gift economy?

The first task in "abolishing capital" is capital passing into the hands of the revolutionary working class.


I don't care how to run a 'capitalism with a human face', what the most efficient means of accumulation is, and neither should any other communist. The voices that say 'we must be defend our gains!' in revolutionary ferment are counter-revolutionary. Whether a unionized workforce in a public sector business or industry has a slightly better chance at having a more stable and comfortable life or not is irrelevant to the question of abolishing capitalism and establishing communism.No one is talking about capitalism with a human face. I want to know what you think concretely the working class revolution should do?

The classical programme posed in the communist manifesto and the writings of Marx and Engels is that the workers nationalize the means of production, and begin "socialist accumulation". Expropriate the capitalists through our own state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is all of society except the slave owners. The whole of society takes over all of production, and begins to plan it to the benefit of the whole instead of the profits of the few.

This means a period of construction that gradually leads to the dissolution of money economy and eventually the state itself.

It seems to me, you don't see any role for a workers' state nationalization of the capitalists' means of production, and this is the real issue between us. This is something that goes far deeper than the question of state capitalism. Rather, we are at complete odds when it comes to what is the revolutionary task of the proletariat, its final task.


I answered your question on Hungary earlier but will reiterate:

No- those are not the only 2 choices comrade. Neither is the answer either: private and public sector should be abolished equally. This whole thread is asking about the time between capitalism and communism. You're saying that we should build on state capitalism as it has existed and as it currently exists, that an international command economy is the first step in a long process of transition. I think this is counter-revolutionary and will only re-create capitalist social relations just as they did in the 20th century. Attacking the economy as a whole means destroying the basis of exploitation in both private and nationalized industries- it won't be a choice of 1 or the other.We are not in the business of "attacking the economy as a whole". We are in the business of taking the economy from the capitalists.

This is impossible without some sort of revolutionary nationalization by the proletariat. I don't see what exactly you think is going to happen. Some sort of weird individualist anarchism?

In the case of Hungary, the workers would have only had to change the political form of the state, and smash any attempt at privatization of the economy. The workers would have had to, and in fact did, create new soviets to run the already nationalized economy. Unfortunately, they were smashed by the bureaucracy and did not succeed.


The textile workers in Egypt are a case in point of what I'm talking about. Their constant mass strikes, uniting both public and private sector textile workers (who work next to eachother in the industrial city Mahalla) in the same struggle against the owners and the state. That is the kind of struggle that gives us a hint today what a future revolutionary crisis will look like: a glimpse at a struggle against public and private sector, against politicians (like the Egyptian Trotskyists calling for minimum programme demands), against unions and the state.You are ignoring the fundamental fact that in no case do these workers argue for privatization. In fact, some of those very strikes were against privatization.


But like the Hungarian revolt, isolation is doomed to failure.

Are you saying workers there should count their blessings that some of them work for state owned textile mills and go home? Or fight to make the state nationalize the private sector mills and that this would be a gain?The workers should fight for the nationalization of the entire sector yes, as the beginnings to the nationalization of all the biggest companies, yes.

Are you arguing that they should allow their workplaces to close when a capitalist finds they are not profitable enough?


Yes to all. No nationalization, no command economy, no continued existence of classes under illusions of workers self-management.See, our disagreement is about more than Stalinism, it is about the very core idea of expropriating the capitalists.

There can be no expropriation without nationalization, for what is created otherwise is disconnected and competing workers' cooperatives. Any programme of expropriation without nationalization creates capitalist cooperatives. It is not surprising that this counterrevolutionary programme is exactly the first step the bureaucrats in the former soviet union took in destroying the nationalized economy. First they allowed the factories to compete, which allowed the formation of richer and poorer factories, then they allowed the poorest to close and the richest to expand, then they transformed the managers of the factories to become owners.

You are not arguing against the degeneration. Your programme is the programme of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy just as it transformed itself into a class.


It's a meaningless question unless you define what you mean by 'owns'.

Classicaly, there are three parts of ownership - usus, abusus and fructus, meaning 'use', 'abuse' and 'fruits', which is best translated as 'products'.

If workers in Russia did not have the rights and opportunities to a) use (and command the use of); b) destroy or disposses and c) take and dispose of the products of, the means of production, they did not 'own' them and all your talk of workers' control is just cant. The working class in Russia did not 'own' anything. Anything to the contrary is just a legal fiction and therefore yes, a superstructural question.
This is ridiculous. You may argue about the political side of the equation all you want. We already agree the workers did not have political control. The state owned the entire economy. Meaning there were no private owners of the means of production. The capitalists did not own the capital, and therefore did not exist. Capitalism cannot exist without capitalists which own the means of production.

The bureaucrats controlled the means of production through their role as managers in the state, but they did not own it, and could not pass it down to their heirs, until they privatized it. If your father was a bureaucrat at such and such a factory, or in such and such a ministry, it afforded you privileges and certain advantages, but there was no guarantee that you would then be head bureaucrat in the same place. You could just as well end up with nothing.

The position of the bureaucracy, unlike the position of the property owning capitalist class, was constantly in flux, and they never had the stability of property. Class is based on property.

You are arguing that what existed is capitalism without capitalists, which flies in the face of class analysis.


Capitalism creates capitalists, not the other way around. The capitalists who existed in Antique Slave societies could not 'create' capitalism as a system; the fact that capitalism continued was enough to create the capitalists. Dispossesing individuals of their capital (as happened in the early Soviet Republic) doesn't get rid of capitalism. You can disposses, exile, imprison or shoot all the capitalists you like, if people go to work and get paid to make stuff that is sold, capitalism will continue.So our transition will be a magical leap from capitalism to full communism overnight?:lol:

It is clear that getting paid to make stuff that is sold will still exist after capitalism has been abolished. Before money can lose its power as regulator of exchange, the economy has to first have no need for it. A generation that never lived under capitalist relations would need to be the first to get rid of that.

In the meantime, we would continue to get paid, though with more and more equal pay, until we stopped worrying what we got paid and how much our neighbour worked, because there was plenty to go around.

More importantly, paid labour has existed far before capitalism. The very example you used speaks to this point. The capitalists of antiquity did hire wage labour, and yet the system that existed, even with pockets of capitalist relations, was still ancient slavery, not capitalism!

The fundamental difference between capitalism and elements of capitalist relations in a fundamentally slave-based economy is that the capitalists own the decisive sector of the economy and that capitalist relations are predominant. In a similar sense, elements of feudalism remain to this day in some capitalist economies, and yet they are not feudal. Why? Because the dominant economic property form is capitalist.

In the same way, leftover elements of capitalist economics remain in a transitional society. We will begin socialist construction, not with man as he should be but with real, actual, existing man, as he has emerged from capitalism.

A transitional economy will still have at its beginning: alienation, from each according to his abilities to each according to his work as opposed to his need, ie wage labour, etc...

What a transitional economy will not have, is the capitalist class, the minority which owns the means of production, and whose power issues from that ownership. The first prerequisite for getting rid of all the other cancers that stem from the bourgeois class's mode of production will be to expropriate the economy from them, to eliminate the bourgeois as an owning class.

When the economy passes into the hands of the entire society, we can plan what we want to do with it, where we want to invest, how we want to eliminate pollution, cure cancer, technologically connect the planet, eliminate unemployment, reduce the work day to 6 and then 4 and etc.. hours.

Before the proletariat can stop being a class, it needs to be the ruling economic class, and it will express that through its own state.


I bet you love it when the bourgeois state gors to war as well, and starts to command the economy. That's what socialism is comrade! A vast prison built to wage war! Hurrah for the bright new future of barracks socialism and industrialised death!Hurray for strawmen! Knock those strawmen down!

Why do you think the bourgeoisie has to switch to elements of planning in times of need? Because the capitalist system is chaotic and cannot provide. World War Two was just such a moment. But is not just a question of the command, but the question of what is the decisive factor in the economy.

It is clear that in the capitalist system, even in extreme cases like world war two, the decisive factor was the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class. At no point will the capitalists ever nationalize themselves out of existence. They introduce elements of nationalization, even elements of planning or price controls, but always to support the private sector, never to destroy it.

There is a very important limit to the comparison between this and an economy which has been entirely nationalized and where there are no private capitalists. It is a decisive difference. And while we may both find the bureaucracy disgusting, it is important to note that while the slave owners were the free and politically dominant class under the roman republic and put to the sword under the Caesars, the property form of both periods was theirs. Both the Senate who ruled for them and the Caesar who dominated them were expressions of their own rule, even if in a distorted or deformed form, in the case of the Caesar.

His abolition of the slave owners' direct control of the state did not abolish the slave owners' control of the economy.

The difficulty you are having is a mental one. Since the economic form of rule of the working class is a social one, not a private one, they can have no direct economic rule without direct political rule. This is the fundamental difference between them and all ruling classes to come before them.

The workers can't "own" the means of production without the intermediary of their state, the way the capitalists who play no role in the state own factories regardless. When there is no longer a state, there will also be no workers, because classes have been fully abolished and so has money.

So what is the property form of a society born of a workers' revolution, where a Caesar, a Bonaparte, a Hitler, a Stalin has risen on their backs and usurped their state? It remains the same as when they had political power: the collective state property, ie, the workers' form of economy.


1 - the question makes no sense. Would or should the Hungarian workers have privitiseed the economy if they'd taken power? How could one tell? The Hungarian Uprising was a mix of genuine workers' uprising with a nationalist movement supported by the western powers. It was also doomed to isolation in Hungary. What difference would it have made if they privitised, nationalised, co-operativised or whatever else? They would remain an islated revolutionary territorey in a cpaitalist world. Without world revolution the Hungarian Uprising was doomed. Is it better to be shot or stabbed? That's the choice you're offering.A successful workers' revolution would have done nothing to privatize, but would have erected soviets once again to democratize the planned economy.

I am asking you to be a revolutionary. What would Blake's Baby have advocated during this struggle?

If you cannot bring yourself to call for either maintaining the nationalized economy but putting it under democratic planning, you must explain what exactly you would put forward instead.

This is the way to judge the system how do you go from that to communism? If you do maintain nationalization, then we have to take a hard look at whether your other premises still hold water.

The question about internationalism is a red herring. Many of the soviet soldiers broke down in tears and went over to the revolution when they realized they had been sent to Hungary to put down a workers' revolution, rather than Germany to put down a Fascist revolt as they had been told. It goes without saying that a success in Hungary would have unleashed a wave of revolutions as important as 1917. This is precisely why the Stalinists were determined to crush it.


2 - the basis? What do mean? Do you mean 'the defining characteristic'? In which case, no, it isn't. Wage labour and commodity production are the defining characteristics of capitalism. Many previous forms of society have had 'private property' without being capitalism. Capitalism also has 'non-private' forms of property. So, no, property forms are not a defining characteristic of capitalism, it's the generalisation of commodity production and wage labour that defines whether an economic system is capitalist.Wage labour and commodity production existed in all social systems since ancient slavery. The question is what was the property base. Only when the capitalist class owned the decisive part of the means of production did capitalism come about.

Remember comrade? The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle? You seem to be mechanically replacing that with "is the history of struggle between different means of exchange of labour and commodities". That is only one part of the equation.

The decisive part in Marx's thinking was always what property form leads to what society. Who owns the means of production is the question the workers must solve. Only when we all own the means of production can we begin to demolish capitalism.

[Lord Hargreaves]

It absolutely wasn't a world system at any point before the late 19th century at the earliest. As it's possible to see capitalism developing in Europe from the 14th century at the latest, it wasn't a world system for at least 500 years - and for at least 200 of those it was at the very least a local hegemonic system. So, no, I entirely reject every aspect of that argument.


OK, well, it doesn't much matter. You seem to have excluded all European colonial expansion and empire building prior to the late 19th century as not being relevant to the development of capitalism as a world system, which I doubt is what you meant because such claims would obviously be false. But let's not get into that.



I agree that there is a lot of simple commodity production in the world. Even in capitalist countries artisan production continues. Doesn't mean that the economy isn't capitalist.

I'm not talking about simple commodity production, which is surely as old as human history itself. Capitalism develops so unevenly around the world in different countries, that it is sometimes difficult to say what "the capitalist world system" actually means to people on the ground.


No, it doesn't.

[...]

Fair enough. I don't. I think anyone who tries to invent new categories for the Soviet Union is going to end up supporting capitalism under a red flag.

It seems obvious to me that the experience of the USSR (and that of fascism) throws up theoretical questions that cannot be fully answered by referring to late 19th century ideas, especially not the simplistic rendering of them. Marx's preface to the critique of political economy cannot much help us in understanding these phenomenon, in my opinion, and the base/superstructure language was always at best a metaphor which was never meant quite literally.

As others have said, Marx's writings on the French Revolution contain a much more fluid understanding of the interelations between class struggle and economic development, the growth of the state and property forms, etc. These kinds of writings point us toward the theoretical contributions of other much later Marxists and other radicals for trying to understand what went on in the 20th century


But the west had massive gains in living standards after WWII that have since been erroded. Which part of the western economies do you think was 'socialism'?

OK fine, I cannot argue that gains for the working class mean it was socialism. Fair enough. I think it was in the nature of those gains that made those gains noteworthy. But I guess that's another argument

[marxleninstalinmao]

What do you mean "obviously" because socialism cannot exist in one country... that is utter nonsense. Socialism existed in the USSR and exists in Cuba, China and the DPRK to name just three. Remember, socialism is merely an economic system and has nothing to do with what the government does. So right off the bat, your post is littered with fallacies.

For example, China is still largely socialist, even though it is obviously no longer run by revolutionaries such as Mao, as the business interests are kept in the hands of the state and run largely in the interests of the people. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat still and, thus, is still largely socialist.

You sound like another trot... great...


We acknowledge that the proletarian dictatorship still retains vestiges of the capitalist mode of production, obviously because socialism cannot exist in one country for reasons that have been discussed plentifully.

My question, though, is this: what is the concrete difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and an economy run by a state-capitalist class. It seems like a dumb question but I've been thinking about this a lot lately. At what specific point did the state-capitalist class come into being in the Soviet Union? Was it during the first five year plan? Earlier, in the early 20's?

It seems like the historical basis of the state-capitalist class is strictly political. Meaning, the only process of it coming into being was that of the deprivation of the working class of political power, the crushing of worker's democracy, which happened in the early 20's.

Plainly it is impossible to ascribe a specific date or cutting off point to the exact degeneration of the revolution, because that takes into account many different factors that developed unevenly and under different conditions. I think, though, that it should be easier to remark on the exact occasion of the state-capitalist class's first breaths of life taking into account the institutional, social, and political conditions that gave rise to it.

Hopefully this isn't too much of a noob question, and hopefully it can facilitate some good discussion. Thanks in advance for answers.

[subcp]

Unions whose primarily betrayal has been accepting privatization.

I don't think there has been a betrayal- I think capitalism has undergone changes over time, defined by aspects of these changes in different eras; and a defining aspect of capitalism in the previous era (WWI-1970's) was the institutionalization of the mediation of the sale and conditions of labor: a time when trade unionism became integrated into the state.

The period you're talking about (1970's-present) has seen trade unions consistently negotiate backwards, working conditions, wages, benefits, etc. I don't think privatization is 'special' in this process. Workers in the public sector, such as Wisconsin, saw their union leaders promise to give away every concession in exchange for continued bargaining rights and dues check-off. It would be noteworthy if it was 1 workplace or industry, but it's a generalized tendency. Worker's in the private sector have been undergoing the exact same phenomenon- unions negotiating their 'gains' of the class-struggle of the past with the support of companies and the state.


I am not a Keynsian. Nationalization within capitalism does not do away with the private sector, which remains the fundamental part of the economy, and cannot do away with the market and the profit motive.

But nationalization is a gain for the working class. Even if you only want to talk about the living standards of the workers, it is the public sector where the working class has the best conditions compared to the private sector.

Underconsumptionism is endemic among the post-war Trotskyist groups. It is present today- Andrew Kliman convincingly makes the link between 'underconsumptionist' Trots and Keynesianism in one of his books (Failure of Capitalist Production)- nationalization is a part of this.

And union workers, on average, have higher wages than non-union workers. But in both cases- what you are arguing for is a kinder, gentler capitalism. A better managed capitalism- not the movement for communism.


The other thing is the logic of nationalization. Nationalization of the healthcare industry for example is a fundamental gain for the working class, even under capitalism, which was forced on the capitalists by the workers. Here the workers' movement forced the creation of a public industry run not for private profit but for social needs.

This assumes the state is instrumentalist- that it is up to the people (party members representing a class or a section/faction of a class) at the helm of the state to do with it what they choose. The state debates among academic Marxists in the 70's were very interesting- and one side was what you are proposing: that 'gains' can be won from the state if only a strong worker's party takes control. I'm more sympathetic to the other side of the debate- structuralism. Even when worker's parties have been in control of the state (even after severe revolutionary crisis), the defining aspects of capitalism have continued in operation. This suggests that it is not a tool to be used by one class to exercise its will, but that no matter who is at the helm of the state, they are compelled to assist capital accumulation and reproduction. And this is backed by Engels and Trotsky's writings on the relationship between economic shifts necessitating corresponding political changes.


Would you argue that the capitalists' clear desire to privatize healthcare and return to market pricing makes no difference, because it is still capitalism either way?

Would you support the nationalization of the medical industry in the US, and the institution of a state-owned, free healthcare industry? Would that not be a gain for the working class?

We are supposed to be for the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to abolish the present state of things and build communism- I don't understand how trying to make capitalism kindler and gentler aids that effort, and does anything but divert the attention and energy of individuals who desire a Marxist/communist alternative (and in the event of a revolutionary crisis, the counter-revolution- the history of the 20th century being a case in point).


Because the privatization that happened in the USSR, even if you consider it to have been from capitalism to capitalism, included the privatization of healthcare and the dismantlement of those reforms. Do you think that did not matter to the living standards of the workers?

I'm sure it did. I'm saying that had it stayed nationalized, it would not have helped the struggle for communism one iota.


There is no capitalism without capitalists. It is clear, however, that the elements of capitalist exchange still continue without capitalism until we have achieved full communism where money itself ceases to exist.

I think the capitalist social relation is a constantly changing or evolving animal. Command economies of the 20th century have shown us what a capitalism without capitalists looks like- even if the whole world had a command economy (and all that comes with it- competition between managers, competition between state firms and industries for resources and the most highly skilled workers, money-currency as expression of exchange-value for commodities, etc.) it would still be the capitalist social relation.


Are you proposing skipping expropriating the capitalists through the dictatorship of the proletariat and passing straight to a moneyless gift economy?

I think the real movement of the working-class, from the time it begins to turn capitalist crisis into revolutionary crisis, is the DotP. When all other classes and strata have been 'proletarianized' (had their property expropriated and specialization abolished- including the petit-bourgeoisie, the peasantry, intelligentsia, etc), when all states have been de-legitimized and whithered away, when all vestiges of self-management and 'radical autonomy' have been defeated, we would have communism. I view the transition period as a much messier affair than the communists of the Third International did at the time- I think a 'World Soviet' of disciplined organization and delegating higher and higher authority to larger council bodies is an outdated understanding of the transition to communism for our times.

Trotskyists are even more guilty of trying to reproduce hierarchical self-management in a revolutionary crisis, rather than the real movement to abolish capitalist social relations and forms and constructing communism, not a 'transition' to communism- that the working-class coercing other classes into joining the movement to abolish the 'present state of things' (by force if necessary) while at the same time abolishing states and the law of value is the transition, and is also the concrete steps of building communism. Not this very orderly , organized affair that the various blueprints of state capitalism that exist in leftist groups.


The first task in "abolishing capital" is capital passing into the hands of the revolutionary working class.

I think it is the working-class engaging in crisis activity, elements of which have already sprung up in international struggles since the latest crisis; but that an international, centralized International of communist militants is necessary to turn a working-class engaging in crisis activity to one capable of completing the transition from capitalist crisis to revolutionary crisis to communism.


No one is talking about capitalism with a human face. I want to know what you think concretely the working class revolution should do?

The classical programme posed in the communist manifesto and the writings of Marx and Engels is that the workers nationalize the means of production, and begin "socialist accumulation". Expropriate the capitalists through our own state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is all of society except the slave owners. The whole of society takes over all of production, and begins to plan it to the benefit of the whole instead of the profits of the few.

This means a period of construction that gradually leads to the dissolution of money economy and eventually the state itself.

It seems to me, you don't see any role for a workers' state nationalization of the capitalists' means of production, and this is the real issue between us. This is something that goes far deeper than the question of state capitalism. Rather, we are at complete odds when it comes to what is the revolutionary task of the proletariat, its final task.

We are not in the business of "attacking the economy as a whole". We are in the business of taking the economy from the capitalists.

The idea of a nationalized economy with a "workers party" in charge of a state (even a world state), or generalized self-management of workplaces by workers, are both examples of trying to make capitalism with a human face. Without capital there are no workers- I did not write 'without capitalists there are no workers'. If the proletariat still exists after a deep revolutionary rupture, and goes back to work and begins producing commodities which are exchanged for some form of remuneration (money, labor credits, precious metals, whatever), where property relations continue to alienate them, the counter-revolution has triumphed.

The experience of both communists and the working-class since the time of the Manifesto should demonstrate to us that these conceptions were wrong; or rather, that history and changes in both capitalism and the working-class have made them wrong- the benefit of hindsight. What we need is a conception of revolution, communism and communist organization that fits the needs of these times we live in now and for the future. We aren't going to be re-doing 1917; or 1936; or 1956 or 1968. Marxism isn't a dogma and shouldn't be treated as such. The communists of the Third International rejected their past social democratic conceptions when material conditions and the real experience of the class struggle changed- they met those times with revolutionary content in their theory and practice, but it failed. We need to be up to the task today. There are timeless aspects of Marxist theory, but that we need to take state power is not one of them.




This is impossible without some sort of revolutionary nationalization by the proletariat. I don't see what exactly you think is going to happen. Some sort of weird individualist anarchism?

I think a combination of forms and content will take place in a revolutionary crisis of our times. I'm not proposing a blue-print, and I don't think blueprints are in the least helpful. I think that the material conditions of a capitalist crisis, where the class struggle and human needs collide and force workers who couldn't give a shit about socialist ideals to do things they would not normally do or want to do (like loot, like occupy a warehouse or factory, like organize their neighborhood in place of the state, etc.), there will be a need for pro-revolutionary communists, who make up a small minority of the working-class population, to intervene and engage internationally in the struggle, to combat counter-revolutionary ideas, and to propose communist solutions to the crisis of capitalism. In times of such deep systemic crises, workers who wouldn't ordinarily be revolutionaries, militants, occupiers, looters, rioters, have a tendency to listen to the communist minority- and the only way communists are up to that task is to organize internationally before such a crisis.


In the case of Hungary, the workers would have only had to change the political form of the state, and smash any attempt at privatization of the economy. The workers would have had to, and in fact did, create new soviets to run the already nationalized economy. Unfortunately, they were smashed by the bureaucracy and did not succeed.

You are ignoring the fundamental fact that in no case do these workers argue for privatization. In fact, some of those very strikes were against privatization.

There was revolutionary content in the Hungarian uprising, and I've already said this 'private-nationalized' coin-flip you keep bringing up is a false dichotomy. What we are arguing about is whether or not nationalization is a stage toward communism; I'm arguing it is counter-revolutionary, not revolutionary. That doesn't mean I'm a proponent of privatization- I'm saying that as far as the revolutionary transformation of society goes, neither one is a gain or a step toward communism, and that therefore communists should not get involved in reformism and anti-Marxist economic and political theories- which do concern themselves with making capitalism better.


The workers should fight for the nationalization of the entire sector yes, as the beginnings to the nationalization of all the biggest companies, yes.

Are you arguing that they should allow their workplaces to close when a capitalist finds they are not profitable enough?

See, our disagreement is about more than Stalinism, it is about the very core idea of expropriating the capitalists.

I never said it wasn't; and my answers were yes in the sense that I do think the things you were trying to inflect in the questions as a negative trait.


Do you argue that a healthy revolution would not nationalize the property of the capitalist class? That the working class should not institute what you refer to as a "command economy"? I call that a planned economy, are you saying that the workers cannot democratically plan and decide production?

I meant Yes I am arguing that a healthy revolution would not nationalize anything; that Yes the proletariat should not give power to 'representatives' who would establish a command economy; Yes that worker's democratically planning and deciding production is an extension of the economy we have now but with a kindler, gentler demeanor. There was a reason the mutualist societies and co-ops were so easily integrated into capitalism in the 19th century England- and those movements were huge. Abolishing capitalism is about more than juridicial forms of property, whether individual capitalists own means of production, or whether workers are happy or not while being exploited. Remember, the working-class is the revolutionary class because of its relationship to the M.O.P. It has nothing to do with how moral or good workers are, how altruistic they are, if they are content with their working-conditions; class struggle exists because capitalism cannot provide for the needs and desires of even a majority of humanity. Communists seek to liberate all humanity from class society and un-chain human ingenuity, creativity, etc. while at the same time utilizing some or most of the productive tools capitalism has developed in its centuries long dominance to meet human needs and human desires since we have the capabilities of material abundance. Trotsky's Literature and Revolution is excellent on this point- so before you accuse me of individualist anarchism again, look at the founder of your tendency.

Post is getting lengthy so will cut it off here.

[Blake's Baby]

OK, well, it doesn't much matter. You seem to have excluded all European colonial expansion and empire building prior to the late 19th century as not being relevant to the development of capitalism as a world system, which I doubt is what you meant because such claims would obviously be false. But let's not get into that....

It seems we're misundertading each other, so I think we probably should.

I have not in any way expressed the view that colonialism before the late 19th century is irrelevant to the development of capitalism. I'm arguing against your claim that capitalism has always been a world system. As the earliest 'capitalist behaviour' is evident from the Antique Slave societies c 600BC, and then becomes a locally hegemonic system (in parts of Europe) from the 14th century AD, develops in Europe, is exported as a system to the colonies (but is not immediately established as a hegemonic system) but does not become a system that embraces the great majority of the world until the late 19th century, it seems obvious to me that the claim that 'capitalism has always been a world system' is patently false.



...
I'm not talking about simple commodity production, which is surely as old as human history itself...

No, it isn't, I'd argue. without 'markets' commodity production (simple or capitalist) makes no sense. Simple commodity production takes place in a market setting, typically in the interaction zone between a capitalist and pre-capitalist economy. also, inside a capitalist economy. Also, in a tiny way, inside a pre-capitalist economy. But most production in pre-capitalist economies is for direct use, not commodity production.


... Capitalism develops so unevenly around the world in different countries, that it is sometimes difficult to say what "the capitalist world system" actually means to people on the ground...

So if you're not talking about simple commodity production, wht are you talking about here? Feudal production?



...
It seems obvious to me that the experience of the USSR (and that of fascism) throws up theoretical questions that cannot be fully answered by referring to late 19th century ideas, especially not the simplistic rendering of them. Marx's preface to the critique of political economy cannot much help us in understanding these phenomenon, in my opinion, and the base/superstructure language was always at best a metaphor which was never meant quite literally...

That's up to you. No reason why the rest of us need to care, however.


...As others have said, Marx's writings on the French Revolution contain a much more fluid understanding of the interelations between class struggle and economic development, the growth of the state and property forms, etc. These kinds of writings point us toward the theoretical contributions of other much later Marxists and other radicals for trying to understand what went on in the 20th century...

Bonapartism?

That's a political form not an economic arrangement. The dictatorship of capital can take many forms. Sometimes it cloaks itself in a red flag. It's not hard to understand.



...
OK fine, I cannot argue that gains for the working class mean it was socialism. Fair enough. I think it was in the nature of those gains that made those gains noteworthy. But I guess that's another argument

The nature of those gains in the west, or in the east?

[Blake's Baby]

...
This is ridiculous. You may argue about the political side of the equation all you want. We already agree the workers did not have political control. The state owned the entire economy...

So, it was state capitalism.


... Meaning there were no private owners of the means of production. The capitalists did not own the capital, and therefore did not exist. Capitalism cannot exist without capitalists which own the means of production...

Of course it can. Capitalism creates capitalists, not the other way around.


...The bureaucrats controlled the means of production through their role as managers in the state, but they did not own it, and could not pass it down to their heirs, until they privatized it. If your father was a bureaucrat at such and such a factory, or in such and such a ministry, it afforded you privileges and certain advantages, but there was no guarantee that you would then be head bureaucrat in the same place. You could just as well end up with nothing...

So? That happens to the sons of daughters of capitalists, and indeed aristocrats. Does that mean we've always been living in socialism?


...The position of the bureaucracy, unlike the position of the property owning capitalist class, was constantly in flux, and they never had the stability of property. Class is based on property.

You are arguing that what existed is capitalism without capitalists, which flies in the face of class analysis...

The bureaucratic caste was the capitalist class. Honestly, go and read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific....


...So our transition will be a magical leap from capitalism to full communism overnight?:lol:...

... then go and read the Critique of the Gotha Programme.


...It is clear that getting paid to make stuff that is sold will still exist after capitalism has been abolished. Before money can lose its power as regulator of exchange, the economy has to first have no need for it. A generation that never lived under capitalist relations would need to be the first to get rid of that...

On the contrary, it is clear that "getting paid to make stuff that is sold" means that capitalism still exists.


...
In the meantime, we would continue to get paid, though with more and more equal pay, until we stopped worrying what we got paid and how much our neighbour worked, because there was plenty to go around...

Sorry I don't want to have a revolution if the result is hippy capitalism.


...More importantly, paid labour has existed far before capitalism. The very example you used speaks to this point. The capitalists of antiquity did hire wage labour, and yet the system that existed, even with pockets of capitalist relations, was still ancient slavery, not capitalism!...

It wasn't capitalism as a dominant mode of the economy. It was still 'capitalism' though, much as people can still be directly enslaved, or conversely the Duke of Westminister is still an aristocrat, even though our system is capitalist and not antique slavery or feudal. Economies are about the generalised economic form. In capitalism, that form is wage labour and commodity production. These are what make the USSR capitalist - the fact that the economy conformed to the characteristics of capitalism.

Duck = duck = duck = duck.



...The fundamental difference between capitalism and elements of capitalist relations in a fundamentally slave-based economy is that the capitalists own the decisive sector of the economy and that capitalist relations are predominant. In a similar sense, elements of feudalism remain to this day in some capitalist economies, and yet they are not feudal. Why? Because the dominant economic property form is capitalist...

No, the fundamental differences are the generalisation of commodity production and wage labour. As in the Soviet Union.



...In the same way, leftover elements of capitalist economics remain in a transitional society. We will begin socialist construction, not with man as he should be but with real, actual, existing man, as he has emerged from capitalism.

A transitional economy will still have at its beginning: alienation, from each according to his abilities to each according to his work as opposed to his need, ie wage labour, etc...

The 'transitional economy' you're talking about is still capitalist. At best, ie under the control of the proletariat (which you say wasn't the case in Russia) the DotP will be the working class administering capitalism. Without the working class in control you have 'the working class administering capitalism', minus 'the working class'. What you are then left with is 'administering capitalism'. As we're already agreed on the role of the state here, then we have 'the state administering capitalism' - ie state capitalism.


...What a transitional economy will not have, is the capitalist class, the minority which owns the means of production, and whose power issues from that ownership. The first prerequisite for getting rid of all the other cancers that stem from the bourgeois class's mode of production will be to expropriate the economy from them, to eliminate the bourgeois as an owning class....

But you can't eliminate capitalism in one territory. If the revolution had swept the world, and all the capitalists hd been expropriated, I'd agree with you. But it didn't happen. Socialism is impossible in one country, so the 'transition' you talk of didn't happen. I was arguing with someone a couple of days ago - it may even have been you - that if you build a bridge that doesn't reach the other side of the river, it isn't a bridge. And if you start a 'transition' that doesn't get anywhere, it isn't a transition. It's a failure.


...When the economy passes into the hands of the entire society, we can plan what we want to do with it, where we want to invest, how we want to eliminate pollution, cure cancer, technologically connect the planet, eliminate unemployment, reduce the work day to 6 and then 4 and etc.. hours.

Before the proletariat can stop being a class, it needs to be the ruling economic class, and it will express that through its own state...

I absolutely agree. But the 'economy' doesn't just mean the economy of one place (because all economies are interlinked), the 'entire society' doesn't just mean in one corner of the planet because we're one species and one society.


...Hurray for strawmen! Knock those strawmen down!...

Seems a reasonable enough extrapolation to me, you're the one that thinks state planning is cool.


...
Why do you think the bourgeoisie has to switch to elements of planning in times of need? Because the capitalist system is chaotic and cannot provide. World War Two was just such a moment. But is not just a question of the command, but the question of what is the decisive factor in the economy...

Do you think the USSR's economy was less chaotic than the Western economies then?


...It is clear that in the capitalist system, even in extreme cases like world war two, the decisive factor was the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class. At no point will the capitalists ever nationalize themselves out of existence. They introduce elements of nationalization, even elements of planning or price controls, but always to support the private sector, never to destroy it.

There is a very important limit to the comparison between this and an economy which has been entirely nationalized and where there are no private capitalists. It is a decisive difference. And while we may both find the bureaucracy disgusting, it is important to note that while the slave owners were the free and politically dominant class under the roman republic and put to the sword under the Caesars, the property form of both periods was theirs. Both the Senate who ruled for them and the Caesar who dominated them were expressions of their own rule, even if in a distorted or deformed form, in the case of the Caesar.

His abolition of the slave owners' direct control of the state did not abolish the slave owners' control of the economy.

The difficulty you are having is a mental one. Since the economic form of rule of the working class is a social one, not a private one, they can have no direct economic rule without direct political rule. This is the fundamental difference between them and all ruling classes to come before them.

The workers can't "own" the means of production without the intermediary of their state, the way the capitalists who play no role in the state own factories regardless. When there is no longer a state, there will also be no workers, because classes have been fully abolished and so has money.

So what is the property form of a society born of a workers' revolution, where a Caesar, a Bonaparte, a Hitler, a Stalin has risen on their backs and usurped their state? It remains the same as when they had political power: the collective state property, ie, the workers' form of economy...

But capitalism was never abolished. So Hitlers, Stalins and Bonapartes can come and go. Only the colours on the flags change. It's not 'usurping their state', it's a change of command on the ship of state. Difference between (say) Stalin and Kornilov? Nothing.


...A successful workers' revolution would have done nothing to privatize, but would have erected soviets once again to democratize the planned economy...

There is no 'succesful workers' revolution' in a single territory. There is only the start of the world revolution. Anything else you say here is just meaningless verbiage, because you're failing to grasp a fairly fundamental point.


...I am asking you to be a revolutionary. What would Blake's Baby have advocated during this struggle?...

Workers' councils administering production, sidelining the nationalist elements, immediate extension of the struggle to all sectors of the economy, and urgent campaigns to extend the revolution outside of the territory of Hungary by trying to involve the working class in Czechoslovakia, Austria, Romania, USSR and Yugoslavia.


...If you cannot bring yourself to call for either maintaining the nationalized economy but putting it under democratic planning, you must explain what exactly you would put forward instead...

Control by the workers' councils. No 'nation' and no 'nationalisation' involved.


...This is the way to judge the system how do you go from that to communism? If you do maintain nationalization, then we have to take a hard look at whether your other premises still hold water...

What does that nation/state have to do with the workers' councils?


...The question about internationalism is a red herring. Many of the soviet soldiers broke down in tears and went over to the revolution when they realized they had been sent to Hungary to put down a workers' revolution, rather than Germany to put down a Fascist revolt as they had been told. It goes without saying that a success in Hungary would have unleashed a wave of revolutions as important as 1917. This is precisely why the Stalinists were determined to crush it...

Over-egging the pudding much? I don't think it was 'obvious' at all. I'd certainly be wanting it to happen, but I'm also fairly sure that it was extremely difficult for it to happen. Your absolute blind faith that it was inevitable is religious dogma not Marxist analysis.


...Wage labour and commodity production existed in all social systems since ancient slavery. The question is what was the property base. Only when the capitalist class owned the decisive part of the means of production did capitalism come about...

Did yo see the part where I said 'generalisation'? Someone less polite than me might claim that you were being 'dishonest' or creating strawmen here. So, why did you ignore the point that capitalism (as a system) is the generalisation of wage labour and commodity production? Is it becasue it actually makes it very hard for you to argue the case that the Societ Union wasn't capitalist?


...Remember comrade? The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle? You seem to be mechanically replacing that with "is the history of struggle between different means of exchange of labour and commodities". That is only one part of the equation.

The decisive part in Marx's thinking was always what property form leads to what society. Who owns the means of production is the question the workers must solve. Only when we all own the means of production can we begin to demolish capitalism.

The economic basis of society is determined by the method of extraction of labour. Wage labour and commodity production mean a syste is capitalist.

I agree that we can only begin to demolish capitalism once we all own the means of production - all the means of production. This did not happen in Russia in 1917 (95% of the means of production were not owned even by the working class in Russia, let alone anywhere else) so the task of demolishing capitalism could not even begin. Why do you then think it was completed?

[subcp]

There can be no expropriation without nationalization, for what is created otherwise is disconnected and competing workers' cooperatives. Any programme of expropriation without nationalization creates capitalist cooperatives. It is not surprising that this counterrevolutionary programme is exactly the first step the bureaucrats in the former soviet union took in destroying the nationalized economy. First they allowed the factories to compete, which allowed the formation of richer and poorer factories, then they allowed the poorest to close and the richest to expand, then they transformed the managers of the factories to become owners.

You are not arguing against the degeneration. Your programme is the programme of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy just as it transformed itself into a class.

Bureaucracy is not a class, now or then.

Expropriation means taking shit. Bauer argued for expropriation with remuneration and 'socialization' (nationalization). From his Left-Wing Childishness article from 1918, Lenin writes:

"Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability."

Yet this argument is based on one of taking state power, of re-organizing rather than abolishing the capitalist economy- if worker's expropriate the means of production and distribution, there are other options besides nationalization or setting up "competing co-ops". At first there may be the equivalent of simply taking produced commodities (necessities of life like food), but if the power of the bourgeoisie is smashed and the tendencies to re-institute capitalist social relations are beaten down, people, in the process of being liberated from class, will have to continue to produce to continue to live- and in that process would have to build new ways of living and laboring. In times when severe economic crisis or revolution put a wrench in the works of capital and its state organization, people have proved resilient enough to build new forms of self-organization to meet human needs: like the barter co-ops between town and country in Russia (which were taken over by the Bolshevik-state in the first few years after February and October) and hinted at in the commune's of Spain, the councils in Hungary, etc. Whether nationalized or "workers co-ops", the result is capitalist social relations under the illusion of "workers power". In Russia the workers let the state, 'their state', take over what they were engaged in. In Spain, the workers thought their autonomy and militarization was enough to ensure the state could not interfere with the commune's. In both cases they were mistaken. No remuneration, no nationalization or privatization, but the abolition of the concept of ownership entirely- simultaneously with the abolition of class society, organized in numerous forms (traditional workplace level committee's, councils or assemblies, geographic committee's, councils or assemblies, etc.)- probably dependent on the composition of the working-class and the kinds of workplaces the majority are currently employed in.

[CyM]

Ok, first off, I am actually enjoying this discussion and think it is fruitful.

Now that that is out of the way, Blake's Baby and subcp have slightly nuanced differences. subcp seems to understand that the bureaucracy in and of itself cannot be a class, although of course I would point out that they can stop being bureaucrats and become capitalists instead, when the wall fell.

His criticism comes from an anarchist perspective, and therefore makes sense from that perspective. If what you are looking for is the immediate abolition of the concept of property, you cannot view state property as a transitional form towards that abolition. I cannot get into an argument over anarchism, so I will have to leave it at the fact that what the Stalinists did in Spain was not merely to break up the independence of the collectives through the state, but to break up the collectives themselves and return them to the ownership of the capitalists. That is a quite different question than degeneration of a nationalized economy, in Spain they intentionally did not allow nationalization.

Blake's Baby on the other hand, has the following assumptions:

1. Capitalism means "getting paid to make stuff that is sold".
2. This does not have to include a class that owns the means of production who pay people who own no means of production to make stuff that is sold.
3. The world revolution is one integral whole, or it dies.
4. When the workers take over, they will do so through workers' councils or not at all.
5. Workers' councils are not a state.
6. There can be no bonapartist form of workers' rule, analogous to bourgeois bonapartism where a state usurped their political power without removing them as the ruling economic class, or Absolutism over the feudal lords or Caesarism over the slave owners.

There are a few important points that blake's baby is not considering.

1. The marxist analysis of class society is based not only on relations of exchange, but primarily on relations of property and the classes which spring from them. So, the slaveowning class versus the slaves, the landowning class versus the peasants on the land, the capital owning class versus the propertyless working class who worked the capital. Forms of property are decisive.

2. Marx posited that the proletarian revolution would be the first where an exploited class would not then promptly create a new exploited class, and become exploiters themselves. On this basis, he considered the socialist revolution to be the one to end classes entirely and to dissolve the state. But he never considered this to be an immediate act, that was bakunin's position.

3. Marx considered that the proletariat would take power, take control of the economy from the capitalists, smash them, and in the act of smashing them, thereby abolish themselves as a class. A society cannot have a class of one, it can either have several, or it is classless.

4. To smash the capitalist class, requires smashing the armed remnants of the capitalist class. This means, the defence of workers' democracy requires that that democracy be armed. The marxist definition of a state is "armed bodies of men (and women), separate and above society in defence of the property rights of the ruling class". In the case of the workers' revolution, it is clear that their armed workers' councils constitute the state of the working class.

5. This state is unlike any other, because the armed force it relies on is the majority of society. This gives it a semi-state character, which does not allow it to rise above society, and as the contradictions between worker and capitalist are reduced (by the gradual elimination of capitalist holdovers worldwide), it also gradually falls into disuse. Eventually it "withers away" like a plant whose roots have been nourished by the class struggle since the beginning of history, and starves without it.

6. One cannot conflate the end goal, with the beginning of the process. The working class will never take power across the globe all at once! It is inevitable that a Tunisia, an Egypt, will spark the revolution, and other countries will follow at their own pace. It is inevitable that the revolution will be a protracted process with steps forward and back, and not a mere straight line up, the way that a child imagines the world to work.

7. You keep bringing up the bridge analogy, as in, to build half a bridge is not to build a bridge at all. Your analogy, which was "half a transition is not a transition", is false. To walk across a bridge, and get hit by a car, and stumble blindly before tripping and falling off the edge into the water below, does not mean you were never crossing the bridge in the first place. It's a stupid analogy that does not hold water, even from a basic logical perspective. Using the same analogy, we would say there has yet to be any revolution, because none have been able to completely overturn the new relations, hence the wheel of history never made an actual revolution. See the stupidity of throwing out all half-way developments?

So to summarize:

Because the revolution will begin in one, or a series of countries before it becomes a global victory, it is possible for the revolution to stall, even go into reverse. Because the workers at first throw up a state, such a stalling would produce contradictions which, as a result of the isolation in one country, would tend to produce a bonapartist degeneration, where that state slips out of their political control. And yet even with that state out of their control, the workers' form of property remains dominant: state property. When there are no more workers, there will be no more state and no property at all. But until then, the "collective property" of communism that we are transitioning towards can only express itself as nationalized property through a state. And that state can degenerate as soon as the transition is no longer advancing, the world revolution has stalled.

[Blake's Baby]

...
Blake's Baby on the other hand, has the following assumptions:

1. Capitalism means "getting paid to make stuff that is sold"...

Accurrate in its essentials.

Capitalism as a system is the generalisation (you keep missing that part) of wage labour and commodity production.


...2. This does not have to include a class that owns the means of production who pay people who own no means of production to make stuff that is sold...

Not at all. Capitalism always has a class of capitalists, it just doesn't have to grant them the power to hand shares to their children in order for them to be a class.


...
3. The world revolution is one integral whole, or it dies...

Yes. Socialism in one country is impossible, and even the dictatorship of the proletariat can only last briefly if isolated.


...
4. When the workers take over, they will do so through workers' councils or not at all...

'...or not at all' - that's a big claim. I can't see how the workers could take over the economy and the state except through the workers' councils. If you know another way, perhaps you could outline it.


...
5. Workers' councils are not a state...

That's debatable. They're not a state like other states, but they are in the end 'men armed in defence of property relations'.


...
6. There can be no bonapartist form of workers' rule, analogous to bourgeois bonapartism where a state usurped their political power without removing them as the ruling economic class, or Absolutism over the feudal lords or Caesarism over the slave owners...

If a bonapart dispossess the working class, then no there is no working class rule, therefore there can be no 'bonapartist' class rule. A bonapart can rule as the representative of the bourgeoisie, even if individual bourgeoises are dispossessed, by acting in the interests of the bourgeoisie and capitali as a whole. An individual can't rule as a 'representative' of the working class - how can one person represent the economic interests of the whole of humanity?


...There are a few important points that blake's baby is not considering.

1. The marxist analysis of class society is based not only on relations of exchange, but primarily on relations of property and the classes which spring from them. So, the slaveowning class versus the slaves, the landowning class versus the peasants on the land, the capital owning class versus the propertyless working class who worked the capital. Forms of property are decisive...

What is property in this context? The working class didn't 'own' the means of production in the USSR and therefore can't be said to have been the 'propertied' class. The class that 'owned' (had control over the use, 'abuse' and produce of the means of production) was the bureaucracy which functioned as a capitalist class.

Legal fictions are not decisive. Actual relations of production are. Property in the USSR was a series of legal fictions.


...
2. Marx posited that the proletarian revolution would be the first where an exploited class would not then promptly create a new exploited class, and become exploiters themselves. On this basis, he considered the socialist revolution to be the one to end classes entirely and to dissolve the state. But he never considered this to be an immediate act, that was bakunin's position...

And? I don't think the revolution will immediately end the state and institute socialist society, I don't think it's possible. The revolution will have to start in territory A and continue to advance around the world until it has conquered territory Z - that will take time. In the meantime, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be established to administer the revolutionary territories.


...
3. Marx considered that the proletariat would take power, take control of the economy from the capitalists, smash them, and in the act of smashing them, thereby abolish themselves as a class. A society cannot have a class of one, it can either have several, or it is classless...

Agreed. But this can't be done in one terrritory.


...4. To smash the capitalist class, requires smashing the armed remnants of the capitalist class. This means, the defence of workers' democracy requires that that democracy be armed. The marxist definition of a state is "armed bodies of men (and women), separate and above society in defence of the property rights of the ruling class". In the case of the workers' revolution, it is clear that their armed workers' councils constitute the state of the working class...

Agreed.


...5. This state is unlike any other, because the armed force it relies on is the majority of society. This gives it a semi-state character, which does not allow it to rise above society, and as the contradictions between worker and capitalist are reduced (by the gradual elimination of capitalist holdovers worldwide), it also gradually falls into disuse. Eventually it "withers away" like a plant whose roots have been nourished by the class struggle since the beginning of history, and starves without it...

Agreed. I don't know why you think these are points I haven't 'taken into account'.


...6. One cannot conflate the end goal, with the beginning of the process. The working class will never take power across the globe all at once! It is inevitable that a Tunisia, an Egypt, will spark the revolution, and other countries will follow at their own pace. It is inevitable that the revolution will be a protracted process with steps forward and back, and not a mere straight line up, the way that a child imagines the world to work...

Is it inevitable that someone will conjour strawmen from nothing?

No-one has ever claimed the working class will take power everywhere simultaneously.

It's true that one cannot conflate the end goal with the beginning of the process. That is why we shouldn't conflate the begining of the revolution, in Russia, with the goal of the revolution.


...7. You keep bringing up the bridge analogy, as in, to build half a bridge is not to build a bridge at all. Your analogy, which was "half a transition is not a transition", is false. To walk across a bridge, and get hit by a car, and stumble blindly before tripping and falling off the edge into the water below, does not mean you were never crossing the bridge in the first place. It's a stupid analogy that does not hold water, even from a basic logical perspective. Using the same analogy, we would say there has yet to be any revolution, because none have been able to completely overturn the new relations, hence the wheel of history never made an actual revolution. See the stupidity of throwing out all half-way developments?...

Not at all, it's a perfect analogy, unlike staggering across a built bridge, the analogy is building half a bridge, but calling it a bridge. A bridge has a function, it's to get from here to there. If it doesn't go there, it doesn't fulfill its function - ie, it's not a bridge. Half a revolution is not a revolution, it doesn't fulfill its function.


...So to summarize:

Because the revolution will begin in one, or a series of countries before it becomes a global victory, it is possible for the revolution to stall, even go into reverse...

Absolutely. This is what happened in the period 1917-27.


... Because the workers at first throw up a state, such a stalling would produce contradictions which, as a result of the isolation in one country, would tend to produce a bonapartist degeneration, where that state slips out of their political control...

My main argument is that it doesn't 'tend' to slip from their control but that it will slip from their control.


...And yet even with that state out of their control, the workers' form of property remains dominant: state property...

Hang on, how is 'state property' noew 'workers' property'? It's just state property. It was always state property, from the point the capitalists were expropriated. the difference is that in the first case the state being administered by the working clas, and in the second it isn't.


... When there are no more workers, there will be no more state and no property at all. But until then, the "collective property" of communism that we are transitioning towards can only express itself as nationalized property through a state. And that state can degenerate as soon as the transition is no longer advancing, the world revolution has stalled.

And once it degenerates there is nothing that remains for the working class. Just a hugely powerful state that oppresses them. engels was right. The capitalist relation is not done away with.

[subcp]

His criticism comes from an anarchist perspective, and therefore makes sense from that perspective. If what you are looking for is the immediate abolition of the concept of property, you cannot view state property as a transitional form towards that abolition. I cannot get into an argument over anarchism, so I will have to leave it at the fact that what the Stalinists did in Spain was not merely to break up the independence of the collectives through the state, but to break up the collectives themselves and return them to the ownership of the capitalists. That is a quite different question than degeneration of a nationalized economy, in Spain they intentionally did not allow nationalization.My views are informed by the German/Dutch and Italian communist left; that some anarchists like some Marxist groups or ideas (which they usually call 'Libertarian Marxists'- like Luxemburg and Pannekoek, the KAPD, Mouvement Communiste and TPTG) is immaterial. Most Anarchists are not proponents of most Marxist concepts (formal/real domination of capital, decadence theory, historical materialism) or Marxist forms of organization of communists (the class party/the International and fraction/party relationship).

I get the feeling from your comment that you think I'm advocating something like the Spanish revolution, the CNT-FAI, etc. which is not the case at all.

We're speaking strictly of Marxism; and specifically the lived experience of the class struggle and communist theory and practice since 1848 and how our understanding of the transition from capitalism to communism, the form of organization communists engage in, the practices of communists in pre-and-post revolutionary situations, and how we conceive communism should change with these experiences of history and developments of communist theory and practice.

You're arguing from the perspective of communism and revolution that was the content of communist revolution in 1917- I'm arguing that our understanding of the transition from capitalist crisis-revolutionary crisis-communism, the tasks of communists now and in the future, etc. must be informed by the experience of 1917-1936 and theoretical development since then. That we cannot get a do-over on the same terrain of 1917; that both capital and the working-class are significantly different today and we must act accordingly.

I don't mean to step on anyone's toes, and Blake's Baby's answers will differ from mine, but we are arguing from the same 'side' (broadly defined left communism) so will jump in.


On this basis, he considered the socialist revolution to be the one to end classes entirely and to dissolve the state. But he never considered this to be an immediate act, that was bakunin's position.No, we won't have a crisis turned revolutionary wave then immediately have communism. There is a transition from capitalism to communism, I'm saying the task of the working-class and its communist minority is simply not to build a 'transitional society': that the content of the revolution, whatever forms it takes (councils or geographic general assemblies or a mandated delegate system of committee's or anything else), will have as its content communism; not the 'preconditions for communism'. The transition would immediately begin the movement for communism, and that the content of this movement is communism (not taking state power, not nationalization, not the perpetuation of the working-class). This is a significant difference, and is the basis of the communisation milieu (who are themselves drawing on the experience of the German/Dutch communist left and Bordigism).

example:

‘[T]he formulae ‘workers’ control’ and ‘workers’ management’ are lacking in any content. … The ‘content’ [of socialism] won't be proletarian autonomy, control, and management of production, but the disappearance of the proletarian class; of the wage system; of exchange — even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for labour-power; and, finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as well. There will be nothing to control and manage, and nobody to demand autonomy from.’ Amadeo Bordiga, The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism (1957) (ICP, 1972).


Marx considered that the proletariat would take power, take control of the economy from the capitalists, smash them, and in the act of smashing them, thereby abolish themselves as a class. A society cannot have a class of one, it can either have several, or it is classless.Taking power can be conceived differently from what you are suggesting. I'd argue that the de-legitimizing of the state, mass refusal to go to work, self-organization in the workplace and/or the community in the context of a crisis is the working-class exercising class power and taking political power- the self-organized working-class (in councils, committee's, assemblies) directing other classes and strata to follow its will in the movement to communism is political power wielded by the proletariat; and it is based on my reading of Pannekoek's writings on 'Mass Action', a concept that was further developed (as the content of a proletarian revolutionary movement) by the very young Communist Party of America & Communist Labor Party (before the Bolshevization of the CP's) in 1919-1920 (and before that popular with the revolutionary section of the Socialist Party of America).


To smash the capitalist class, requires smashing the armed remnants of the capitalist class. This means, the defence of workers' democracy requires that that democracy be armed. The marxist definition of a state is "armed bodies of men (and women), separate and above society in defence of the property rights of the ruling class". In the case of the workers' revolution, it is clear that their armed workers' councils constitute the state of the working class.What BB and I are both arguing is that the formation of a semi-state or 'para-state' is a necessity due to classes not disappearing immediately; you're right, that the organs of force and coercion that the working-class uses to force other classes and strata to bend to its will in the movement for communism is this 'semi-state' or 'para-state'; we're saying that this is not an asset of the revolutionary proletariat but is instead a conservative force that favors stasis, not revolution. It is not an ally of the revolution but is a force that weighs negatively, and must be constantly supervised by the class and its communist minority so that it doesn't put the brakes on the revolution (by going out of control like the Tcheka, or become fused with other forms of organization of production or representation that may arise in the course of the revolutionary movement). As long as there are classes some kind of state will arise; we're saying that the communist minority shouldn't identify with this semi-state let alone operate it directly.


One cannot conflate the end goal, with the beginning of the process. The working class will never take power across the globe all at once! It is inevitable that a Tunisia, an Egypt, will spark the revolution, and other countries will follow at their own pace. It is inevitable that the revolution will be a protracted process with steps forward and back, and not a mere straight line up, the way that a child imagines the world to work.You're right; the first regions or areas that have generalized crisis activity turned revolutionary crisis will by nature of being first be in the advance of the rest of the class. But the process of the movement for communism in the context of turning a capitalist crisis into a revolutionary crisis into a movement for communism, will have to spread. It took almost a decade before the waves created by the Paris Commune to reach the US (Great Upheaval 1877); it took a span of 10 years for the revolutionary wave after WWI to reach most areas of the globe (1917-1927); during OWS/Indignados, it took a matter of 6 weeks before the general assembly-occupations forms spread to every corner of the globe. Capital has centralized, it is a tendency of capital to centralize, and with it the development of the productive forces (which includes logistics and communications technology)- the process for a spark, the advance of the revolution, to spread around the world will by nature of this centralization spread faster than previous waves of struggles, as will the forms of that struggle. Just like the Soviet form spread after WWI, and the general assembly-occupation form spread in the Fall of 2011, the next revolutionary wave and its forms and content too should spread rapidly and encompass larger and larger areas of the globe until covering it- it must spread, or it will die.

[CyM]

Ok, so then we're agreed on the following points:

1. The revolution will start in a country or a few countries, and must spread until it has overthrown capitalism worldwide or it will die.

2. The workers will take power and take control of production through workers' councils, which will democratically control production.

3. Until the final dissolution of classes, these workers' councils will need to defend themselves against the resistance of the minority of exploiters, and will therefore constitute a workers' state.

Which brings up the next few in my head:

1. The individual workers still owns no productive property, how could he? This is a revolution to collectivize the means of production. The only way the individual worker's ownership of the means of production can be expressed is indirectly, through the workers' councils/workers' state. Therefore, the only way the whole class can rule economically is through that state.

2. If the workers' councils take control of the means of production, this is known as expropriation/nationalization under workers' control. A state seizing productive property is known as nationalization.

3. So long as capitalism has not completely disappeared worldwide, and the working class still exists, the state still exists and a collective property still exists. We think of it as ours, not the capitalists', as opposed to not even understanding the concept of property.

4. Ultimately, the complete abolition of property, classes, money, the state, and the compulsion to work, will be a communist society. Where we are defined not as workers but as human beings, for there are no classes. This is a communist form of property, or more correctly, the complete lack of property. But as explained, before we get there, we have a form of property, the workers' form of property. And as 1 and 2 explain, that is nationalization.

To summarize, the transitional property form is the complete expropriation of the capitalist class by the workers. This is done through workers' councils, a political tool, a state. Since the workers' councils are expropriating, this is nationalization of the economy. So the workers' form of property is the complete nationalization of the economy, as a first step towards forgetting the concept of property entirely, which can only happen when there are no classes and no need to define collective ownership.

And finally, if the workers' economic rule is expressed through nationalization, then their political rule is, unlike other classes, ultimately important. This is something we can agree on. That being said, there can be steps back, without necessarily completely losing economic rule.

We are all agreed that the workers' revolution dies if it does not spread to the entire planet. But instant death is not something that often happens in nature. More common are painful terminal diseases. Stalinism is the long protracted death of the nationalized property form left behind long after the workers' revolution has stopped spreading and even retreated from political control.

Since the economy is completely nationalized, any bonapartist cancer that grows on this body will be a monstrous one, worse than any known to man. Bad enough to confuse some doctors as to where the cancer stops and the body starts.

[Blake's Baby]

No, before we have abolished property, there is only property. There is no 'workers' property'. There is property administered by the workers' own organs (the workers' councils) but this is not 'nationalised'.

[CyM]

No, before we have abolished property, there is only property. There is no 'workers' property'. There is property administered by the workers' own organs (the workers' councils) but this is not 'nationalised'.
If it is not owned by private individuals but by the workers' councils organized as a state, it is nationalized.

[CyM]

Wait, let's try this from a different angle:


No, before we have abolished property, there is only property. There is no 'workers' property'. There is property administered by the workers' own organs (the workers' councils) but this is not 'nationalised'.
So, after the revolution, but before the abolition of all property, you say there is just "property" in the abstract.

You say it is not "workers' property", but just "property" administered by the workers' councils organized as a state.

Question, is there still "captialist" property? Who owns this abstract "property" that still exists in the transition? What class?

Do the capitalists still own the "abstract property" even though they've been overthrown by the workers? Or do the workers, through the workers' councils, own this property?

[subcp]

Question, is there still "captialist" property? Who owns this abstract "property" that still exists in the transition? What class?

You've been linking expropriation to nationalization throughout the discussion- if you want to focus on this specific area of disagreement, the difference is one of conception.

Expropriation is merely taking control from private property owners- this has taken the form of 'socialization' (i.e. nationalization) in the 20th century; whether the Putilov works in Russia or the British Coal Board after WWII- in both cases, the state takes ownership.

Expropriation can also be conceived as workers refusing to recognize ownership of the means of production; since the working-class is an exploited class and cannot own property by its definition (proletariat- those who have nothing but their labor power to sell), they merely remove ownership from the equation. Internationalist Perspective has written a good deal about a term found in Marx, the "collective worker". The need to collectivize was apparent in nations which were underdeveloped and backward when capitalism made its transition from ascendance to decadence- but, capitalism itself centralizes as a general tendency, inherent in its operation as a mode of production. Today, capital, the means of production, are so centralized that it is a moot point. The working-class is the grave-digger of capitalism, and capitalism has created the productive and distributive and consumptive apparatus that allows the working-class to abolish capital and class society and build a society based on abundance.

The Lenin quote I posted earlier from 'Left Wing Childishness' says this: that the state could not by decree 'socialize' production, even after the bourgeoisie had been expropriated. Socialization/collectivization is a mechanism of capital in its development- it cannot be forced (except through state capitalism). I'm arguing that the means of production and concentrations of the proletariat are well past the time when it needed to be turned into 'collective workers'. That the struggle is directly for communism, and not to build a 'transitional society' as a precondition for communism.

If you start from expropriation, workers seizing workplaces, occupying workplaces and communities, instituting the various forms of class power and decision making (councils, committee's, assemblies), the working-class has attacked the concept of ownership of private property. I'm saying that 'nationalization' as a step after expropriation is a step backwards and is counter-revolutionary; that the revolutionary step in the context of a generalized revolutionary crisis, in the movement for communism, is to stop recognizing ownership- that production is now under the collective control of the working-class which is manifested through decision making bodies (councils, committee's, assemblies).

I don't know what BB thinks about this, but you keep saying that both the worker's councils, workplace or neighborhood committee's and general assemblies, and the organs of armed coercion, are together the 'semi-state'. I don't see it that way; if the means of decision making, operating production/distribution/consumption of goods and services, and the means of exercising coercive force against other classes and strata are merged, it is counter-revolutionary. If the semi-state is the organs of the armed working-class, organized to combat other classes and strata, if it becomes combined with councils, committee's and assemblies, it is no longer the 'semi-state' but begins to take on characteristics of the capitalist state- which is what happened in the Bolshevik days after October (1918-1919 specifically).


So long as capitalism has not completely disappeared worldwide, and the working class still exists, the state still exists and a collective property still exists. We think of it as ours, not the capitalists', as opposed to not even understanding the concept of property.

It's not about 'not understanding' the concept of property, it is about abolishing property as a concept in the real-world. If what was private property under capitalism has been seized (expropriated) by workers, there are 2 different options: maintain property by giving it to a state, or act to abolish property by refusing to recognize ownership by the state or capitalists- 'property' (factories, land, etc.) are simply for common use, un-owned by anyone. Communism requires free access to the means of production as the "property" of everyone- swapping one owner (an individual capitalist) for another (state property) is a step backwards. Bordiga's article "Seize the Factories or Seize Power?" was written in the heat of events during the factory councils/factory occupations in Italy 1920- and is about this very subject.

[Blake's Baby]

...

I don't know what BB thinks about this, but you keep saying that both the worker's councils, workplace or neighborhood committee's and general assemblies, and the organs of armed coercion, are together the 'semi-state'. I don't see it that way; if the means of decision making, operating production/distribution/consumption of goods and services, and the means of exercising coercive force against other classes and strata are merged, it is counter-revolutionary. If the semi-state is the organs of the armed working-class, organized to combat other classes and strata, if it becomes combined with councils, committee's and assemblies, it is no longer the 'semi-state' but begins to take on characteristics of the capitalist state- which is what happened in the Bolshevik days after October (1918-1919 specifically)...

Interesting. Do you have any specific works in mind on this, subcp? My assumption is that the militia will be under th control of the workers' councils - everything will be under the control of the workiers' councils. Who else would excercise armed force, if not the organised working class? Is that the state creeping back, do you think?

[subcp]

It may be just the way I've read the ICC's articles on the October Revolution, Bolshevik party post-1917, the semi-state, etc.

Like this:



This article does not aim to analyse the nature of the new state;[1] (http:///C:/WR/pc/Rint/145/En_145_workers%20councils%205_v3.doc#_ftn1) however to illustrate the subject we are dealing with, we must show that while the new state is not identical to those that preceded it in history, it still retains characteristics that constitute an obstacle to the development of the revolution; which is why, as Engels had already pointed out and as Lenin had made clear in State and Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/), the proletariat must on the very day of the revolution begin the process of eliminating the new state.
After taking power, the main obstacle that the soviets would run into in Russia was the newly emerged state, which “despite the appearance of its greater material power [...] was a thousand times more vulnerable to the enemy than other working class organs. Indeed, the state owes its greater physical power to objective factors which correspond perfectly with the interests of the exploiting classes but can have no association with the revolutionary role of the proletariat”[2] (http:///C:/WR/pc/Rint/145/En_145_workers%20councils%205_v3.doc#_ftn2); “The terrible threat of a return to capitalism will come mainly in the state sector. This, all the more so as capitalism is found here in its impersonal, so to speak, ethereal form. Statification can help to conceal a long-term process opposed to socialism.”[3] (http:///C:/WR/pc/Rint/145/En_145_workers%20councils%205_v3.doc#_ftn3)


http://en.internationalism.org/ir/145/workers-councils-part-5


It suggests that the semi-state is simply a reality that the organs of class power would have to co-exist with, but keep in check (rather than 'merge' with it). It's difficult to interpret the relationship between the Red Guards & Red Army, or the Red Guards & Tcheka- or if there is a difference (structurally) worth noting. I'd imagine any armed body acting in the name or interests of a class exercising its power requires some tendency toward organization or at worst a Fuehrerprinzip (for tactical reasons; or rather an imagined tactical need for organization and consolidation of armed bodies).

[Blake's Baby]

Tendency towards organisation, yes. I'm a little confused by the way the ICC poses the problem, I must admit. Read their pamphlet on the state in the period of transition and thought it was very good; but later came to think actually I hadn't understood it very well. Have you been following the debate between the ICC and OpOp over the transitional state? There's definitely some interesting stuff going on there.

[subcp]

It's interesting you put it that way- over the last year or 2, the tools and conceptions I've learned from the ICC have been at odds with some of what they write- which is why I'm thinking it's just been a matter of interpretation.

Those are good exchanges-I remember reading one of the articles/responses in print. It's definitely relevant to the question of state capitalism during and after a revolution.

From OpOp:


“an accommodation to a vision influenced by anarchism that identifies the Commune-State with the bureaucratic (bourgeois) state”. This puts “the proletariat outside of the post-revolutionary state while actually creating a dichotomy that, itself, is the germ of a new caste reproducing itself in the administrative body separated organically from the workers’ councils”;

A source of agreement for most of the party-promoting left communist milieu is that the Bolshevik Party merging with the state was a definitive mistake (only some Bordigists still promote that). I don't know enough about the Paris Commune (and the earlier inspiration for it- the 'Lyon Commune') to compare the 'Commune-State' it to the Bolshevik-RSFSR State.

If we take, as a starting point, that a semi-state or para-state (or what the OpOp call a 'pre-state') exists as long as there are class distinctions during the revolutionary crisis-proletarian Dictatorship, I don't understand how an administrative-production organizing-Arms Monopoly (or Violence-Monopoly), the unification of the semi-state/armed workers organization-worker's councils (and all the committee's, council's and assemblies), with or without being merged with the Party, withers away.

Whereas, the decentralized (and localized) organizations of armed workers forcibly proletarianizing other classes and strata (forcing small property owners to submit to the Proletarian Dictatorship, putting down armed resistance of recalcitrant bourgeoisie, self-defense of communities from gangsterism), existing so long as there is a need for them, disbanding when 'threats' (from other classes and strata, from organizations of would-be new exploiters or those who use the anarchy of crisis to behave against the community) are resolved, seems easy to imagine 'withering away'.

[subcp]

This was also in the ICC's response to the OpOp:


It’s with this approach that a work of weighing up the world revolutionary wave was made by the Communist Left in Italy.7 (http://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201212/5420/state-period-transition-capitalism-communism-ii#sdfootnote7sym) According to the latter, if the state subsists after the taking of power by the proletariat given that social classes still exist, the former is fundamentally an instrument of the conservation of the status quo but in no way the instrument of the transformation of relations of production towards communism. In this sense, the organisation of the proletariat as a class, through its workers’ councils, must impose its hegemony on the state but never identify with it. It must be able, if necessary, to oppose the state, as Lenin partially understood in 1920-21. It is exactly because, with the extinction of the life of the soviets (inevitable from the fact of the failure of the world revolution), the proletariat had lost this capacity for acting and imposing itself on the state that the latter was able to develop its own conservative tendencies to the point of becoming the gravedigger of the revolution in Russia at the same time as it absorbed the Bolshevik Party itself, turning it into an instrument of the counter-revolution.

Which brings up other questions of the transition. One that comes to mind is the 'administration' of revolutionary bastions, the areas of the Earth that are the first to have a victorious proletariat over the bourgeoisie, all other classes and strata, undermined the legitimacy of the State Capitalist (bourgeois)-state, etc. Bordiga argued as late as 1926 against Stalin, asserting that the Communist International, the entire international Party, should be responsible for decisions affecting a revolutionary bastion- a position still held by one (if not all) of the PCI's.

What do you think, BB?

[Blake's Baby]

...

If we take, as a starting point, that a semi-state or para-state (or what the OpOp call a 'pre-state') exists as long as there are class distinctions during the revolutionary crisis-proletarian Dictatorship, I don't understand how an administrative-production organizing-Arms Monopoly (or Violence-Monopoly), the unification of the semi-state/armed workers organization-worker's councils (and all the committee's, council's and assemblies), with or without being merged with the Party, withers away.

Whereas, the decentralized (and localized) organizations of armed workers forcibly proletarianizing other classes and strata (forcing small property owners to submit to the Proletarian Dictatorship, putting down armed resistance of recalcitrant bourgeoisie, self-defense of communities from gangsterism), existing so long as there is a need for them, disbanding when 'threats' (from other classes and strata, from organizations of would-be new exploiters or those who use the anarchy of crisis to behave against the community) are resolved, seems easy to imagine 'withering away'.

But it's only a 'state' (semi-state, para-state, pre-state, 'state of a previously unknown type') while the working class exists, that's the point. The state exists while there are different groups in society with opposed interests. Once classes have been abolished through the abolition of property, then there is no social basis for a state. Even before this, the fact that the state is (to borrow a phrase) a 'workers' state' in the loosest imaginable definition of that phrase means that it is unlike any previously existing state, the state of a majority of the population. The state in a sense 'withers' at the same time as the condition of being a worker is generalised. When all are workers, no-one is 'working class' (ie, a separate category of workers); when all administer the state, the state ceases to be a separate entity from the population.

Administration of society - that is, in the revolutionary period, state functions of organisation of production and monopoly of violence - is the task of the workers' councils (the organs of the working class organised at the point of production). Do these 'state functions' actually imply a 'state'? In a sense yes - if it looks like a state and acts like a state it's functionally a state. But is a (pre-para-semi-)state (of a different type), because it is the state of a majority, for the first time in history. But whatever its type the state itself is not identical to the working class; it may be under its control but the two aren't the same thing.

But when the revolution is actually 'complete'? When all the territories are under the control of the working class and all property is collectivised and the entire productive and distributive apparatus is under the control of the working class, when all other classes have been integrated into production? There is no 'state' then, just a classless communal society. But to get there... what other option is there but for the working class to administer a 'state' that controls a part only of the world economy? Until the 'parts' are unified into socialised production, these parts must necessarily I think be capitalist, bearing in mind exactly what you said earlier about state property (however we may define the state at this point). The 'withering away' comes precisely because those capitalist parts are wedded together to produce a socialised whole. The three things - taking over the whole economy, generalising the condition of the working class by integrating the other classes into production, and the withering away of the state - are the same phenomenon seen from different angles.


... Bordiga argued as late as 1926 against Stalin, asserting that the Communist International, the entire international Party, should be responsible for decisions affecting a revolutionary bastion- a position still held by one (if not all) of the PCI's.

What do you think, BB?

I think Bordiga was wrong, but not as wrong as Stalin. If you accept both the substitutionist logic that the Party administers the state, and internationalism, then of course the International should administer the bastions. The national parties are subordinate to the centre, the working class has no special interests in one locale as opposed to another, the interests of the entire working class (whether in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary territories) is served by prosecuting the revolution.

But it wasn't internationalism Bordiga was wrong about, it was substitutionism. The working class must administer the state as best it can. I really think it's that simple (or complex).

[subcp]

Administration of society - that is, in the revolutionary period, state functions of organisation of production and monopoly of violence - is the task of the workers' councils (the organs of the working class organised at the point of production). Do these 'state functions' actually imply a 'state'? In a sense yes - if it looks like a state and acts like a state it's functionally a state. But is a (pre-para-semi-)state (of a different type), because it is the state of a majority, for the first time in history. But whatever its type the state itself is not identical to the working class; it may be under its control but the two aren't the same thing.

But when the revolution is actually 'complete'? When all the territories are under the control of the working class and all property is collectivised and the entire productive and distributive apparatus is under the control of the working class, when all other classes have been integrated into production? There is no 'state' then, just a classless communal society

But is the conservative inertia of a semi-state encompassing both the monopoly of arms and the organization of production enough to stall and reverse the movement for communism (proletarianization of all classes and strata and withering away of class society, semi-state's, etc.)?

Pannekoek wrote a bit about the difference between promoting the soviet form, and formalism (or the qualitative difference between soviets):



Organised autonomy of the productive masses stands in sharp contrast to the organisation from above in state socialism. But one must keep the following in mind. "Workers' councils" do not designate a form of organization whose lines are fixed once and for all, and which only requires a subsequent elaboration of the details. It means a principle - the principle of the workers' self-management of enterprises and of production.

This principle can in no way be implemented by a theoretical discussion about the best practical forms it should take. It concerns a practical struggle against the apparatus of capitalist domination. In our day, the slogan of "workers' councils," does not mean assembling fraternally to work in co-operation; it means class struggle - in which fraternity plays its part - it means revolutionary action by the masses against state power. Revolutions cannot, of course, be summoned up at will; they arise spontaneously in moments of crisis, when the situation becomes intolerable. They occur only if this sense of the intolerable lives in the masses, and if at the same time there exists a certain generally accepted consciousness of what ought to be done. It is at this level that propaganda and public discussion play their part. And these actions cannot secure a lasting success unless large sections of the working class have a clear understanding of the nature and goal of their struggle. Hence the necessity for making workers councils a theme for discussion.
-Letter on Worker's Councils (1952)



I do think the general mistrust of workers in the West of the 'classical workers movement', and a drop-off for democratization movements in the East (China for ex.) are twin manifestations of a similar tendency- and may be the kind of mentality that is necessary in such a revolutionary crisis for the organs of proletarian dictatorship to carry out their tasks until all classes are abolished. I'm still inclined to think, despite the revolutionary consciousness of workers engaged in the future revolutionary crisis, that there are structural bases for why the soviets merged with the organizations of violence constitute a traditional bourgeois (State Capitalist) state- like Pannekoek's description of the post-November Revolution, German council-state. That was a state with a majority participation, directly animated by, the working-class; and a merged monopoly of violence/arms and council system.

[Blake's Baby]

Who is to stop the workers' councils excercising a monopoly of force, or organising production?

[subcp]

The workers themselves I'd guess; which is where the descriptions of 'false starts, dead ends, temporary retreats' comes into play: the large amount of regional diversity, trial & error, following the examples of what appear to be the most advanced areas regarding the revolutionary transformation of society, and the influence of the Communist Party (which would be trying to engage with the organs of class power to avoid unnecessary false starts, temporary retreats, dead ends).

The ICC make the distinction by writing that the workplace based councils organize the working-class; while the territorial or geographic councils organize all non-bourgeois strata and classes along with the workers, and that the latter is thus a part of the semi-state/Commune-State.



In The State and Revolution, Lenin himself said that the proletariat needed the state to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie, but also to lead the non-exploited population in the socialist direction: “The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population — the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians — in the work of organising a socialist economy.”20 (http://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201212/5420/state-period-transition-capitalism-communism-ii#sdfootnote20sym)
We support Lenin’s point of view here, according to which, in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must be able to bring behind it the immense majority of the poor and the oppressed, among which it can itself be a minority. Any alternative to such a policy doesn’t exist. How was this concretised in the Russian revolution? Two types of soviets emerged: on the one hand, soviets based essentially on the centres of production and regrouping the working class, called workers’ councils; on the other, soviets based on territorial units (territorial soviets) in which all the layers of the non-exploited actively participated in the local management of that society. The workers’ councils organised the whole of the working class, that is to say, the revolutionary class. The territorial soviets,21 (http://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201212/5420/state-period-transition-capitalism-communism-ii#sdfootnote21sym) meanwhile, based on revocable delegates, were intended to be part of the Commune-State,22 (http://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201212/5420/state-period-transition-capitalism-communism-ii#sdfootnote22sym) the latter having the function of managing society as a whole. In the revolutionary period, all of the non-exploited layers, while being for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and against the restoration of its domination, have not necessarily accepted the idea of the socialist transformation of society. They could even be hostile to it. In fact, within these layers, the proletariat can be in a small minority.

If the Commune-State encompasses both the worker's councils and territorial/geographic councils encompassing all non-bourgeoisie, and the organization of arms, and this is a positive thing, that's basically the Bordigist conception of the proletarian state- which can only be run by the Communist Party by nature of its class consciousness and political maturity.

[Blake's Baby]

The workers themselves I'd guess; which is where the descriptions of 'false starts, dead ends, temporary retreats' comes into play: the large amount of regional diversity, trial & error, following the examples of what appear to be the most advanced areas regarding the revolutionary transformation of society, and the influence of the Communist Party (which would be trying to engage with the organs of class power to avoid unnecessary false starts, temporary retreats, dead ends)...

The working class, organising itself in the workers' councils, uses the power of the workers' councils, to prevent the workers' councils taking power from the workers' councils?

You know me - I'm not being a dick on purpose here. But this is the only way I can understand what you're saying. I'm really not grasping what you're trying to elaborate.


...The ICC make the distinction by writing that the workplace based councils organize the working-class; while the territorial or geographic councils organize all non-bourgeois strata and classes along with the workers, and that the latter is thus a part of the semi-state/Commune-State...

I think they're wrong about this. 'The state' is an organ for one class to oppress another. It is also, in the last analysis 'men armed in defence of property relations'. Under the DotP 'the state' will be the (semi-pre-para-)state (of a new type) that the working class establishes. It will be the working class armed in defence of collective property. That state may permit the machinery of democracy (in the form of territorial councils) in order that non-exploiting strata can express their views but it is not the territorial councils that comprise 'the state' because 'the state' is the organisation that 1-defends property relations (in this case the workers' militias, controlled by the workers' councils), 2-organises the economy (in this case, the workers' councils directly), and 3-oppresses another class (in this case, the workers' councils through expropriating the bourgeoisie, having some kind of Cheka to prevent sabotage, and militarily opposing restoration). The territorial councils as I see them are useful, but not necessary (in a mathmatical/philosophical sense). The proletarian dictatorship could do without them if it had to - if it was a necessary temporary measure for security, for example. It can't do without the workers' councils because they're intrinsic to it - the workers' councils are the DotP.

EDIT: this may be one of those points where I said I maybe hadn't understood the ICC position very well. Re-(re-)reading that passage the part about 'revocable delegates' struck me. Previously, I've taken the distiction between 'workers' councils' and 'territorial soviets' as being synonymous with 'pyramid of factory committees' (workers organised at point of production, plus councils of factory delegates) and 'pyramid of neighbourhood committees' (general population of neighbourhood, plus councils of neighbourhood delegates). Perhaps the ICC are meaning that the councils of factory delegates (as opposed to the mass assemblies with an executive committee, which is my reading of 'factory committee') are actually 'territorial soviets', as 'revocable delegates', from a geographical area (like a city) are meeting together. But I can't see why the general population need be part of this. So really there are perhaps four kinds of soviets - factory committees; councils of factory delegates (which are based on geography); neighbourhood assemblies; councils of neighbourhood delegates. Unless the neighbourhood delegates are given some kind of consultative/advocacy role in the councils of factory delegates. Either way - it is the first two types, the factory committees and the councils of factory delegates, that constitute the machinery of the proletarian dictatorship. In my understanding anyway.


...
If the Commune-State encompasses both the worker's councils and territorial/geographic councils encompassing all non-bourgeoisie, and the organization of arms, and this is a positive thing, that's basically the Bordigist conception of the proletarian state- which can only be run by the Communist Party by nature of its class consciousness and political maturity.

I don't know why you think the Party necessarily has any role here at all, that seems a total non sequiteur. I think it will have a role (I am a Partyist after all), but not that the Party will 'run' the state, just that it will be in the workers' councils arguing for communism (and to be honest, I suspect that it will have to contend with representative of a billion othe 'parties' from the Platformists to the Impossibilists to the multiplicity of types of Trotskyists). I think the role of the Party, in line with Marx, is understanding most clearly the line of march and arguing for it; but it is up to the working class (organised in the councils) to implement whatever policy it thinks is best. The Party can advise, it can't rule.


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Have we got a very long from state capitalism here? Or are we still on topic? It's difficult to tell sometimes.

[CyM]

I typed up a long reply earlier this week, then the computer crashed.

It's a bit late to reply to this post now, but let's try it again.


You've been linking expropriation to nationalization throughout the discussion- if you want to focus on this specific area of disagreement, the difference is one of conception.
Yes, I'm glad I've gotten across my point that it is important to talk about the nationalization of the economy whenever we are talking about the degeneration of a nationalized economy.


Expropriation is merely taking control from private property owners- this has taken the form of 'socialization' (i.e. nationalization) in the 20th century; whether the Putilov works in Russia or the British Coal Board after WWII- in both cases, the state takes ownership.I think there's a clear difference between the nationalization by the capitalists of unprofitable infrastructure businesses which are an absolutely necessity to the remainder of capitalist industry, and the mass occupation of factories and the election of Soviet delegates from them who then proceed to decree them expropriated. There's a reason you keep choosing the former in your examples. By not using any examples of nationalized industries in a planned economy, you prove that you subconsciously know there is a difference. By always choosing nationalized industries in a capitalist economy to make your point against nationalization, you clearly find these the "worst" examples which would best make the point. I.e. there is a difference between the two, and you can tell them apart, or else you would be discussing nationalization in revolutionary Russia instead of in capitalist Britain or under Czarism.


Expropriation can also be conceived as workers refusing to recognize ownership of the means of production; since the working-class is an exploited class and cannot own property by its definition (proletariat- those who have nothing but their labor power to sell), they merely remove ownership from the equation. Internationalist Perspective has written a good deal about a term found in Marx, the "collective worker". The need to collectivize was apparent in nations which were underdeveloped and backward when capitalism made its transition from ascendance to decadence- but, capitalism itself centralizes as a general tendency, inherent in its operation as a mode of production. Today, capital, the means of production, are so centralized that it is a moot point. The working-class is the grave-digger of capitalism, and capitalism has created the productive and distributive and consumptive apparatus that allows the working-class to abolish capital and class society and build a society based on abundance.If the capitalist class still exists and claims ownership, and the working class "refuses to recognize" its claims, this refusal takes the form of occupations and armed expropriation. I.e. the act of refusing to recognize their property cannot be simply a negative act, but must be a positive act of actively taking from them. So long as there are competing classes, the abolition of the bourgeoisie's property is the strengthening of the proletariat's competing collective property and not the simple disappearance of property all together.

For that, we require the highest stage of communism, and not simply the first, tentative steps at smashing capitalism.


The Lenin quote I posted earlier from 'Left Wing Childishness' says this: that the state could not by decree 'socialize' production, even after the bourgeoisie had been expropriated. Socialization/collectivization is a mechanism of capital in its development- it cannot be forced (except through state capitalism). I'm arguing that the means of production and concentrations of the proletariat are well past the time when it needed to be turned into 'collective workers'. That the struggle is directly for communism, and not to build a 'transitional society' as a precondition for communism.It would save us a lot of time if the next time I point out that you have the anarchist conception of revolution, that of an immediate road directly to communism without any transition, you just say this instead of denying it. You may not consider yourself an anarchist, but this is exactly what I was saying you stood for.

There is no precondition for communism, except the seizure of power and the means of production by the workers across the world. The "transitional society" is not a "precondition" it is society as it exists immediately after the first revolutionary victories against the capitalists in one or several countries in the world, with contradictory elements because of the remaining capitalist relations that it has yet to overcome, and the semi-state that exists because of those elements.

This state of being can exist for a short, or a long time, though the longer it exists the greater the danger of degeneration and counterrevolution. The quicker the revolution spreads across the world, the quicker the contradictions are resolved, the quicker this period is closed and we enter into the highest stage of communism.


If you start from expropriation, workers seizing workplaces, occupying workplaces and communities, instituting the various forms of class power and decision making (councils, committee's, assemblies), the working-class has attacked the concept of ownership of private property. I'm saying that 'nationalization' as a step after expropriation is a step backwards and is counter-revolutionary; that the revolutionary step in the context of a generalized revolutionary crisis, in the movement for communism, is to stop recognizing ownership- that production is now under the collective control of the working-class which is manifested through decision making bodies (councils, committee's, assemblies).Which is nationalization. Those decision making bodies are a state. The state has taken control of these industries. The state owns them. It is nationalization, you are simply twisting the term to fit your preconceived notion of what it means. You are also refusing to realize that so long as someone claims ownership and you take it from him, you are taking ownership yourself as a class, not simply refusing to recognize the idea of ownership.

So long as there are competing claims of ownership, the concept of ownership still plays a role and property is not abolished. Only the full abolition of classes will remove the need to specify ownership and thereby the concept of property itself.

But this goes back to transition vs. romanticism.


I don't know what BB thinks about this, but you keep saying that both the worker's councils, workplace or neighborhood committee's and general assemblies, and the organs of armed coercion, are together the 'semi-state'. I don't see it that way; if the means of decision making, operating production/distribution/consumption of goods and services, and the means of exercising coercive force against other classes and strata are merged, it is counter-revolutionary. If the semi-state is the organs of the armed working-class, organized to combat other classes and strata, if it becomes combined with councils, committee's and assemblies, it is no longer the 'semi-state' but begins to take on characteristics of the capitalist state- which is what happened in the Bolshevik days after October (1918-1919 specifically).If the decision-making bodies, the mass assemblies and their councils, are not in control of the use of arms, there is a danger of a guerrilla army separate and apart from the people's will which carries out its own interests.

That being said, the goal is for there to be no standing army, but the people themselves in arms. So while the people decide how to use those arms, their democratic bodies have to call on the people to apply those arms, not through a specialist force that can be separate and above them.

This is one of the safeguards against counterrevolution, although if the revolution does not win across the world no safeguard will stop it in the long run.

The victory of the counterrevolution in Spain began with the refusal of the Anarchists to create a parallel workers' state with the people in arms. This allowed the return of the bourgeois state, which the Anarchists became ministers in.

If we are not careful, this experience can be repeated.


It's not about 'not understanding' the concept of property, it is about abolishing property as a concept in the real-world. If what was private property under capitalism has been seized (expropriated) by workers, there are 2 different options: maintain property by giving it to a state, or act to abolish property by refusing to recognize ownership by the state or capitalists- 'property' (factories, land, etc.) are simply for common use, un-owned by anyone. Communism requires free access to the means of production as the "property" of everyone- swapping one owner (an individual capitalist) for another (state property) is a step backwards. Bordiga's article "Seize the Factories or Seize Power?" was written in the heat of events during the factory councils/factory occupations in Italy 1920- and is about this very subject.This is a false dichotomy drawn from the fear of the word state. Idealism has fear of forms because it does not understand the content.

Can the transitional state be a danger? Absolutely, as the USSR proves, that is one possibility. Can anything be done to alleviate that danger? Not really, so long as the transition is not advancing towards completion across the world, it will fall backwards and tend towards degeneration in those countries who have begun it.

But "swapping one owner for another" is exactly what the revolution is about at first. You are not merely "allowing everyone free access" to the means of production, you are denying access to the capitalists. You are forcibly removing them from the premises, and not allowing them to enter. In otherwords, you are making everyone else owners, while stripping them of their property.

The difference being that we are not individual owners, but collective owners. Our joint shares are expressed through our workers' councils, our state.

Before there can be no property, it must first become our property and not theirs.

In otherwords:

1. The transition will begin in one or several countries, but must spread as quickly as possible.
2. In the first blows against capitalism, the workers will need to occupy and expropriate the property of the capitalists.
3. This must be brought together through workers' councils elected from the workplaces, and the use of arms must be regulated (though not taken) by these councils, making them a state.
4. The transitional form of property is collective, ie, workers' state, property.
5. In the event that the revolution stalls, the state property remains, but the dangers of the state as a counterrevolutionary force become very real.
6. Bonapartism arises from this "stalled transition", allowing for a state more monstrously separated high above the people than any known in human history precisely because everything is nationalized.
7. If new revolutions occur elsewhere in the world, this would provoke movements against the degenerated state, which could pick up where the degenerated revolution left off: without getting rid of the nationalized property, they would elect councils to run it.
8. This is all that would be needed to continue the transition, just a change in the state form and not the property form, showing that even Stalinism remains on the same social basis as a healthy democratic workers' state in transition.

[subcp]

By not using any examples of nationalized industries in a planned economy, you prove that you subconsciously know there is a difference. By always choosing nationalized industries in a capitalist economy to make your point against nationalization, you clearly find these the "worst" examples which would best make the point. I.e. there is a difference between the two, and you can tell them apart, or else you would be discussing nationalization in revolutionary Russia instead of in capitalist Britain or under Czarism.

I meant the Putilov works after the October revolution- sorry about that, wasn't worded well. But it was supposed to be a clear parallel between a factory complex taken over during a revolutionary crisis and integrated into the state (the nationalized planned economy that took shape after October) and an industry taken over by the bourgeois (State Capitalist) state- that is at the heart of this disagreement concerning state capitalism and the period of transition: I don't think there is a qualitative difference between a state operating and organizing production in a capitalist crisis or revolutionary crisis: in both cases, I see only State Capitalism.


If the capitalist class still exists and claims ownership, and the working class "refuses to recognize" its claims, this refusal takes the form of occupations and armed expropriation. I.e. the act of refusing to recognize their property cannot be simply a negative act, but must be a positive act of actively taking from them. So long as there are competing classes, the abolition of the bourgeoisie's property is the strengthening of the proletariat's competing collective property and not the simple disappearance of property all together.

For that, we require the highest stage of communism, and not simply the first, tentative steps at smashing capitalism.

I agree with you here, though I don't think, in contemporary times and looking forward, that there is a division between a static 'transitional society' and the movement toward the 'high phase' of communism: I'm arguing that there is no 'low phase', there is only the movement for communism, which starts on day 1 of the revolutionary crisis and must finish with the transformation of all social relations and abolition of all states and classes (and value)- and what comes in-between day 1 of the revolutionary crisis and 'Full Communism' cannot be State Capitalism or there will be no communism.


It would save us a lot of time if the next time I point out that you have the anarchist conception of revolution, that of an immediate road directly to communism without any transition

There will of course be a transition (that will likely take the shape of soviet-type formations, workplace and geographic committee's, assemblies, councils, etc.), I'm arguing that it will not be a "transitional society": that this transition phase is, well, transitory, not static, constantly shifting with the movement for communism. If the content of the revolutionary movement is simply "Councils + democracy + better distribution of goods" we end up with a friendlier USSR v2.0 rather than communism.


This state of being can exist for a short, or a long time, though the longer it exists the greater the danger of degeneration and counterrevolution. The quicker the revolution spreads across the world, the quicker the contradictions are resolved, the quicker this period is closed and we enter into the highest stage of communism.

Exactly- but what we disagree on is what is and what isn't an impediment to this movement toward communism, and what communists should recognize as dangers to this movement.


Which is nationalization. Those decision making bodies are a state.

If you don't differentiate between free access and "Collective Ownership" mediated by a representative body, you'd be right (about nationalization). Codifying ownership into the hands of representative bodies (if those bodies also have a monopoly of arms) is not a semi-state, but a regular state: much like the ones that existed in the former command economies, you have state capitalism.


So long as there are competing claims of ownership, the concept of ownership still plays a role and property is not abolished. Only the full abolition of classes will remove the need to specify ownership and thereby the concept of property itself.

Which is the content of the revolutionary movement for communism; if it is not, we aren't going to get to communism. The question is whether or not calls for a 'proletarian state', or the unification of production and organization and monopoly of arms, or nationalization, etc. are impediments to communism rather than necessary during the transition.


The victory of the counterrevolution in Spain began with the refusal of the Anarchists to create a parallel workers' state with the people in arms. This allowed the return of the bourgeois state, which the Anarchists became ministers in.

I'm with Dauve on this ('When Insurrections Die'); that the anarchists did not consider the republican state a threat and did not attack it directly, and this was the backdoor through which bourgeois order was restored (among a number of other things). But that's assuming there was a generalized international revolutionary movement at the time, which there wasn't.


This is a false dichotomy drawn from the fear of the word state. Idealism has fear of forms because it does not understand the content.

Not hardly; the 20th century is one big lesson on what a state is, what it does, how it behaves- in a revolutionary crisis and in the context of the movement for communism. Not learning from those experiences leaves communist aloof of potential danger in the future and sap our ability to perform the tasks set out by communist militants going back to Marx and Engels.



Before there can be no property, it must first become our property and not theirs.

I agree. We're agreed on a lot of this, but the back and forth is over a very small number of points that we do not agree on:

1) the definition of a state
2) the type of state in the transition from capitalism to communism
3) the task of communists in a revolutionary crisis
4) the definitions of expropriation and nationalization

[subcp]

The working class, organising itself in the workers' councils, uses the power of the workers' councils, to prevent the workers' councils taking power from the workers' councils?

You know me - I'm not being a dick on purpose here. But this is the only way I can understand what you're saying. I'm really not grasping what you're trying to elaborate.

What I mean is the worker's organized into the various forms of organs to exercise their class power will be the people making such decisions- and that this process necessarily involves false starts, dead ends, temporary retreats, etc. I'd guess that a kind of 'revolutionary combined and uneven development' will take place as well: where the most advanced sections of the proletariat in a revolutionary crisis would serve as a model for workers elsewhere to emulate, and that the place of the Communist Party in this process is to defend the communist program in these organs of class power, try to influence decisions to keep workers from engaging in decisions and activities that would result in dead ends, false starts and temporary retreats (things like localism, state capitalist measures, etc.) and be engaged however possible. Since these decisions are for the workers to make themselves, rather than communists doing it for them or taking control from them, it's up to the organized working-class in the organs of class power to correct mistakes and 'right the ship'.




I think they're wrong about this. 'The state' is an organ for one class to oppress another. It is also, in the last analysis 'men armed in defence of property relations'. Under the DotP 'the state' will be the (semi-pre-para-)state (of a new type) that the working class establishes. It will be the working class armed in defence of collective property. That state may permit the machinery of democracy (in the form of territorial councils) in order that non-exploiting strata can express their views but it is not the territorial councils that comprise 'the state' because 'the state' is the organisation that 1-defends property relations (in this case the workers' militias, controlled by the workers' councils), 2-organises the economy (in this case, the workers' councils directly), and 3-oppresses another class (in this case, the workers' councils through expropriating the bourgeoisie, having some kind of Cheka to prevent sabotage, and militarily opposing restoration). The territorial councils as I see them are useful, but not necessary (in a mathmatical/philosophical sense). The proletarian dictatorship could do without them if it had to - if it was a necessary temporary measure for security, for example. It can't do without the workers' councils because they're intrinsic to it - the workers' councils are the DotP.

I disagree; I think the centralization of these functions and organs is the first step in the road to full-fledged state capitalism. The territorial or geographic organizations are seemingly one of the most important aspects of the DotP; it is the mechanism for the working-class to 'proletarianize' all other classes and strata, while the armed bands of workers (the semi-state) perform defensive functions and coercive functions (against the resisting bourgeoisie, and the resisting elements of all other classes/strata)- since it is only through generalizing the proletarian condition (propertylessness) to all people that the working-class can abolish classes and class society, they seem to be of primary importance.

The reason I don't see the councils as part of or the most important component of the semi-state is based around what makes this semi-state the state of a new type, and unlike any previous state. The modern capitalist state takes on organizing production and distribution, acting as an arbiter between industries, and has a monopoly of arms. If the semi-state is different and unlike any other state, it wouldn't make sense for it to resemble the existing capitalist state by functioning along similar lines. This is a facet of the ICC's program that I initially felt I disagreed with, but over time find it completely compatible with my way of thinking. My previous post on the withering away of the semi-state outlines this train of thought. I'm not sure what the relationship would be between the bodies of armed workers and the worker's councils (or other organs/forms)- but inclined to think that it would be complimentary, rather than under the same roof, or merged as one entity.


EDIT: this may be one of those points where I said I maybe hadn't understood the ICC position very well. Re-(re-)reading that passage the part about 'revocable delegates' struck me. Previously, I've taken the distiction between 'workers' councils' and 'territorial soviets' as being synonymous with 'pyramid of factory committees' (workers organised at point of production, plus councils of factory delegates) and 'pyramid of neighbourhood committees' (general population of neighbourhood, plus councils of neighbourhood delegates). Perhaps the ICC are meaning that the councils of factory delegates (as opposed to the mass assemblies with an executive committee, which is my reading of 'factory committee') are actually 'territorial soviets', as 'revocable delegates', from a geographical area (like a city) are meeting together. But I can't see why the general population need be part of this. So really there are perhaps four kinds of soviets - factory committees; councils of factory delegates (which are based on geography); neighbourhood assemblies; councils of neighbourhood delegates. Unless the neighbourhood delegates are given some kind of consultative/advocacy role in the councils of factory delegates. Either way - it is the first two types, the factory committees and the councils of factory delegates, that constitute the machinery of the proletarian dictatorship. In my understanding anyway.

This part gets me as well; to the point where elsewhere I question how universal the soviet form is today (but that's a whole other discussion). I'm more inclined to think that the forms that the working-class in a revolutionary crisis creates will perform the kinds of tasks and functions as has been theorized for the soviets in communist theory.




I don't know why you think the Party necessarily has any role here at all, that seems a total non sequiteur. I think it will have a role (I am a Partyist after all), but not that the Party will 'run' the state, just that it will be in the workers' councils arguing for communism (and to be honest, I suspect that it will have to contend with representative of a billion othe 'parties' from the Platformists to the Impossibilists to the multiplicity of types of Trotskyists). I think the role of the Party, in line with Marx, is understanding most clearly the line of march and arguing for it; but it is up to the working class (organised in the councils) to implement whatever policy it thinks is best. The Party can advise, it can't rule.

Mea culpa; tried to weave together that if one puts forward that the semi-state is the combination of soviets + arms, this is basically saying the semi-state is a 'proletarian state'. If that is how you view the semi-state, it would no longer be a necessity that would arise because of the continuing divisions of classes and strata, but rather a central part of the revolutionary movement for communism and an ally of the insurgent proletariat.



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Have we got a very long from state capitalism here? Or are we still on topic? It's difficult to tell sometimes.

a lot of these questions basically come down to how you define state capitalism and the DotP, and whether the DotP is comprised of a kind of state capitalism. I dunno, I think it's on topic (for what it's worth).