To the Trots...

[Comrade Jacob]

I know a lot of you love to go on about degenerate worker's states but do you think there has ever been a worker's state and up until when? If not, which came the closest?

[Fred]

I know a lot of you love to go on about degenerate worker's states but do you think there has ever been a worker's state and up until when? If not, which came the closest?

Do you mean to ask what would a Trotskyist consider a healthy workers' state? If so, the answer would be the USSR before 1924. This with the understanding that there were certainly problems before that. It is critical to underscore that Trotskyists defend the USSR and the deformed workers' states (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea -- and the East bloc countries) against imperialist attack and against the restoration of capitalism. The theoretical underpinnings for this are laid out nicely by comrade Trotsky in "In Defense of Marxism," which is available online.

FYI, I don't "love" to go on about degenerated or deformed workers' states. I do love my children, chocolate, and Mozart Operas.

[A.J.]

Do you get "deformed bourgeois states" or "deformed feudal states"?:lol:

What a crock!:laugh:

[Geiseric]

Do you mean to ask what would a Trotskyist consider a healthy workers' state? If so, the answer would be the USSR before 1924. This with the understanding that there were certainly problems before that. It is critical to underscore that Trotskyists defend the USSR and the deformed workers' states (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea -- and the East bloc countries) against imperialist attack and against the restoration of capitalism. The theoretical underpinnings for this are laid out nicely by comrade Trotsky in "In Defense of Marxism," which is available online.

FYI, I don't "love" to go on about degenerated or deformed workers' states. I do love my children, chocolate, and Mozart Operas.

Fred put it pretty well. The thing that ruined those workers states were the chinese and Russian bureaucracies interest in restoring capitalism, which led to treating revolutions like chess games with imperialists. The best example is how Stalin divided up eastern Europe with England and shot all of the former partisans who were by the end of world war 2 pushing for workers control over the means of production. Stalin felt he had to appease every Euro government, including Nazi Germany, which is the reason the fSU was a DWS. The most important thing though is that there was a planned economy which was marginally better than today's capitalism, which lacked things like homelessness and drug addiction which are now huge problems in eastern europe.

[Art Vandelay]

Do you get "deformed bourgeois states" or "deformed feudal states"?:lol:

What a crock!:laugh:

Is this supposed to be a contribution? Your line of thinking here seems to be underpinned by the conviction (which you provide no reasoning for) that isolated developments/phenomenon's cannot arise in individual modes of production. You're entire argument here is that since there were no 'deformed states' in feudalism or capitalism, then there couldn't be a 'degenerated workers state.' First off let me commend you for this stunning Marixst analysis, you've quite clearly demonstrated your full grasp of Marxist dialectics. :rolleyes: Secondly, just for the record, there is a difference between the theory of the 'Degenerated Workers State' (put forth by Trotsky in the 'The Revolution Betrayed') and the theory of the 'Deformed Workers State' which was developed by a current in post-Trotsky, Trotskyism.

As to your actual post, its no better then your average troll post. The Russian Revolution was the most radical break with traditional property relations the world has ever seen (that is unless you don't think a proletarian revolution took place) and if you do not agree with Trotsky's theory to explain the events which transpired post 1917', that's fine, but then put forth your own line of argumentation, ie: contribute or don't post. Posts such as yours here only diminish the already minute intellectual atmosphere of the board.

[Misericordia]

Why do Trotskyists consider the USSR before 1924 a "healthy worker's state" while at the time the Bolsheviks(and Lenin himself) considered it a state-monopoly capitalist workers' and peasants' state?

[cliffhanger]

Stalin felt he had to appease every Euro government, including Nazi Germany.You should probably get some of the next books in the series, they'll tell you about how Stalin destroyed Nazi Germany and helped build successful worker's revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia and Germany. Other than that I guess he appeased people though?

[Geiseric]

You should probably get some of the next books in the series, they'll tell you about how Stalin destroyed Nazi Germany and helped build successful worker's revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia and Germany. Other than that I guess he appeased people though?

You and Stalins ghost should read about the millions of people Hitler said he'd enslave in Mein Kamph which came out in 1933. Then you should read about the non agression pact with France, and then the Molotov ribbentrop pact. Read about popular frontism, and how it worked out.

Wow you are bringing up Hungary and Poland though, I'm not even going to point out how that is funny. Does the slur "tankie" mean anything to you?

[cliffhanger]

You and Stalins ghost should read about the millions of people Hitler said he'd enslave in Mein Kamph which came out in 1933. Wow you are bringing up Hungary and Poland though, I'm not even going to point out how that is funny.

Yeah we can't all have the prescience of Trotsky:

"The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit." (1940)

[Fred]

Why do Trotskyists consider the USSR before 1924 a "healthy worker's state" while at the time the Bolsheviks(and Lenin himself) considered it a state-monopoly capitalist workers' and peasants' state?

Lenin used many, sometimes contradictory terms, to refer to the USSR. And there were different opinions among the Bolsheviks. Trotsky called a workers' state that leaned on the peasantry -- which is more precise. There is no such thing as a "state-monopoly capitalist workers' and peasants' state." How many classes can rule at once? Three? Two? I think only one, except for exceptional and very temporary circumstances of dual power. Lenin considered the USSR to be the dictatorship of the proletariat (he used the dd of the pp formulation before, but I don't think after the revolution).

So the USSR was a workers' state without severe bureaucratic deformations before the Soviet Thermidor in 1924. At that time the Triumvirate took complete control of the Party and all democratic discussion ended. Political opposition to the Triumvirs began to be treated as criminal offenses.

[Geiseric]

Yeah we can't all have the prescience of Trotsky:

"The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit." (1940)

I didn't even mention Trotsky, I don't have to since only Stalinists are so delusional. That quote had nothing to do with this. The red army didn't show much sympathy for gays or women during their invasion of Europe you know. Gays were actually kept inside concentration camps in many cases by all of the allies.

[Fred]

You should probably get some of the next books in the series, they'll tell you about how Stalin destroyed Nazi Germany and helped build successful worker's revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia and Germany. Other than that I guess he appeased people though?

Uh, the Red Army marching into Eastern Europe did not exactly constitute successful workers' revolutions. As a Trotskyist, I defend the overturn of capitalism in those states, but let's just say it wasn't done in an optimal fashion. That being said, the might of the Soviet workers' state did ultimately smash the Nazis. IN SPITE OF STALIN's OUTRAGEOUSLY BAD LEADERSHIP (e.g., purging and killing most of the USSR's high level military leaders in the late 30s, ignoring the very clear intelligence he received the the Germans were invading including the exact times, places, troop strengths, etc.).

[cliffhanger]

I didn't even mention Trotsky, I don't have to since only Stalinists are so delusional. That quote had nothing to do with this. The red army didn't show much sympathy for gays or women during their invasion of Europe you know. Gays were actually kept inside concentration camps in many cases by all of the allies.Ok, you can oppose the liberation of Eastern Europe from Nazi rule, personally I think it was a good thing. Also this thread is about Trotsky, which makes him relevant, especially in the context of beliefs about Hitler.

[cliffhanger]

Uh, the Red Army marching into Eastern Europe did not exactly constitute successful workers' revolutions.Ok, just send me the list of countries that were successfully liberated by Trotskyist armies, or real Trotskyist worker-revolutions, so we can compare success against success.

[Brotto Rühle]

A workers state without workers power. My goodness Trotsky tried so hard to preserve the Bolshevik legacy.

[Geiseric]

A workers state without workers power. My goodness Trotsky tried so hard to preserve the Bolshevik legacy.

That's where the word "degenerated" comes in, because as a matter of fact there was a revolution in Russia which nationalized all property.

[Sam_b]

Do you get "deformed bourgeois states" or "deformed feudal states"?

What a crock!

Read this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stricter-rules-learning-t182305/index.html) again and think before you make these sort of posts in Learning. Infraction.

[Fred]

Ok, just send me the list of countries that were successfully liberated by Trotskyist armies, or real Trotskyist worker-revolutions, so we can compare success against success.

The list is one item longer than Stalin's - The October Revolution and the Civil War (that would be Trotsky who led the Red Army).

How the fuck did Eastern Europe work out? Counterrevolution in every country including the USSR. Or how about the trashing and then the dissolution of the Comintern? Kudos on that, too. That is Stalin's legacy. So by my scoreboard that would be:

Trotsky 1
Stalin -40

[cliffhanger]

The list is one item longer than Stalin's - The October Revolution and the Civil War (that would be Trotsky who led the Red Army).

How the fuck did Eastern Europe work out? Counterrevolution in every country including the USSR. Or how about the trashing and then the dissolution of the Comintern? Kudos on that, too. That is Stalin's legacy. So by my scoreboard that would be:

Trotsky 1
Stalin -40Hmm, I disagree. You seem to be stretching. Next you'll be including the numerous Trotskyist actions against the Allies in World War 2 as successful actions, since obviously large numbers of Trotskyists went over to the position that World War 2 was an interimperialist war and that it didn't matter if the Allies or Nazis won. It might be unseemly to include such objectively pro-Nazi actions, though.

[Geiseric]

Hmm, I disagree. You seem to be stretching. Next you'll be including the numerous Trotskyist actions against the Allies in World War 2 as successful actions, since obviously large numbers of Trotskyists went over to the position that World War 2 was an interimperialist war and that it didn't matter if the Allies or Nazis won. It might be unseemly to include such objectively pro-Nazi actions, though.

As we can tell from the current world situation it did not matter who won. There is still capitalism worldwide and the USSR doesn't exist.

[cliffhanger]

As we can tell from the current world situation it did not matter who won. There is still capitalism worldwide and the USSR doesn't exist.Ok, I respect your opinion. Personally, I think that ending the Holocaust was a good thing, seems like an important priority, but we've all got different priorities.

[Geiseric]

Ok, I respect your opinion. Personally, I think that ending the Holocaust was a good thing, seems like an important priority, but we've all got different priorities.

Umm Stalin didn't give a rat's ass about the holocaust, if he did he wouldn't of signed the Molotov ribbentrop pact which sold out the whole of eastern Europe for leibensraum.

[cliffhanger]

Umm Stalin didn't give a rat's ass about the holocaust, if he did he wouldn't of signed the Molotov ribbentrop pact which sold out the whole of eastern Europe for leibensraum.Actually Eastern Europe fell to the Red Army. You might have done better, although I'm not sure where those Trotskyist successes are, but I think Stalin did a pretty good job, all things considered. Nobody's perfect.

[Fred]

Actually Eastern Europe fell to the Red Army. You might have done better, although I'm not sure where those Trotskyist successes are, but I think Stalin did a pretty good job, all things considered. Nobody's perfect.

:lol:It depends on how one operationalizes "good." Stop with the BS about ending the holocaust because no one is disagreeing with you on that. Stalin betrayed the revolution, by abandoning internationalism, by liquidating a generation of communists. In his position as a parasite on the workers' state, he was compelled to do some things that were good. He did almost everything he could to fuck up the war effort against the Germans. In the end the USSR won and overturned capitalism in Eastern Europe. I'm pissed the Red Army didn't keep going into Western Europe -- Stalin kept all of his agreements with FDR and Churchill.

[cliffhanger]

I'm pissed the Red Army didn't keep going into Western Europe -- Stalin kept all of his agreements with FDR and Churchill.Well, an aggressive invasion of Western Europe by Stalin against his allies probably would have ended in total disaster, possibly one-sided nuclear war, and I think you know that, so I have to assume you're suicidal. I'm not sure where you live but there are help hotlines that can get you in contact with someone who can listen.

[Geiseric]

Well, an aggressive invasion of Western Europe by Stalin against his allies probably would have ended in total disaster, possibly one-sided nuclear war, and I think you know that, so I have to assume you're suicidal. I'm not sure where you live but there are help hotlines that can get you in contact with someone who can listen.

But the allies were already threatening the ussr and every socialistic country with that... also your logic is the same thing Stalinists say about the Molotov pact.

[Panda Tse Tung]

Do you mean to ask what would a Trotskyist consider a healthy workers' state? If so, the answer would be the USSR before 1924. This with the understanding that there were certainly problems before that. It is critical to underscore that Trotskyists defend the USSR and the deformed workers' states (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea -- and the East bloc countries) against imperialist attack and against the restoration of capitalism. The theoretical underpinnings for this are laid out nicely by comrade Trotsky in "In Defense of Marxism," which is available online.

So... a healthy workers state turned into a degenerate workers state?
Does this mean any future 'healthy' workers state could suffer the same faith?
Or wasn't it that healthy after all?

[cliffhanger]

But the allies were already threatening the ussr and every socialistic country with that...There's a significant difference between challenging imperialism and naked aggression. War is always a serious threat to socialist countries because the imperialist system tends towards it, but that doesn't mean socialist countries should simply enter a state of unending military adventurism. Beyond that, democratic revolutions have an element of force but they are founded on a mass base internal to the nation. The only reason why Eastern Europe fell to communism was because there were large worker's movements in these countries that were organized into vanguards that won over the support of a majority of the workers. The Red Army provided cover by smashing the existing fascist state structures but the creation of people's democracies was led by parties with real support. Were the Soviets to simply invade France and Italy, for example, what would have happened to the native worker's movement in these countries? It would have buckled under the aggression and lost the support of the people. That is, if the Soviets had the military capacity to defeat the entire united Western forces, which they did not.

[Dave B]

What was the original form of the ‘workers state’ according to Trotsky in 1922?



…..this is explicable in part by an incomprehension of an expression frequently used by us, that we now have state capitalism. I shall not enter into an evaluation of this term; for in any case we need only to qualify what we understand by it. By state capitalism we all understood property belonging to the state which itself was in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which exploited the working class. Our state undertakings operate along commercial lines based on the market. But who stands in power here? The working class…[ or in reality the Bolshevik party which was less than 1% of the population ]…Herein lies the principled distinction of our state ‘capitalism’ in inverted commas from state capitalism without inverted commas.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm

Or in other words state capitalism organised for the benefit of the otherwise, ‘corrupted and degraded working class’, by the Bolshevik party.

How did this workers state ‘degenerate’ ?

The state capitalist Bolshevik party ‘as it was developed’, to use Trotsky’s own 1922 glass house ‘Junker’ words, became a ‘bureaucratic caste’ which increasingly organised the state capitalist “worker’s state” for its own ‘Dacha’economic interests rather than for the workers.

Ditto; Just as the ‘junkers and [state] capitalists of Germany’, which the Bolsheviks were emulating, did.

Only an anti Marxist apostate by inverting the paradigm of economic base determining ideology could conclude that the one party Bolshevik state capitalism ‘degenerated’.

The economic base of the Bolshevik party was state capitalism.

Thus, also from 1922;


We refuse to understand that when we say “state” we mean ourselves….[The Bolshevik party].. the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the ….[The Bolshevik party]…, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We.. ….[The Bolshevik party].. are the state.

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

And so taking first Trotsky’s basic analysis; the ‘base’ economic state capitalism of the Bolsheviks actually ‘deformed’ and ‘degenerated’ the ideology of the Bolshevik party to the so called ‘bureaucratic caste’ system of the Stalinist system.

But according to Marxism ideologies are not ‘deformed’ or ‘degenerated’ by economic bases- that would be turning historical materialism on its head.

So turning it the right way up ‘Stalinism’ and its ideology was, ‘formed’ and ‘generated’ out of the compost and seed of Bolshevik party state capitalism; as it adapted its own ideology to more conveniently suit its own interests.

Stalinism was an inevitable progressive ‘formation’, fruition and ‘generation’ of its own self-perfecting ideology and political system suitable, necessary and adapted and rooted to its economic own economic base.

If anything at all the Bolshevik revolution before "1924" itself was temporarily ‘deformed’, or not fully formed, as the ideology of the;

‘rule of the new state capitalist class’

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/grant/works/4/9/reply_to_tony_cliff.html

[Hit The North]

A workers state without workers power. My goodness Trotsky tried so hard to preserve the Bolshevik legacy.


That's where the word "degenerated" comes in, because as a matter of fact there was a revolution in Russia which nationalized all property.

Yes, private property was converted into state property. Therefore, who governs over the state is of crucial importance. If it's not the workers who hold power then how can it be a "workers state"?

[Fourth Internationalist]

I know a lot of you love to go on about degenerate worker's states but do you think there has ever been a worker's state and up until when? If not, which came the closest?

As with most Trotskyists, I'd say USSR until 1924 was a pretty good example of a healthy workers' state, despite some of its problems which eventually would lead to its degeneration into Stalinism. Most Trotksyists don't really believe there were any other healthy workers' states, however, many disagree with one another on how long the USSR was a degenerated workers' state for (and when it became [state] capitalist), and whether or not Eastern European Stalinist states and others were deformed workers' states or Stalinist-capitalist states.

[cliffhanger]

Most Trotksyists don't really believe there were any other healthy workers' statesWait, so Trotskyists believe their strategy has never worked? Will it ever work? Weird.

[Skyhilist]

Some term "degenerate workers state" is pretty silly the way it's used, because it implies that a nation was once a workers' state, when this obviously isn't the case.

The term "degenerated workers' state" is used to describe places like DPRK and Vietnam sometimes, but lets be honest, when have places like that ever really been "workers' states" in the first place? They've been substitutionist since the start.

[cliffhanger]

They've been substitutionalist since the start.So what? Substitutionism gets results.

[Skyhilist]

So what? Substitutionism gets results.

Even if it did get results, that wouldn't make a substitutionist government the same thing as a workers' state, so it's irrelevant.

[Fakeblock]

So what? Substitutionism gets results.

Which kinds of results are you hoping to achieve?

[cliffhanger]

Which kinds of results are you hoping to achieve?Stalin's Soviet Union seemed like a good place to live.

[Thirsty Crow]

Stalin's Soviet Union seemed like a good place to live.
Sure, for toadies.


So what? Substitutionism gets results.Long and lasting, evident today especially.

[cliffhanger]

Sure, for toadies.

Long and lasting, evident today especially.

Which revolutionary country would you want to live in? Stalin-backed Republican Spain maybe?

[Fakeblock]

Stalin's Soviet Union seemed like a good place to live.

Disregarding the famines, terrors and foreign invasions I suppose you might say so. However this doesn't really matter, as it's the class character of the Soviet Union that's being discussed. Living standards are a whole other matter and shouldn't be what communists base their politics on anyway. Let's leave that for the social-democrats.

[Devrim]

Some term "degenerate workers state" is pretty silly the way it's used, because it implies that a nation was once a workers' state, when this obviously isn't the case.

The term "degenerated workers' state" is used to describe places like DPRK and Vietnam sometimes, but lets be honest, when have places like that ever really been "workers' states" in the first place? They've been substitutionist since the start.

This isn't right. Trotsky used the term 'degenerated workers state' to apply to the Soviet Union. After the Second War Trotskyists realising as your point out degenerate implies it was once better coined the term 'deformed workers state' to refer to the states of Eastern Europe, which had quite clearly never been workers states. North Korea would therefore be deformed and not degenerated.

Of course non of that means that it isn't all mumbo jumbo.

Devrim

[cliffhanger]

Disregarding the famines, terrors and foreign invasions I suppose you might say so. However this doesn't really matter, as it's the class character of the Soviet Union that's being discussed.Stalin's Soviet Union was a worker's state. What's wrong with terror?

[Skyhilist]

This isn't right. Trotsky used the term 'degenerated workers state' to apply to the Soviet Union. After the Second War Trotskyists realising as your point out degenerate implies it was once better coined the term 'deformed workers state' to refer to the states of Eastern Europe, which had quite clearly never been workers states. North Korea would therefore be deformed and not degenerated.

Of course non of that means that it isn't all mumbo jumbo.

Devrim

You're right, I did get my terms mixed up (mixed up degenerate and deformed that is, but forgive me, it's an easy mistake to make). But yeah deformed workers' state doesn't make sense either. If a person is deformed (i.e. they are a deformed person), they must by definition still be a person. A deformed workers' state must still therefore technically be a type of workers' state to call it that then, which obviously none of the places most trots claim as reformed worker's states are.

[Thirsty Crow]

Which revolutionary country would you want to live in? Stalin-backed Republican Spain maybe?I don't tend to play this kind of a role-play, historical fantasy games.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Wait, so Trotskyists believe their strategy has never worked?

That was not said nor implied.


Will it ever work?
It worked in Russia (as Trotskyism is merely a continuation of Leninism and Marxism) until the workers' state degenerated, not as a consequence of Leninism but of international isolation, famines, civil war, and other conditions.

[Sea]

It worked in Russia (as Trotskyism is merely a continuation of Leninism and Marxism) until the workers' state degenerated, not as a consequence of Leninism but of international isolation, famines, civil war, and other conditions.I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that Trotskyism is what made Russia tick back in its glory days, considering that in 1917 there was really no such thing as Trotskyism. Perhaps the term you're looking for is Leninism. Or Marxism. But I won't say "Marxism-Leninism" because I don't want to make you uncomfortable...


This isn't right. Trotsky used the term 'degenerated workers state' to apply to the Soviet Union. After the Second War Trotskyists realising as your point out degenerate implies it was once better coined the term 'deformed workers state' to refer to the states of Eastern Europe, which had quite clearly never been workers states. North Korea would therefore be deformed and not degenerated.

Of course non of that means that it isn't all mumbo jumbo.

DevrimSo Romania, North Korea, etc, were deformed workers states but were not worker's states in the first place? Would it not simply be more logical to call them what they were / are -- nationalistic, reactionary states -- rather than attaching workerist rhetoric to a state that, by your own admission, was never a worker's state?

[Red_Banner]

Hmm, I disagree. You seem to be stretching. Next you'll be including the numerous Trotskyist actions against the Allies in World War 2 as successful actions, since obviously large numbers of Trotskyists went over to the position that World War 2 was an interimperialist war and that it didn't matter if the Allies or Nazis won. It might be unseemly to include such objectively pro-Nazi actions, though.


Then those "Trotskyists" didn't care about Trotsky's ideas in "Fascism What It Is And How To Fight It.".

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Sorry, this is going back to a trolling post on the first page, w/r/t "Well, were there ever deformed bourgeois/feudal states?"

Interestingly, while I would dispute conclusions drawn by characterizing the USSR as a "degenerated" workers' state (was the state proper ever controlled by the working class?), let alone describing various other states as "deformed", I do think that there are instances of "imperfect" bourgeois and feudal "states" (I think applying the term "state" to all these cases is also problematic, since, obviously, the modern centralized bourgeois state is a different beast than the forms that preceded it). Capitalism didn't take real hold all at once, and I think there's something to be said about formal/real subsumption in this context. Of course, "degenerated" might not be so apt as "incomplete" or "partially realized". If anything, I think this could also be said about various "socialisms" - but, of course, at this point, it's clear I have a pretty different take than any Trotskyists, so I'll respectfully bow out of the discussion.

[Fred]

Actually, what would really have been useful, would have been the USSR supporting revolution in the west. Instead, the "official CPs" in Italy and France, toed the line and helped the bourgeoisie regain control. It also would have been great if the USSR could have avoided selling out the Greek Revolution at the end of WWII.

I think it is debatable whether or not they wanted to overthrow capitalism in the Warsaw Pact countries -- I think they arrived at the conclusion they would not have had a stable military buffer zone if they did not. Whatever. Since I believe it was a good thing. The problem was, Stalinist bureaucrats were installed in each of the countries. And there was, as there was in the USSR a profound de-politicization. Of course, there was some opposition to the Stalinists, some of it from the left, most notably in Hungary in 1956, where there was a political revolution unfolding with workers calling for "socialism without the bureaucrats." This was a far cry from the right wing solidarnosc that was aligned with the US and the pope. There was also an uprising in East Germany in 1953 and the Prague Spring (which was much more muddled than Hungary in 1956).

I'm not really serious about calling for the Soviets to invade Western Europe, although you don't really know how that would have turned out. It certainly isn't clear in hindsight that it would have been better in the long run. It also is probable that the Red Army, at that point could not have easily taken over all of Germany, Austria. Could they have taken over France? I don't know -- neither do you. How many atomic weapons did the US have in 1944 (none I think, it wasn't until 1945 that they were ready). One can make a reasonable argument for the USSR not doing that.

[Devrim]

So Romania, North Korea, etc, were deformed workers states but were not worker's states in the first place? Would it not simply be more logical to call them what they were / are -- nationalistic, reactionary states -- rather than attaching workerist rhetoric to a state that, by your own admission, was never a worker's state?

I was just explaining the usage. I don't agree with it.

Devrim

[Fourth Internationalist]

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that Trotskyism is what made Russia tick back in its glory days, considering that in 1917 there was really no such thing as Trotskyism. Perhaps the term you're looking for is Leninism. Or Marxism. But I won't say "Marxism-Leninism" because I don't want to make you uncomfortable...


Trotskyism is, at its core, Leninist, and Leninist methods worked in Russia and are a part of Trotksyist methods. Hence why I mentioned that it's a continuation of Leninism. Of course I know that Trotskyism was not an ideology then, but the Leninist methods that were used then are a part of Trotskyism now, and they did work. Sorry for the confusion.

[Art Vandelay]

You're right, I did get my terms mixed up (mixed up degenerate and deformed that is, but forgive me, it's an easy mistake to make). But yeah deformed workers' state doesn't make sense either. If a person is deformed (i.e. they are a deformed person), they must by definition still be a person. A deformed workers' state must still therefore technically be a type of workers' state to call it that then, which obviously none of the places most trots claim as reformed worker's states are.

I think its important to note that the theory of 'deformed workers state' is upheld by a minority of Trotskyists.

What I find interesting about this discussion though and many like it in the past, is that those who uphold that a genuine dotp was established in the USSR, but do not uphold a form of the theory of the degenerated workers state, essentially convict themselves of upholding the possibility of reformism in reverse.

[Five Year Plan]

What was the original form of the ‘workers state’ according to Trotsky in 1922?


Or in other words state capitalism organised for the benefit of the otherwise, ‘corrupted and degraded working class’, by the Bolshevik party.

How did this workers state ‘degenerate’ ?

The state capitalist Bolshevik party ‘as it was developed’, to use Trotsky’s own 1922 glass house ‘Junker’ words, became a ‘bureaucratic caste’ which increasingly organised the state capitalist “worker’s state” for its own ‘Dacha’economic interests rather than for the workers.

Ditto; Just as the ‘junkers and [state] capitalists of Germany’, which the Bolsheviks were emulating, did.

Only an anti Marxist apostate by inverting the paradigm of economic base determining ideology could conclude that the one party Bolshevik state capitalism ‘degenerated’.

The economic base of the Bolshevik party was state capitalism.

Thus, also from 1922;


And so taking first Trotsky’s basic analysis; the ‘base’ economic state capitalism of the Bolsheviks actually ‘deformed’ and ‘degenerated’ the ideology of the Bolshevik party to the so called ‘bureaucratic caste’ system of the Stalinist system.

But according to Marxism ideologies are not ‘deformed’ or ‘degenerated’ by economic bases- that would be turning historical materialism on its head.

So turning it the right way up ‘Stalinism’ and its ideology was, ‘formed’ and ‘generated’ out of the compost and seed of Bolshevik party state capitalism; as it adapted its own ideology to more conveniently suit its own interests.

Stalinism was an inevitable progressive ‘formation’, fruition and ‘generation’ of its own self-perfecting ideology and political system suitable, necessary and adapted and rooted to its economic own economic base.

If anything at all the Bolshevik revolution before "1924" itself was temporarily ‘deformed’, or not fully formed, as the ideology of the;

‘rule of the new state capitalist class’


You are confusing a form of state with a mode of production. The state was a workers' state. It presided over an economy that retained relations that remained capitalist in form. Feudal or tributary states didn't cease to be feudal or tributary because some of the relations in the society over which they presided were bourgeois. What matters is classifying a state is its class basis, the social property relations on which the state depends for its officials capacity to act authoritatively.

[Panda Tse Tung]

Sorry, this is going back to a trolling post on the first page, w/r/t "Well, were there ever deformed bourgeois/feudal states?"

Interestingly, while I would dispute conclusions drawn by characterizing the USSR as a "degenerated" workers' state (was the state proper ever controlled by the working class?), let alone describing various other states as "deformed", I do think that there are instances of "imperfect" bourgeois and feudal "states" (I think applying the term "state" to all these cases is also problematic, since, obviously, the modern centralized bourgeois state is a different beast than the forms that preceded it). Capitalism didn't take real hold all at once, and I think there's something to be said about formal/real subsumption in this context. Of course, "degenerated" might not be so apt as "incomplete" or "partially realized". If anything, I think this could also be said about various "socialisms" - but, of course, at this point, it's clear I have a pretty different take than any Trotskyists, so I'll respectfully bow out of the discussion.

Trotsky himself reffered to Napoleon as an example of a deformed bourgeouisie state. Which i think is pretty solid.
Now i dont agree with Trotsky's analyses of the Soviet Union, but i do think the term deformed workers state would apply to say North Korea and China for example.

Still nobody seems interested in my question, was the USSR really a healthy workers state if it could degenerate into a deformed one? (this counts mostly for Trots upholding this theory, since Maoists acknowledge the fallacies of the Soviet Union whereas Trots dont seem to notice any in the pre-1924 Soviet government).

[Fred]

Some term "degenerate workers state" is pretty silly the way it's used, because it implies that a nation was once a workers' state, when this obviously isn't the case.

The term "degenerated workers' state" is used to describe places like DPRK and Vietnam sometimes, but lets be honest, when have places like that ever really been "workers' states" in the first place? They've been substitutionist since the start.

Right. So the USSR was a degenerated workers' state. Romania, Poland, were deformed workers states precisely because they were run by a nationalist, bureaucratic layer from the outset. Cuba, Vietnam, N.Korea, Laos and PRC are all deformed workers states.

[Fred]

This isn't right. Trotsky used the term 'degenerated workers state' to apply to the Soviet Union. After the Second War Trotskyists realising as your point out degenerate implies it was once better coined the term 'deformed workers state' to refer to the states of Eastern Europe, which had quite clearly never been workers states. North Korea would therefore be deformed and not degenerated.

Of course non of that means that it isn't all mumbo jumbo.

Devrim

Almost right. They are all workers' states. That is actually the key point. Workers' states politically ruled by narrow, conservative, nationalistic, bureaucratic layers. They all have planned and collectivized economy's where the laws of value and exchange do not determine production.

[Fred]

So... a healthy workers state turned into a degenerate workers state?
Does this mean any future 'healthy' workers state could suffer the same faith?
Or wasn't it that healthy after all?

Sure. One must understand how and why the USSR "degenerated," in order to prevent that from happening. But could it happen again? Of course. The key point to make to anti-communists, like Dave B., is that the degeneration was not caused primarily by incorrect policies and was absolutely not some kind of inevitable outcome of Leninism.

[Fred]

Trotsky himself reffered to Napoleon as an example of a deformed bourgeouisie state. Which i think is pretty solid.
Now i dont agree with Trotsky's analyses of the Soviet Union, but i do think the term deformed workers state would apply to say North Korea and China for example.

Still nobody seems interested in my question, was the USSR really a healthy workers state if it could degenerate into a deformed one? (this counts mostly for Trots upholding this theory, since Maoists acknowledge the fallacies of the Soviet Union whereas Trots dont seem to notice any in the pre-1924 Soviet government).
If a person is healthy, comrade, can they become sick? Trotskyists don't claim that everything was great pre 1924 and then suddenly, poof, degeneration. No, there were lots of problems that were festering prior to that. Lenin spoke to the rise of the bureaucracy within the party and state several years earlier. And the NEP, for example, was a concession to extremely perilous circumstances that existed in the USSR at the time. The question for Marxists is at what point did quantity become quality. We say 1924.

[Hit The North]

Almost right. They are all workers' states. That is actually the key point. Workers' states politically ruled by narrow, conservative, nationalistic, bureaucratic layers. They all have planned and collectivized economy's where the laws of value and exchange do not determine production.

The question of the law of value is a contentious one. But what makes these states "workers states" if they are ruled by narrow, conservative, nationalistic, bureaucratic layers - especially given that these bureaucratic layers have a different role in the labour process, a different relation to the means of production, and cannot be called workers at all, except by some slight of hand? Are you claiming that the mere fact of a planned, collectivised economy is de facto a workers state?

What kind of economy does a workers state rest on if it is not socialist or capitalist, as you argued earlier in this thread?

[Fred]

What was the original form of the ‘workers state’ according to Trotsky in 1922?



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

Or in other words state capitalism organised for the benefit of the otherwise, ‘corrupted and degraded working class’, by the Bolshevik party.

How did this workers state ‘degenerate’ ?

The state capitalist Bolshevik party ‘as it was developed’, to use Trotsky’s own 1922 glass house ‘Junker’ words, became a ‘bureaucratic caste’ which increasingly organised the state capitalist “worker’s state” for its own ‘Dacha’economic interests rather than for the workers.

Ditto; Just as the ‘junkers and [state] capitalists of Germany’, which the Bolsheviks were emulating, did.

Only an anti Marxist apostate by inverting the paradigm of economic base determining ideology could conclude that the one party Bolshevik state capitalism ‘degenerated’.

The economic base of the Bolshevik party was state capitalism.

Thus, also from 1922;

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

And so taking first Trotsky’s basic analysis; the ‘base’ economic state capitalism of the Bolsheviks actually ‘deformed’ and ‘degenerated’ the ideology of the Bolshevik party to the so called ‘bureaucratic caste’ system of the Stalinist system.

But according to Marxism ideologies are not ‘deformed’ or ‘degenerated’ by economic bases- that would be turning historical materialism on its head.

So turning it the right way up ‘Stalinism’ and its ideology was, ‘formed’ and ‘generated’ out of the compost and seed of Bolshevik party state capitalism; as it adapted its own ideology to more conveniently suit its own interests.

Stalinism was an inevitable progressive ‘formation’, fruition and ‘generation’ of its own self-perfecting ideology and political system suitable, necessary and adapted and rooted to its economic own economic base.

If anything at all the Bolshevik revolution before "1924" itself was temporarily ‘deformed’, or not fully formed, as the ideology of the;

‘rule of the new state capitalist class’

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/grant/works/4/9/reply_to_tony_cliff.html
Your never-ending battle to somehow equate the Bolsheviks in the revolutionary period to the CP under the Triumvirsm, Duumvirs, and ultimately Stalin, are as labored as this sentence.

Any decent Marxist knows that the "economic base" and the political formations resting on top of it have a bi-directional (and dialectical) relationship. History doesn't happen according to sterile, mechanistic schemata.

Cherry picking quotes from Trotsky doesn't really add to the clarity, although I thought his speech to the youth group was excellent and I thank you for the link. Lenin and Trotsky's main commitment was to the world revolution. To that end, they were tenacious in their goal to build up the economic capacities of the USSR. I will start a thread on State Capitalism one of these days and it can be thrashed out more clearly.

Since you do not even understand that a workers revolution took place in the first place, why not stick with that? The various twists and turns would be immaterial to you since it was all capitalism anyway.

[Devrim]

The question for Marxists is at what point did quantity become quality. We say 1924.

What does 'We' mean in this sentence.

Derim

[Fred]

The question of the law of value is a contentious one. But what makes these states "workers states" if they are ruled by narrow, conservative, nationalistic, bureaucratic layers - especially given that these bureaucratic layers have a different role in the labour process, a different relation to the means of production, and cannot be called workers at all, except by some slight of hand? Are you claiming that the mere fact of a planned, collectivised economy is de facto a workers state?

What kind of economy does a workers state rest on if it is not socialist or capitalist, as you argued earlier in this thread?

Indeed it is:). If, as in France, you had a bourgeois revolution, where the political power of the bourgeoisie was usurped by Napoleon and his minions, was France still a bourgeois republic? Yes it was.

Was the USSR a workers' state even after Stalin and Co. usurped power? Same reasoning applies. It is dicier, perhaps with the countries, like China, Cuba and Vietnam which came to power led by Stalinist parties. The Trotskyist concept is, you can have a workers' state without worker's democracy. This is not in any way preferable to the workers having political control, but it can and has happened.

[Devrim]

Indeed it is:). If, as in France, you had a bourgeois revolution, where the political power of the bourgeoisie was usurped by Napoleon and his minions, was France still a bourgeois republic? Yes it was.

So France was a bourgeois republic during the period that it was a monarchy. Do you have a special adjective to describe the sort of 'republic' it was? Perhaps you could call it a 'bourgeois monarchical republic'.

Devrim

[Fred]

So France was a bourgeois republic during the period that it was a monarchy. Do you have a special adjective to describe the sort of 'republic' it was? Perhaps you could call it a 'bourgeois monarchical republic'.

Devrim

Yeah, a bourgeois state. I stand corrected. :crying: Although I like the bourgeois monarchical republic formulation a bunch.

[Geiseric]

So France was a bourgeois republic during the period that it was a monarchy. Do you have a special adjective to describe the sort of 'republic' it was? Perhaps you could call it a 'bourgeois monarchical republic'.

Devrim

All of the land was privately owned and traded at any rate since the aristocracy was abolished. That is different than say Russia where the aristocracy owned everything until 1914, which qualifies as something other than a bourgeois republic. The fSU was a workers state since all of the property was technically publicly owned as a result of the revolution. It doesn't mean it was socialism, it just means that the revolution was incomplete in abolishing the state, and a regime which technically wouldn't be in power unless the revolution happened was in fact in power.

[Brotto Rühle]

That's where the word "degenerated" comes in, because as a matter of fact there was a revolution in Russia which nationalized all property.

Nationalized property =/= workers state.

Read capital for an understanding of capitalism.

[Geiseric]

Nationalized property =/= workers state.

Read capital for an understanding of communism.

Umm i've read capital Mr. Intellectual. Marx lays down nationalizing property as one of the first things socialists are to push for in Principles of Socialism.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

section 18

[Comrade Jacob]

Umm i've read capital Mr. Intellectual. Marx lays down nationalizing property as one of the first things socialists are to push for in Principles of Socialism.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

section 18

I'm sure he means that you can't just have nationalized industry you need that nationalized industry to be democratically controlled by it's workers. ei. Toyota is a nationalized company in Japan but it is not democratically controlled by it's workers, the same with lots of South-Korea.

A socialist economy needs 3 main things:
1. Nationalize industry
2. Have that nationalized industry benefit the people via it's surplus & produce
3. Have it be democratically controlled by the workers

For example: you can have 1 but that doesn't mean 2 and 3 automatically follow...is what I think he meant.

[Fred]

I'm sure he means that you can't just have nationalized industry you need that nationalized industry to be democratically controlled by it's workers. ei. Toyota is a nationalized company in Japan but it is not democratically controlled by it's workers, the same with lots of South-Korea.

A socialist economy needs 3 main things:
1. Nationalize industry
2. Have that nationalized industry benefit the people via it's surplus & produce
3. Have it be democratically controlled by the workers

For example: you can have 1 but that doesn't mean 2 and 3 automatically follow...is what I think he meant.

Yes, comrade those are the goals. Trotskyists do not argue that the USSR was socialist. We do argue that capitalism was abolished in the USSR.

[Geiseric]

I'm sure he means that you can't just have nationalized industry you need that nationalized industry to be democratically controlled by it's workers. ei. Toyota is a nationalized company in Japan but it is not democratically controlled by it's workers, the same with lots of South-Korea.

A socialist economy needs 3 main things:
1. Nationalize industry
2. Have that nationalized industry benefit the people via it's surplus & produce
3. Have it be democratically controlled by the workers

For example: you can have 1 but that doesn't mean 2 and 3 automatically follow...is what I think he meant.

Well people benefit from the oil industry in Venezuela, but that obviously doesn't mean that the country is socialist. He was bringing up a strawman to begin with.

[Hit The North]

Yes, comrade those are the goals. Trotskyists do not argue that the USSR was socialist. We do argue that capitalism was abolished in the USSR.

So what was the mode of production?

[Geiseric]

So what was the mode of production?

Industrial? Technically about a third to half of the GDP was spend on the military while the rest of the countries living standards stagnated, and stayed at about the same level, until debt made that impossible on the part of the bureauracy who proceeded to privatize everything, and make most of their money today by selling the fSUs weapons on the black market. Instead of having stagnating living standards poverty and drug addiction is widespread, so whatever you want to call today, it is different from when the state had monopoly on the economy, as a consequence of the restoration of capitalism.

[Old Bolshie]

I'm sure he means that you can't just have nationalized industry you need that nationalized industry to be democratically controlled by it's workers. ei. Toyota is a nationalized company in Japan but it is not democratically controlled by it's workers, the same with lots of South-Korea.


But the Japanese and the South Korea economies aren't exactly planned economies just because both states own some industry. A planned economy implies the complete nationalization of the means of production by the state and not just one small part of it.

[Per Levy]

Industrial? Technically about a third to half of the GDP was spend on the military while the rest of the countries living standards stagnated, and stayed at about the same level, until debt made that impossible on the part of the bureauracy who proceeded to privatize everything, and make most of their money today by selling the fSUs weapons on the black market. Instead of having stagnating living standards poverty and drug addiction is widespread, so whatever you want to call today, it is different from when the state had monopoly on the economy, as a consequence of the restoration of capitalism.

the question was "So what was the mode of production?" and not what gdp was spend on and what is going on today. so what mode of production was the soviet union? from your point of view it cant be socialist or capitalist so what is it then?

[Geiseric]

the question was "So what was the mode of production?" and not what gdp was spend on and what is going on today. so what mode of production was the soviet union? from your point of view it cant be socialist or capitalist so what is it then?

why does that even matter if we understand the substance of my argument? It was a planned economy, it was like a fortress, with a bureaucracy who leeched off of it.

[cliffhanger]

why does that even matter if we understand the substance of my argument? It was a planned economy, it was like a fortress, with a bureaucracy who leeched off of it.Many socialists care if a country was socialist or not. They use this knowledge to inform their strategy.

[Old Bolshie]

Right. So the USSR was a degenerated workers' state. Romania, Poland, were deformed workers states precisely because they were run by a nationalist, bureaucratic layer from the outset. Cuba, Vietnam, N.Korea, Laos and PRC are all deformed workers states.

I agree pretty much with the definition of Cuba or N.Korea as deformed workers state where private ownership is still meaningless but can't apply the same logic to China where the bourgeoisie strongly developed since Deng's reform and consolidated within the party. The tendency of the past decades has been to liberalize even more the Chinese economy. That tendency is obviously part of the local bourgeoisie agenda which reflex its growing influence in the party.

[Sea]

Umm i've read capital Mr. Intellectual. Marx lays down nationalizing property as one of the first things socialists are to push for in Principles of Socialism.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

section 18
Just an FYI, if someone says that reading Capital will be a good way for you to understand communism, you can freely tell them to piss off, because they probably haven't read it themselves. :)

[Fred]

I agree pretty much with the definition of Cuba or N.Korea as deformed workers state where private ownership is still meaningless but can't apply the same logic to China where the bourgeoisie strongly developed since Deng's reform and consolidated within the party. The tendency of the past decades has been to liberalize even more the Chinese economy. That tendency is obviously part of the local bourgeoisie agenda which reflex its growing influence in the party.

I understand why you might say this. I still think the largest parts of the Chinese economy are state owned and there is still central planning. That being said, the bureaucrats have certainly set the stage for a restoration of capitalism. They walk a fine line, as there is a Chinese bourgeoisie. They've been hanging out in Taiwan since the revolution. Oh, and they have also been allowing the local bourgeoisie to develop. Since what is happening in China is without historical precedent, I think we will have to watch what develops and draw appropriate conclusions.

[Fakeblock]

The degenerated/deformed workers' state theory is a contradictory mess and only works if you mystify the relations between states and classes. State monopoly is only in the interest of the worker when industry is under the command of the working class directly exercising its dictatorship and when it serves the purpose of enabling the abolition of the working class Otherwise it's really nothing to get excited about.

And saying that the bureaucracy can control a 'proletarian form of economy' (a form that can't possibly exist) and a revolutionary, proletarian state while directly hindering and preventing revolutionary progress is completely nonsensical. Seems like it was just a stupid way for Trotsky to discredit Stalin while not looking as if he'd given up on the revolution, which would be fine if the theory was coherent. But it isn't. On the contrary it posits that workers' states can be ruled by social groups (classes, castes, whatever) that have only a predatory connection to the workers and that these states can take the form of a typical bourgeois dictatorship with its bureaucracy, standing army, police force etc. How any marxist could claim that is beyond me.

The talk 'proletarian bonapartism' doesn't make sense either. You can't compare bourgeois and proletarian dictatorships in this regard. Whereas the bourgeois dictatorship remains so by preserving bourgeois econmomic power (which even the bonapartist, bourgeois states did) the proletarian dictatorship will only serve proletarian interests when it's used for the purpose of abolishing the proletariat in its entirety. Whereas the bourgeoisie controls the state through its economic power, through its ownership over the means of production, the proletariat only has economic power through the state. The working class therefore has to build state structures that it can control directly. Lose control of these institutions to bureaucracies, landowners, capitalists or whatever and there can be no more talk of a workers' state. In that case it doesn't matter how many industries are nationalised, the workers are getting fucked all the same.

[Fred]

The degenerated/deformed workers' state theory is a contradictory mess and only works if you mystify the relations between states and classes. State monopoly is only in the interest of the worker when industry is under the command of the working class directly exercising its dictatorship and when it serves the purpose of enabling the abolition of the working class Otherwise it's really nothing to get excited about.

And saying that the bureaucracy can control a 'proletarian form of economy' (a form that can't possibly exist) and a revolutionary, proletarian state while directly hindering and preventing revolutionary progress is completely nonsensical. Seems like it was just a stupid way for Trotsky to discredit Stalin while not looking as if he'd given up on the revolution, which would be fine if the theory was coherent. But it isn't. On the contrary it posits that workers' states can be ruled by social groups (classes, castes, whatever) that have only a predatory connection to the workers and that these states can take the form of a typical bourgeois dictatorship with its bureaucracy, standing army, police force etc. How any marxist could claim that is beyond me.

The talk 'proletarian bonapartism' doesn't make sense either. You can't compare bourgeois and proletarian dictatorships in this regard. Whereas the bourgeois dictatorship remains so by preserving bourgeois econmomic power (which even the bonapartist, bourgeois states did) the proletarian dictatorship will only serve proletarian interests when it's used for the purpose of abolishing the proletariat in its entirety. Whereas the bourgeoisie controls the state through its economic power, through its ownership over the means of production, the proletariat only has economic power through the state. The working class therefore has to build state structures that it can control directly. Lose control of these institutions to bureaucracies, landowners, capitalists or whatever and there can be no more talk of a workers' state. In that case it doesn't matter how many industries are nationalised, the workers are getting fucked all the same.
But it can most certainly be said the the proletariat benefited greatly from the proletarian property forms in the USSR. By the 1960s they were far far better off than they would have been had the Revolution not overthrown the bourgeoisie. This with a civil war, invasion by 14 imperialist nations, WWI and WWII. So as the bourgeoisie benefits from some situations where they do not have direct political power, so can the proletariat.

And please, don't lecture about the brutality of primitive capital accumulation. The USSR was very economically and socially backward. As long as it was not aided by a wider proletarian revolution many difficult decisions had to be made. But treating the Bolsheviks as a group without accounting for their internationalism is crazy. It misses the whole point of why it mattered that they hold on. Stalin, of course changed that aspect.

[Zanthorus]

It was a planned economy, it was like a fortress, with a bureaucracy who leeched off of it.

OK, first problem I have with the theory of the Degenerated Workers' State. The NEP temporarily rescinded the grip of the state on the economy, it was only under Stalin that the fully planned economy was birthed. But if we accept this, that means that it was in fact the bureaucracy that ended capitalism once and for all in the Soviet Union, or at least they were the force that finished the job, rather the proletariat.

If that is the case then it follows either (1) that the proletarian revolution is not the only event which can abolish capitalism, a proposition which is contrary to Marxism. (2) That the Soviet Union was a state in which the workers' really did have political dominion, (3) that the Soviet Union was always capitalist or (4) that the presence or absence of planning has nothing to do with the presence or absence of capitalism, or only to a certain extent.

Further to the point, Trotskyists assume that a workers' state will not have a capitalist economy. But to my mind, the point of the workers' state is precisely that the economy is still capitalist, and hence the continued need for the existence of political life. Marx said in fact, that it was precisely the contradiction between the rule of the workers' in the political sphere and their subjection in the social sphere that was the driving force behind the Paris Commune (The Commune, moreover, didn't nationalise property, but it was still regarded as the DotP by Marx and Engels).

The Manifesto is all very well and good, but Marx and Engels did not regard those demands as either equivalent to socialism, or equivalent to the existence of the workers' state, they regarded them as demands to be implemented once the political rule of the working-class had been achieved. So quoting the demand for nationalisation in the ten points is, well, besides the point. In fact, Engels had to this to say about the demands of the communist party:


But Herr Heinzen also promises social reforms. Of course, the indifference of the people towards his appeals has gradually forced him to. And what kind of. reforms are these? They are such as the Communists themselves suggest in preparation for the abolition of private property. The only point Herr Heinzen makes that deserves recognition he has borrowed from the Communists, the Communists whom he attacks so violently, and even that is reduced in his hands to utter nonsense and mere day-dreaming. All measures to restrict competition and the accumulation of capital in the hands of individuals, all restriction or suppression of the law of inheritance, all organisation of labour by the state, etc., all these measures are not only possible as revolutionary measures, but actually necessary. They are possible because the whole insurgent proletariat is behind them and maintains them by force of arms. They are possible, despite all the difficulties and disadvantages which are alleged against them by economists, because these very difficulties and disadvantages will compel the proletariat to go further and further until private property has been completely abolished, in order not to lose again what it has already won. They are possible as preparatory steps, temporary transitional stages towards the abolition of private property, but not in any other way.

- The Communists and Karl Heinzen

It seems pretty clear here that Engels believes:

(1) That the practical demands of the Communists are not equivalent to socialism but in fact are transitional stages which will compel the proletariat further to completely abolish private property.

(2) That these demands only have meaning as communist demands when enforced by the political power of the proletariat, without that they are empty.

Conclusion: For Marx and Engels the measure of whether or not a state is a 'workers' state' is the existence or non-existence of the political rule of the proletariat as a class. The policies of a workers' state only have significance insofar as these are the political acts of the working-class, take away the elements of working-class rule and you have capitalism again. Further to the point, the existance of a society with a state but which has transcended capitalism is contrary to the Marxist understanding of the state as an element of class society.

So, the USSR was either a workers' state, or a plain old capitalist state. And I am inclined towards the former.

Addendum: I don't think Trotskyism has ever come up with a satisfying explanation for the economies which the Soviet Union exported it's economic model too. Practically none of these had genuine periods of working-class rule, but internally their organisation was similar to the Soviet Union. How can this be? At some point we either tack the name 'workers' state' onto countries which never had workers' political power, and make a patent absurdity out of the whole Marxist conception, or we admit that 'workers' state', 'degenerated', 'deformed' or otherwise, just doesn't quite cut the mustard.

[Five Year Plan]

The degenerated/deformed workers' state theory is a contradictory mess and only works if you mystify the relations between states and classes. State monopoly is only in the interest of the worker when industry is under the command of the working class directly exercising its dictatorship and when it serves the purpose of enabling the abolition of the working class Otherwise it's really nothing to get excited about.

And saying that the bureaucracy can control a 'proletarian form of economy' (a form that can't possibly exist) and a revolutionary, proletarian state while directly hindering and preventing revolutionary progress is completely nonsensical. Seems like it was just a stupid way for Trotsky to discredit Stalin while not looking as if he'd given up on the revolution, which would be fine if the theory was coherent. But it isn't. On the contrary it posits that workers' states can be ruled by social groups (classes, castes, whatever) that have only a predatory connection to the workers and that these states can take the form of a typical bourgeois dictatorship with its bureaucracy, standing army, police force etc. How any marxist could claim that is beyond me.

The talk 'proletarian bonapartism' doesn't make sense either. You can't compare bourgeois and proletarian dictatorships in this regard. Whereas the bourgeois dictatorship remains so by preserving bourgeois econmomic power (which even the bonapartist, bourgeois states did) the proletarian dictatorship will only serve proletarian interests when it's used for the purpose of abolishing the proletariat in its entirety. Whereas the bourgeoisie controls the state through its economic power, through its ownership over the means of production, the proletariat only has economic power through the state. The working class therefore has to build state structures that it can control directly. Lose control of these institutions to bureaucracies, landowners, capitalists or whatever and there can be no more talk of a workers' state. In that case it doesn't matter how many industries are nationalised, the workers are getting fucked all the same.

I agree with deformed workers' state theory being a mess. To be more blunt, there is no "theory" of deformed workers' states. It's a label lazily applied to enshrine of an untested assumption of Trotsky made in his writings from the late 1930s, an assumption which post-war realities later disproved.

The degenerated workers' state theory, however, is a different story entirely. To acknowledge the existence of a degenerating or degenerated workers' states requires nothing more than acknowledging that states have some relative autonomy from ruling classes, and so do not always at all times act to enforce the expressed or even implied interests of those classes. As Fred here mentioned earlier, the French empire did not cease being a republic just because the Napoleonic dictatorship was not a transparent reflection of the wishes of the bourgeoisie. It's the same with workers' states. Sometimes they can act bureaucratically. Sometimes, as happened in Russia in the 1920s, it can degenerate so severely that the ruling class would have to forcibly overthrow of the bureaucrats in office to get the machinery of the state to work fully in their own interests again.

Disputing the possibility of a degenerated or degenerating workers' state is to apply an unrealistic standard to the workers' state, a standard which if actually met would make any state unnecessary in the first place.

[Geiseric]

The N.E.P. only happened because the workers state allowed it to happen. It got out of control as we all know because the workers state allowed that to happen, since the right and center oppositions, which grew after the civil war, wanted to restore capitalism as far back as 1925. Stalin even said that he would allow Kulaks in the Caucuses to own their land and sell their grain for as long as they wanted, while people in the cities were suffering from food shortages. He was forced to collectivize due to his blissful ignorance about the inequalities still existing as far forward as 1928.

[Brotto Rühle]

To clear things up, I meant capitalism, not communism in my comment about capital.

So, what features of capitalism did not exist in the USSR? Because alienation, commodity production, wage labour, etc. All still existed.

[Comrade Jacob]

But the Japanese and the South Korea economies aren't exactly planned economies just because both states own some industry. A planned economy implies the complete nationalization of the means of production by the state and not just one small part of it.

I know, I was referring to the some of the industries' mode of production. Not the whole.

[Sea]

I know, I was referring to the some of the industries' mode of production. Not the whole.Huh? Socialism-in-one-industry? I'm sorry, but even nationalized industries can retain the objective characteristics of capitalist production.

[Fakeblock]

But it can most certainly be said the the proletariat benefited greatly from the proletarian property forms in the USSR. By the 1960s they were far far better off than they would have been had the Revolution not overthrown the bourgeoisie. This with a civil war, invasion by 14 imperialist nations, WWI and WWII. So as the bourgeoisie benefits from some situations where they do not have direct political power, so can the proletariat.

What does benefit mean in this context? The workers in the West benefitted from the post-World War 2 golden age, but America still isn't a workers' state. Living standards aren't really effective 'measurements' of the class character of a state.


And please, don't lecture about the brutality of primitive capital accumulation. The USSR was very economically and socially backward. As long as it was not aided by a wider proletarian revolution many difficult decisions had to be made. But treating the Bolsheviks as a group without accounting for their internationalism is crazy. It misses the whole point of why it mattered that they hold on. Stalin, of course changed that aspect.

I'm not really sure how what you wrote here applies to my post as I agree with most of this. Though I'd go further and say that the isolation of the revolution lead to the death of the workers' state within the first few years. This was beyond the control of the Bolsheviks and anyone else. Some difficult decisions, though necessary, all came at the cost of the dotp.


I agree with deformed workers' state theory being a mess. To be more blunt, there is no "theory" of deformed workers' states. It's a label lazily applied to enshrine of an untested assumption of Trotsky made in his writings from the late 1930s, an assumption which post-war realities later disproved.

The degenerated workers' state theory, however, is a different story entirely. To acknowledge the existence of a degenerating or degenerated workers' states requires nothing more than acknowledging that states have some relative autonomy from ruling classes, and so do not always at all times act to enforce the expressed or even implied interests of those classes. As Fred here mentioned earlier, the French empire did not cease being a republic just because the Napoleonic dictatorship was not a transparent reflection of the wishes of the bourgeoisie. It's the same with workers' states. Sometimes they can act bureaucratically. Sometimes, as happened in Russia in the 1920s, it can degenerate so severely that the ruling class would have to forcibly overthrow of the bureaucrats in office to get the machinery of the state to work fully in their own interests again.

When the bourgeois state starts working against the preservation of wage-labour - capital relations it will no longer be a bourgeois state.

The bourgeoisie can build their economic power without possessing state power. As long as the state preserves bourgeois productive relations at the expense of feudal or more advanced ones it will remain a bourgeois state, as it preserves the social supremacy of the bourgeois class. And it will do this because of the bourgeoisie's previously acquired socio-economic power, both within an outside the state machine. I'm not saying that a class has to sit around a table and plan legislature before it can be called a ruling class.

The proletariat, on the other hand, seeks political supremacy over all other elements in society, not so it can build social supremacy, but so it can abolish class supremacy in its entirety. Either it possesses political supremacy and uses it to accomplish this goal or it doesn't. Compromise will always be in favour of the enemy. The proletariat has no other potential organs of power as the bourgeoisie has and workers' power can only be expressed politically. If a state disempowers workers, fights against working class revolutions and preserves traditional productive relations, i.e if there are no organs of proletarian political power, it isn't a workers' state.


Disputing the possibility of a degenerated or degenerating workers' state is to apply an unrealistic standard to the workers' state, a standard which if actually met would make any state unnecessary in the first place.

I expect nothing more than proletarian political rule in a proletarian state. If that one simple criterion isn't met, it shouldn't be called a workers' state.

[Brotto Rühle]

I ask the Trots, yet again. What features of capitalism no longer existed?

Protip: nationalization is a part of capitalism.

[Comrade Jacob]

Huh? Socialism-in-one-industry? I'm sorry, but even nationalized industries can retain the objective characteristics of capitalist production.

No, when I referred to me referring to it I was talking about how they are nationalized but are not socialist. Bloody hell.

[Geiseric]

What does benefit mean in this context? The workers in the West benefitted from the post-World War 2 golden age, but America still isn't a workers' state. Living standards aren't really effective 'measurements' of the class character of a state.



I'm not really sure how what you wrote here applies to my post as I agree with most of this. Though I'd go further and say that the isolation of the revolution lead to the death of the workers' state within the first few years. This was beyond the control of the Bolsheviks and anyone else. Some difficult decisions, though necessary, all came at the cost of the dotp.



When the bourgeois state starts working against the preservation of wage-labour - capital relations it will no longer be a bourgeois state.

The bourgeoisie can build their economic power without possessing state power. As long as the state preserves bourgeois productive relations at the expense of feudal or more advanced ones it will remain a bourgeois state, as it preserves the social supremacy of the bourgeois class. And it will do this because of the bourgeoisie's previously acquired socio-economic power, both within an outside the state machine. I'm not saying that a class has to sit around a table and plan legislature before it can be called a ruling class.

The proletariat, on the other hand, seeks political supremacy over all other elements in society, not so it can build social supremacy, but so it can abolish class supremacy in its entirety. Either it possesses political supremacy and uses it to accomplish this goal or it doesn't. Compromise will always be in favour of the enemy. The proletariat has no other potential organs of power as the bourgeoisie has and workers' power can only be expressed politically. If a state disempowers workers, fights against working class revolutions and preserves traditional productive relations, i.e if there are no organs of proletarian political power, it isn't a workers' state.



I expect nothing more than proletarian political rule in a proletarian state. If that one simple criterion isn't met, it shouldn't be called a workers' state.

the working class in the U.S. benefited from the growth of the AFLCIO, not from the war itself. There is a big difference between Kenyesian economics and the planned economy the fSU had.

[Geiseric]

I ask the Trots, yet again. What features of capitalism no longer existed?

Protip: nationalization is a part of capitalism.

Unemployment, the reserve army of labor, and illiteracy were eliminated by the revolution. All of those things are now present in russia. The idea of state or public ownership of the economy, such as public schooling we have in most countries, was applied to everywhere in the fSU's economy. Of course there were bureaucrats who were the surrogates of the pressures that imperialism imposed. They were the entire problem from the get go. If they were overthrown then the fSU would of continued to have a planned economy to this day.

[Remus Bleys]

the reserve army of labor
"The slaves in Stalin’s camps are a crude version of the “army of unemployed” of traditional capitalism, that is, they serve to keep the rest of the workers ‘in their places’." Tony Cliff. ,

illiteracy What does this have to do with the mode of production?

[Geiseric]

"The slaves in Stalin’s camps are a crude version of the “army of unemployed” of traditional capitalism, that is, they serve to keep the rest of the workers ‘in their places’." Tony Cliff. ,
What does this have to do with the mode of production?

The gulag system was forced labor, primitave accumulation, as we see in any other country with prisons. But that is a far fetched comparison especially since gulags weren't in use much after the war. If you want to say that the existence of forced labor makes something capitalism then ancient rome, which was run by slave labor was also capitalist. Besides not that many of those existed post Stalin.

[Remus Bleys]

If you want to say that the existence of forced labor makes something capitalism then ancient rome, which was run by slave labor was also capitalist.That's not what is being argued. The gulag system was analogous to the reserve force of labor.
If you didn't watch yourself or went on strike (anything that'll get you fired here) you'd get sent to the gulag. That was a way of keeping the workers in check, and a cheap force of labor.

[bluemangroup]

Do you mean to ask what would a Trotskyist consider a healthy workers' state? If so, the answer would be the USSR before 1924. This with the understanding that there were certainly problems before that. It is critical to underscore that Trotskyists defend the USSR and the deformed workers' states (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea -- and the East bloc countries) against imperialist attack and against the restoration of capitalism. The theoretical underpinnings for this are laid out nicely by comrade Trotsky in "In Defense of Marxism," which is available online.

As a Maoist, I would IMHO view this as idealistic from a Marxist point of view. The USSR under Lenin (and Trotsky) was a workers' state, although one that had been misshaped by the unmitigated growth of the bureaucracy which was a process beginning under Lenin but continuing unimpeded under Stalin and subsequent (revisionist) Soviet leaders

There were notable attempts under Stalin to revitalize and democratize the bureaucratized and un-wieldly soviets (an attempt resisted most strongly by cadre, according to the author of Class Struggles in the USSR)

The major difference IMHO between Stalin's USSR and Mao's China was Mao's repeated attempts to keep the communist party linked deeply with the masses as it had been during the civil war, through the practicing of grassroots democracy and the implementation of serve the people and bombard the headquarters policies most notably during the Cultural Revolution.

Lenin had foreseen the dangers of bureaucracy, which had started to materialize as early as 1918 out of the emerging Soviet system then still in its early stages. The state had developed in a markedly different manner from his predictions in his April Thesis (i.e. a commune-state) and had taken a bureaucratic turn as the Soviet system expanded and matured. Lenin never lost faith, according to the leftist historian E.H. Carr, in the direct democracy embodied in the soviets. Unfortunately for Lenin, the notion of an un-bureaucratic or even anti-bureaucratic state proved to be unworkable in the long run owing to the complexities of managing a state encompassing much of the former Czarist empire.



Uh, the Red Army marching into Eastern Europe did not exactly constitute successful workers' revolutions. As a Trotskyist, I defend the overturn of capitalism in those states, but let's just say it wasn't done in an optimal fashion. That being said, the might of the Soviet workers' state did ultimately smash the Nazis. IN SPITE OF STALIN's OUTRAGEOUSLY BAD LEADERSHIP (e.g., purging and killing most of the USSR's high level military leaders in the late 30s, ignoring the very clear intelligence he received the the Germans were invading including the exact times, places, troop strengths, etc.).

The Red Army entering eastern Europe, controversial as it was, broke the USSR's longstanding isolation from the rest of the world. The hostile and genocidal Nazi state was destroyed militarily, while communists for the first time assumed power in Europe outside of the USSR or east Asia.

The KPD's major mistake before the 1933 Nazi seizure of power was to disregard the Nazis as a threat to the prospects of revolution and to instead scrutinize the Social-Democrats; the KPD post-1945 sought to correct its past mistakes through forging a multiparty, antifascist alliance with antifascist and democratic parties (esp. with the Social-Democrats) included in the makeup of the post-war east German state

From a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist point of view, as the Soviet Union and consequently eastern Europe descended into revisionism (such as the refusal to recognize class struggle under the proletarian dictatorship a la Khrushchev through his belief in 'Peaceful Co-existence') the communist party gradually fell to individuals who not only did not believe in the class struggle anymore but who sought to implement capitalist reforms in their respective countries (such as China after Mao's death or the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and subsequent leaders)

IMHO I would have to resolutely disagree with the Trotskyist view of a 'deformed workers' state' as overly simplistic and idealistic (as I am a materialist who seeks to form a complex picture of historical events)

[Brotto Rühle]

Unemployment, the reserve army of labor, and illiteracy were eliminated by the revolution. All of those things are now present in russia. The idea of state or public ownership of the economy, such as public schooling we have in most countries, was applied to everywhere in the fSU's economy. Of course there were bureaucrats who were the surrogates of the pressures that imperialism imposed. They were the entire problem from the get go. If they were overthrown then the fSU would of continued to have a planned economy to this day.

What does illiteracy have to do with the mode of production? Remus hits the nail on the head. Not only was the "reserve labour army" in existence, unemployment was never at 0%

State run schools, hospitals, etc. Are clearly not alien to capitalism...

[Geiseric]

The only way capitalism developed in russia was in concert with the backwardness of the country, which had a near total illiteracy rate. An entire country of people didn't know how to read, and got their life lessons from some orthodox priest, for the most part. That changed when there was free education accross the whole fSU, and it's one sign that capitalism was abolished, with the huge strides made by the citizens of the fSU in a very short amount of time.

State run schools, hospitals, factories, are not alien to capitalism but state ownership of those things, as well as the entire economy, is completely alien to capitalism, since it's impossible to claim ownership of something, thus profit off of others labor, when the capital is owned by the state. The distribution of wealth was nowhere near as sharp as where it is now either, which is exponentially worse than during the fSU.

However the existance of a GULAG system doesn't make a country capitalist. I'm not defending anything they did, but the planned economy was completely different than capitalism. It doesn't take a world class economist to figure that out.

[Red_Banner]

The only way capitalism developed in russia was in concert with the backwardness of the country, which had a near total illiteracy rate. An entire country of people didn't know how to read, and got their life lessons from some orthodox priest, for the most part. That changed when there was free education accross the whole fSU, and it's one sign that capitalism was abolished, with the huge strides made by the citizens of the fSU in a very short amount of time.

State run schools, hospitals, factories, are not alien to capitalism but state ownership of those things, as well as the entire economy, is completely alien to capitalism, since it's impossible to claim ownership of something, thus profit off of others labor, when the capital is owned by the state. The distribution of wealth was nowhere near as sharp as where it is now either, which is exponentially worse than during the fSU.

However the existance of a GULAG system doesn't make a country capitalist. I'm not defending anything they did, but the planned economy was completely different than capitalism. It doesn't take a world class economist to figure that out.


What is the "f" in "fSU"?

And no this isn't a joke about fuck.

[Remus Bleys]

What is the "f" in "fSU"?

And no this isn't a joke about fuck.
former Soviet Union

[Brotto Rühle]

The only way capitalism developed in russia was in concert with the backwardness of the country, which had a near total illiteracy rate. An entire country of people didn't know how to read, and got their life lessons from some orthodox priest, for the most part. That changed when there was free education accross the whole fSU, and it's one sign that capitalism was abolished, with the huge strides made by the citizens of the fSU in a very short amount of time.Illiteracy has nothing to do with the mode of production. It's like your argument is "something good occurred, therefore capitalism didn't exist!"


State run schools, hospitals, factories, are not alien to capitalism but state ownership of those things, as well as the entire economy, is completely alien to capitalism, since it's impossible to claim ownership of something, thus profit off of others labor, when the capital is owned by the state. The distribution of wealth was nowhere near as sharp as where it is now either, which is exponentially worse than during the fSU. No, it's not. The state, a private entity, controlled profits of the working class who had to sell their labour to survive, and were alienated from the means of production which were owned by the state.

I suggest you read to find out what capitalism is. Marx's critique of Political Economy should help.


However the existance of a GULAG system doesn't make a country capitalist. I'm not defending anything they did, but the planned economy was completely different than capitalism. It doesn't take a world class economist to figure that out.Jesus Christ. Read some Marx.

[synthesis]

However the existance of a GULAG system doesn't make a country capitalist.

Slave labor doesn't make a country capitalist?

[Remus Bleys]

Slave labor doesn't make a country capitalist?
Slave labor is different than wage labor.
That being said, how is slave labor remotely compatible with a worker's state? Its more reactionary than serfdom.

[Fred]

Slave labor is different than wage labor.
That being said, how is slave labor remotely compatible with a worker's state? Its more reactionary than serfdom.

For that to be meaningful, you would have to argue that slave labor was a significant contributor to the Soviet economy. It was not. A lot of ugly things happen (ed) under Stalinist misrule. And in the long run, it is not compatible, it is a contradiction. In historical terms, the Stalinist bureaucracies are parasitical ephemera, that will have no role to play as time goes on. Meaning, that either capitalism gets restored, or we have large-scale proletarian revolution.

[Fred]

Illiteracy has nothing to do with the mode of production. It's like your argument is "something good occurred, therefore capitalism didn't exist!"

No, it's not. The state, a private entity, controlled profits of the working class who had to sell their labour to survive, and were alienated from the means of production which were owned by the state.

I suggest you read to find out what capitalism is. Marx's critique of Political Economy should help.

Jesus Christ. Read some Marx.

How do you figure the state is a private entity? Production for profit did not exist, the laws of value and exchange did not exist. How's that for Marxist purity? There was no private competing capital -- that which Marx said is the very essence of capital. Geseric is not making good arguments here, but he is essentially correct. He was just turning a classic state capper argurment on its head which is: "Something bad occurred, so it's not a workers' state."

[Remus Bleys]

For that to be meaningful, you would have to argue that slave labor was a significant contributor to the Soviet economy. It was not. A lot of ugly things happen (ed) under Stalinist misrule. And in the long run, it is not compatible, it is a contradiction. In historical terms, the Stalinist bureaucracies are parasitical ephemera, that will have no role to play as time goes on. Meaning, that either capitalism gets restored, or we have large-scale proletarian revolution.

I wasn't saying that the "slave labor" was significant.
I was saying slave labor does not make something capitalist. The significance is that this is analogous to the reserve force of labor in regular capitalism.

The unemployed are not a "productive" force of capitalism, yet they are an essential part.

[Fred]

I wasn't saying that the "slave labor" was significant.
I was saying slave labor does not make something capitalist. The significance is that this is analogous to the reserve force of labor in regular capitalism.

The unemployed are not a "productive" force of capitalism, yet they are an essential part.

I'm not sure I understand you. Okay, of course slave labor does not equal capitalism. It is rather, somewhat antithetical to it. The reserve army of labor is essential -- their role is to keep wages low. In the USSR, lower employment meant higher wages, because there was only so much money allotted for wages in the spending plans -- just another point to distinguish it from capitalism.

[Remus Bleys]

I'm not sure I understand you. Okay, of course slave labor does not equal capitalism. It is rather, somewhat antithetical to it. The reserve army of labor is essential -- their role is to keep wages low. In the USSR, lower employment meant higher wages, because there was only so much money allotted for wages in the spending plans -- just another point to distinguish it from capitalism.

Let me break it down for you:
According to the State Capitalist theory, which I'm really on the fence about, those sent did represent the reserve army of labor. The argument goes, if you acted out of line, instead of being fired, who were used as slave labor - slave labor replacing the reserve army of unemployed.

Now, the reason you're replying to me is that you appeared to misunderstand this:

Slave labor doesn't make a country capitalist?

Slave labor is different than wage labor.
That being said, how is slave labor remotely compatible with a worker's state? Its more reactionary than serfdom.Synthesis was acting as if slave labor is what made it capitalist. Which makes no sense. Slave labor isn't capitalist, but in this case it was roughly analogous to the reserve army of labor.

The second part was a question to the non-state capitalist people. The USSR had slave labor. Slave labor is more reactionary than even serfdom. So how does a worker's state, a progressive force, incorporate such reactionary things, such as slave labor, into its core?

[bluemangroup]

The second part was a question to the non-state capitalist people. The USSR had slave labor. Slave labor is more reactionary than even serfdom. So how does a worker's state, a progressive force, incorporate such reactionary things, such as slave labor, into its core?

IMHO it was a holdover from the old (Czarist) regime, a survival from the not-so-distant past; When the revolution advanced from the bourgeois-democratic stage to the socialist stage in October 1917, it took with it elements of the Russian past (such as the dominance of the kulaks over the rural villages, bureaucracy in the party and in the soviets, a strong centralized Soviet government based from Moscow, etc.)

Collectivization of agriculture, an increase in the use of heavy factories for manufacture, the revitalization of the soviets (however problematic), etc. were all attempts to socialize society economically or politically in a historically backwards peasant country.

So there were reactionary elements inherent in Soviet society which took years to overcome, contradictions in the overarching Soviet system.

[Fred]

Let me break it down for you:
According to the State Capitalist theory, which I'm really on the fence about, those sent did represent the reserve army of labor. The argument goes, if you acted out of line, instead of being fired, who were used as slave labor - slave labor replacing the reserve army of unemployed.

Now, the reason you're replying to me is that you appeared to misunderstand this:

Synthesis was acting as if slave labor is what made it capitalist. Which makes no sense. Slave labor isn't capitalist, but in this case it was roughly analogous to the reserve army of labor.

The second part was a question to the non-state capitalist people. The USSR had slave labor. Slave labor is more reactionary than even serfdom. So how does a worker's state, a progressive force, incorporate such reactionary things, such as slave labor, into its core?

Thanks for the clarification, comrade. Slave labor was a blight -- and one of the many contradictions that embodied the USSR. The state capper argument about slave labor (prison labor, really) is specious. It in no way served the purpose that the reserve army of the unemployed serve in a capitalist economy.

[Remus Bleys]

Thanks for the clarification, comrade. Slave labor was a blight -- and one of the many contradictions that embodied the USSR. The state capper argument about slave labor (prison labor, really) is specious. It in no way served the purpose that the reserve army of the unemployed serve in a capitalist economy.

Can you explain why this is?

[argeiphontes]

This article (http://libcom.org/history/strikes-against-stalin-1930s-russia-jeffrey-rossman) gives some insight about the extent to which there was a worker's state in Russia in the 1930s.

Not only were labor camps part of the threat to keep people in line (like the threat of unemployment), but you could be fired and blacklisted, for example the article talks about the "lishentsy [persons deprived of their civil rights]". Oh, and exiled to Kazhakstan or Siberia like some of the strike leaders in the article.

edit: Ever hear the slogan, "Nye rabatayesh, nye kushayesh", meaning "If you don't work, you don't eat." This is the same existential threat as unemployment. In fact it's greater.

[Fred]

This article (http://libcom.org/history/strikes-against-stalin-1930s-russia-jeffrey-rossman) gives some insight about the extent to which there was a worker's state in Russia in the 1930s.

Not only were labor camps part of the threat to keep people in line (like the threat of unemployment), but you could be fired and blacklisted, for example the article talks about the "lishentsy [persons deprived of their civil rights]". Oh, and exiled to Kazhakstan or Siberia like some of the strike leaders in the article.

edit: Ever hear the slogan, "Nye rabatayesh, nye kushayesh", meaning "If you don't work, you don't eat." This is the same existential threat as unemployment. In fact it's greater.

You are missing the forest for the trees. The principle function of the reserve army of the unemployed in capitalism is to depress wages so as to increase profit. So while what the Soviets did may have elicited similar emotions from some sections of the proletariat, none of this stuff served to suppress wages in a meaningful way.

[argeiphontes]

Fair enough about the wage depression, but you don't think it serves to increase profit, just by ensuring that some minimum amount of work is done? The state enterprises would just have crumbled otherwise, since "we pretend to work and you pretend to pay us" in the worker's paradise.

edit: Of course, there were other incentives for work, as exemplified by the sort of "useful idiot" who was swayed by them, for example the "Worker's Hero" figure depicted in the Andzej Wajda film, Man of Iron. But I would still maintain that coercion was the biggest factor in workforce discipline.

edit2: As for wage depression, in the article I linked to, they decrease rations and enforce it through arrests and ignoring the striker's demands when people rebel against it. In a way, decreasing rations is decreasing remuneration for work, just not in the form of money.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Personally, I think the USSR showed the capitalist mode of production and that's what I argue when I debate this with Trots I know (I organise within a Trot group, not because I agree with the theory 100% but because I think that within the place I live they are the only group engaging within the working class effectively). However, they always ask 'who were the capitalists then?' as the bureaucratic layer (or, probably more specifically, the politburo) never definitively owned the means of production and technically answering to the workers (although not in practice). I always reply along the same lines as Paul Mattick, that the politburo acted as a defacto-bourgeoisie never having a piece of paper that said they owned this factory or that mine but nonetheless operating as a capitalist to extract the surplus value and reinvest it to regain profit.

What are various people's interpretations of this? What was the class nature of the bureaucrats in other peoples' opinions? If capitalism exists (or didn't exist) where was the capitalist class who controlled the means of production? I'm interested in this discussion and the various interpretations.

[argeiphontes]

The bureaucracy and the party appropriated more of the social product for themselves at the expense of the workers. That's an exploitative relationship. There must have been a surplus produced to give some people more than the value of their product (this bureaucracy). Hence some got less, and there was capitalism of a kind, viz. state capitalism. You often hear of the lavish lifestyles, including dachas and elaborate hunting trips and so on, of higher level party bureaucrats. How could they have this surplus to waste if they didn't extract it from the workers?

[Fred]

The bureaucracy and the party appropriated more of the social product for themselves at the expense of the workers. That's an exploitative relationship. There must have been a surplus produced to give some people more than the value of their product (this bureaucracy). Hence some got less, and there was capitalism of a kind, viz. state capitalism. You often hear of the lavish lifestyles, including dachas and elaborate hunting trips and so on, of higher level party bureaucrats. How could they have this surplus to waste if they didn't extract it from the workers?

This is all very confused. Surplus value, in capitalism has exchange value. That is profit can be turned into almost anything. In addition it can be horded or consumed. In the USSR the parasitic bureaucracy did take more than their fair share of the surplus, and that was a big problem (probably far less, btw than capitalists typically do). but it does not make them capitalists. They could not do what they wanted with the means of production. As soon as they lost their position, the lost all of the goodies too. They could not invest the spoils as any capitalist is free to do. Production was not for profit in the USSR and the bureaucrats didn't own anything. Did they exploit the proletariat of the USSR? Sure. Does that make them capitalists?

[argeiphontes]

Thanks for the reply, Fred, but I'm unconvinced. Wealth could be secondary to capitalism. Wage labor, not so much.

[Dave B]

"He who does not work shall not eat",


Yes we should have ‘heard’ of that as it came from one of Lenin’s more notorious works, eg;


However, it persists as far as its other part is concerned; it persists in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society. The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm

as well as from windbag Trotsky’s;


In a country where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat. Exactly how many Bolsheviks have been expelled, arrested, exiled, exterminated, since 1923, when the era of Bonapartism opened, we shall find out when we go through the archives of Stalin’s political police. How many of them remain in the underground will become known when the shipwreck of the bureaucracy begins.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch11.htm

it actually comes from the bourgeois christian revisionist saint Paul ;2nd Thessalonians 3:6 -12.

The issue of the different interests of the workers and the ruling state capitalist class (the 1%) was raised by Bukharin in his 1926 analysis of Bolshevik state capitalism.


Here I must raise another question. If the working class does not regard industry as its own, but as State capitalism, if it regards the factory management as a hostile force, and the building up of industry as a matter outside its concerns, and feels itself to be exploited, what is to happen? Shall we then be in a position, let us say, to carry on a campaign for higher production? “What the devil!” the workers would say, “are we to drudge for the capitalists? Only fools would do that.” How could we draw workers into the process of building up industry “What!” they would say, “shall we help the capitalist and build up the system? Only opportunists would do that.” If we say our industry is State capitalism, we shall completely disarm the working class. We dare not then speak of raising productive capacity, because that is the affair of the exploiters and not of the workers.

To what end then shall we get larger and larger numbers to take part in our production conferences, if the workers are exploited, and when all that has nothing to do with them? Let the exploiter look after that! If we put the matter in this light, not only shall we be threatened with the danger of estrangement from the masses, but we shall not be in a position to build up our industries. That is as clear as daylight.






http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1926/01/x01.htm

Stalin didn’t adopt the idea that Bolshevik Russia was no [longer] state capitalism until 1928 was it?

I can’t be even bothered checking it might have 25.

On the ‘confusion’ between the ‘political’ [Bolshevik] state and the state capitalist economic system.

The state is there to facilitate and enforce the economic [state capitalist] system.

Even though there might be subtle conceptual differences between them if in any system they are fused together it was in Bolshevik state capitalism according to Lenin were they were ‘unconfused’.


We..[the 1%]…. refuse to understand that when we say “state” we mean ourselves, the .. the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is ..the bolsheviks.., the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We ..[the 1%]…. are the state.



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

It hasn’t always been the case of course that ‘Trots’ like, Fred, now accept that Bolshevik Russia in 1922 was state capitalism.

There is article below by yet another lying Leninist [forgive the tautology] including quotes from the now famous SPGB book by Buick and Crump (of Manchester branch).

http://hetsa.org/pdf/34-A-08.pdf

In that the idea is repeated accurately that it was actually the [some] Mensheviks, of all people, that first came up with the idea of a ‘deformed workers state’ in the 1920’s. It was in Dan’s book I think.

Theodore Dan and his faction, [spit] post 1925 became a crypto Trotskyist before Trotsky was one.

Fred is welcome to my clips and Quotations from Trotsky’s ‘Tasks of Young communists’.

As, 'the Bolshevik Russia was not state capitalist and Cliff is a wanker' Ted Grant used to ‘joke’.


that he didn't know why Lenin and Trotsky (http://www.marxist.com/lenin-trotsky-stalinism-johnstone.htm) wrote so many books. Nobody reads them and if they do they don't understand the ideas!"http://www.marxist.com/revolutionary-ted-grant-memorial-meeting.htm

[Brotto Rühle]

How do you figure the state is a private entity? The state is a bourgeois entity, and when it owns the means of production, it acts as a private owner.


Production for profit did not exist, the laws of value and exchange did not exist. Yeah...they did. MCM' did exist.


How's that for Marxist purity?You being wrong is pretty pure, not very Marxist though.


There was no private competing capital -- that which Marx said is the very essence of capital. Geseric is not making good arguments here, but he is essentially correct. He was just turning a classic state capper argurment on its head which is: "Something bad occurred, so it's not a workers' state."This is just precious. Yet, you're wrong again.

[Brotto Rühle]

This is all very confused. Surplus value, in capitalism has exchange value. That is profit can be turned into almost anything. In addition it can be horded or consumed. In the USSR the parasitic bureaucracy did take more than their fair share of the surplus, and that was a big problem (probably far less, btw than capitalists typically do). but it does not make them capitalists. They could not do what they wanted with the means of production. As soon as they lost their position, the lost all of the goodies too. They could not invest the spoils as any capitalist is free to do. Production was not for profit in the USSR and the bureaucrats didn't own anything. Did they exploit the proletariat of the USSR? Sure. Does that make them capitalists?

This is by far my favourite quote of all time... "Did they do everything the bourgeoisie did? Yes! But it doesn't make them bourgeois!"

[Fred]

This is by far my favourite quote of all time... "Did they do everything the bourgeoisie did? Yes! But it doesn't make them bourgeois!"

Yes, they were baaaad people. Were they capitalists? No they did not have the same relationship to the means of production. Since class seems to be a moral rather than a material category to you, I guess it is hard to fathom. They behaved in a very different fashion than the bourgeoisie because the property forms were different.

[Brotto Rühle]

Yes, they were baaaad people. Were they capitalists? No they did not have the same relationship to the means of production. Since class seems to be a moral rather than a material category to you, I guess it is hard to fathom. They behaved in a very different fashion than the bourgeoisie because the property forms were different.

A state run corporation, such as (formerly) Air Canada, which makes profits...is...not...capitalist.

[Hit The North]

Yes, they were baaaad people. Were they capitalists? No they did not have the same relationship to the means of production. Since class seems to be a moral rather than a material category to you, I guess it is hard to fathom. They behaved in a very different fashion than the bourgeoisie because the property forms were different.

Nevertheless, the bureaucracy controlled the means of production (including the disposal of labour power), monopolised political power, and supervised over a rapid process of accumulation which rather than placing the working class at the head of society, determined that the bureaucracy needed to place its foot over the throat of the working class. So whilst it may not have been bourgeois it still acted as a class distinct from the proletariat and as the human agent of capital over labour.

Btw, Fred, have you answered my question as to what you consider the MOP of the USSR to have been if it was neither capitalist or socialist?

[synthesis]

Synthesis was acting as if slave labor is what made it capitalist. Which makes no sense. Slave labor isn't capitalist, but in this case it was roughly analogous to the reserve army of labor.

I thought about qualifying that part with something like "well technically blah blah blah ancient mode of production et cetera" but I felt it would detract from the point of the post, which in context was supposed to be saying "does slave labor make a country not socialist," which still seems awkwardly worded. Obviously slave labor is not the deciding factor that made the USSR capitalist - the fact that it was a capitalist, imperialist country made it that way - but it's certainly a deciding factor as to whether or not it could be called "socialist," or "something between capitalism and socialism," which seems to be what Geiseric is trying to say here.

I still don't think nitpicking about modes of production is really addressing the post to which I was responding.

[Fred]

Nevertheless, the bureaucracy controlled the means of production (including the disposal of labour power), monopolised political power, and supervised over a rapid process of accumulation which rather than placing the working class at the head of society, determined that the bureaucracy needed to place its foot over the throat of the working class. So whilst it may not have been bourgeois it still acted as a class distinct from the proletariat and as the human agent of capital over labour.

Btw, Fred, have you answered my question as to what you consider the MOP of the USSR to have been if it was neither capitalist or socialist?

The mode of production was that of a workers' state in transition. There can be no socialist mode of production in a single country. Sadly, it went in the wrong direction and capitalism was restored. On balance, it shared more with socialist than capitalist, I would say -- that is my impression. But really, it was neither. And it was historically progressive compared to capitalism that is why it was correct to defend it, even with all the problems. And here's a question, are union bureaucrats in the West a different class than the workers? By your logic the must be.

[Fred]

I thought about qualifying that part with something like "well technically blah blah blah ancient mode of production et cetera" but I felt it would detract from the point of the post, which in context was supposed to be saying "does slave labor make a country not socialist," which still seems awkwardly worded. Obviously slave labor is not the deciding factor that made the USSR capitalist - the fact that it was a capitalist, imperialist country made it that way - but it's certainly a deciding factor as to whether or not it could be called "socialist," or "something between capitalism and socialism," which seems to be what Geiseric is trying to say here.

I still don't think nitpicking about modes of production is really addressing the post to which I was responding.
Your posts suggest that slave labor was an important part of the Soviet economy. You know it wasn't. How different is it from what happens in US prisons where prisoners produce products for pennies an hour? Does that make the US not capitalist?

[synthesis]

Your posts suggest that slave labor was an important part of the Soviet economy. You know it wasn't.

What's your measure of "importance"?


How different is it from what happens in US prisons where prisoners produce products for pennies an hour? Does that make the US not capitalist?

lol wut

[Sea]

No, when I referred to me referring to it I was talking about how they are nationalized but are not socialist. Bloody hell.And nationalization does not change the mode of production. Unless you believe in socialism-in-one-industry, of course.

[Brotto Rühle]

After 2 long weeks of work I'm boarding a plane home. I'll address this much better at my desktop...cause Fred...holy shit.:rolleyes:

[Geiseric]

What's your measure of "importance"?



lol wut

Slave labor wasn't dominant in every area of the economy. At least it wasn't intended to exist at all when the fSU was created, however there were work camps as far back as the begining of the civil war, mostly due to what they perceived as "military necessity," which had obviously unfortunate consequences for anybody caught in the middle of this whole thing and mistakenly arrested, which was likely the worst case during the civil war, or in Stalin's case for being a political undesirable. That practice persisted to exponential heights as the state became more centralized, and the forced removal of many other ethnic groups continued.

But the important thing to remember is that none of this would of happened if there wasn't a pressure from outside countries to restore the fSU's place in the world market. French and Belgian corporations had a lot of capital put under the management of the workers state at its inception, and the gains the workers built and achieved themselves, despite the bureaucracy which was inherited from Czarism, in the very beginning and through the civil war, as well as the early years of the N.E.P. when they were reconstructing the country, couldn't of been and weren't undone until the counter revolution in the 1990s.

[Five Year Plan]

The mode of production was that of a workers' state in transition. There can be no socialist mode of production in a single country. Sadly, it went in the wrong direction and capitalism was restored. On balance, it shared more with socialist than capitalist, I would say -- that is my impression. But really, it was neither. And it was historically progressive compared to capitalism that is why it was correct to defend it, even with all the problems. And here's a question, are union bureaucrats in the West a different class than the workers? By your logic the must be.

"Workers' state" is not a mode of production. It's is a form of state used by workers to transition from capitalism to socialism. The answer to Hit the North's question would be, according to people who call themselves orthodox Trotskyists, an economy that is "socialistic," one that combines features of capitalism and socialism since it is at a midpoint between the two. The problem for people who call themselves orthodox Trotskyists is that they try so hard to distance themselves from state capitalist theory that they do everything possible not to acknowledge the existence of any remnants of capitalism, going so far as to call the economy a "workers' state" instead of what their other aspects of their own theories necessitate they call it. All their theory really entails is that property relations inhering in the workers' state prohibited from a new capitalist class from developing without an overturn of the nationalized property relations. This claim is different than saying that the functions of capital, including the buying and selling of labor power for the purpose of appropriating the resultant surplus, were not being performed in the Russian economy when it was nationalised. It is also different than saying that value had been eliminated in the Soviet economy. Value, and the commodity form, don't disappear until the full onset of socialism, when bureaucracy and institutionalized hierarchy in the process of planning disappear.

I disagree with the view that nationalised property meant that a capitalist class could not materialize because I think the juridical separation realized through private property could just as effectively be realized through the divvying up of offices in the bureaucratic pecking order. This leads me to a discussion of the role of money capital in these societies, and the fluidity and transferability of surplus created by workers. Fred alluded to the topic earlier. A response, however, would require a much lengthier post that would take me off the topic of the post I am currently responding to.

[Fred]

What's your measure of "importance"?



lol wut

By important I mean it carried no weight economically. And slave labor is a dicey term, anyway. These were prisoners -- some of whom were petty criminals, many of whom were there for political reasons. My point is that this has something to do with the political regime, not which class rules.

[Fred]

"Workers' state" is not a mode of production. It's is a form of state used by workers to transition from capitalism to socialism. The answer to Hit the North's question would be, according to people who call themselves orthodox Trotskyists, an economy that is "socialistic," one that combines features of capitalism and socialism since it is at a midpoint between the two. The problem for people who call themselves orthodox Trotskyists is that they try so hard to distance themselves from state capitalist theory that they do everything possible not to acknowledge the existence of any remnants of capitalism, going so far as to call the economy a "workers' state" instead of what their other aspects of their own theories necessitate they call it. All their theory really entails is that property relations inhering in the workers' state prohibited from a new capitalist class from developing without an overturn of the nationalized property relations. This claim is different than saying that the functions of capital, including the buying and selling of labor power for the purpose of appropriating the resultant surplus, were not being performed in the Russian economy when it was nationalised. It is also different than saying that value had been eliminated in the Soviet economy. Value, and the commodity form, don't disappear until the full onset of socialism, when bureaucracy and institutionalized hierarchy in the process of planning disappear.

I disagree with the view that nationalised property meant that a capitalist class could not materialize because I think the juridical separation realized through private property could just as effectively be realized through the divvying up of offices in the bureaucratic pecking order. This leads me to a discussion of the role of money capital in these societies, and the fluidity and transferability of surplus created by workers. Fred alluded to the topic earlier. A response, however, would require a much lengthier post that would take me off the topic of the post I am currently responding to.

Your points are well taken. The Soviet Economy certain had elements of capitalism, particularly during the NEP. However, after 1928 while the economy had remnants from capitalism, it was a very different animal. The key point is that the Stalinist bureaucracy constituted neither a new bourgeoisie, nor a never seen before ruling class.

[Brotto Rühle]

Your points are well taken. The Soviet Economy certain had elements of capitalism, particularly during the NEP. However, after 1928 while the economy had remnants from capitalism, it was a very different animal. The key point is that the Stalinist bureaucracy constituted neither a new bourgeoisie, nor a never seen before ruling class.

It was a new bourgeoisie. I mean, how many to.we do we have to explain their relation to the state and means of production, the surplus labour, etc etc.

You never acknowledge the fact that every aspect of capitalism still existed. You just say "well it wasn't capitalism".

Try harder.

[Fred]

"He who does not work shall not eat",


Yes we should have ‘heard’ of that as it came from one of Lenin’s more notorious works, eg;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm

as well as from windbag Trotsky’s;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch11.htm

it actually comes from the bourgeois christian revisionist saint Paul ;2nd Thessalonians 3:6 -12.

The issue of the different interests of the workers and the ruling state capitalist class (the 1%) was raised by Bukharin in his 1926 analysis of Bolshevik state capitalism.




http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1926/01/x01.htm

Stalin didn’t adopt the idea that Bolshevik Russia was no [longer] state capitalism until 1928 was it?

I can’t be even bothered checking it might have 25.

On the ‘confusion’ between the ‘political’ [Bolshevik] state and the state capitalist economic system.

The state is there to facilitate and enforce the economic [state capitalist] system.

Even though there might be subtle conceptual differences between them if in any system they are fused together it was in Bolshevik state capitalism according to Lenin were they were ‘unconfused’.

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

It hasn’t always been the case of course that ‘Trots’ like, Fred, now accept that Bolshevik Russia in 1922 was state capitalism.

There is article below by yet another lying Leninist [forgive the tautology] including quotes from the now famous SPGB book by Buick and Crump (of Manchester branch).

http://hetsa.org/pdf/34-A-08.pdf

In that the idea is repeated accurately that it was actually the [some] Mensheviks, of all people, that first came up with the idea of a ‘deformed workers state’ in the 1920’s. It was in Dan’s book I think.

Theodore Dan and his faction, [spit] post 1925 became a crypto Trotskyist before Trotsky was one.

Fred is welcome to my clips and Quotations from Trotsky’s ‘Tasks of Young communists’.

As, 'the Bolshevik Russia was not state capitalist and Cliff is a wanker' Ted Grant used to ‘joke’.

http://www.marxist.com/revolutionary-ted-grant-memorial-meeting.htm

Ah comrade, you are doing better with the fonts. To clarify a few points. Dan was on the other side in the October Revolution. He did not defend the Revolution as Trotsky did.

Fred does not believe that Russia was state capitalist. I reject the formulation -- especially as used by anti-communists such as you. Elements of capitalism remained for a time, but they were mostly gone by the 1930s.

Fred also wonders why you think you are exposing anything interesting when you quote Lenin (nice ellipses, btw) about state capitalism. He certainly never suggested that the USSR was led by bourgeoisie.

Bukharin was making an argument against speeding up the pace of industrialization. He was among the staunchest proponents of fostering the development of capitalism in the countryside and light industry, at the expense of heavy industry. His policies, if kept in place would have led to a rapid restoration of actual capitalism rather than having the workers state survive another 65 years or so. His idea of "building socialism at a snail's pace," and his exhorting the peasantry to "enrich themselves," would have been disasters in a fairly immediate time frame. Stalin went along until he realized in a panic that these pro-peasant policies were leading the country into an untenable place -- where bumper harvests and starvation in the cities could happen simultaneously. Then Stalin adopted some of the LOs program including collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization (both in an extremely ham-fisted and poorly implemented fashion) -- but this did buy the USSR time.

Finally, like many of your Menshevik/reformist cohort, you completely disregard the most important thing about the Bolsheviks -- their internationalism. So the idea of building actual socialism in Russia without proletarian revolutions elsewhere was not in their heads. And they devoted tremendous resources to try to help the working class come to power in other countries. So Lenin and Trotsky among others, believed that it was necessary to keep the workers' in power in the USSR, even at a high cost, so as to provide resources to the world revolution -- including military help if needed -- that was what the military campaign in Poland in 1920 was largely about.

[Dave B]

Fred does not now believe that Russia was state capitalist. I reject the formulation! Hang on a minute you said last month.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/kautskyi-t182166/index.html?p=2646845


that Trotsky’s;



………this is explicable in part by an incomprehension of an expression frequently used by us, that we now have state capitalism.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...outh/youth.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm)

or in other words the task of young communists to understand that 1922 Bolshevik Russia was state capitalism, in 1922.

Was;



………. is absolutely on the money.

When does “Fred does not believe that Russia was state capitalist”, sometime after Stalin took power?

Did Stalin 'guide' Trotsky's 'permanent revolution' from state capitalism towards a 'degenerate workers state'?

Whilst at the end of 1922 Lenin said in the Manchester Guardian


……….for although slowly, with interruptions, taking steps backward from time to time, we are still making progress along the path of state capitalism, a path that leads us forward to socialism and communism (which is the highest stage of socialism)……..

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

How are simple factory workers like myself supposed to follow this?

[Fred]

Hang on a minute you said last month.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/kautskyi-t182166/index.html?p=2646845


that Trotsky’s;


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...outh/youth.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm)

or in other words the task of young communists to understand that 1922 Bolshevik Russia was state capitalism, in 1922.

Was;

When does “Fred does not believe that Russia was state capitalist”, sometime after Stalin took power?

Did Stalin 'guide' Trotsky's 'permanent revolution' from state capitalism towards a 'degenerate workers state'?

Whilst at the end of 1922 Lenin said in the Manchester Guardian

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

How are simple factory workers like myself supposed to follow this?



The issue here is not whether there were elements of capitalism. The issue is which class ruled. Does Trotsky, anywhere, anyplace, anytime, suggest there was a "new bourgeoisie" or later that the bureaucracy was a ruling class? No. He believed the USSR was, to the day he died that it was a worker's state. The state cappers, like Cliff and his followers, maintain that because there was "state capitalism" the USSR was ruled by the bourgeoisie, in the form of bureaucrats. It is a lame theory, divorced from Marx's work. And I don't think that the USSR was ever state capitalist -- I think it was a workers' state that utilized some aspects of capitalist economy to survive during a difficult period.

[Brotto Rühle]

The issue here is not whether there were elements of capitalism. The issue is which class ruled. Does Trotsky, anywhere, anyplace, anytime, suggest there was a "new bourgeoisie" or later that the bureaucracy was a ruling class? No.What's your point? That if Trotsky didn't say something was true, then it wasn't? Get bent.


He believed the USSR was, to the day he died that it was a worker's state.He was dead wrong.


The state cappers, like Cliff and his followers, maintain that because there was "state capitalism" the USSR was ruled by the bourgeoisie, in the form of bureaucrats. It is a lame theory, divorced from Marx's work. And I don't think that the USSR was ever state capitalist -- I think it was a workers' state that utilized some aspects of capitalist economy to survive during a difficult period.I agree that Cliff's analysis was wrong. It's why I don't cite him.

The bureaucrats held state power, and the state owned the means of production. Their relationship to the proletariat was no different than the bourgeoisie in liberal capitalism in the USA, UK, Germany, etc.

How is our theory of state capitalism, which (not using Cliff's theory), acknowledges the law of value as a law ONLY of the capitalist mode of production (which clearly still acted in the USSR), and uses Marx's determination of relations to the means of production, etc. as the basis of calling the bureaucracy a "new bourgeoisie", and describing the aspects of the capitalist mode of production which existed in the USSR (all), divorced from Marxism?

BUT

A theory which creates a brand new mode of production outside of Marx's analysis of capital. A theory which claims that a bourgeois state form, where the working CLASS had no political power, didn't manage the economy, were suppressed when rising against it (see: various strikes, East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956)... where piecework pay, stakhanovism, managers who can fire and hire and are paid often 10x the amount of the workers prevailed, where (as you agreed earlier) profits were made and not controlled by the proletariat..is a workers state... is TOTALLY within the realm of Marxism.

Fuck off.

[bluemangroup]

The bureaucracy and the party appropriated more of the social product for themselves at the expense of the workers. That's an exploitative relationship. There must have been a surplus produced to give some people more than the value of their product (this bureaucracy). Hence some got less, and there was capitalism of a kind, viz. state capitalism. You often hear of the lavish lifestyles, including dachas and elaborate hunting trips and so on, of higher level party bureaucrats. How could they have this surplus to waste if they didn't extract it from the workers?

IMHO it was state-capitalist under the NEP but socialist after 1928 with the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan.


What are various people's interpretations of this? What was the class nature of the bureaucrats in other peoples' opinions? If capitalism exists (or didn't exist) where was the capitalist class who controlled the means of production? I'm interested in this discussion and the various interpretations.

The bureaucrats were necessary to keep the state machine running during a time of civil war and afterwards; they were a mix of intellectuals, workers, and peasants (in the latter case, through the village soviets, peasants' assemblies, etc.)

The capitalists still existed after October 1917, and long afterwards with the introduction of the NEP which was considered a major concession to capitalism and the peasant.

The NEP ended along with an end to the retreat which was replaced by revolutionary methods after 1928.

[Five Year Plan]

How are simple factory workers like myself supposed to follow this?

By changing your font back to the forum default, for starters.

I'll try to explain the lay of the land for you. It is important to be careful with our language here. You are failing to understand the way that Lenin and Trotsky referred to state capitalism in the early 1920s. For both it meant that the workers' state would harness the power of accumulation through the regulation of private capitals still existing in Russia. Both obviously thought accumulation was possible through the state sector as well, but neither of them referred to that sector as capitalist, or argued that the capitalist laws of motion operated through the state apparatus, since both would have argued (correctly at that time, IMO) that the state officials did not constitute a capitalist class.

Without a class personifying economically and politically the interests of capital, so that workers are subject to the laws of accumulation for the sake of accumulation, there is no capitalism in its proper sense of the term. (This is why, as an example, medieval guilds were not capitalist despite the fact that their self-reproduction required the exchange of commodities according to their value. Value was not the regulator of their social-production decisions. They themselves were.) Under a workers' state, value and commodity production even in the state sector are harnessed by a group personifying the agency of the proletariat pursuing a class-independent revolutionary program.

An interesting question is whether Lenin would have shared the view Trotsky expressed in the 1930s that nationalised property precluded the formation of a capitalist (not bourgeois) class that would have reinstated the laws of capitalist motion, i.e., the capitalist mode of production proper. Another interesting question is whether Trotsky himself would have continued to uphold his own view following the war. About these questions there is only speculation.

[synthesis]

By important I mean [gulag labor] carried no weight economically.

I really have no idea what information you're working with here, and I won't just assume there isn't any, so I'll just present some stuff I got from a quick look at the World's Most Accurate Encyclopedia and allow people to judge for themselves. By all means present information that supports the claim that gulag labor had no significance in the Soviet economy.


Up until WWII, the Gulag system expanded dramatically to create a Soviet “camp economy”. Right before the war, forced labor provided 46.5% of the nations nickel, 76% of its tin, 40% of its cobalt, 40.5% of its chrome-iron ore, 60% of its gold, and 25.3% of its timber
In addition to food shortages, the Gulag suffered from labor scarcity in the beginning of the war. The Great Terror had provided a large supply of free labor, but by the start of WWII the purges had slowed down. In order to complete all of their projects, camp administrators moved prisoners from project to project.To improve the situation, laws were implemented in mid-1940 that allowed short camp sentences (4 months or a year) to be given to those convicted of petty theft, hooliganism, or labor discipline infractions. By January 1941, the Gulag workforce had increased by approximately 300,000 prisoners.
In addition, factories converted to produce ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies. Moreover, the NKVD gathered skilled workers and specialists from throughout the Gulag into 380 special colonies which produced tanks, airplanes, armaments, and ammunition.This can't be rationalized as a necessity of war or post-war reconstruction, either; in the early 1950's, the gulag population spiked again with a vengeance, rising to 2.5 million people at its peak. And it can't be dismissed on the basis of the sources; in gathering this information I have been very, very conscious not to use anything that even resembles right-wing propaganda against the Soviet Union.

More: Economic Role of the Gulag (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Economic_role_of_the_Gulag), Foreign Forced Labor in the Soviet Union. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Union)


My point is that this has something to do with the political regime, not which class rules.

It has everything to do with determining the Soviet Union's mode of production. Obviously if these "political prisoners" (even that is being generous) are doing forced labor in prison camps, then they are not the ruling class. What part of "working class rule" is it that justifies sending people to forced labor camps on the pretext of "labor discipline infractions"?

And are you really trying to draw a distinction between "slave labor" and "forced labor" in camps where people were regularly starved and worked to death?

[Geiseric]

But nobody got rich because of the nickel mining, the surplus value wasn't materialized into much personal wealth. They might of looted old mansions and stolen old limos, or even bought them, but nothing close to the scale of capitalist private ownership was in existence. If you want to claim that the fSU was capitalist you need to show the wealth posession of the richest bureaucrats in comparison to the regular workers.

[Remus Bleys]

But nobody got rich because of the nickel mining, the surplus value wasn't materialized into much personal wealth. They might of looted old mansions and stolen old limos, or even bought them, but nothing close to the scale of capitalist private ownership was in existence. If you want to claim that the fSU was capitalist you need to show the wealth posession of the richest bureaucrats in comparison to the regular workers. I was under the oddest impression that ownership of the MoP is what constitutes class, not wealth or income.


Most people got out of Gulags by the way and found other jobs.
Unemployed people also get jobs.

[Brotto Rühle]

I was under the oddest impression that ownership of the MoP is what constitutes class, not wealth or income.

Unemployed people also get jobs.

Relationship my friend, not ownership. Remember, if it was ownership, we would see the proletariat become the bourgeoisie in a workers state. Always remember what distinguishes is relation, and the direct producers are the proletariat.

[synthesis]

But nobody got rich because of the nickel mining, the surplus value wasn't materialized into much personal wealth. They might of looted old mansions and stolen old limos, or even bought them, but nothing close to the scale of capitalist private ownership was in existence. If you want to claim that the fSU was capitalist you need to show the wealth posession of the richest bureaucrats in comparison to the regular workers.

To be honest - and I appreciated the thought you put into your last response, and didn't really have a reply to it - I'm not concerned right now with convincing anyone that the Soviet Union was capitalist. There are plenty of people more qualified to do that than myself. What I am saying is that the slave labor and the extreme exploitation and subjugation of workers in the gulags were a pretty good indicator that the Soviet Union wasn't socialist.

[Fred]

What's your point? That if Trotsky didn't say something was true, then it wasn't? Get bent.

He was dead wrong.

I agree that Cliff's analysis was wrong. It's why I don't cite him.

The bureaucrats held state power, and the state owned the means of production. Their relationship to the proletariat was no different than the bourgeoisie in liberal capitalism in the USA, UK, Germany, etc.

How is our theory of state capitalism, which (not using Cliff's theory), acknowledges the law of value as a law ONLY of the capitalist mode of production (which clearly still acted in the USSR), and uses Marx's determination of relations to the means of production, etc. as the basis of calling the bureaucracy a "new bourgeoisie", and describing the aspects of the capitalist mode of production which existed in the USSR (all), divorced from Marxism?

BUT

A theory which creates a brand new mode of production outside of Marx's analysis of capital. A theory which claims that a bourgeois state form, where the working CLASS had no political power, didn't manage the economy, were suppressed when rising against it (see: various strikes, East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956)... where piecework pay, stakhanovism, managers who can fire and hire and are paid often 10x the amount of the workers prevailed, where (as you agreed earlier) profits were made and not controlled by the proletariat..is a workers state... is TOTALLY within the realm of Marxism.

Fuck off.

Sorry, comrade, I was answering Dave's post about Trotsky's views. Since you don't quote Trotsky and clearly don't know enough to give a hoot about what he said, you need not chime in on that. Especially with gratuitously nasty comments. And please don't lecture me on the evils of Stalinism as you are preaching to the choir.

The USSR economy was a transitional economy between capitalism and socialism. As TROTSKY noted, it was caught in the middle and could have gone either way.

Neither the law of value nor exchange operated in the USSR like it does in capitalist economies. Production was not for profit. The bureaucrats did not own the means of production as every other ruling class since time immemorial has.

So here is an extended quote from the Pamphlet, Why the USSR is not Capitalist published in 1977:


The proposition that the class character of the USSR is capitalist does violence to the basic concepts of Marxism. As Marx disclosed, capitlism is a mode of production based on private property in which the production of commodities becomes generalized and all the determinants of production (labor power, instruments of labor, land and so on) become commodities. Generalized commodity production is based on competition in an anonymous market. This competition between individual capitals generates the law of labor value and constitutes the driving force for the historic process of capital accumulation.

The expropriation of the capitalist class and the nationalizaton of the means of production by the workers state eliminates capitalist competition by establishing a planned economy. With the extinguishing of the market economy, the means of production cease to be a commodity, i.e., capital, and the law of labor value cease to operate in a capitalist mode.

The contention of RP7 [Red Papers 7] that in the USSR the means of production comprise a single capital collectively owned by "state monopoly capitalists" is yet another revision of Marxism. Here is what Marx had to say on the subject:


Incompetition this inner tendency of capital appears as a compulsion imposed on it by other capital and driving it forward over and beyond the proper proportion with a continuous Marche, marche. . . Conceptually, competition is nothing but the inner nature of capital, its essential character, appearing and realized as the interaction of many capitals on one another, the inner tendency as external necessity. Capital exists and can exist only as many capitals, and its self-determination therefore appears as the interaction of these on one another." (original emphasis)
Grudrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie, Rohentwurf 1857-1858, pp. 316-317 [our translation]

[Fred]

I ask the Trots, yet again. What features of capitalism no longer existed?

Protip: nationalization is a part of capitalism.

Piecemeal nationalization sure. Nationalization of most or all of the economy? Never. Do I have to remind you that there was a monopoly on foreign trade, banks were nationalized, individuals could not purchase capital goods. Production was not for profit. The law of exchange value did not exist. Show me under capitalism where a planned, collectivized economy existed?

[Fred]

Relationship my friend, not ownership. Remember, if it was ownership, we would see the proletariat become the bourgeoisie in a workers state. Always remember what distinguishes is relation, and the direct producers are the proletariat.

Yes. But what RELATIONSHIP to the means of production does a ruling class have? Ownership. The bureaucrats simply did not have that relationship to the means of production in the USSR.

[Fred]

To be honest - and I appreciated the thought you put into your last response, and didn't really have a reply to it - I'm not concerned right now with convincing anyone that the Soviet Union was capitalist. There are plenty of people more qualified to do that than myself. What I am saying is that the slave labor and the extreme exploitation and subjugation of workers in the gulags were a pretty good indicator that the Soviet Union wasn't socialist.

Yup. Socialism it was not. I don't think anyone in on this discussion is saying that it was.

[synthesis]

Piecemeal nationalization sure. Nationalization of most or all of the economy? Never.

Right, I forgot about the glorious workers' democracy that was Iraq under Saddam Hussein - although I suppose there were plenty of "anti-imperialist" Trotskyists who remember.

[synthesis]

Yup. Socialism it was not. I don't think anyone in on this discussion is saying that it was.

The point is that the gulag labor, if anything, regressed the Soviet Union's mode of production from capitalism back to whatever you'd like to call the United States in the antebellum era. This is a rebuttal to the assertion that the gulag labor "didn't make the Soviet Union capitalist," which in context is clearly in defense of the proposition that there were even elements of the Soviet Union that were socialist or whatever stage you think comes after capitalism.

[Geiseric]

I was under the impression that distribution of wealth was the most important thing which Marxists focused on, but I guess the relation one has to the mode of production is more important than the actual end result of wealth distribution. EDIT: Sorry I didn't make it clear I was being sarcastic, but I meant to say that in a sarcastic tone.

[synthesis]

I was under the impression that distribution of wealth was the most important thing which Marxists focused on, but I guess the relation one has to the mode of production is more important than the actual end result of wealth distribution.

This is absolutely, positively the most important issue - in practice it is the decisive factor that sets Marxists apart from left-liberals. The problem is not that the rich live in palaces; this is incidental, form-over-substance. The problem, very broadly and overly simplified, is that the means of production are not owned and controlled by the same people that create value through them. In this way, the USSR was always subject to the capitalist mode of production - although it seems that aspects of the feudal mode did survive longer there than in most other industrial countries.

[Geiseric]

But everything that happened was a result of imperialism isolating Russia which would of supported spreading the revolution if efforts which were sparked by the revolution in Russia were successful. To think that a caste of bureaucrats can undo a revolution is ridiculous.

[Remus Bleys]

But everything that happened was a result of imperialism isolating Russia which would of supported spreading the revolution if efforts which were sparked by the revolution in Russia were successful. To think that a caste of bureaucrats can undo a revolution is ridiculous.
Then who dissolved the USSR?

[synthesis]

But everything that happened was a result of imperialism isolating Russia which would of supported spreading the revolution if efforts which were sparked by the revolution in Russia were successful.

This is the reason that the Soviet system was a bourgeois revolution - the only possible result of so-called "progressive nationalism" that could remotely be called positive by the standards of Marxism. It was the establishment of a domestic imperialist bourgeoisie that pushed out both the local aristocracy and other imperial capitalist powers.


To think that a caste of bureaucrats can undo a revolution is ridiculous.

How is it ridiculous if you understand that caste as owning the means of production to the exclusion of the working class and therefore becoming the new bourgeoisie? Take a look at the composition of the Russian bourgeoisie after Gorbachev and tell me how many weren't previously Soviet bureaucrats.

[Geiseric]

There's one gaping hole in your theory: The same people who were alive during the revolution, the working class of russia, had the experience of their successful revolution in their minds, so it was impossible for capitalism to exist without a serious counter revolution which the bureaucrats weren't able to carry out until the 90's. The existance of the USSR and the constitution that was made was clearly dependent on state, not "state bourgeois" ownership. It was literally impossible to profit off of other peoples labor, the bureaucrats were only able to steal a marginal amount of wealth for themselves from the state bank, which was technically illegal in contradiction with the laws of the fSU.

In this context a bureaucrat couldn't make nearly the same amount of money as a capitalist in any european country, and there is nothing to prove that they were able to, which defeats the entire idea of state capitalism on a surface level, despite its theoretical contradictions, such as the denial of the idea that the state exists between classes as a result of not national but international class conflict.

[Fred]

Right, I forgot about the glorious workers' democracy that was Iraq under Saddam Hussein - although I suppose there were plenty of "anti-imperialist" Trotskyists who remember.


Come on, comrade. Was there no private industry in Iraq? No private financial institutions? Production was based on a plan and not driven by profit? That is silly. It is also silly to suggest that actual Trotskyists ever gave any political support to Hussein. Of course the folks of Healy's International Committee did, but they were being given money by Saddam -- therefore not only not Trotskyist but not part of the worker's movement (in the US that was the Workers League, now the Socialist Equity Party).

[Fred]

This is absolutely, positively the most important issue - in practice it is the decisive factor that sets Marxists apart from left-liberals. The problem is not that the rich live in palaces; this is incidental, form-over-substance. The problem, very broadly and overly simplified, is that the means of production are not owned and controlled by the same people that create value through them. In this way, the USSR was always subject to the capitalist mode of production - although it seems that aspects of the feudal mode did survive longer there than in most other industrial countries.

Your definition of "capitalist production" is defined by so few markers. What separates Marxists from liberals and reformists is the focus on unleashing productive forces from the restraints of capitalism so humans can finally be free from material want. This wasn't going to happen in one backward isolated country.

I am not so trusting of your sources about slave labor. What percentage of Soviet production did this ostensibly amount to? 1%? 5%?20%? Even if I buy that the figures in those particular industries is accurate what does it mean? I really don't think anyone worth a damn has ever argued the the Soviet economy was primarily based on slave labor. So let's stipulate that to the extent that this was used to oppress the working class -- it was an awful thing. It does not in any way define the class character of the USSR. Think of the range of bourgeois regimes. They range from social-democratic (think Sweden in the 1970s) to fascist. Obviously, there are many examples of one section of a ruling class oppressing other sections (like Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Suharto in Indonesia, etc.).

For the record, slave production is actually a pre-feudal mode.

[Fred]

This is the reason that the Soviet system was a bourgeois revolution - the only possible result of so-called "progressive nationalism" that could remotely be called positive by the standards of Marxism. It was the establishment of a domestic imperialist bourgeoisie that pushed out both the local aristocracy and other imperial capitalist powers.



How is it ridiculous if you understand that caste as owning the means of production to the exclusion of the working class and therefore becoming the new bourgeoisie? Take a look at the composition of the Russian bourgeoisie after Gorbachev and tell me how many weren't previously Soviet bureaucrats.

This gets to the heart of the matter where you get it wrong. Your definition of "owning" is false. The didn't own the means of production -- they benefited from their relationship to it, yes. But in capitalism, ownership means being able to dispose of the means of production in any way one chooses. It is a huge distinction that you gloss over. Most soviet bureaucrats had almost no leeway other than figuring out the best ways to fulfill a plan.

After the counterrevolution led by Yeltsin, the property relations were overturned in the USSR -- Putin et al., are bourgeois -- the state now defends private property. And if you don't think there was a big change in the fSU post counter-revolution, you weren't really paying attention.

[Brotto Rühle]

Sorry, comrade, I was answering Dave's post about Trotsky's views. Since you don't quote Trotsky and clearly don't know enough to give a hoot about what he said, you need not chime in on that. Especially with gratuitously nasty comments. And please don't lecture me on the evils of Stalinism as you are preaching to the choir.What does quoting Trotsky have to do with me knowing about him? I know that his theory of the Degenerated Workers' State is a total crock and justification of party dictatorship and state capitalism.


The USSR economy was a transitional economy between capitalism and socialism. As TROTSKY noted, it was caught in the middle and could have gone either way. There is no such thing. It was capitalism. MCM', etc etc.


Neither the law of value nor exchange operated in the USSR like it does in capitalist economies. Production was not for profit. The bureaucrats did not own the means of production as every other ruling class since time immemorial has.They did operate in the USSR. Production WAS for profits. They DID own the means of production, via the state.


Piecemeal nationalization sure. Nationalization of most or all of the economy? Never. Do I have to remind you that there was a monopoly on foreign trade, banks were nationalized, individuals could not purchase capital goods. Production was not for profit. The law of exchange value did not exist. Show me under capitalism where a planned, collectivized economy existed?What does piecemeal vs total nationalization have to do with anything? The mode of production remains the same, the means of production remain alienated from the direct producers.


Yes. But what RELATIONSHIP to the means of production does a ruling class have? Ownership. The bureaucrats simply did not have that relationship to the means of production in the USSR.They did. Regardless of the concept of "well, his name wasn't on the deed!!!", the fact the the means of production were state property, and the state was NOT controlled by the working class...we can then go on to see that the workers were still being exploited, and that the bureaucrats, via the state, controlled the means of production and extracted surplus labour.

What it seems to come down to, is that you (like the Centrists and other anti-communists) view the state as a class neutral entity. THAT is revisionism.

[Fred]

What does quoting Trotsky have to do with me knowing about him? I know that his theory of the Degenerated Workers' State is a total crock and justification of party dictatorship and state capitalism.

There is no such thing. It was capitalism. MCM', etc etc.

They did operate in the USSR. Production WAS for profits. They DID own the means of production, via the state.

What does piecemeal vs total nationalization have to do with anything? The mode of production remains the same, the means of production remain alienated from the direct producers.

They did. Regardless of the concept of "well, his name wasn't on the deed!!!", the fact the the means of production were state property, and the state was NOT controlled by the working class...we can then go on to see that the workers were still being exploited, and that the bureaucrats, via the state, controlled the means of production and extracted surplus labour.

What it seems to come down to, is that you (like the Centrists and other anti-communists) view the state as a class neutral entity. THAT is revisionism.

I was suggesting comrade, that your making an asinine comment about my quoting Trotsky was neither to the point nor necessary.

Simply asserting that production was for profit in the USSR doesn't make it so. Especially because it was not. Enterprises were given quotas of what to produce -- the aim of the enterprise was to exceed that goal -- often at the expense of profits.

Terms have specific meanings. You would like to include in the word "ownership" to include qualitatively different meaning because it suits your political purpose. In this case the owners lost "possession" of "their" property as soon as they lost their place in the bureaucracy. It is a confusion that you have between using and owning. In fact, these new members of the bourgeoisie had no commitment to any given enterprise or industry earning a profit! That wasn't how they moved up the ladder. If you use enough creative definitions, non-Marxist ones in particular, you can arrive at your conclusion.

But, oh no, they were bad, workers suffered. Duh -- that doesn't turn a cantaloupe into a mango.

[Brotto Rühle]

Simply asserting that production was for profit in the USSR doesn't make it so. Especially because it was not. Enterprises were given quotas of what to produce -- the aim of the enterprise was to exceed that goal -- often at the expense of profits.Uh, no. The goal was always to maximize profits.


Terms have specific meanings. You would like to include in the word "ownership" to include qualitatively different meaning because it suits your political purpose. In this case the owners lost "possession" of "their" property as soon as they lost their place in the bureaucracy. It is a confusion that you have between using and owning. In fact, these new members of the bourgeoisie had no commitment to any given enterprise or industry earning a profit! That wasn't how they moved up the ladder. If you use enough creative definitions, non-Marxist ones in particular, you can arrive at your conclusion. You really should read Capital.

Though, on the way to that, perhaps this might help you out:

An Analysis of the Russian Economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm)

The Nature of the Russian Economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm)

New Developments in Stalin's Russia (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/10/new-developments-russia.htm)

Production Statistics and the Devaluation of the Ruble (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1948/devaluation-ruble.htm)


But, oh no, they were bad, workers suffered. Duh -- that doesn't turn a cantaloupe into a mango.A fruit is still a fruit though.

If all you've gathered from my arguments are "The state was bad", then you aren't reading my arguments. Why don't you care about the relations at the point of production?

[Dave B]

Post 141 was more interesting ;


You are failing to understand the way that Lenin and Trotsky referred to state capitalism in the early 1920s. For both it meant that the workers' state would harness the power of accumulation through the regulation of private capitals still existing in Russia.
First of all there was no inference or reference to that from Trotsky ie with his;



..Our state undertakings operate along commercial lines based on the market...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/youth/youth.htm

Nor in Lenin’s keynote and state of the nation address in 1922.

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

Nor incidentally was that ever discussed by the anti state capitalist theorists like Ted Grant.


Even though it would appear that Ted and Alan Wood’s had read 'bits' of it; after nobody would read it all!

Thus from 1969;

Alan Woods and Ted Grant


Lenin and Trotsky—what they really stood for



In a speech at the Eleventh Party Congress in March, 1922, Lenin pointed out that the class nature of many who worked in the factories at this time was non-proletarian; that many were dodgers from military service, peasants and de-classed elements:
"During the war people who were by no means proletarians went into the factories; they went into the factories to dodge war. And are the social and economic conditions in our country today such as to induce real proletarians to go into the factories? No. It would be true according to Marx; but Marx did not write about Russia; he wrote about capitalism as a whole, beginning with the fifteenth century. It held true over a period of six hundred years, but it is not true for present-day Russia. Very often those who go into the factories are not proletarians; they are casual elements of every description." (Works, vol. 33, page 299)


http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1969/lat/7.htm



However there is sort of part truth in some stuff Lenin wrote in 1921; that I in a rushed way I will attempt to expand on that;



...the workers' state would harness the power of accumulation through the regulation of private capitals still existing in Russia....
But that was not what Lenin meant or was discussing in 1922, he discussed that separately, in an unfortunately complicated thesis, in April 1921.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm)

To return to the historical evolution of the idea

Stalin in 1925 used Lenin's 1921 material to attempt distort, revise or explain away at the time the universally held and accepted view at the time that; Bolshevik Russia was and always had been state capitalism, ‘period’.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1925/12/18.htm#7._Concerning_State_Capitalism_

For historical context

What isn’t historically understood is that everybody up until 1925 considered Bolshevik Russia to be unequivocally state capitalism.

Eg the Bolshevik ‘People's Commissar of Finance’, educated at the Sorbonne in economics, Sokolnikov said, just as a current example;


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




[There is a subtle difference between that and people like Bukharin who said it ‘shouldn’t’ be.]

So to reiterate, when the SPGB quoted from the article by Lenin as below;

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

Which was quickly translated into English and published in a pamphlet called the ‘Chief Tasks of Our Time’ in 1918 for the instruction and comprehension of British leftists workers by Pankhurst's lot, and the Scottish ILP, and which contained the statement for example;


What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out.

We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.



No worries then about being confused about some finer book learned intellectual details.


The SPGB was not initiating a theoretical leftist sectarian impossibilist anti-trot squabble that it intended to take into the next millennia; but was just matter of factly stating what everybody already accepted as true.


Including the Berkman's who then saw Bolshevik state capitalism as a 'historical necessity'.


From 1925 onwards all that was progressively sent down the memory whole in a myth making process (initially Stalinist and later Trot) tissue of lies that Bolshevik Russia never had been state capitalism and Trotsky and Lenin had never said it was.


And it was even forgotten that the intellectual 'anarchists' like Pankhurst and the Berkmans along with some more temporarily duped council communists that had gone along with it as well; for their own somewhat embarrassed convenience.


[There had been in fact some barely credible rumours circulating around in the SPGB, originating from older members, that Trotsky had said in some key pamphlet that Bolshevik Russia was state capitalism.

It didn’t seem particularly important at the time to them, hence nobody knew where he had said it.

Which is what set me on the hunt for it.]

Returning to Lenin’s 1921 April thesis, I am honestly not dodging any bullets; it would take too long to go through it all item by item.



So I will attempt to concentrate on the core ‘concessions’ issue as first raised by Stalin in 1925 and plagiarized by Trotsky in 1933.

[The Windbag never did have an original idea of his own.]

Thus from lying Johnny come lately Trotsky in 1933;


Lenin did actually apply the term “state capitalism” but not to the Soviet economy as a whole, only to a certain section of it: the foreign concessions, the mixed industrial and commercial companies and, in part, the peasant and largely kulak [rich peasant] cooperatives under state control.





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

[ Trotsky also incidentally dealt matter of factly with Lenin’s famous "Leftwing Childishness" state capitalism thesis in 1928;

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

]

Analysing the concession system

The concession system involved the Bolshevik state renting out ‘their own’ industrial enterprises, mainly mines and oil wells (some recently acquired from an ‘imperialist’ invasion and acquisition from a democratically elected government)

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


…….. to western capitalists eg Rockerfellers Standard Oil company etc

As far as most of the concession system was concerned;


Lenin described this, in fact, acquisition of the ‘differential ground-rent’ due to the ‘landowning class’ from the renting out of ‘naturally productive land’ to capitalists for exploiting wage labour as; ‘clear cut’ Bolshevik state capitalism.

Calling that ‘state capitalism’ was a 'schoolboy' understanding of volume III das capital.

It would be like calling the Saudi Royal family ‘clear cut’ state capitalist.


Perhaps I am being a churlish Marxist snob for bring that up.


But never mind; if in fact this ‘clear cut’ state capitalism as far as the recipients of the revenue was concerned wasn’t 'state capitalism' at all.

Lenins 'political' objective was to euphemise and sanitise its 'obviousness', by categorising it as part of the generally widely accepted and other ‘less clear cut’ state capitalism.


from 141 again;



Without a class personifying economically and politically the interests of capital, so that workers are subject to the laws of accumulation for the sake of accumulation, there is no capitalism in its proper sense of the term. ………. Under a workers' state, value and commodity production even in the state sector are harnessed by a group personifying the agency of the proletariat pursuing a class-independent ..[??] . revolutionary program.


But who is to say that a minority ‘group’ that justifies entering the ‘marble halls of power’ in order to allegedly, philanthropically, act in the interests of the working class doesn’t become a ‘political aristocracy or oligarchy’.

And 'discredit itself'.

What is the difference between an incipient Bolshevik party ‘bureaucratic caste’, which was transparently latent from the beginning and unfolded from its own nature.

And a ‘political aristocracy or oligarchy’, that can surely only blossom and seek and find its idyllic economic mode of production in state capitalism.

But at least it seems that we are talking about the early Bolshevik Party conceiving of themselves as agents acting on behalf of the working class rather than the Bolshevik Party being the working class, or controlled by it.

The second part is I assure you demonstrably untrue.

Lenin was implacably and politically opposed to the idea of the Bolshevik party ‘embracing the entire proletariat’;as they were ‘corrupted, vice ridden and degraded’ by ‘imperialism’.

That was a longish one pass and rushed post and I have to go out now.

so apologies for any linking mistakes etc.

[Fred]

Uh, no. The goal was always to maximize profits.

You really should read Capital.

Though, on the way to that, perhaps this might help you out:

An Analysis of the Russian Economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm)

The Nature of the Russian Economy (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm)

New Developments in Stalin's Russia (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/10/new-developments-russia.htm)

Production Statistics and the Devaluation of the Ruble (http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1948/devaluation-ruble.htm)

A fruit is still a fruit though.

If all you've gathered from my arguments are "The state was bad", then you aren't reading my arguments. Why don't you care about the relations at the point of production?

Whose goal was it to maximize profits in the USSR? The state? Who was the state? The folks in Gosplan? That was not their goal --that is not what drove their planning. Did they get a nicer Dacha if their was a greater surplus? It seems you really don't know much about the Soviet economy because you keep on asserting things that are not true.

You should really read Lenin and Trotsky. And you should read AND understand Capital. Okay, what you say is that the workers didn't have political power and were often ill-treated. Ergo, it can't be a worker's state. I don't agree.

Oy, Dunayevskaya, I should have known. Are you next going to site Kautsky on the USSR? Okay, I'll get back to you on this, but give me some time.

[synthesis]

Were Soviet workers not paid wages? And was that wage labor not used so that the Soviet bureaucrats did not have to do productive labor themselves? Are the rest of your distinctions not then artificial?

[Brotto Rühle]

Whose goal was it to maximize profits in the USSR? The state? Who was the state? The folks in Gosplan? That was not their goal --that is not what drove their planning. Did they get a nicer Dacha if their was a greater surplus? It seems you really don't know much about the Soviet economy because you keep on asserting things that are not true.The state was the bureaucracy. The Party elite.

I keep asserting facts. You keep denying them with your pseudo-socialism.


You should really read Lenin and Trotsky. And you should read AND understand Capital. Okay, what you say is that the workers didn't have political power and were often ill-treated. Ergo, it can't be a worker's state. I don't agree. I've read both. I understand capital... which you clearly do not.

Seriously though...someone who acknowledges that the working class doesn't have political power...but then claims it doesn't eliminate the existence of a workers state...is in need of a serious reality check. That's precisely what a "workers' state" is... the working CLASS with political power.


Oy, Dunayevskaya, I should have known. Are you next going to site Kautsky on the USSR? Okay, I'll get back to you on this, but give me some time.What a scathing polemic.

[Old Bolshie]

Uh, no. The goal was always to maximize profits.


This fails to explain why the USSR not only did maintain unprofit industries and enterprises but also kept a great economic emphasis around it in its Fiver Years Plans specially during Stalin's period.

Also, during the period of economic stagnation real wages in USSR increased which goes against the capitalist tendency of lowering wages when the economy stagnates and profit falls.


What I am saying is that the slave labor

Gulag prisoners received 'monetary rewards' or 'bonus remunerations' (premvoznagrazhdeniia) and by 1950 they were receiving wages.



and subjugation of workers in the gulags were a pretty good indicator that the Soviet Union wasn't socialist.

Why so? A ruling class can't repress members of its own class? In that case your assumption that bureaucrats formed the ruling class in USSR also must fail because a lot of bureaucrats were "subjugated" in Siberian Camps, mostly in the 30's.


Were Soviet workers not paid wages?

Were Soviet bureaucrats not paid wages?


And was that wage labor not used so that the Soviet bureaucrats did not have to do productive labor themselves?

Unless you think that someone can plant cabbage during the day and deal with affairs of state during the night as a part-time you will always need to have someone to do the bureaucratic work as long as there is a state, being a worker's state or not.

[Five Year Plan]

Post 141 was more interesting ;


Even though it would appear that Ted and Alan Wood’s had read 'bits' of it; after nobody would read it all!

Thus from 1969;

Alan Woods and Ted Grant


Lenin and Trotsky—what they really stood for



However there is sort of part truth in some stuff Lenin wrote in 1921; that I in a rushed way I will attempt to expand on that;


But that was not what Lenin meant or was discussing in 1922, he discussed that separately, in an unfortunately complicated thesis, in April 1921.

To return to the historical evolution of the idea

Stalin in 1925 used Lenin's 1921 material to attempt distort, revise or explain away at the time the universally held and accepted view at the time that; Bolshevik Russia was and always had been state capitalism, ‘period’.

For historical context

What isn’t historically understood is that everybody up until 1925 considered Bolshevik Russia to be unequivocally state capitalism.

Eg the Bolshevik ‘People's Commissar of Finance’, educated at the Sorbonne in economics, Sokolnikov said, just as a current example;

[There is a subtle difference between that and people like Bukharin who said it ‘shouldn’t’ be.]

So to reiterate, when the SPGB quoted from the article by Lenin as below;


Which was quickly translated into English and published in a pamphlet called the ‘Chief Tasks of Our Time’ in 1918 for the instruction and comprehension of British leftists workers by Pankhurst's lot, and the Scottish ILP, and which contained the statement for example;

No worries then about being confused about some finer book learned intellectual details.

The SPGB was not initiating a theoretical leftist sectarian impossibilist anti-trot squabble that it intended to take into the next millennia; but was just matter of factly stating what everybody already accepted as true.


Including the Berkman's who then saw Bolshevik state capitalism as a 'historical necessity'.

From 1925 onwards all that was progressively sent down the memory whole in a myth making process (initially Stalinist and later Trot) tissue of lies that Bolshevik Russia never had been state capitalism and Trotsky and Lenin had never said it was.


And it was even forgotten that the intellectual 'anarchists' like Pankhurst and the Berkmans along with some more temporarily duped council communists that had gone along with it as well; for their own somewhat embarrassed convenience.


[There had been in fact some barely credible rumours circulating around in the SPGB, originating from older members, that Trotsky had said in some key pamphlet that Bolshevik Russia was state capitalism.

It didn’t seem particularly important at the time to them, hence nobody knew where he had said it.

Which is what set me on the hunt for it.]

Returning to Lenin’s 1921 April thesis, I am honestly not dodging any bullets; it would take too long to go through it all item by item.

So I will attempt to concentrate on the core ‘concessions’ issue as first raised by Stalin in 1925 and plagiarized by Trotsky in 1933.

[The Windbag never did have an original idea of his own.]

Thus from lying Johnny come lately Trotsky in 1933;


[ Trotsky also incidentally dealt matter of factly with Lenin’s famous "Leftwing Childishness" state capitalism thesis in 1928;
]

Analysing the concession system

The concession system involved the Bolshevik state renting out ‘their own’ industrial enterprises, mainly mines and oil wells (some recently acquired from an ‘imperialist’ invasion and acquisition from a democratically elected government)



…….. to western capitalists eg Rockerfellers Standard Oil company etc

As far as most of the concession system was concerned;


Lenin described this, in fact, acquisition of the ‘differential ground-rent’ due to the ‘landowning class’ from the renting out of ‘naturally productive land’ to capitalists for exploiting wage labour as; ‘clear cut’ Bolshevik state capitalism.

Calling that ‘state capitalism’ was a 'schoolboy' understanding of volume III das capital.

It would be like calling the Saudi Royal family ‘clear cut’ state capitalist.


Perhaps I am being a churlish Marxist snob for bring that up.


But never mind; if in fact this ‘clear cut’ state capitalism as far as the recipients of the revenue was concerned wasn’t 'state capitalism' at all.

Lenins 'political' objective was to euphemise and sanitise its 'obviousness', by categorising it as part of the generally widely accepted and other ‘less clear cut’ state capitalism.


from 141 again;





But who is to say that a minority ‘group’ that justifies entering the ‘marble halls of power’ in order to allegedly, philanthropically, act in the interests of the working class doesn’t become a ‘political aristocracy or oligarchy’.

And 'discredit itself'.

What is the difference between an incipient Bolshevik party ‘bureaucratic caste’, which was transparently latent from the beginning and unfolded from its own nature.

And a ‘political aristocracy or oligarchy’, that can surely only blossom and seek and find its idyllic economic mode of production in state capitalism.

But at least it seems that we are talking about the early Bolshevik Party conceiving of themselves as agents acting on behalf of the working class rather than the Bolshevik Party being the working class, or controlled by it.

The second part is I assure you demonstrably untrue.

Lenin was implacably and politically opposed to the idea of the Bolshevik party ‘embracing the entire proletariat’;as they were ‘corrupted, vice ridden and degraded’ by ‘imperialism’.

That was a longish one pass and rushed post and I have to go out now.

so apologies for any linking mistakes etc.


Your posts are impossible to read, comrade. Your font is unnecessarily large, and you jump around linking about a dozen different web sites without explaining how any specific passages in any of them might or might not contradict the content of the post you are responding to. Sorry, but I did not mention Azerbijan, a concessions system, Ted Grant, or the SPGB. Why bring them up? It looks as though you just copy-pasted some long rambling draft into your post. If you want to continue having a back and forth with me, I am asking you to reconsider your methodology. I am not going to respond to another post formatted and constructed that way. It's a waste of time trying to make sense of it, and it is an eyesore.

Your response was to a post of mine in which I explained that Lenin and Trotsky used "state capitalism" to refer to the workers' state management and regulation of private capitals. In that same post, I noted that both thinkers believed that the state sector still consists of accumulative practices. Your response to me was to excerpt a quote of Trotsky's in which he says basically that: that the state sector could function in commercial ways, with the items produced assuming the form of a commodity as a result of the persistence of value relations throughout all of society.

Your confusion seems to stem from your conflation of capitalism with commodity production and exchange. Commodities were produced in early agricultural societies. They were produced in classical Rome by urban craftsmen who specialized in blacksmithing and so on. Would you argue that these indicated a capitalist mode of production? I sure hope not.

You insist on repeating over and over again that "the universally held and accepted view at the time that; Bolshevik Russia was and always had been state capitalism." But you seem to have no interest in what Lenin or Trotsky (or anybody else for that matter) meant when they used the term state capitalism, or when it is explained to you, you just fall back on other quotes where Lenin and Trotsky didn't use the actual term state capitalism, but where they make observations about markets in which the state operated, as if they either of them thought that capitalism could be reduced down to the question of commodity production or market exchange. You do understand that Marx critiqued Adam Smith on precisely this point, right?

You can complain that the Bolsheviks were a political oligarchy all you want. A political oligarchy is not a Marxian class. They might coincide, but you'll have to do more to explain why we should consider them synonymous in this respect than just point to the fact that there was political repression and that a peaceful, class utopia without bureaucracy didn't begin the day after the provisional government was overthrown. I happen to think that the Soviet state was capitalist for decades, but certainly not in the 1920s.

[Fred]

The state was the bureaucracy. The Party elite.

I keep asserting facts. You keep denying them with your pseudo-socialism.

I've read both. I understand capital... which you clearly do not.

Seriously though...someone who acknowledges that the working class doesn't have political power...but then claims it doesn't eliminate the existence of a workers state...is in need of a serious reality check. That's precisely what a "workers' state" is... the working CLASS with political power.

What a scathing polemic.

You keep on asserting falsehoods. I give concrete examples of bourgeois states where most of the bourgeoisie do not have political power -- you don't deny this, yet you insist it is not possible to have any kind of workers' state where the workers do not have political power. That is illogical.

You keep on asserting that production was for profit in the USSR -- it simply was not -- as Comrade Bolshie points out -- production units and even industries ran ad infinitum even if they were losing money. In times of labor scarcity, wages went down -- the opposite of capitalism -- again because things were done according to a plan for output, not for profit.

The last point was no polemic. It was just a cry of pain at the thought of having to read some of that stuff again. The least you could do would be to pull some pertinent quotes that back any of your assertions about the USSR. Ah well.

[Brotto Rühle]

You keep on asserting falsehoods. I give concrete examples of bourgeois states where most of the bourgeoisie do not have political power -- you don't deny this, yet you insist it is not possible to have any kind of workers' state where the workers do not have political power. That is illogical.So, you're telling me that you take the revisionist notion that the state is a "class neutral" entity?


You keep on asserting that production was for profit in the USSR -- it simply was not -- as Comrade Bolshie points out -- production units and even industries ran ad infinitum even if they were losing money. In times of labor scarcity, wages went down -- the opposite of capitalism -- again because things were done according to a plan for output, not for profit.Wrong again and again and again.


The last point was no polemic. It was just a cry of pain at the thought of having to read some of that stuff again. The least you could do would be to pull some pertinent quotes that back any of your assertions about the USSR. Ah well.Sorry, wait, let me scour Trotsky and Lenin for some quotes, I know those are the only ones you'll ever read.

So, you're telling me you have a refutation of Dunayevskaya's analysis of Russia?

At least the Stalinists tried to claim the law of value operated within socialism, instead of just claiming it no longer existed in the USSR.

[Five Year Plan]

So, you're telling me that you take the revisionist notion that the state is a "class neutral" entity?

No, Fred is stating the elementary proposition that the class basis of a state is different than the identities of the people who staff the state , or the concrete acts of oppression that the people who staff the state might or might not choose to engage in. A bourgeois state is still a bourgeois state, even if it is staffed by Napoleon's army. A bourgeois state is still a bourgeois state, even if it throws this or that capitalist in jail. The same holds true for a workers' state, although the constitutive role that workers' agency plays in the foundation of a workers' state does mean that too broad or consistent a political assault on the working class would jeopardize the existence of a workers' state.

The question, then, is when quantitatively growing acts of anti-worker oppression lead to a qualitative transformation in the relationship of the state agents and the working class. You are studiously avoiding this question by just pointing out there was oppression. Not helpful.


So, you're telling me you have a refutation of Dunayevskaya's analysis of Russia?Here are a couple of questions I don't think Dunayevskaya or her acolytes are capable of answering: if the October Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, where was their bourgeois, or even capitalist, program? Every bourgeois revolution in history came to power on the basis of a capitalist program, from the American Civil War to the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan. When has there ever been a bourgeois revolution led by a party enjoying mass support for a program undermining the foundations of existing capitalist property relations? Also, where was the capitalist property owned by the Bolsheviks that empowered them enough to topple the government? Again every other bourgeois revolution was fought when the bourgeoisie had acquired so much power through their own exploitative property relations that they were able to muster other classes in society to topple feudal states. Yet in the October Revolution, it was the bourgeoisie and their lackeys that were toppled from power.

I would honestly like to here you try to answer these questions, especially the first one. It's a strange theory that proposes that a bourgeois revolution was carried out non-bourgeois classes on an anti-capitalist program in order to instantaneously become a new state capitalist class.

[Brotto Rühle]

No, Fred is stating the elementary proposition that the class basis of a state is different than the identities of the people who staff the state , or the concrete acts of oppression that the people who staff the state might or might not choose to engage in. A bourgeois state is still a bourgeois state, even if it is staffed by Napoleon's army. A bourgeois state is still a bourgeois state, even if it throws this or that capitalist in jail. The same holds true for a workers' state, although the constitutive role that workers' agency plays in the foundation of a workers' state does mean that too broad or consistent a political assault on the working class would jeopardize the existence of a workers' state.Christ this revisionist nonsense continues and continues.

The working class either holds political power, or it does not.

Just as the bourgeoisie holds political power in capitalist society, in ALL cases.


The question, then, is when quantitatively growing acts of anti-worker oppression lead to a qualitative transformation in the relationship of the state agents and the working class. You are studiously avoiding this question by just pointing out there was oppression. Not helpful.
I'm pointing out that the state owned the means of production, extracted surplus labour, that the direct producers were alienated from the means of production, etc etc. Fucking read you moron.


Here are a couple of questions I don't think Dunayevskaya or her acolytes are capable of answering: if the October Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, where was their bourgeois, or even capitalist, program?Dunayevskaya asserts that the October revolution was, indeed, proletarian. I, as well, view it as a proletarian revolution. Unlike Dunayevskaya, I do not believe a DotP was solidified. There are "left communists" who believe the revolution was bourgeois. I am NOT one of them.


Every bourgeois revolution in history came to power on the basis of a capitalist program, from the American Civil War to the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan.See above


When has there ever been a bourgeois revolution led by a party enjoying mass support for a program undermining the foundations of existing capitalist property relations? Also, where was the capitalist property owned by the Bolsheviks that empowered them enough to topple the government? Again every other bourgeois revolution was fought when the bourgeoisie had acquired so much power through their own exploitative property relations that they were able to muster other classes in society to topple feudal states. Yet in the October Revolution, it was the bourgeoisie and their lackeys that were toppled from power.See above yet again.


I would honestly like to here you try to answer these questions, especially the first one. It's a strange theory that proposes that a bourgeois revolution was carried out non-bourgeois classes on an anti-capitalist program in order to instantaneously become a new state capitalist class.I answered it, and I answered it showing that you had NO IDEA what views she held, or I hold.

[Five Year Plan]

Christ this revisionist nonsense continues and continues.

The working class either holds political power, or it does not.

Just as the bourgeoisie holds political power in capitalist society, in ALL cases.

I'm pointing out that the state owned the means of production, extracted surplus labour, that the direct producers were alienated from the means of production, etc etc. Fucking read you moron.

Dunayevskaya asserts that the October revolution was, indeed, proletarian. I, as well, view it as a proletarian revolution. Unlike Dunayevskaya, I do not believe a DotP was solidified. There are "left communists" who believe the revolution was bourgeois. I am NOT one of them.

See above

See above yet again.

I answered it, and I answered it showing that you had NO IDEA what views she held, or I hold.

What you say and how you say it mirror one another perfectly. You can't seem to process or formulate ideas requiring more than a soundbyte's worth of thought, which means that you are smuggling a handful of bourgeois "common sense" assumptions into the core of your thinking. And the aesthetics of what you write match this. Short little one- or two-sentence snippets spliced all throughout the paragraphs of my previous post.

You claim that the issue of what constitutes a workers' state is a simple one, and is simply determined by whether the working class holds power. This just invites the question of what it means to say that the working class holds power in a state. That workers can participate in elections? Then the USA is the world's most powerful workers' state. That the state came to power as a result, in part, through workers' struggle? Then the French Revolution established a workers' state in 1789. That none of society's producers are politically oppressed in any way? Then you are not describing a workers' state, but Marx's vision of full communism free of any kind of bureaucracy in terms not just of production decisions, but also in terms of the enforcement of allocative decisions. Or does "workers holding political power" mean that only less than 10% of workers are politically suppressed, disfranchised? What about 20%? 30%? Does "workers holding political power" mean that the offices have to be staffed by people who are purely discharging the function of the collective worker under capitalism? Then any kind of bureaucratic state is impossible, because the second any worker assumes a position of bureaucratic privilege over his comrades, he is no longer fully a worker. The only kind of authority in that scenario would be the kind of "public authority" Marx envisioned for the higher stage of communism. More ultra-left fantasizing with zero practicality.

If Dunayevskaya asserts that the October Revolution was proletarian, when was that revolution smashed, and the bodies of armed men that constituted the basis of defending that Revolution crushed in a counter-revolution?

If, instead, we accept your view, and recognize that the DotP was never established or "solidified," then you necessarily think that the October Revolution was a political revolution that led to the shifting of power from one capitalist (bourgeois) class to another capitalist (but non-bourgeois class). In that case, would you care to explain to me, once more, how a "state capitalist" political revolution occurred on the basis of mass worker support for a party that, at that time, was structured around an objectively anti-capitalist program, and which functioned politically in a way that would have made the establishment of *class* (not politically bureaucratic) relationships between itself and the working class as a whole impossible without dramatic restructuring? What about the workers in the Russian Communist Party in the late 1910s and very early 1920s, when there were still democratic norms? Were those workers, by virtue of dictating the decisions of the party leaders, mini-capitalists at the same time that they were workers? I guess this makes them middle class, while the non-party workers were just workers?

And I would appreciate it if you actually demonstrated a mature and developed intellect before presuming to possess one to such a degree that you feel at liberty to lord it over others by calling them "fucking morons." So far I have seen no such evidence in your posts on this thread. Keep trying, comrade.

[Brotto Rühle]

What you say and how you say it mirror one another perfectly. You can't seem to process or formulate ideas requiring more than a soundbyte's worth of thought, which means that you are smuggling a handful of bourgeois "common sense" assumptions into the core of your thinking. And the aesthetics of what you write match this. Short little one- or two-sentence snippets spliced all throughout the paragraphs of my previous post.I can't keep arguing the same point sover and over, just because Fred refuses to acknowledge the fact that they are real. You can keep persuing the idea that capitalism can become a "transitional mode of production" so long as nationalization occurs, or, you can actually realize that the direct producers were alienated from the means of production, that surplus labour was extracted, that political power was not in the hands of the proletariat. The Trotskyist view is a delusional one, which, whether you say it or not, accepts the revisionist notion of the state as a class neutral entity.


You claim that the issue of what constitutes a workers' state is a simple one, and is simply determined by whether the working class holds power. This just invites the question of what it means to say that the working class holds power in a state. See: Karl Marx and the State (http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/karl-marx-the-state.html)


That workers can participate in elections? Then the USA is the world's most powerful workers' state. Strawman some more.


That the state came to power as a result, in part, through workers' struggle? Then the French Revolution established a workers' state in 1789.I can start a really big fire with all the straw


That none of society's producers are politically oppressed in any way? Then you are not describing a workers' state, but Marx's vision of full communism free of any kind of bureaucracy in terms not just of production decisions, but also in terms of the enforcement of allocative decisions.The fact that you even said the phrase "Full communism" tells me you are nothing more than a joke.


Or does "workers holding political power" mean that only less than 10% of workers are politically suppressed, disfranchised? What about 20%? 30%? Does "workers holding political power" mean that the offices have to be staffed by people who are purely discharging the function of the collective worker under capitalism? Then any kind of bureaucratic state is impossible, because the second any worker assumes a position of bureaucratic privilege over his comrades, he is no longer fully a worker. The only kind of authority in that scenario would be the kind of "public authority" Marx envisioned for the higher stage of communism. More ultra-left fantasizing with zero practicality.See, again, Karl Marx and the State.


If Dunayevskaya asserts that the October Revolution was proletarian, when was that revolution smashed, and the bodies of armed men that constituted the basis of defending that Revolution crushed in a counter-revolution?most say by 1921. I agree. In the Civil war, and by the method of which the proletariat allowed the party to control the soviets, any semblence of workers' power was eliminated. The working class itself, was decimated in numbers, opening the party to the influence of the peasantry.


If, instead, we accept your view, and recognize that the DotP was never established or "solidified," then you necessarily think that the October Revolution was a political revolution that led to the shifting of power from one capitalist (bourgeois) class to another capitalist (but non-bourgeois class).Yeah.


In that case, would you care to explain to me, once more, how a "state capitalist" political revolution occurred on the basis of mass worker support for a party that, at that time, was structured around an objectively anti-capitalist program, and which functioned politically in a way that would have made the establishment of *class* (not politically bureaucratic) relationships between itself and the working class as a whole impossible without dramatic restructuring? What about the workers in the Russian Communist Party in the late 1910s and very early 1920s, when there were still democratic norms? Were those workers, by virtue of dictating the decisions of the party leaders, mini-capitalists at the same time that they were workers? I guess this makes them middle class, while the non-party workers were just workers?Again, it's strawman after strawman.

A failed workers revolution occurred. One which, while the workers attempted to establish their power in the vacuum created, the party commandeered and took that power themselves.

Do you understand Marx's concept of class? Do you understand what the relations at the point of production means?


And I would appreciate it if you actually demonstrated a mature and developed intellect before presuming to possess one to such a degree that you feel at liberty to lord it over others by calling them "fucking morons." So far I have seen no such evidence in your posts on this thread. Keep trying, comrade.Yes father, no worries father. I apologize yet again father.

Don't fucking patronize me.

[Five Year Plan]

I can't keep arguing the same point sover and over, just because Fred refuses to acknowledge the fact that they are real. You can keep persuing the idea that capitalism can become a "transitional mode of production" so long as nationalization occurs, or, you can actually realize that the direct producers were alienated from the means of production, that surplus labour was extracted, that political power was not in the hands of the proletariat. The Trotskyist view is a delusional one, which, whether you say it or not, accepts the revisionist notion of the state as a class neutral entity.

I don't think you understand the Trotskyist position, which is unfortunate in light of all the invective you are hurling at people who you think are advancing it. Trotskyists do not call capitalism is a "transitional mode of production." What they say is that the workers' state presides over a transition from capitalism to communism. Part of this process, in backward Soviet Russia, involved strategies for accumulation and industrial development, as well as bringing the peasantry into industrial production. One of those strategies involved what both Lenin and Trotsky referred to as "state capitalism," which was the workers' state bringing private capital under what they called "workers' control" as a part of the process of transitioning to communism and full producers' collective self-management.

You mention nationalization. There is no "Trotskyist view" of nationalization. The supposedly orthodox Trotskyist view is that complete nationalization is incompatible with the existence of a capitalist class. I, also a Trotskyist, happen to think that this is wrong. You are correct that workers' were alienated from the means of production, but the point I would make is that as a result of the October Revolution, that alienation was no longer embodied in a definite ruling class. Instead, under the workers' state, the function of capital was performed by private capitals overseen by the workers' state, as well as bureaucrats who also exercised the global function of the collective worker insofar as they engaged in planning processes and procedures, however distorted it was by the competing demands of accumulation and competition, that would need to be carried out in a communist society. What this means in terms of the dual function of the bureaucrats is that they were not a capitalist class. They occupied a class position analogous to the middle class under traditional bourgeois capitalism.

The rest of your post is wrongly claiming I am setting up strawmen, when the supposed strawmen you were referring to were just possible answers to the question I was putting forward of what you mean by workers having power. I wasn't saying that these were your answers. In fact, I am still waiting for your answer. All you have done is link an article that makes the point that states are not neutral pieces of machinery that any class can use for its own purposes. The Trotskyists you call delusional actually agree with this. They argue that the October revolution established a workers' form of state, one that degenerated and bureaucratized over time to the point where it more and more came to resemble the very kind of exploitative-class state it replaced, until eventually counter-revolution occurred.

Oh, and asking you to treat people with a modicum of respect for the purposes of maintaining a civil and substantive discussion is not "patronizing." It's telling you to cool it with the snarks because your presumed knowledge way oversteps your actual knowledge. Even if you were a brilliant theoretician, there's something to be said about civil exchange. That you are not a brilliant theoretician, and seem not to be the best informed on Marxian theory, makes my suggestion all the more important for you to consider.

[Fred]

I can't keep arguing the same point sover and over, just because Fred refuses to acknowledge the fact that they are real. You can keep persuing the idea that capitalism can become a "transitional mode of production" so long as nationalization occurs, or, you can actually realize that the direct producers were alienated from the means of production, that surplus labour was extracted, that political power was not in the hands of the proletariat. The Trotskyist view is a delusional one, which, whether you say it or not, accepts the revisionist notion of the state as a class neutral entity.

See: Karl Marx and the State (http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/karl-marx-the-state.html)

Strawman some more.

I can start a really big fire with all the straw

The fact that you even said the phrase "Full communism" tells me you are nothing more than a joke.

See, again, Karl Marx and the State.

most say by 1921. I agree. In the Civil war, and by the method of which the proletariat allowed the party to control the soviets, any semblence of workers' power was eliminated. The working class itself, was decimated in numbers, opening the party to the influence of the peasantry.

Yeah.

Again, it's strawman after strawman.

A failed workers revolution occurred. One which, while the workers attempted to establish their power in the vacuum created, the party commandeered and took that power themselves.

Do you understand Marx's concept of class? Do you understand what the relations at the point of production means?

Yes father, no worries father. I apologize yet again father.

Don't fucking patronize me.
The comrade was nicely saying that you are a behaving like a disrespectful jerk. He could have used your preferred infantile language but, in a comradely fashion, asked that you keep it civil. You make empty assertions and then get all pissy because we are calling you to task on it.

You claim the law of value was in full sway in the USSR -- how? Where? Because workers did not receive the full value of their labor? How the hell would that have even been possible in the USSR? Or desirable? The state would have actually collapsed and there would have been a very early return of REAL capitalism. No one here is claiming that the USSR was socialist. The October Revolution occurred in specific conditions that Marx did not anticipate -- but trying to argue that he would have called it capitalist underscores your partial understanding. If you want to intelligently argue that the USSR was something other than a workers' state, you need to establish that it was something different from capitalism -- just because workers' were paid wages and not treated well is simply insufficient to establish that it was capitalist.

[Remus Bleys]

The comrade was nicely saying that you are a behaving like a disrespectful jerk. He could have used your preferred infantile language but, in a comradely fashion, asked that you keep it civil. You make empty assertions and then get all pissy because we are calling you to task on it.

You claim the law of value was in full sway in the USSR -- how? Where? Because workers did not receive the full value of their labor? How the hell would that have even been possible in the USSR? Or desirable? The state would have actually collapsed and there would have been a very early return of REAL capitalism. No one here is claiming that the USSR was socialist. The October Revolution occurred in specific conditions that Marx did not anticipate -- but trying to argue that he would have called it capitalist underscores your partial understanding. If you want to intelligently argue that the USSR was something other than a workers' state, you need to establish that it was something different from capitalism -- just because workers' were paid wages and not treated well is simply insufficient to establish that it was capitalist.

Don't stalinists argue that the law of value can operate in socialism?

[Brotto Rühle]

Don't stalinists argue that the law of value can operate in socialism?

Stalin himself argues that it does, and that it DID operate in the USSR. And also goes into detail about profits, the law of value and commodity production, in the USSR, here:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/

[Brotto Rühle]

The comrade was nicely saying that you are a behaving like a disrespectful jerk. He could have used your preferred infantile language but, in a comradely fashion, asked that you keep it civil. You make empty assertions and then get all pissy because we are calling you to task on it. DO me a favour, and comradedly get bent.

I'm making assertions based on fact, I am openly and clearly stating that the law of value was in effect in the USSR (something even Stalin had to say was true -- though he then claimed that this was okay, cause the LoV persists into socialism)


You claim the law of value was in full sway in the USSR -- how? Where? Because workers did not receive the full value of their labor? How the hell would that have even been possible in the USSR? Or desirable? The state would have actually collapsed and there would have been a very early return of REAL capitalism. No one here is claiming that the USSR was socialist. The October Revolution occurred in specific conditions that Marx did not anticipate -- but trying to argue that he would have called it capitalist underscores your partial understanding. If you want to intelligently argue that the USSR was something other than a workers' state, you need to establish that it was something different from capitalism -- just because workers' were paid wages and not treated well is simply insufficient to establish that it was capitalist.

Define capitalism. Go for it. I'm going to love this.

Oh, remember those links I gave earlier Fred, maybe you should give them a read ;)

[Fred]

I doubt that we would disagree on a definition of capitalism. The differences arise when looking at the economy of the USSR. So here is a pertinent, if rather long quote:


One articulate exponent of the left version of "state capitalism in the US is Raya Dunayevskaya. Of Russian origin, Dunayevskaya entered the Trotskyist movement in the late 1930s. She split from the Fourth International in the late 1940s as part of an essentially syndicalist faction led by the West Indian J.R. Johnson and loosely tied to the Spaniard Grandizo Munis.

An early, brief and cogent statement of Dunayevskaya's position is "A New Rivision of Marxian Economics" published in (of all places) the American Economic Review (September 1944). (She is polemicizing here against a Russian Stalinist economist who maintains that the law of value prevails under "socialism" -- whence the title.) This is the heart of Dunayevskaya's position:


There is incontrovertible evidence that there exists in Russia at present a sharp class differentiation based upon a division of function between the workers, on the one hand, and the managers of industry, millionaire kolkhozniki [collective farmers], political leasders and the intelligentsia in general, on the other. . . . This distinction between the intelligentsia and the mass of the workders has found its economic expression in the formula: 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his labor.' This formula should be compared with the traditional Marxist formula: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' 'Each according to his need' has always been considered a repudiation of the law of value. The document however, states that 'distribution according to labor' is to be effected through the instrumentality of money. This money is not script notes or some bookkeeping term but money as the price expression of value."

What Dunayevskaya neglected to mention is that "to each according to his need" is the capsule description of full communism. As Marx clearly stated in the "Critique of the Gotha Program," the transitional epoch is characterized by economic scarcity and therefore by differential wage labor. Wage labor in a workers state serves to allocate different types of labor, ration scarce consumables and ensure an external compulsion to work.

If the economy is based on wage labor, then the money cost of the production must be the key index of economic accounting and calculation. The money cost of production is the only common denominator (though a highly imperfect one) which allows comparison of the different kinds of resources expended on physically heterogeneous goods and services. Contrary to Dunayevskaya, economic clculation based on labor costs in terms of money outlay does not mean the predominance of the law of value in the economy. What is the positive program implied by the anarcho-syndicalist and left communist contention that the USSR is state capitalist? For the former, it is producer cooperatives necessarily linked through market relations; for the latter, it is a purely administrative economy, an idealized version of the "war communism" of 1918-1921. Both these programs are reactionary utopias. They cannot exist as stable economic systems, and attempt to iimplement such programs will lead to economic collapse.

A system of producer cooperatives would in short order degenerate into capitalist exploitation. In the absence of state restriction, the more profitable cooperatives would buy out bankrupt ones and exploit the former cooperative members as wage labor. The immanent tendency of workers management under market conditions to transform unprofitable enterprises into spheres of capitalist exploitation is generally recognized in Yugoslavia. The leading Titoist theoretician, Eduard Kardelj, explains that only strict government control prevents profitable enterprises from taking over financially weak ones and exploiting the latter's labor in a fully capitalist manner (see his "Toward Higher Forms of Integration," Socialist Thought and Practice,April-June 1967)

If producer cooperatives are a road to capitalist restoration, then the idea of a moneyless, marketless totally administrative economy under conditions of scarcity is a reactionary utopia pure and simple. The Soviet masses, who suffered the militarization of labor under Stalin, who still wait in line hours every week for goods in short supply, will not take kindly to programs for allocating labor by administrative fiat and rationing consumables in physical units. . . . [S]uch utopian fantasies may seduce idealistic radical youth, the potential cadre of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard.

--Introduction to "Why the USSR is Not Capitalist" Spartacus Youth Publishing Co. 1977

[Fred]

Don't stalinists argue that the law of value can operate in socialism?

Yeah, some of them do. But most of them argue that the USSR was socialist in the 1930s. So you can take that with a big grain of salt. If that was socialism, well, then I'm a monkey's uncle.

[Fakeblock]

When, according to the trotskyists, does something start and stop being a workers' state. What are the minimum requirements so to speak?

[Geiseric]

When, according to the trotskyists, does something start and stop being a workers' state. What are the minimum requirements so to speak?

Property has to be turned back to the bourgeoisie, from the workers state who by necessity owns it after overthrowing capitalism. There can't be a capitalist revolution in a country which is already ruled by finance capital. For example the fSU's bureaucracy itself were the channel through international capital looted the country, which is due to the contradictions with the existence of a state separated from the working class, which Marx and Engels did address ahead of time, when they made it clear that socialism can't exist in one country due to imperialist pressures as well as the possible economic backwardness of a country such as Russia.

[Fred]

I'm making assertions based on fact, I am openly and clearly stating that the law of value was in effect in the USSR (something even Stalin had to say was true -- though he then claimed that this was okay, cause the LoV persists into socialism)





Do not believe everything Stalin said. Some if it was not true;).

[Geiseric]

something EVEN stalin, the worst enemy of the international working class said?

[Brotto Rühle]

something EVEN stalin, the worst enemy of the international working class said?

The point is that the law of value existed in the USSR, quite obviously. Stalin, in seeing this, had to then claim that the law of value was no longer just a law of capitalism, but also socialism.

Jesus Christ. Stalin also supports a vanguard party. Therefore Trotsky is also a Stalinist and follows the worst enemy of the working class.

[Remus Bleys]

Why would stalin make up a lie like that?
All it could possibly have done was hurt him.

[Brotto Rühle]

Why would stalin make up a lie like that?
All it could possibly have done was hurt him.

Precisely, the law of value not existing would have been a bigger push for him, because he wouldn't have to deviate from Marx and say that it also exists in socialism.

[Geiseric]

The point is that the law of value existed in the USSR, quite obviously. Stalin, in seeing this, had to then claim that the law of value was no longer just a law of capitalism, but also socialism.

Jesus Christ. Stalin also supports a vanguard party. Therefore Trotsky is also a Stalinist and follows the worst enemy of the working class.

what in marx's name are you talking about? Stalin dismembered all of the vanguard parties through europe.

[Brotto Rühle]

what in marx's name are you talking about? Stalin dismembered all of the vanguard parties through europe.Missed the point.

[Fred]

Why would stalin make up a lie like that?
All it could possibly have done was hurt him.

Because, with regard to Marxist theory, Stalin had no idea what he was talking about. The clue is that he declared socialism to have been established in the USSR. So on the one hand, you take as good coin his comment that the law of value exists, but dismiss his notion that there is socialism? Why do that.

It would have been in Stalin's best interest to mobilize against the German invasion, too. The man veered all over the place.

[Brotto Rühle]

Because, with regard to Marxist theory, Stalin had no idea what he was talking about. The clue is that he declared socialism to have been established in the USSR. So on the one hand, you take as good coin his comment that the law of value exists, but dismiss his notion that there is socialism? Why do that.

It would have been in Stalin's best interest to mobilize against the German invasion, too. The man veered all over the place.

If Stalin were an idiot, he wouldn't have gotten where he did. I don't believe for a second that Stalin believed Socialism had been achieved.

[Fred]

If Stalin were an idiot, he wouldn't have gotten where he did. I don't believe for a second that Stalin believed Socialism had been achieved.

Yet he did some disastrously idiotic things -- even on his own terms. Another item, I have posted some detailed replies to your fierce assertions that the law of value held sway in the USSR and that production was for profit. You have sniped but not responded at all -- even to the post about Dunayevskaya. What's the hold up. You certainly jump all over most things I dare to say:confused:

[Dave B]

Perhaps Stalin had forgotten, in 1925, what he had said a “communist...... society” was in 1906; in the same way that Trotsky had forgotten, in 1933, what he had said Bolshevik Russia was, in 1922, ie a state capitalist society ?

Thus from Stalin


That is why Marx said in 1875:


[I]page 339

"In a higher phase of communist (i.e., socialist) society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of livelihood but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual . . . only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be crossed in iis entirety and society inscribe on its banners: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'" (see Critique of the Gotha Programme (http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/CGP75.html)).[91 (http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html#en91)].



Such, in general, is the picture of future socialist society according to the theory of Marx.


Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no


page 337

need either for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power.



That is why Karl Marx said as far back as 1846:



"The working class in the course of its development Will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called . . . " (see The Poverty of Philosophy).[89 (http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html#en89)]


http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/AS07.html#c3

[Dave B]

FYI


Joseph Stalin

Economic Problems of the USSR

3. The Law of Value Under Socialism




http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch04.htm

[Brotto Rühle]

Yet he did some disastrously idiotic things -- even on his own terms. Another item, I have posted some detailed replies to your fierce assertions that the law of value held sway in the USSR and that production was for profit. You have sniped but not responded at all -- even to the post about Dunayevskaya. What's the hold up. You certainly jump all over most things I dare to say:confused:

You haven't given any detailed replies that refute the functioning of the law of value in the USSR. You linked a spart article, which does nothing more than you, just deny. You never had any critiques of any of the links, noteablly Analysis of the Russian Economy, which goes into greater detail than the other articles.

[Ismail]

Why would stalin make up a lie like that?
All it could possibly have done was hurt him.If you actually read the text Stalin was replying to two different viewpoints among Soviet economists concerning the law of value. One claimed it didn't exist under socialism and thus in the USSR. The other pretty much claimed that the law of value determined economic policy. Stalin pointed out it was wrong to claim that the law of value didn't exist in the USSR, it obviously did, but also that while it was taken into account it didn't determine economic policy, hence his remarks about how Soviet economics was focused on heavy industry (which doesn't return a profit for decades) rather than immediately profitable light industry (which, if the law of value were blindly followed, would have been given priority as under capitalism), etc.

Every single "Stalinist" (in the broadest sense) country held that the law of value existed under socialism. Doesn't matter if it's Stalin or Hoxha, Deng or Khrushchev, Tito or Castro; all talked about the law of value in some form. Kim Il Sung went on at length concerning the subject, while Mao critiqued Stalin's views from the "left." The role of the law of value was the issue, not its existence or lack thereof.

[Hit The North]

Every single "Stalinist" (in the broadest sense) country held that the law of value existed under socialism.

Perhaps they did but how would they know as none of them lived in a socialist society.

[Fred]

You haven't given any detailed replies that refute the functioning of the law of value in the USSR. You linked a spart article, which does nothing more than you, just deny. You never had any critiques of any of the links, noteablly Analysis of the Russian Economy, which goes into greater detail than the other articles.

Help me out here, comrade. Could you narrow down what you would like me to critique. I work full time, have little kids and try to be a good dad and it would be beyond me to write a full response to Dunayevskaya's work. So if you could quote some passages, I will try to accommodate.

[Fakeblock]

Property has to be turned back to the bourgeoisie, from the workers state who by necessity owns it after overthrowing capitalism. There can't be a capitalist revolution in a country which is already ruled by finance capital. For example the fSU's bureaucracy itself were the channel through international capital looted the country, which is due to the contradictions with the existence of a state separated from the working class, which Marx and Engels did address ahead of time, when they made it clear that socialism can't exist in one country due to imperialist pressures as well as the possible economic backwardness of a country such as Russia.

Great, but what actually defines a workers' state? How do you determine which states do or do not fit the label? As the terms seems to apply to all kinds of states from Russia in late 1917 to present-day China, I think it's fair to say that it's a rather broad description. So what does the term "workers' state" actually mean?

[Fred]

Great, but what actually defines a workers' state? How do you determine which states do or do not fit the label? As the terms seems to apply to all kinds of states from Russia in late 1917 to present-day China, I think it's fair to say that it's a rather broad description. So what does the term "workers' state" actually mean?

The expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the development of a planned collectivized economy. And you are correct, it is a broad definition and does include present day China -- although the Chinese bureaucracy has been undermining the planned collectivized economy for a long time, and the risk of counterrevolution runs very high. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and even North Korea fit this definition. Obviously, none of these have workers' democracy, and they all would be categorized as "deformed workers' states" from a Trotskyist viewpoint.

[Brotto Rühle]

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the proletariat armed and organized, with political power. Not some false notion of "nationalization", even when the proletariat then has nothing to do with the state or industry besides continuing their same old position of being exploited.

[Geiseric]

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the proletariat armed and organized, with political power. Not some false notion of "nationalization", even when the proletariat then has nothing to do with the state or industry besides continuing their same old position of being exploited.

They were exploited in the fSU so heavy industry could be built up, which was intended when the 5 year plan was conceived by the Left Opposition to advance the international class struggle by providing a "communist fortress," to aid other revolutions. That idea was bastardized by Stalin, regardless nobody profited from it until today, when they sell what was made to other countries. If you've read animal farm, the "windmill," was the allegory George Orwell used for the 5 year plan.

[Per Levy]

They were exploited in the fSU so heavy industry could be built up, which was intended when the 5 year plan was conceived by the Left Opposition to advance the international class struggle by providing a "communist fortress," to aid other revolutions.

wich does prove that that the soviet union was a dictatorship over the proletariat, since the proles are used like machines and had almost no say in what was going on.


That idea was bastardized by Stalin, regardless nobody profited from it until today, when they sell what was made to other countries.

i dont understand what you want to say with this, are you arguing that the soviet union wasnt selling stuff on the world market for most of its time? and that they(russia) start selling stuff just "today"?


If you've read animal farm, the "windmill," was the allegory George Orwell used for the 5 year plan.

why do you bring this up? what relevance does that have?

[Brotto Rühle]

They were exploited in the fSU so heavy industry could be built up, which was intended when the 5 year plan was conceived by the Left Opposition to advance the international class struggle by providing a "communist fortress," to aid other revolutions. That idea was bastardized by Stalin, regardless nobody profited from it until today, when they sell what was made to other countries. If you've read animal farm, the "windmill," was the allegory George Orwell used for the 5 year plan.State capitalism.

Don't get me wrong, I even believe the DOTP to have a cpaitalist mode of production. Just that, you have to acknowledge when the proletariat has political power (is the ruling class) or isn't.

[Fred]

wich does prove that that the soviet union was a dictatorship over the proletariat, since the proles are used like machines and had almost no say in what was going on.



i dont understand what you want to say with this, are you arguing that the soviet union wasnt selling stuff on the world market for most of its time? and that they(russia) start selling stuff just "today"?



why do you bring this up? what relevance does that have?

The Bolsheviks were faced with a number of very serious problems. The only way to actually build up the relative weight of the proletariat, and to have enough in the way of industrial might to fight potential wars against imperialism, they had to industrialize. This meant a temporary increase in the rate of exploitation of the workers -- at the same time a rapid expansion of the working class through industrialization.

You are confusing political power with economic system. In particular historical circumstances, a very narrow section of the ruling class may have a monopoly on political power (e.g., Nazi German, USSR).

[Fakeblock]

The expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the development of a planned collectivized economy. And you are correct, it is a broad definition and does include present day China -- although the Chinese bureaucracy has been undermining the planned collectivized economy for a long time, and the risk of counterrevolution runs very high. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and even North Korea fit this definition. Obviously, none of these have workers' democracy, and they all would be categorized as "deformed workers' states" from a Trotskyist viewpoint.


You are confusing political power with economic system. In particular historical circumstances, a very narrow section of the ruling class may have a monopoly on political power (e.g., Nazi German, USSR).

If property forms determine the class character of a state, doesn't it follow, then, that the revolutionary overthrow of the state by the proletariat is unnecessary in order to establish "proletarian property forms"? If the state form matters so little, shouldn't communists just push for nationalisation of the means of production within the capitalist state? Lots of capitalist states have expropriated a section of their bourgeoisie. How do you determine whether this is part of the development of the planned economy?

Apropos, the "proletarian property form", there can't be any such thing. The only form of property the proletariat has interest in requires the abolition of the proletariat in its entirety. State ownership, even by a proletarian state, doesn't equate to collective ownership by all of society. Neither the economic system or state forms in the Communist states (with the exception of the early Soviet Union) did anything to further this real goal of the working class. Your fetish for nationalisation is reformist at best and leads you to the defence of obviously counter-revolutionary states.

[Five Year Plan]

If property forms determine the class character of a state, doesn't it follow, then, that the revolutionary overthrow of the state by the proletariat is unnecessary in order to establish "proletarian property forms"? If the state form matters so little, shouldn't communists just push for nationalisation of the means of production within the capitalist state? Lots of capitalist states have expropriated a section of their bourgeoisie. How do you determine whether this is part of the development of the planned economy?

You make a good point here against equating the proletarian STATE form with just full nationalization. Fred makes this mistake, which permits him to say that workers' states were established without proletarian revolutions all across Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Your point about a proletarian property form, which you seem to be using interchangeably with proletarian state form, is less successful. Fred is correct that bourgeois capitalism would act to thwart this at every opportunity. It is also true that capitalism functioning within the confines of a fully nationalized economy, where value relations are directly political relations, is a highly unstable affair.

The reason capitalism existed within a fully nationalized economy in the Soviet Union was that it had usurped the gains achieved by the world's first proletarian state, one of them being the establishment of a proletarian property form. It was by no means an ideal solution, but was the result of bureaucrats needing to keep out (and compete with) larger internationally operating bourgeois capitals, and also not wanting to incite the working class through transforming property forms. The first factor is why many third-world anti-imperialist countries also resorted to a proletarian property form as a way to maintain economic/political independence against imperialism. Only when it was obvious that the Stalinist economies were hovering into negative growth rates and complete stagnation did the top officials, though still divided over the question, accept out of desperation the need to scrap the nationalized property form.

I would argue, then, that nationalized property represents a proletarian property form, but is not necessarily indicative of a proletarian state form.


Apropos, the "proletarian property form", there can't be any such thing. The only form of property the proletariat has interest in requires the abolition of the proletariat in its entirety. State ownership, even by a proletarian state, doesn't equate to collective ownership by all of society. Neither the economic system or state forms in the Communist states (with the exception of the early Soviet Union) did anything to further this real goal of the working class. Your fetish for nationalisation is reformist at best and leads you to the defence of obviously counter-revolutionary states.You are not thinking dialectically here. A proletarian property form can be stripped of its proletarian essence and wielded by alien forces, as happened in the Stalinist states. The problem is that the form contradicts the essence so much that the ensuing process is a highly unstable and fraught one. You're right that a proletarian state "owning" all the property is not the same as collective self-management by all of society. The first is called the transition from capitalism to communism. The second we refer to as communism.

[Fakeblock]

Your point about a proletarian property form, which you seem to be using interchangeably with proletarian state form, is less successful. Fred is correct that bourgeois capitalism would act to thwart this at every opportunity. It is also true that capitalism functioning within the confines of a fully nationalized economy, where value relations are directly political relations, is a highly unstable affair.

I'm not sure I understand. I reject the notion that a proletarian property form can exist in the first place (see below). The dictatorship of the proletariat/workers' state is a description of (exclusively) a state form, not a property form. The question of nationalised property is irrelevant to the question of the class nature of the Communist states. Actually one particular Engels quote comes to mind:


But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
Now I'm not trying to play the "who can quote Marx and Engels speaking in favour of my argument"-game, but I think he makes exactly the point I'm trying to make. It's the 'act' of destruction of capitalist productive relations that characterises the state as proletarian, not the 'act' of nationalisation. The significance of nationalisation is that it creates the conditions for the former process to take place. But so does capitalism itself.


The reason capitalism existed within a fully nationalized economy in the Soviet Union was that it had usurped the gains achieved by the world's first proletarian state, one of them being the establishment of a proletarian property form. It was by no means an ideal solution, but was the result of bureaucrats needing to keep out (and compete with) larger internationally operating bourgeois capitals, and also not wanting to incite the working class through transforming property forms. The first factor is why many third-world anti-imperialist countries also resorted to a proletarian property form as a way to maintain economic/political independence against imperialism. Only when it was obvious that the Stalinist economies were hovering into negative growth rates and complete stagnation did the top officials, though still divided over the question, accept out of desperation the need to scrap the nationalized property form.

My only point of disagreement here is that I think nationalised property can and has been in the interests of the bourgeoisie and not just a concession to the working class. Mostly this has been as a way of asserting independence and starting the process of local industrialisation.


I would argue, then, that nationalized property represents a proletarian property form, but is not necessarily indicative of a proletarian state form.

You are not thinking dialectically here. A proletarian property form can be stripped of its proletarian essence and wielded by alien forces, as happened in the Stalinist states. The problem is that the form contradicts the essence so much that the ensuing process is a highly unstable and fraught one. You're right that a proletarian state "owning" all the property is not the same as collective self-management by all of society. The first is called the transition from capitalism to communism. The second we refer to as communism.

Perhaps my problem is with the wording. Proletarian property form implies that state monopoly (in the sense that we saw in the Soviet Union) is something that should preserved, something that corresponds to the interests of the proletariat. However, the only property form that corresponds to the interests of the proletariat is one that abolishes the proletariat altogether. As such, nationalised production is only useful insofar as it paves the way and leads to the abolition of class society in its entirety. Calling it a proletarian property form when it doesn't serve this purpose is misleading. As soon as the proletarian state loses momentum and ceases in its struggle for communism, it (and the state monopoly it has established) loses its proletarian character.

[Five Year Plan]

I'm not sure I understand. I reject the notion that a proletarian property form can exist in the first place (see below). The dictatorship of the proletariat/workers' state is a description of (exclusively) a state form, not a property form. The question of nationalised property is irrelevant to the question of the class nature of the Communist states. Actually one particular Engels quote comes to mind:

I faulted you for mashing together discussions of proletarian property forms with proletarian state forms. Thank you for clarifying that you do recognize them to be distinct.


Now I'm not trying to play the "who can quote Marx and Engels speaking in favour of my argument"-game, but I think he makes exactly the point I'm trying to make. It's the 'act' of destruction of capitalist productive relations that characterises the state as proletarian, not the 'act' of nationalisation. The significance of nationalisation is that it creates the conditions for the former process to take place. But so does capitalism itself.

Right. It is an example of the conditions for socialism, the new society, developing within the womb of the old. It is this quality of nationalized property, and its preponderance as a prop to salvage capitalism within the epoch of capitalist decay, that points to its proletarian nature. As I pointed out in my last post, the directly political nature of value relations within nationalized property places capitalism on a highly unstable footing. Why? Because politicization of a highly advanced division of labor featuring extensive coordination pushes in the direction of socialist revolution, of proletarian control. It is a proletarian property form. As Engels said, "State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict [of the struggle to overturn capitalism], but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution." The second half of that quote corroborates my point.


My only point of disagreement here is that I think nationalised property can and has been in the interests of the bourgeoisie and not just a concession to the working class. Mostly this has been as a way of asserting independence and starting the process of local industrialisation.

In the interests of capitalists at a particular juncture in the history of capitalism. In the epoch of decay, it is used by them to salvage the system when it is the least worst option. What this means is that they are compelled by the circumstances to adopt a form of property that has concessions to the working class built into it. The epoch of imperialism is synonymous with the epoch of decay, so opting for nationalized property to maintain national independence of capitalist processes is an example of this point.


Perhaps my problem is with the wording. Proletarian property form implies that state monopoly (in the sense that we saw in the Soviet Union) is something that should preserved, something that corresponds to the interests of the proletariat. However, the only property form that corresponds to the interests of the proletariat is one that abolishes the proletariat altogether. As such, nationalised production is only useful insofar as it paves the way and leads to the abolition of class society in its entirety. Calling it a proletarian property form when it doesn't serve this purpose is misleading. As soon as the proletarian state loses momentum and ceases in its struggle for communism, it (and the state monopoly it has established) loses its proletarian character.

State monopoly should be "preserved" or fought for as part of overturning capitalism through a workers' state. In the Stalinist states, this entails overthrowing the existing state and replacing it with a new workers' state that employs the nationalized property form for its true purposes.

Calling nationalized property is not misleading. It indicates how the form has a certain logic built into it that makes its use by capitalists dangerous, and its use by proletarians logic. It points in the direction of proletarian power, even if it is not synonymous with that power, as you and I (and Engels and Marx) would both agree.

[Glitchcraft]

What does it mean to you Anti-Trots if capitalism wasn't overthrown in 1917?

From what I can tell the "it wasn't real communism" or the State Capitalism arguments are to support the counter revolutions in the fSU, DPRK, Cuba etc.
If it's not really communism in Russia then you can cheer on the collapse of the USSR.
Right? Isn't that what these arguments are really getting at? You can squabble over the semantics of Marxist rhetoric all you want but what it really comesw down to is being Pro or Anti counter revolution in deformed workers states (or whatever you call them). You don't have to support military imperialism against them but you can side with capitalist restoration... or the reinstating of democracy or whatever you vehement anti-trots would call it.
If that's not the case what is the reason for rejecting the Bolsheviks, calling the DPRK a feudal society or monarchy. What is with the need to denounce the USSR if not to align with counter revolutionary forces?
Is it just "It wasn't Communism, so fuck Lenin?" you don't have to agree with Lenin then?
Are you really petite bourgeois and still wanna be in the revolution? What's the deal?
It would seem all the anarchists and Anti-Trots are so adamant that the Soviet Union was worse than anything ever. Why? There's no evidence to support this. Capitalism was overthrown but shit got fucked up for a bunch or different reasons, why is that such an abhorrent statement?

I say what happened in 1991 was capitalist restoration or counter-revolution. What's your description of what happened? To you who support Shactman or Chomsky or Hal Draper or these Left Communist academia, or any of the myriad of Liberal Social Democrat traitors in the denunciation of USSR. whose side were you on? What side were these Social Democrats on when the wall came down? And what do you call what has happened since then? Do you also oppose Rosa Luxembourg or only if the Sparticists would have won? I know who their opposition was do you? The same people with the same arguments you are espousing, so did you support the Social Democrats vs The Spartacists in Germany 1918 too?

What is the reason for condemning the USSR? and subsequently/usually the rest of the Deformed Workers States if not to support capitalist restoration? (or whatever you call it)

[Thirsty Crow]

Oh boy.



Are you really petite bourgeois and still wanna be in the revolution? What's the deal? Yes, obviously, assessing USSR as capitalist is the product of being a petite bourgeois scum.

I'd love to see an argument in favor of this claim.


It would seem all the anarchists and Anti-Trots are so adamant that the Soviet Union was worse than anything ever. Why? There's no evidence to support this. Capitalism was overthrown but shit got fucked up for a bunch or different reasons, why is that such an abhorrent statement?
Take a deep breath an relax. I doubt that anyone here would play this game of "worse-than-X".

As far as the statement goes, it's not abhorrent. It's just incomplete and vague.


I say what happened in 1991 was capitalist restoration or counter-revolution. What's your description of what happened?Class recomposition.


To you who support Shactman or Chomsky or Hal Draper or these Left Communist academiaYou haven't got a clue if you think that contemporary, or historical, left communism is a matter of the academia.


or any of the myriad of Liberal Social Democrat traitors in the denunciation of USSR.You're aware that guilt by association is not an argument but a pathetic cop-out?


The same people with the same arguments you are espousing, so did you support the Social Democrats vs The Spartacists in Germany 1918 too? I wasn't alive in 1918.


What is the reason for condemning the USSR? and subsequently/usually the rest of the Deformed Workers States if not to support capitalist restoration? (or whatever you call it)The reason for a clear class analysis of said society, and not condemnation, is to produce definite historical lessons from the horrific degeneration of the first workers' revolution that managed to smash bourgeois state power.

Do I need to explain why this is necessary?

[Geiseric]

It crushed bourgeois state power and created state capitalism in its wake? Do you think Russians are idiots, and would just stand by and watch as things went back to where they were? Something called "collectivization," happened, which turned the russian economy on its head, by getting rid of the backward, semi feudal Kulak owned economy, replacing it with something the world has never seen before, a publicly owned country. Heavy industry to defend the public property was then in the forefront of the states interests, out of necessity.

[Glitchcraft]

Oh boy.

Yes, obviously, assessing USSR as capitalist is the product of being a petite bourgeois scum.

I'd love to see an argument in favor of this claim.


Just asking if this is the case. A lot of anarchists I've met are self employed in some way. I don't think petite bourgeois are necessarily scum. Self employed carpenters or roofers are petite bourgeois, independent web developers and that guy who washes the windows are petite bourgeois, they are not scum they are just not capable of leading the proletariat to power.





You haven't got a clue if you think that contemporary, or historical, left communism is a matter of the academia.

No i'm just citing the sources of the "it wasn't communism" that I frequently hear, Not trying to say guilt by association, I apologize if it seems that way.
But Chomsky, Draper, Shactman and Left Communists and social democrats seem to be the most common proponents of the State Capitalism argument. It's not the liberals that say this.



I wasn't alive in 1918.

You know what I am saying, talk about a cop out.


And you still haven't answered my question. Do you support what happened in 1991?
Do you (non-stalinist) Anti Trots support "class recomposition" in DPRK, Vietnam, Cuba?
That's my question. You have not answered it.

[Fakeblock]

Right. It is an example of the conditions for socialism, the new society, developing within the womb of the old. It is this quality of nationalized property, and its preponderance as a prop to salvage capitalism within the epoch of capitalist decay, that points to its proletarian nature. As I pointed out in my last post, the directly political nature of value relations within nationalized property places capitalism on a highly unstable footing. Why? Because politicization of a highly advanced division of labor featuring extensive coordination pushes in the direction of socialist revolution, of proletarian control. It is a proletarian property form. As Engels said, "State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict [of the struggle to overturn capitalism], but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution." The second half of that quote corroborates my point.

To an extent you're right. However, one could also say that the development of capitalism created the conditions that allows the development of socialism and brings, through its class contradictions, its own demise. That wouldn't make capitalism a proletarian mode of production. Nationalised property might be a more unstable form of capitalist property, but it remains capitalist until it is used in the abolition of capitalist relations.

The rest of your post is pretty much spot on. I think the real danger lies in using the nationalised property in the Communist states as a justification for defending or supporting them. One would then, by default, be defending the counter-revolution.


And you still haven't answered my question. Do you support what happened in 1991?
Do you (non-stalinist) Anti Trots support "class recomposition" in DPRK, Vietnam, Cuba?

No, we support proletarian revolution. No one has written anything in this thread to suggest otherwise, so I don't see why you had to throw a tantrum like you did.

[Thirsty Crow]

Just asking if this is the case. A lot of anarchists I've met are self employed in some way. Self-employed people are not petite borugeois. They do not employ wage labor. If you really want to know, my livelihood depends on irregular work and irregular self-employment. Make of that what you will.


I don't think petite bourgeois are necessarily scum. Neither do I.


Self employed carpenters or roofers are petite bourgeois, independent web developers and that guy who washes the windows are petite bourgeois, they are not scum they are just not capable of leading the proletariat to power. As I said, you're wrong.





No i'm just citing the sources of the "it wasn't communism" that I frequently hear, Not trying to say guilt by association, I apologize if it seems that way. The fact that USSR did not represent a communist society needs to be stressed since the Soviet ruling class in fact did make such a claim as part of its official ideology, or to be more precise, the claim that a non-antagonistic class society (socialism) describes the class dynamics of the country. Another reason is the much needed clarification in the face of incessant bourgeois propaganda that produces the impression that any workers' revolution can only end up in Stalinism 2.0


But Chomsky, Draper, Shactman and Left Communists and social democrats seem to be the most common proponents of the State Capitalism argument. It's not the liberals that say this. [/QUOTE]Social democrats had dropped any theoretical and political framework which would enable them to speak of state capitalism long ago.



You know what I am saying, talk about a cop out. Yes, I do, and it's irrelevant.


And you still haven't answered my question. Do you support what happened in 1991?
Do I support a disastrous class recomposition affecting not only the Russian working class but also other national working classes? No, and frankly I don't think this kind of question merits an answer. I would have been in OI if I did. Furthermore, I don't think anarchists and other left communists "support" (what's there to support in case of a finished historical process?) that.


Do you (non-stalinist) Anti Trots support "class recomposition" in DPRK, Vietnam, Cuba?
That's my question. You have not answered it.I don't.

[Geiseric]

IF you don't support what happened in 1991, you must admit that vaguely something was "better," beforehand. How could a capitalist restoration happen in an already "state capitalist," country?

[Thirsty Crow]

IF you don't support what happened in 1991, you must admit that vaguely something was "better," beforehand. How could a capitalist restoration happen in an already "state capitalist," country?
No, I reject any false necessity of doing any such thing. I reject entirely the notion of comparative assessment from the point of view of consumption standards.

And I thought I made it clear that I do not think that 1991 represented capitalist restoration. The term I use is class recomposition, coming from the Italian operaismo and autonomia of the '60s and '70s, denoting the actual make up of the ruling class and its dynamics which historically shifts in relation to workers struggles (for an account on class struggle in the USSR check out Neil Fernandez's surprisingly titled Capitalism and Class Struggle in USSR) and other factors as well. The prefix "re-" signifies a historical shift.

EDIT: to clarify in relation to the end of the USSR, of course it's better not to be subject to a brutal assault by the ruling class. But what does this mean actually in terms of analysis and politics? To provide political support for any previous modes of the regulation of exploitation in the history of Russian society?

I also edited the title of Fernandez's book. It is available online: http://libcom.org/library/capitalism-class-struggle-ussr-neil-c-fernandez

[Thirsty Crow]

Be more specific, I don't know what you're talking about.You should be more specific in asking for clarification. I don't know what you find unclear.

[Aleister Granger]

Trotskyism is the name for 18 year old leftists on college campuses passing out fliers detailing the flaws of capitalism. At some point in the next decade, most will grow out of it and either conform or begin arguing with themselves over whether the USSR was good or bad.

I'm just calling it like it is. :unsure:

[Geiseric]

Trotskyism is the name for 18 year old leftists on college campuses passing out fliers detailing the flaws of capitalism. At some point in the next decade, most will grow out of it and either conform or begin arguing with themselves over whether the USSR was good or bad.

I'm just calling it like it is. :unsure:

Trotskyism is actually an ideology. If they do that they're not trotskyists since trotsky never told people to do that.


You should be more specific in asking for clarification. I don't know what you find unclear.

Sorry I typed that and just went like "forget it," because I don't feel like arguing any more.

[Dave B]

For the information of pseudo and neo Leninist

There is an article by Lenin below as he attempts to square circles including;

2. State Capitalism In The Proletarian [..workers..] State And The Trade Unions.

3. The State Enterprises That Are Being Put On A Profit Basis And The Trade Unions


Including;



The factory management, usually built up on the principle of one-man responsibility, [..as in modern bourgeois liberal capitalism..] must have authority independently to fix and pay out wages, and also distribute rations, working clothes, and all other supplies on the basis and within the limits of collective agreements concluded with the trade unions [..as in modern bourgeois liberal capitalism..];



it must enjoy the utmost freedom to manoeuvre, exercise strict control of the actual successes achieved in increasing production, in making the factory pay its way and in increasing profits, and carefully select the most talented and capable administrative personnel, [..as in modern bourgeois liberal capitalism..] etc.

Under these circumstances, all direct interference by the trade unions in the management of factories must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible [..as in modern bourgeois liberal capitalism..].

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/dec/30.htm

[Thirsty Crow]

Sorry I typed that and just went like "forget it," because I don't feel like arguing any more.
If you do find my writing style unclear, or the concepts I use, feel free to point it out anytime.