Writings about state capitalism

[RedWorker]

What are some of the best articles/works/texts about state capitalism? I cannot find much.

Also, which tendencies recognize USSR-style states as capitalist? Which parties or international organizations recognize this?

[robbo203]

http://libcom.org/library/state-capitalism-wages-system-under-new-management-adam-buick-john-crump

[Tim Cornelis]

https://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience

I'd say this is much better than the text linked to above. (not trying to one up, just saying it's a bit more theoretically underpinned).

[Dave B]

The situation is actually fairly straightforward.

Up until Stalin in 1925;

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

Everybody had accepted that Bolshevik Russia was state capitalist, including Lenin.

Eg post 18; maybe Lenin’s comments on the matter from September 1917 are more relevant.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-and-state-t118579/index.html

And Trotsky as well. Eg


……..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. Herein lies the principled distinction of our state ‘capitalism’ in inverted commas from state capitalism without inverted commas.

What does this mean in perspective? Just this. The more state capitalism say, in Hohenzollern Germany, as it was, developed, the more powerfully the class of junkers and capitalists of Germany could hold down the working class. The more our ‘state capitalism’ develops the richer the work ing class will become, that is the firmer will become the foundation of socialism



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

Later as a result of high brow theoretical debate within the magic circle of vanguard Trot intellectuals; and with council communist type Marxist theoreticians like Otto Ruhle.

They came to the conclusion that the admission that Russia was entering into a phase of degenerate state capitalism meant that if;


.. [Bolshevik Russia was state capitalist].. one could only conclude that the same thing happened with the Russian as with the French Revolution. Marx was the prophet of the new state capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky were the Robespierres and Carnots of the Russian Revolution. The fact that Lenin and Trotsky had good intentions is beside the point, as were the good intentions of the leaders of the bourgeois revolution. They merely paved the way for the rule of the new state capitalist class.




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



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

Or in other words what had happened in Russia, or its ‘content’, was just a replay of the capitalist French capitalist revolution, history repeating itself with the actors merely appearing in ‘different costumes’

The final form it took, ie state capitalism, being just that a different form of capitalism but still capitalism for all that.




So the ‘orthodox’ Trots like Grant and Mandel thought it best just to deny and lie about it and take the Stalinist line.

The fact that Grant as an orthodox Trot was obviously lying about it in his;

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

Was made clear to his fellow Trot illuminati by his conspicuous inclusion in his essay of an “inappropriate quotation” from;


And this is the crux of the question.


(Left wing childishness and the petty-bourgeois mentality. Collected Works, Volume 27, page 335)

Which was, as Lenin’s classic essays on Bolshevik state capitalism, no accident, it starts a little way into part III.

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/LWC18.html

That might seem like balls for a Leninist to include a reference to an article by Lenin that trashed his own thesis.

But it was in fact more like the contempt of the vanguardist intellectuals for their intellectually challenged readership.

Eg;



"You know, Ted sometimes said to me 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

The cheeky bastards (Grant and Woods, still holding the same line) did it again in 1969 with;




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

That was almost on the same page to the second most clear cut statement by Lenin on Bolshevik state capitalism.

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

When Cliff the heterodox Trot said Russia became State capitalism in 1928 or whatever he was just making the best of a bad job.

The bottom line is that historical Trot theory on Bolshevik state capitalism is a pack lies.

Stalin’s argument against state capitalism is slightly more sophisticated; but can be dealt with as well.