State Capitalism - Buercratic Collectivism what's the difference?

[Asoka89]

Please help me out here Trots, I'm talking about the Cliffite "State-Capitalist" label vs the Max Shachtman label. I use them both interchangably, but im tempted to go for more of a Milovan Djilas view of the "new class"

[BobKKKindle$]

Please help me out here Trots, I'm talking about the Cliffite "State-Capitalist" label vs the Max Shachtman label.

Shachtman did not agree with the theory of "state-capitalism" and instead argued that the USSR was a new form of class society called "bureaucratic collectivism" distinct from both socialism and capitalism.

[mikelepore]

The USSR was similar to capitalism in that the industrial managers were appointees who were announced from above, and the workers were considered to be only hired hands who were not consulted in such matters.

The USSR was unlike capitalism in that private investments on stock and bond markets were not the source of industrial funding, and dividends to private shareholders were not the result of extracting surplus value.

Like the old debate about "is light a particle or a wave", it's more important to express the similarities and the differences than to have the convenience of reusing the old labels.

[Lamanov]

What was the USSR? - Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value under State Capitalism Part I (http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/auf_6_ussr1.html)

[Yehuda Stern]

I don't understand how you can use bureaucratic collectivism interchangeably with state capitalism - those are completely different concepts. You could confuse the Cliffite version of state capitalism with the version of state capitalism that we support, because they superficially seem to be identical, but to extend that to bureaucratic collectivism is ridiculous.

BC is the theory according to which the USSR operated under a historically unprecedented mode of production, which arose at some point in the 1930s. Early advocates of the theory extended it to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Roosevelt's America. This sort of broadness shows how ridiculous the theory is, when you go all the way with its logic - any state can be said to be 'bureaucratic collectivist,' inasmuch as the tendency towards statification exists (though is not fulfilled) in most countries.

Cliffite state capitalism says that the USSR stopped being a workers state in 1928, when workers' control was smashed. Then capitalism arose in the USSR through the operation of the law of value not due to the class struggle, but due to the pressures of military competition with western imperialism.

There are two major problems with this theory (and so many, many others): one, that just like the Pabloite theory of supposed workers' states going back to capitalism without a counterrevolution in the 1980s, it is 'reformism in reverse': Cliffites recognize that the Stalinists have destroyed the workers' state without any sort of civil war. Second, the law of value operates not only under capitalism but also in a workers' state, which the USSR was (not a 'socialist state'...). One comrade of mine once remarked that this leads to a conception similar to 'socialism in one country', where the law of value can be overcome without the revolution becoming victorious globally.

In contradistinction to that, the ISL holds that the USSR became a capitalist state in the full sense and traditional sense of the word in the late 1930s, after the smashing of the left opposition, although with abberations due to the nationalized nature of capitalist property, and that states similar to it, such as Cuba and China, were no different in essense - the main difference was that the USSR was an imperialist state (and Russia is still today) while the other Stalinist states were third world countries.