Results 1 to 20 of 263
State Capitalist Theories
Revolutionary leftists have differing views on the nature of the "actually existing socialist" states of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.
"Orthodox Trotskyists" say they were/are "deformed/degenerate workers states". The "socialist" countries weren't socialist, meaning the means of production were not controlled by the working class but rather by a parasitical bureaucracy. Most Trots would see the collectivized economies as a step forward and worthy of critical support. The idea is to support a workers revolution internally, to democratize the economy.
Trotskyites from the "left Schactmanite" tradition favor various theories of state capitalism. The ISO/British SWP follow Tony Cliff's view of military competition creating state capitalism.The League For the Revolutionary Party (LRP)has a version which, as I understand, asserts that competition between firm managers for resources, and quota fulfillment in the FSU led to SC. I'm far from understanding this fully, but I believe Istvan Mazaros comes close to this idea as well.
CLR James/Raya Dunskayava have yet another theory.
Maoists, Anti-revisionists, Hoxhaists, left communists, and some MLs also have state cap theories.
Questions-if is is/was so apparent that the former "socialist" states were SC, why are there so many differing theories to try and prove it?
Can SC theories be seen as opportunism?
If you're a state cappie, which version do you follow and why?
If the FSU was SC, when and how did this happen?
If the FSU became SC under Khruschev, or earlier, in the mid 30s, how could this have happened w/out a major social struggle?
Does this debate matter, or is it anachronistic?
Since all industrial societies today can be said to be "state capitalist", does the term have any meaning?
I'm new here. I meant this to be provocative, but I don't mean to offend anyone.
I don't really see "competition" as fundamental to capitalism, the reason I call the USSR state-capitalist is because the social relations of production were capitalist.
In fact, I think we can trace the first glimpses of a theory of "state-capitalism" to Marx's criticism of "crude communism" in the Economic and Philosophic manuscripts:
"Crude communism" did not transcend capitalism by abolishing wage-labour and it's corrolary capital but instead "both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – [wage-]labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community."
"State-capitalism" is essentially the same. The state is raised to the level of universal capitalist and everyone is made to work as a paid wage-labourer for the state.
All modern industrial societies cannot be said to be "state-capitalist" because the state doesn't own all means of production.
"From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation."
- Karl Marx -
There is an interesting link to a chapter on state capitalism in Dave Perrin's book on the SPGB, one of the earliest organisations anywhere to call the Russian Revolution a capitalist revolution and the system that the Bolsheviks set up, "state capitalism".
Here's the link
http://wspus.org/in-depth/russia-len...te-capitalism/
Equating all lines that identify some state as state capitalist is wrong. As every historical line is accompanied by a political line dependent on it, it is crucial to specify exactly in which period a nation was state-capitalist. For example, in countries experiencing peoples' wars, Maoists have to politically (and militarily) struggle against both Trotskyites who denounce the whole Chinese line since 1927 as state-capitalist, and revisionists who uphold even the present China as socialist.
We Maoists maintain that a prolonged struggle had taken place both before, during and after the Khruschevite revisionist takeover in the USSR. The struggle prior to the takeover was mostly internal, which your tendency denounces as Stalinist purges. The struggle after the takeover spread worldwide as political and later military contradictions between revolutionaries and revisionists.
How would the change in the USSR from socialist to state capitalist be reflected in the nuts and bolts of the economy? How did the relationship of the working class to the means of production change from Stalin to Khruschev? My understanding is that it was pretty much the same system, indeed Khruschev tried to shake up the Soviet bureaucracy and was deposed partly because of this.
As I understand most orthodox Trots don't regard the CCP after 1927 as being state capitalist. Mao did allow elements of capitalism to remain until the early 50s, but that's not the same thing. China, up until the late 90s, was a deformed worker's state. Friends of mine think it still is.
Would you agree with the Trots that, to put it simplistically, "the good guys lost that round"? Stalin or at least his regime remained intact, despite the fact that Beria possibly had Stalin poisoned.If the purges reflected the struggle you mentioned, who won and who lost?
The debate isn't important per se, but you read into it different theories of what capitalism is and how it operates, which is surely relevant to properly conceiving it today and thus fighting against it
In my own view, Trotsky's original analysis was the closest we got to workable description of the USSR. More research still needs to be done of course, but his "degenerated worker's state" thesis is streaks ahead of some of the (frankly bizarre) "state capitalist" theories around.
for freedom and peace
I take the Orthodox Trotskyist view. The Soviet Union (exluding it's early years) was state capitalist because the state, rather than the workers had control of the means of production.
This very much happened as a political struggle, members of Trotsky's Left Opposition were murdered or exiled, and were calling for a revolution to restore socialism.
Proponent of Marx-Lenin-Trotsky-Awesome thought
no that wasn't Trotsky's view. Later communists working within the Trotskyist movement invented their own "state capitalist" theories to explain the USSR, differing from Trotsky himself on the question. Most Trotskyists (as far as I know) still hold to the "degenerated worker's state" thesis
(and tbh, the state owning the means of production has nothing to do with the question posed. If anything, it goes further to disproving the idea that the USSR was capitalist. Indeed, the idea of "state capitalism" is a straight contradiction, disproved by definition, if the state is considered in isolation from the world market)
for freedom and peace
State capitalism, although not phrased as such, is an important part of what made the USSR a degenerated workers state, in my view.
That really depends on the definition of state capitalism though, I'm probably misunderstanding the theory.
Proponent of Marx-Lenin-Trotsky-Awesome thought
Well yeh, Lenin's "state capitalist" measures were still in place through much of the history of the USSR, but this was taking place within the context of the degenerate worker's state. So I agree with you there. But state capitalists are arguing something different again, at least as I understand it
for freedom and peace
State Capitalism just sounds like every Capitalist State in the world. Capitalism needs a state to survive,in this definition America is state capitalist. The whole "USSR/Maoist China/ect are state capitalist!" sounds ridiculous! The Bourgeois class have been eliminated, the means of production are owned by the state.
Isn't that the point of the Command Economy?
Why do trots hold this view? I don't understand why Trots hold onto Leninism at all since every example of it has basically turned into a "deformed/degenerated workers state" by there own definition. Could have to do something with vanguards putting strong emphasis on a central government bureaucracy through a command economy ex. "Top to bottom" socialism.
I generally hold to the analysis of state capitalism similar to that of Paresh Chattopadhyay in 'The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience'. Given that a 'workers' state' takes place under capitalism anyhow, that's not much of a difference, theoretically. Given that Marx referred to "the state as capitalist producer" (Notes on Wagner), and mentioned, "state capital, in so far as governments employ productive wage labour in mines, railways, etc, and function as industrial capitalists," in Capital Vol. 2, pg. 177 of the Fernbach translation, the state producing commodities hardly seems to absolve you of capitalism.
If you define 'state capitalism' as meaning 'capitalism with a state', then sure, but that's not how it is generally used.
And who owns the state in those countries? Hint: it's not the workers.
If someone's telling you a way to get rich, they're really telling you a way to make them rich.
If someone's telling you to fight for freedom, they're really telling you to fight for their freedom.
"Market economies require a rule of law. A society without state protection of individual rights, especially the right to own property, would not build private long-term assets, a key ingredient of a growing modern economy." -Alan Greenspan
eh? wtf?
That is to completely rip what Marx is saying from any context. Its really quite a shameful display. Virtually the whole of Capital vol.2 is devoted to showing how surplus value "produced" in production is "realised" through the market. We get the circuits of capital schema, where value is realised in circulation etc. (it is therefore meaningless to talk of surplus value aside from a market). Yet now we can talk about capitalism without considering the market-place, which clearly did not exist as such in the USSR? The blurb on the back of the book says "the second volume of Capital considers in depth the nature of commodity and the market-place in bourgeois society". You don't even have to open the cover
To say the state behaves as a capitalist, as Marx is, is not to say anything about whether the state can act as the sole capitalist. That is simply an ahistorical hypostatization. The state behaves as a capitalist in the Western economies today, in the way Marx meant, but as you said yourself, "capitalism with a state" has nothing much to do with the theory of "state capitalism"
for freedom and peace
This is a separate question which deserves a detailed answer which I won't be able to provide. I suggest that you start a new thread specifically on this topic.
This line is wrong. China during the 70s changed from socialist to state capitalist; from revolutionary to reactionary.
It is often not correct to view a group as "revolutionary forever". Stalin had become encircled by revisionists. The transition of the USSR from a revolutionary to a reactionary system is very obvious when its relation with revolutionary groups in other countries are studied.
The structural split of the workers from the means of production is not the same as the political squeezing-out of the workers from democratic control of them. In feudalism, the worker (serf) is still connected to his land and has rights to it, even as he had no political rights, for example. Indeed, the USSR under Stalin was something more akin to a re-feudalization - imho that is a more helpful way of looking at things.
for freedom and peace
The communist left also warned of the dangers very early on:
DevrimOriginally Posted by Kommunist @April 20 1918
The communist left sees 'state capitalism' to be a general tendency within capitalist societies, not something that applies only to the USSR and its satellites.
Devrim
Marcel van der Linden's Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (2007) is a worthwhile book based on a huge amount of literature on the nature of the USSR.
PM me if anyone wants a copy.
People really make us "orthodox Trotskyists" out to be far less critical of Stalinism than we are. I think part of the problem is that we've got the Spartacist cults running around saying that the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan was progressive. I'm a member of the left-wing of the Fourth International and I've got my own theories of where the line between "State Capitalism" and "a deformed worker's state" are. First of all, I think the Soviet Union became State Capitalist somewhere between 1936 and 1938, and I hold that they were State Capitalist completely. The whole of society basically worked for the Soviet Beauracracy to support the capitalistic and imperialist arms race that the USSR got itself entangled with against the US. I pretty much all of the Soviet Bloc countries were State Capitalist as well, seeing as they were really nothing more than extra help for producing big profits for the beauracracy in the arms race. I don't know too much about China, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for being a deformed worker's state ruled by a beauracracy up until the sixities when it too became obviously State Capitalist, and right now I'd just classify China as capitalist, no need to call it "State" capitalist. I think Cuba began as a fairly healthy yet deformed worker's state until the 1980's and now I consider it a worker's state with baueracratic deformities (almost a worker's state, but not quite there. C'mon, lets get some freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and you got it Cuba) I think DPRK is essenhtially State Capitalist economically speaking, but their government can't even be called communist in one way or another. DPRK rejected communism. They're "Juche" now.
Nations that call themselves socialist aren't the only ones who are state capitalist. I consider Iran to be state capitalist because the state owns a very successful automotive corporation and makes a profit off of it internationally, and the citizens must sell their labor for it.
"It is not enough to possess the sword, one must give it an edge it is not enough to give the sword an edge, one must know how to wield it."-L. Trotsky
