Why does much of the left have such a distain for the Soviet Union and China

[Paul Cockshott]

They were the changes that every society went through during industrial take off. Take Germany 1870-1900, for example, or Britain a century earlier. Even if the process was slightly truncated in the case of the USSR, this was merely shaving a decade or two of the typical European experience

No they were not. If you look at what happened in Britain you saw the
progressive expropriation of the small farmers with the confiscation of
their land by the titled aristocracy. The agricultural system shifted from
peasant smallholdings using common land to one with private land worked
by capitalist farming.
The expropriated farmers flooded into the cities creating a permanent
reserve army of labour where they were employed by a rich capitalist
class.
As the process continued more and more wealth was concentrated in the
hands of the landowning and capital owning class, along with which went
an increased share of national income going as surplus value in the form
of profit and rent.

The vast bulk of this profit and rent was spent not on capital investment
but on the building of fine houses, the purchase of luxuries and on the
employment of hoards of unproductive personal servants.

The process in Revolutionary Russia was completely different in social terms.
In agriculture common ownership by the peasants replaced ownership by the
landlord class or by private capitalist farmers.

In China too, common ownership of the land had by the mid 60s replaced ownership by the landlord class.

In the process one of the major drains on economic development - the luxury
consumption of the landlords and their employment of unproductive personal
servants was eliminated.

In industry too, common ownership as opposed to private capitalist ownership
was the dominant form of organisation in Russia and China. This meant that
in the industrial as well as the agricultural economy the drain caused by
private capitalist consumption of most of the surplus was eliminated.

The consequence was not only a much flatter distribution of wealth and
income, but a much more rapid rate of growth since the unproductive luxury
consumption of the exploiters was eliminated.

If you look at table 6 of my paper 'Testing Marx, some new results from UK data',

http://glasgow.academia.edu/paulcock...s_from_UK_data

you will see that from the 1860s ( which is as far back as I could get
reliable sources ) the share of profit being accumulated as new capital
rather than being spent unproductively rarely rose above 10%.

This exploiters tariff was completely eliminated by the Chinese and
Russian revolutions.

You ignore these basic points about property relations and the structure
of national income, were you to pay attention to them your claims about the identity of economic structures in Victorian Britain and revolutionary Russia would
be seen as absurd.

[Paul Cockshott]

But then there we go using something other than Tsarist Russia as a baseline. You could pick the NEP or the post-Stalin periods or capitalist contemporaries or a hypothetical socialist alternative, etc, etc. You could even project Tsarist growth rates forward thirty years. All are better and more honest alternatives

That is because Tsarist Russia is what Revolutionary Russia replaced.
It was the concrete alternative.
But if you want to compare Germany from the failure of the German revolution
you will see that the same basic processes that I described for Britain were
working in Germany - except that the expropriation of the peasantry was
less vicious than in Britain. Again you ended up with a highly unequal distribution
of income and wealth with the greater part of the surplus going on
unproductive consumption.

The only capitalist model which comes close to socialist economic development in terms of efficiency is the Japanese model during the
period 1950 to 1980 or so. Here, unusually for a capitalist economy,
a large part of surplus was reinvested, and economic inequality was
much lower than in European capitalist development.

[ComradeOm]

You ignore these basic points about property relations and the structure
of national income, were you to pay attention to them your claims about the identity of economic structures in Victorian Britain and revolutionary Russia would
be seen as absurd.

And they're different because one was in Russia and the other in Britain

I have not claimed that the economic evolution of these countries was identical and I have certainly made no assertions regarding the development of property relations. What I was referring to was not the exact "economic structure" but the "social changes"

That is because Tsarist Russia is what Revolutionary Russia replaced

Oh, and now we're dismissing all distinctions between the various Soviet economies in favour of lumping them into a single "Revolutionary Russia"? No. The topic of this thread is Stalinist Russia and the Stalinist economy did not replace the Tsarist economy

[Paul Cockshott]

I have not claimed that the economic evolution of these countries was identical and I have certainly made no assertions regarding the development of property relations. What I was referring to was not the exact "economic structure" but the "social changes"

You were saying that the social changes that took place in Russia in the middle
of the 20th century were basically the same as those that took place
in Britain a century or so earlier.

What do you mean by social changes if you exclude changes
the class and economic structure of the societies? I suppose you must be restricting the term social change to changes in the demographics structure, the residence patterns the rights of women, the educational system etc.

I argued, and you did not dispute, that the part of social change that related
to economic and class structure in British and Soviet industrialisation were
very different.

Now there were some similarities of course - a general rise in urbanisation
being the obvious one, but if you look at the actual social makeup of the
urban population it was very different in the two cases. In the British case
a huge part of the urban population was made up of a desperate pauperised lumpen proletariat - Marx's surplus population or the 'poor' of Mayhew's London
These people scraped a living with occasional casual work, petty trading,
whoring, petty dishonesty etc. Alongside this went a huge population of domestic servants - maids, cooks, gardeners etc. Domestic workers making up the majority of the women in urban employment.

This was a totally different social structure from that of the Soviet urban
population.

If you look at the industrial population of the two countries another
striking difference is evident - the British industrial revolution depended
heavily on child labour in factories and mines. A population indentured to
such work from the age of 7 was brought up illiterate and ignorant.

The Victorian education system was aimed at educating the upper classes
and, as far as possible, keeping the working class in ignorance. What were
laughably called 'Public Schools' were private boarding schools for the
wealthy.

The class system meant that occupational mobility for working class children was almost zero - only the wealthy could aspire to secondary or higher education.


This was the reality of capitalist industrialisation and was radically different
from Soviet Russia.

Oh, and now we're dismissing all distinctions between the various Soviet economies in favour of lumping them into a single "Revolutionary Russia"? No. The topic of this thread is Stalinist Russia and the Stalinist economy did not replace the Tsarist economy

The topic of the thread is the Soviet Union and China and the hostility of
the left in the West to those countries. These are real social formations
for which we have historical data, just as we have for Tsarist Russia.

When you speak of the various Soviet economies, are you meaning
the economies of Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine etc, and objecting to my
using the term Russia for them?

If so what is particular about these economies in the Soviet period that distinguished them from the economy of Soviet Russia?

[ComradeOm]

You were saying that the social changes that took place in Russia in the middle
of the 20th century were basically the same as those that took place
in Britain a century or so earlier

No, we were talking, or rather you specifically were, of changes "comparable in scale to those in Russia from 1910 to 1940". I couldn't care less about the specifics of property relations, not here at least

When you speak of the various Soviet economies, are you meaning
the economies of Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine etc, and objecting to my
using the term Russia for them?

No, I am referring to the various stages through which the Soviet economy progressed. Lumping together the NEP, Stalinism and the post-Stalinist economy into some "Revolutionary Russia" is both silly and misleading

[Paul Cockshott]

No, we were talking, or rather you specifically were, of changes "comparable in scale to those in Russia from 1910 to 1940". I couldn't care less about the specifics of property relations, not here at least

Yes but the prior context was somebody claiming that there had been
no progress towards a classless society in Soviet Russia. You concurred
with this saying the social changes in Soviet Russia were basically no
different from those that occured during the capitalist indsutrialisation
of Britain.

I have pointed out lots of differences all of which show that the social
changes in Capitalist society were towards a more sharply divided
class structure whereas the reverse was the case in the USSR.

I dont understand your reluctance to look at any real social relations
in order to give some substance to your case.

No, I am referring to the various stages through which the Soviet economy progressed. Lumping together the NEP, Stalinism and the post-Stalinist economy into some "Revolutionary Russia" is both silly and misleading

Well you are obviously right in that the social revolution went through a
number of stages and accelerated particularly from the end of the 20s with the collectivisation of agriculture, the expropriation of the remaining private capitalists and the creation of a socialist economy, but the earlier phases had set both the initial political preconditions and had also achieved the expropriation of the landlord class and the original capitalist class.

[Jose Gracchus]

As far as I am aware, there were not many instances where the Victorian workers of Manchester saw real earnings cut by 90% in order to make more room for profit to be reinvested in capital investments. But under Stalin the working-class's living standards and consumption allotments collapsed to finance the Stalinist program.

But I don't think you want to talk about those social relations.

Furthermore, nowhere in Marx is to be found this special pleading for the real crime in capital being that it immorally allows the parasites to consume off the backs of servants. What is required is that the laborer is confronted by the products of his labor as a force alien to and oppose to him. Humanity accommodates industry, rather than industry, humanity. That Stalinism had some spartan austerity for its servitors, at times, and was more reliant on naked appeal to force and terror than most regimes, it still followed that broader pattern. I do not see a 'revolutionary' distinction made, in a Marxian sense, over how much Victorian gentlemen did or did not spend on fine china out of their profits...

[Paul Cockshott]

As far as I am aware, there were not many instances where the Victorian workers of Manchester saw real earnings cut by 90% in order to make more room for profit to be reinvested in capital investments. But under Stalin the working-class's living standards and consumption allotments collapsed to finance the Stalinist program.

You are being rather unspecific - implying that that at some unspecified
period in soviet history real wages fell by 90%, of course you dont
openly state such an unlikely claim, since I doubt that such falls in
real wages have ever occured anywhere.

But for the avoidance of doubt are you claiming that there was a period
in soviet history when real wages fell to 10% of their previous value?
If so for which years do you claim it was true, and what statistical
sources are you citing as evidence.

But I don't think you want to talk about those social relations.

Furthermore, nowhere in Marx is to be found this special pleading for the real crime in capital being that it immorally allows the parasites to consume off the backs of servants.

I am not claiming either that the capitalist class 'consumed off the back
of servants' or that this was 'a real crime'. Marxism does not treat
capitalist exploitation as a 'crime'.

What I am saying is that the reality of capitalist society is one
in which the mass of the population is forced to work to support
the luxurious lifestyle of the upper classes. By far the greatest
part of the surplus labour is expended on unproductive consumption.
The whole structure of society is organised to maximise the
amount of surplus labour going to support the propertied classes
and minimise the share of the working day that is consumed by
the working class.

Marx analyses the unproductive expenditures of the propertied classes
mainly in Theories of Surplus Value volume 1, where he distinguishes
between productive wage labour and unproductive wage labour.
In this he is continuing the progressive side of Smith's political economy.

What is required is that the laborer is confronted by the products of his labor as a force alien to and oppose to him. Humanity accommodates industry, rather than industry, humanity.

This formulation strips the analysis of capitalist production of all
class content you have 'industry' versus 'humanity' as opposed to
capitalists versus wage labourers. If you look at things at the level
of such vague abstractions as 'humanity' and 'industry' instead of
the concrete social roles that people take on, then you are unable
to see any difference between socialism and capitalism.

I do not see a 'revolutionary' distinction made, in a Marxian sense, over how much Victorian gentlemen did or did not spend on fine china out of their profits...

There is a huge difference between work that is necessary for the
future development of industrial production to meet the needs of
the population as a whole, and work that is there just to support
the luxury consumption of the wealthy - if you cant see the difference
I wonder that you see any point in socialism at all.
Pragmatically there is also a big difference in terms of the rate of
growth that a society can undergo in these two circumstances.
The primary cause of the much faster economic growth of China
as opposed to India after 1948 is down to the fact that the Chinese
revolution eliminated the unproductive consumption of the surplus
product by a landlord class. Even in the current predominantly
state capitalist economy of China, the rate of accumulation of
new means of production stands at near to 50% of GNP and contributes
to the very rapid rate of growth of China. As such even the
current form of Chinese state capitalism is far superior to the
amalgum of private capitalism, and semi servile relations of production
that persist in India.

[Tim Finnegan]

This formulation strips the analysis of capitalist production of all
class content you have 'industry' versus 'humanity' as opposed to
capitalists versus wage labourers. If you look at things at the level
of such vague abstractions as 'humanity' and 'industry' instead of
the concrete social roles that people take on, then you are unable
to see any difference between socialism and capitalism.

The degradation of human labour to meet the needs of industrial production is something which Marx himself comments on with no little feeling, and a number of respected discussions of it are found within the Marxist tradition. (Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is a good discussion of this process during the industrial revolution, and Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital for the scientific-technical revolution.) This formulation is in no sense in contradiction to one of class struggle, but is rather complementary to it, describing the same antagonisms in different terms. The focus is merely on the human experience of class antagonisms under capital, rather than on the historical process of class struggle, which, I would argue, is vital for constructing a critique of capitalism that is genuinely humanist, and not merely economic or moral-historicist.

[Jose Gracchus]

My apologies, it was 1932 wages were half the real value of 1928 wages. I did not mean to mislead anyone.

[promethean]

This formulation strips the analysis of capitalist production of all
class content you have 'industry' versus 'humanity' as opposed to
capitalists versus wage labourers. If you look at things at the level
of such vague abstractions as 'humanity' and 'industry' instead of
the concrete social roles that people take on, then you are unable
to see any difference between socialism and capitalism.

The primary cause of the much faster economic growth of China
as opposed to India after 1948 is down to the fact that the Chinese
revolution eliminated the unproductive consumption of the surplus
product by a landlord class. Even in the current predominantly
state capitalist economy of China, the rate of accumulation of
new means of production stands at near to 50% of GNP and contributes
to the very rapid rate of growth of China. As such even the
current form of Chinese state capitalism is far superior to the
amalgum of private capitalism, and semi servile relations of production
that persist in India.

Actually, the problem with your assertions is that you assume that the former USSR and Maoist PRC were socialist. However, such a view of socialism is totally contradictory to any definitions of 'socialism' found in the writings of Karl Marx. Nowhere did Marx differentiate between socialism and communism. So, your 'socialism' is just some arbitrary label you conjure up to incorrectly label economies that where in no way socialist. In reality, these economies were just autarkies and most of them hovered somewhere between capitalism and pre-capitalism.

It appears that in your view, the only role of communists should be to act as advisers to the heads of the former USSR, the PRC and similar governments, while simultaneously uncritically consuming whatever ideological garbage they spew out in the name of 'Marxism-Leninism'. The question of any claimed superiority of these disastrous autarkic experiments is itself a nonsensical one posed only by apologists of these regimes.

[Jose Gracchus]

^ Actually, Mr. Cockshott's magnum opus was conceived of, in fact, as a kind of 'guide-to-action' for those die-hard Brezhnevites left in Gorby's late '80's USSR. That's the origin-point for Towards a New Socialism. This is not accidental, for both Brezhnevism and TaNS presupposes classes and production as passive subjects, which may be affected by government decrees, bureaux, and sterile mobilizational politics.

Paul, do you still think the abolition of classes is 'utopian'?

[Paul Cockshott]

Actually, the problem with your assertions is that you assume that the former USSR and Maoist PRC were socialist. However, such a view of socialism is totally contradictory to any definitions of 'socialism' found in the writings of Karl Marx.

Can you please cite the definition of socialism in the writings of Karl Marx?
Please provide the passage you are thinking of?

[Paul Cockshott]

Paul, do you still think the abolition of classes is 'utopian'?

No. I think that the USSR by the 1960s had made great progress towards the abolition of classes. The old classes of pre-revolutionary Russia had effectively been abolished. An incipient class division between manual and intellectual workers was begining to arise, but I dont think that this problem need be insuperable.

[Paul Cockshott]

The degradation of human labour to meet the needs of industrial production is something which Marx himself comments on with no little feeling, and a number of respected discussions of it are found within the Marxist tradition. (Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is a good discussion of this process during the industrial revolution, and Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital for the scientific-technical revolution.) This formulation is in no sense in contradiction to one of class struggle, but is rather complementary to it, describing the same antagonisms in different terms. The focus is merely on the human experience of class antagonisms under capital, rather than on the historical process of class struggle, which, I would argue, is vital for constructing a critique of capitalism that is genuinely humanist, and not merely economic or moral-historicist.

I agree that in the work of Thompson and Braverman the analysis of the capitalist labour process is not divorced from economic and class analysis. What I am polemicising against is not people like Braverman but the opposition humanity/industry which stems from post WWII Western sociological concept of Industrial Society which, by focussing only on the invariants of all industrial countries abstracts from the specific social, economic and property relations of socialist and capitalist societies.

[Rafiq]

That's a liberal argument. Relative to 1920, 1950 America was huge. Do you therefore support US capitalism?

RED DAVE

Understanding things advanced does not equate to supporting the means of how they carried out such advancements.

[promethean]

Can you please cite the definition of socialism in the writings of Karl Marx?
Please provide the passage you are thinking of?

I am referring to the usage of the word socialism in Marx's writings. Nowhere does Karl Marx differentiate between communism and socialism. For him, the two are synonymous terms. For example, in his Critical Notes on "The King of Prussia", he just uses the term socialism. If socialism and communism are the same for Marx, then as far as I am aware, Marx never defined socialism as being an autarkic capitalist society. He may have defined the transitional form towards socialism/communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as being capitalist, but that is of course not relevant here, since the former USSR, the PRC and other states were not dictatorships of the proletariat in any way imaginable since all of them ended up being transitional forms towards capitalism.

[RGacky3]

Understanding things advanced does not equate to supporting the means of how they carried out such advancements.

Yeah, but it shows that you can't use advanecment alone as a defence of a system.

[Rafiq]

Yeah, but it shows that you can't use advanecment alone as a defence of a system.

Paul Cockshott wasn't defending anything. He was stating a well known fact.

[Comrade Hill]

I am referring to the usage of the word socialism in Marx's writings. Nowhere does Karl Marx differentiate between communism and socialism. For him, the two are synonymous terms. For example, in his Critical Notes on "The King of Prussia", he just uses the term socialism. If socialism and communism are the same for Marx, then as far as I am aware, Marx never defined socialism as being an autarkic capitalist society. He may have defined the transitional form towards socialism/communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as being capitalist, but that is of course not relevant here, since the former USSR, the PRC and other states were not dictatorships of the proletariat in any way imaginable since all of them ended up being transitional forms towards capitalism.

Well, in all honesty, you can't really have an advanced socialist economy without first having a capitalist economy. You have to have a certain mode of production and commodity relation to built a socialist economy on top of it.

So to denounce to Soviet Union because of this is really quite silly....it's not like they prevented socialism from forming, some aspects of socialism came into being.