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lets learn about state capitalism!
"Marx was for communism, but Lenin was for state capitalism; Marx was for working class interest , but Lenin was for peasants interest; Marx was against capitalist, but Lenin was for 'distressed' capitalist; Marx was for a communist revolution, but Lenin was for democratic revolution; Marx was for unity of workers of the world, but Lenin was for unity of workers, peasants and patriotic peoples of a country; and Marx was for a communist revolution, which range is universal, and which is only job of working class, but Lenin was for national liberation. Thus, both the persons are not same, but quite opposite. Therefore, Marx was discoverer of Science of socialism, but Leninism is corruption of science of socialism."
saw this online and was kinda surpassed by how orthodox marx it was, guess i just dont see it that often. can anyone explain state capitalism in a condensed manner please?
"Is it the navajo indians who make it a point always to leave in their woven rugs and other artifacts some slight imperfections, in order not to compete with the gods? I think it is. Well, i have no gods, and so i can't justify my shortcomings as do the navajos."
"The proletariat uses the state not in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries..." - Friedrich Engels
The state owns the means of production; a small class of bureaucrats and party bosses are/control the state and thus the means of production forming a de facto bourgeois capitalist class. The USSR, China and their satellites were all state capitalist, and China still is.
Last edited by Red Banana; 14th October 2012 at 21:52.
Lenin was not for any sort of "state capitalism", that is a myth. Basically Russia was in a horrendous situation after WWI and the Russian Civil War and it was thought necessary to back track and institute the New Economic Program. There was supposed to be two economies during this time, a collectivized state sector and a private sector.Eventually the socialist sector was supposed to fully take over.
The term "state capitalism" is usually used as a description of what the USSR and other "socialist" states were believed to be by unorthoox Trotskyists, anti-revisionist MLs and Maoists.It was developed by CLR James and later picked up by Tony Cliff.
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget
Arundhati Roy
Lenina Rosenweg is a glorious beacon of light
By that definition China would be just plain ol' capitalist, not state capitalist. They have a market economy afterall. Unless you consider every other economy in the world state capitalist.
But I think state capitalism is horseshit anyway.
Actually, Lenin himself desired, promoted and acknowledged the implementation of State Capitalism in Russia, but it was mostly confined to party debate and private letters. The destruction of soviet democracy and Trotsky's "militarization of labor" and the introduction of 'War Communism' was when the Bolsheviks introduced it in Russia, and it was solidified by the NEP.
Here are a few quotes by Lenin
"State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country."
"The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.
Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable."
people were using the term long before james, and cliff's definition of state capitalism isn't quite the same a james'.
Until now, the left has only managed capital in various ways; the point, however, is to destroy it.
No Lenin was for communism, to claim otherwise regardless of agreeing with his ideas or not, is just not accurate.
As for the quotes above, Lenin says state-capitalism would be preferable to the situation they had. Is that socialism vs. state-capitalism? No. It's privite production vs. state-capitalism that he is comparing. More centralized production (done already by capitalism) is much better for workers to take over since we have already been collectivised in the production process, we just don't have any power. But he did not argue that this was socialism or communism: he argues in that article that workers have political power but not economic power (since much of production was done by small privite producers still despite a small number of very large industrial areas). He basically argued that state-capitalism was a way workers could use their political power to hold society together until the German Revolution could bolster Revolution in Russia by providing a much more economically powerful working class and one that was much more organized with longer tradditions of cooperation and consiousness.
So a lot of the policies in this time were about trying to deal with a growing fissure between working class interestes and the interests of the pesantry. They tried forced appropriation of food to bring to the armies and cities, they tried opening up space for the pesants to engage in market trade in order to keep them alligned to the worker's government.
But at this same time revolution in other places was being defeated and the Russian working class was dissolving and this opened up the space for a (IMO counter-revolutionary) alternative of not using state-capitalism as a sort of emergency measure, but as the basis for building up the national economy.
And this is the kind of "state-capitalism" that the OP was asking about I think. Not an economic policy, but a system in which the state stands in and acts as the capitalist class would (except for various histotical reasons the capitalists can not). For example, there was state-capitalism in 19th century Germany where the central state was used to modernize the country to compete with the more advanced capitalist countries.
In Russia, the original implementation of state-capitalism as Lenin argued was supposed to be organized by represenatives of worker's interests - so state capitalism was to be a way to keep production going and prevent production breaking into small independant capitalist producers by maintaining or increasing centralization of production. This assumes that the working class in Russia would remain confident and organized and that the revolution would spread to more advanced capitalist countries - neither of these things happened. In it's later form in the USSR, however, the goal is production in of itself and the class force was the beurocracy which had formed and become part of the Bolshevik party. These were often non-bolsheviks (in 1917) who were specialists and had burocratic skills needed initially but at any rate, building a strong "socialist" country became the goal, not worker's power.
Last edited by Jimmie Higgins; 15th October 2012 at 09:30.
Russia was not industrialized when the Bolsheviks seized control. Lenin might not have wanted to introduce capitalism but he had no choice and freely admitted that.
That's just ridiculous and I think you know it to be untrue. Not least because Bordiga had written extensively about it way before Cliff and the SPGB had been calling Russia state capitalism within months of the Bolsheviks ascent to power. It's through the SPGB that Cliff learned his theory of state capitalism which he mangled and got wrong.
I'd like to see the evidence that Cliff learned this theory via the SPGB and for you to show how he mangled it and in what way he got it wrong.
Edit: It will also give you the opportunity to actually read Cliff's work
Last edited by Hit The North; 15th October 2012 at 12:25.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
I am not sure where Cliff 'learned this theory' from, but it certainly wasn't his original creation. Ideas about state capitalism in Russia had been around since at least early 1918. Cliff certainly knew his Lenin, and it is inconceivable that he would have been ignorant of debates within the party which Lenin directly refers to in his pamphlets.
Personally, I think that Cliff's version of state capitalism is theoretically the weakest I have seen, and is contains major flaws.
Devrim
Well indirectly, Cliff got his state capitalism from Jock Haston, Jock Haston got his his stance on state capitalism from the SPGB. Cliff was originally asked by Mandel to "fight the state capitalist heresies" within the RCP. In the course of arguing against state capitalism Cliff changed his position.I'd like to see the evidence that Cliff learned this theory via the SPGB and for you to show how he mangled it and in what way he got it wrong.
Edit: It will also give you the opportunity to actually read Cliff's work
And yes I have read Cliff and the most glaring mistake if I remember correctly is that he claims that the bolsheviks only introduced state capitalism after 1921. Which is frankly quite ridiculous and fairly obvious to anyone with an objective view point that he is clearly employing some mental gymnastics in order to discredit Stalin while staying loyal to Lenin and Trotsky.
Originally Posted by Jock Haston
Last edited by Manic Impressive; 17th October 2012 at 16:19. Reason: added quote
I'm not denying that Lenin wasn't emotionally for communism, even if he thought it could be brought about through state capitalism.
Soviet state capitalism wasn't about workers using their political power for anything. The Bolsheviks ignored the factory committees’ suggestions and instead utilized Tsarist structures as the framework for what they called "socialism." In workplace they urged and imposed “dictatorial” one-man management. The Bolsheviks became isolated from the masses (as they themselves admitted) while soviet executives accrued more power. The economy collapsed as bureaucracy mismanaged it. A strongly centralized state capitalist Government running the economy was undesirable and wildly Utopian. For example, the central economic body did not even know how many workplaces it was managing.
Look, I'm not expecting Lenin to have been able to turn water into wine, nor could he have. When you have a political party that seizes power in advance to the population becoming socialist minded, you have no choice but to administer capitalism. The Bolshevik revolution was a complete failure form the standpoint of advancing the socialist cause and its outcome was the imposition of dictatorship over the proletariat, the harsh suppression of the workers and the rolling out of a programme state-administered capitalism. It is a not a model of revolution that any socialist would recommend and part of the reason for its failure was precisely the conspicuous lack of a majority of workers who understood what a genuine socialist society was about and sought to bring it about. And there's no such thing as state capitalism "in the interest of the workers," since capitalism can only really be run in the interests of capital.
jimmie higgins has answered the question the best according to my original post and the insurrectionist has made a good rebuttal to that post by jimmie. what i want to know is that, although i understand you cannot go from the tsarist nation they had to communism, did lenin understand this when introducing state capital and hoped to move on to socialism etc? what was the point of the state capitalism, what role did it play in moving towards socialism?
"Is it the navajo indians who make it a point always to leave in their woven rugs and other artifacts some slight imperfections, in order not to compete with the gods? I think it is. Well, i have no gods, and so i can't justify my shortcomings as do the navajos."
"The proletariat uses the state not in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries..." - Friedrich Engels
Ermm, by Lenin's definition, the model of state-(monopoly)capitalism was Kaiser Wilhelm II's German Empire/Deutsches Kaiserreich.
According to Lenin, state-capitalism was, in his time, the final(because he believed that the overthrow of bourgeoisie supremacy and it's replacement by working-class supremacy was imminent in the entire capitalist world) stage of capitalism, and the most progressive, because by the time it kicks in, the means of production have been developed to such an extent, that socialism has finally become feasible, all of it's prerequisites are already there. I.e, the fastest road to socialism is from state-capitalism.
Last edited by l'Enfermé; 16th October 2012 at 16:44.
The SPGB in fact ‘got’ the idea that Bolshevik Russia is/was state capitalism, or to quote Grant from 1948;
http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm
From a pamphlet called ‘The Chief Task Our Times” which was printed by Pankhurst’s ‘anarchist’;
THE WORKERS' SOCIALIST FEDERATION in 1918.
Published as an uncritical endorsement of the Bolshevik experiment.
Probably provided by the then ;THE PEOPLE'S RUSSIAN INFORMATION BUREAU 152, Fleet Street, E.C.4.
The second part of which is a slightly amended version of;
V. I. Lenin SESSION OF THE ALL-RUSSIA C.E.C. APRIL 29, 1918.
http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/SAR18.html
Some of the ‘state capitalism’ quotes in the original had been changed to ‘state socialism’.
The SPGB continued to use that pamphlet, including in debates with Trots uptothe 1950’s; but we appear to have lost it from our library soon after.
We recovered a scanned electronic copy of it from the Australian national library and digitalised it.
The Australian copy was original owned by an ‘Australian’ Trot [FONT=Arial]Baracchi, Guido; lets presume he had also read it.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Actually there was no debate at all before say 1925 about whether or not Bolshevik Russia was/or had been state capitalism.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]It was not contested and everybody accepted it, then .[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial] Including Lenin (obviously) as well as Trotsky, Bukharin, Ruhle and [/FONT]People's Commissariat of Finance Sokolnikov etc;who had studied economics at the Sorbonne for what it matters.
If Cliff hadn’t read Lenin’s “Leftwing Childishness” in 1948, in which Lenin unequivocally stated that, to quote Grant again that;
Then you would have thought that he would have read it after Grant’s ‘rebuttal’ of Cliff’s thesis; as Ted ‘helpfully’ directed his attention to it when he quoted from it, albeit with a ‘Incorrect Usage of Quotations’.
In fact all the members of the magic circle of Trot intellectuals, including Trotsky, Cliff and Grant knew about Lenin’s leftwing childishness pamphlet, and what was in it, before 1948.
James Burnham said so.
Trotsky also, apart from saying that that Bolshevik Russia was state capitalism himself in 1922, quoted Lenin saying so from Leftwing Childishness in Trotsky’s own seminal anti Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ essay of 1928?
A must read for any budding Trot intellectual.
As Grant pointed out; Cliff’s idea that Russia became state capitalism after 1928 would mean that it went from its original Leninist path of state capitalism to “something else” (after Lenin and under Stalin ie 1924-8) and back to state capitalism again.
So even according to Lenin at the end of 1922;
[FONT=Arial]http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/05.htm[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Can anyone provide a quotation that anybody thought before 1925 that Russia was not state capitalist?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]We are being flattered, and for some aggrandizing ourselves, for having ‘discovered’ the idea.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial].
[/FONT]
That is a misleading way to put it. He thought socialism could be brought about through revolution in Germany - he thought state-capitalist policies under the policical control of workers (though this is where problems of substitutionism lead to much bigger problems down the road, but I think this was a development out of coditions at the time, not by design or intent and not ienvitable) would keep the revolution progressing in the meantime. Coversely, state capitalism as a system as it developed in the USSR was not temporary, it was the basis of how the country produced and it was backed by a group of beurocrats who owed their position not the the revolution and the power of the working class revolt, but owed their position to the sucess of state-capitalism as an economic end to itself.
The isolation and substitutionism were indeed problems and while Lenin saw state-capitalism as a way for workers to protect their gains from the country petty-bourgoise whose interests if not tied and subordinate to working class interests are in induvidual small capitalist poduction, utlimately it was the urban petty-bougroise, who pushed things back. This is an important lesson, but I don't buy the arguments that this was inevitable or by design, rather than due to circumstances and a long process.
I think this is the opposite of Lenin's thinking on this. The population, the workers engaged in struggle specifically, were socialist minded. This is why "All power to the Soviets" became the rallying cry for the Bolsheviks. The problem in the view of almost all socialists either Bolshevik or Menshevik was that the economic conditions were not present in Russia alone. This led the Menshiviks to conclude as you stated that there is no choice but capitalism. The Bolsheviks developed a different view and counted on a Russian Revolution creating working class policial power which would then inspire and be joined by Revolutions in places where there could be real working class economic as well as political power.
Lenin's view of "State capitalism" was that this was the step forward from small petty-bourgoise production, not a step forward from fully developed capitalism. In Germany there would be no purpose for state-capitalism because capitalism was already hightly industrialized and centralized and so the system had already done the work of putting economic power in the hands of workers - they just needed to take it into their own hands. In Russia though, while there were some large industries, these were often geared for export and so workers couldn't produce what they need alone, most Russian production was still done by small farmers and small shops and so on.
To quote Lenin on State-Capitalism and the misconceptions by other revolutionaries:
Originally Posted by Lenin, "Left-Wing Childishness"The Bolshevik revolution was a huge advance and the most important thing for socialism since the Paris Commune and here we are still debating it. The counter-revolution was the set-back, the failure of Revolution in Germany was a set-back, that the counter-revolution kept the language and theories of marxism and used them for their opposite was the set-back IMO.
The specific policies after the Revolution are specific to the conditions and time so yes, we probably will not have to deal with a situation where small production is more common than industrial processes in a region because capitalism has established it's links everywhere and there are large working classes all over the world whereas 100 years ago much of the world still had small farm production (even in the US until the 1920s or so, most people were rural and not part of industrial production).
would you say that the ussr was state capitalist for sometime and then made the transition to socialism, or it remained state capitalist until its downfall?
"Is it the navajo indians who make it a point always to leave in their woven rugs and other artifacts some slight imperfections, in order not to compete with the gods? I think it is. Well, i have no gods, and so i can't justify my shortcomings as do the navajos."
"The proletariat uses the state not in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries..." - Friedrich Engels
Almost all Chinese companies are owned by China, so by said definition China would be state capitalist. The role of markets is near irrelevant, I'm talking about ownership. They have however been integrating traditional capitalist corporations into their economy which, I think, would be the only basis for your argument.
Actually the term has three different meaning, one of which being the Cliffite definition and another being that which Lenin used.
Russia was one of the largest industrial powerhouses in the world at the time. If my memory serves correctly it was the largest producer of iron in the world a few years before the revolution.
