File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/97-02-02.084, message 27


Subject: Re: M-G: so-called "deformed workers states"
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 20:41:58 +1100 (EST)


> 
> Dave McMullen writes:
> 
> >The simplest refutation of the Trotkyist position on the Soviet Union
> >being socialist, is the fact that Western capitalism is obviously a more
> >advanced stage of social development than Soviet "socialism".   A
> >"socialism" that is inferior to capitalism aint socialism. With the
> >demise of the old Soviet state capitalism, we are now seeing the messy
> >transition to this more advanced western form of capitalism.
> 
> 
> This is the Real McCoy of State Cap vulgar sociology and history (not to
> mention Marxism).
> 
> The State Cap dogma refuses to distinguish between the economic foundations
> of a state and its superstructure. All or nothing. At least where states in
> a transition to socialism are concerned. It sees a million shades of
> regimes under capitalism, including of course Stalinism which it labels as
> State Capitalism, but as for the necessary transition to socialism which
> Lenin attempted to get into Bolshevik and worker heads in the State and
> Revolution, no shades at all.

I do not believe that socialism is "all or nothing". The logic of being a 
period (and process) of transition between capitalism and communism means
that it has to be a mongrel mix of the two. The nature of the mix depends 
on where you are in the process. 

I consider that the Soviet Union in the 1920s 1930s and 1940s was 
socialist or transitional. It upheld revolutionary Marxism in a rough 
fashion, it dragged Russia into the modern world and won World War 11. In
the 1950s, it repudiated the old Marxist verities (partly under cover of 
attacking Stalin's
s errors/crimes) and stopped doing anything remotely 
useful, interesting or inspiring. Instead it became a total pain in the 
arse and by the early 1970s was a major threat to world peace.  When it 
fell apart the whole world smiled.
> 
> In the first place, what does Dave mean by Western capitalism? The whole
> wide world under the imperialist system? The richest 30, 20 or seven
> countries? The suburban "middle classes" in these countries?

I mean the industrialized countries. The distinguishing thing about Third 
World countries is their lack of capitalism. Commodity production is not 
fully developed, most people are still independent small producers and 
the governments are semi-feudal kleptocracies that tax and borrow in 
order to both fund the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed and 
to buy political support.

I am not sure what people mean by the "imperialist system" these days. 
Most of the former colonial countries have been independent for a 
generation or more and their raw material exports to industrial countries 
has become a minor part of world trade. Also foreign investment in most 
of these countries is chicken shit. Furthermore, what trade and 
investment that there is is not generally tied to any particular 
"neo-colonial" power. For a further discussion of "imperialism" see my 
review of Bill Warren's 
Imperialism, Pioneer of 
Capitalism at 
http://www.su.swin.edu.au/~davidm/pages/rp16.htm
 


 > 
> Depending on the answer to this, he could try giving us concrete examples
> of how this capitalism is better for working class people (a more advanced
> ! stage of social development than Soviet "socialism") than the child care
> facilities of the Soviet Union, the education set-up there, the right to
> employment, access to and availability of culture etc -- and this even
> given the distortions of a degenerated workers' state and the brutal
> oppression of Stalinist bureaucratic rule!

There are lots of Western countries that have better child care 
facilities than the old Soviet Union. In Australia where I live, the 
federal government spends annually about US$3,000 per child on childcare. 
And that is not including various tax concesssions. A lot of the Soviet 
Union`s cheap or free services were appallingly bad. Medical care for the 
plebs was crap while the nomenklatura had their own special hospitals. 
There were also special schools for the gifted and the children of the 
privileged. Rent was low but then the accommodation provided was crap - 
for example, sharing a room or space for a bed under a staircase. If you 
were a party boss, you had a palace.

Getting enough food to eat meant standing in line for half the day, and 
the quality was lousy and choice limited. The best food was only 
available in special shops for the party bosses.

Yes the Soviet Union had secure employment but real wages were comparable 
to welfare payments in the West. And if you were a dissident, secure 
employment meant shovelling shit.

The general happiness of the average Soviet citizen was best exemplifed 
by the fact that most of them were drunk all the time.

> 
> Go to Russia and stand on the street preaching this line, and people will
> fall over themselves to bless you for reminding them of the benefits of
> "this more advanced western form of capitalism".

Any process of change is messyand painful. Engels mentions in Socialism, 
Utopian and Scientific, that the bottom 10 per cent of French society 
were the losers from the French Revolution because the revolutionary 
government closed down all the church charities. I am sure many 
aristocrats wept crocodile tears over that. And of the course the whole 
process of transition from peasant and small scale agriculture to modern 
industry based on wage labor was extremely painful, as people were thrown 
off their land and pushed into factories and city slums. The old feudal 
reactionists carried on a treat about that - idyllic rural life versus 
the satanic mills. By the same token, I seem to vaguely remember reading 
that quite a lot of freed slaves found themselves materially 
worse off than they were before abolition - no longer having a "paternal" 
owner to "look after" them.

It is also important to keep in mind that a major part of the mess in 
eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is a legacy of the old system. 
Remember, these regimes simply fell apart from within due to their own 
rottenness. At the moment there is a process of adjustment from this 
state of collapse to something more viable - military industries have to 
be converted, industries that have lost markets with the breakup of the 
Soviet Union and Comecon have to find new ones, develop new products or 
go bust. The government has to start collecting taxes so it can start 
paying its employes. Bourgeois property rights have to be developed and 
generally respected so that capitalists can feel secure about their 
investments.

A lot of people naively thought that their utterly rotten society could 
be magically tranformed into a western one overnight. They are now 
feeling bitterly disappointed. 

> 
> The Trotskyist perspective on the Soviet Union is not that it was
> socialist, but that it was in the throes of a transition to socialism from
> a very backward and isolated capitalist starting point. In the Transitional
> Programme it is very clearly stated that the development can go two ways:
> either the working class will take power for socialism or the bureaucrats
> will hand power back to the bourgeoisie. Here is the original:
> 
> 
>         The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a
>         *degenerated workers' state*. Such is the social diagnosis. The
>         political prognosis has an alternative character: either the
>         bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in
>         the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and
> plunge
>         the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the
>         bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.
> 
> (The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch)
> 
Is this how you would characterize what has happened recently?  Do you 
see it as the "overthrow [of] the new forms of property"? 

The "new forms of property" had become nothing more than kleptocracy, 
corruption and bribery that proved an even bigger fetter on the 
productive forces than that presented by western capitalism. By the late 
1970s the Soviet economy was shrinking from one year to the next, 
disguised only partly by lying statistics. 

If you had been in the Soviet Union before this dreadful 
"counterrevolution" would you have reported dissidents to the KGB?


> 
> Keep it coming, Dave!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Hugh
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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