Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 17:57:10 +0000
Subject: M-G: Albania and state capitalism


From:  Dave Bedggood
Date:          Wed, 19 Mar 1997 14:44:21 1200+
Subject: Albania and state capitalism      


Paul responds to my suggestion that we debate what is going on in 
Albania and asks why I think that Stalinists can be counter-revolutionary 
without being the class enemy.  He also argues that state capitalism 
is consistent with the development and collapse of  `soviet' 
societies including Albania.  These questions are obviously related: 
for Paul stalinists are bourgeois and therefore the class enemy.  
This wrong conclusion follows from the method of marxists who 
do not use Marx's dialectical method properly. To try and argue this 
will take more than one post.  Below is an attempt to present 
Trotsky's critique of state capitalism in the 1930's.


THE CLASS ROOTS OF STATE CAPITALISM
"In Defence of Marxism", Trotsky in the late 1930's  deals with 
the formal logic which underlies such a conclusion. It was central to 
his struggle with the petty bourgeois opposition in the SWP who 
rejected unconditional defence of the SU.  They rejected it because 
they looked at the SU and saw concrete differences fixed in black and white.  
They saw a stalinist bureaucracy living off the labour of the working class, 
oppressing workers and invading other countries like Poland and 
Finland. Therefore they concluded, there was nothing progressive in the SU 
to defend. 

So what type of class society was the SU if it wasnt worth defending?
The options were capitalism, or some new society.  Most opted for 
capitalism,  after all Lenin had characterised the SU as state 
capitalist.  But to draw this conclusion one had to find a way of 
applying Marx's analysis of capitalism so that the SU fitted into 
this category.  Trotsky shows that to do this, Marx's method had to 
be violated.  First, capitalism  becomes cut up into parts rather 
than understood as a totality.  The inequalities in the SU are 
attributed to the extraction of surplus-value, but without the direct 
operation of the law of value. That is, the surplus was extracted by 
administration rather than via market prices.

Its a while since I read the two main state capitalist positions I 
know of, so my presentation may be a bit rusty.  Tony Cliff and his 
co-thinkers attempt to explain  this arguing that the law of value 
operates indirectly, more or less internally and externally.  
The SU then becomes a sort of large London County Council 
in the world capitalist economy.  Walter  Daum tries to escape the
trap  of claiming that state capitalism can operate while the law of
value is suspended, by rejecting the market mechanism as necessary 
to capitalist production. 

In effect both positions argue that the suppression of the law of 
value is consistent with capitalist production, and is also the cause 
of the ultimate collapse of state capitalism and its replacement by 
`market' capitalism. At the level of appearances this collapse in the 
1980's and 1990's is consistent with the neo-liberal attacks on state 
intervention in the non-soviet capitalist states. 

The essential point,  however, is that what starts as an empiricist 
impression of class, has to adapt Marx's concept of capitalism to 
provide the theoretical justification for the concept of state capitalism.  
Now some people on this list think that that is unnecessary since
Lenin already arrived at his analysis of state capitalism. However, 
this is not good enough. The slightest acquaintance with Lenin shows 
that Lenin was talking about the survival of the law of value 
operating inside Russia,  but under the control of the workers state. 

Lenin's was a Marxist characterisation of a transitional society in 
which the workers had state power, but needed the law of value to 
allocate social labour until such time as economic conditions allowed 
a complete socialisation of production.  Therefore it is inadmissable 
to try to use his concept of this complex concrete reality in which 
the law of value is consciously used by a workers state, to account 
for what is amost the opposition situation - the suppression of the
law of value in a state where workers control had been usurped by a 
bureaucracy.

What the state capitalist theorists have to do is explain when the 
workers state underwent a social counter-revolution from workers 
state to capitalist state. Otherwise, of course, they have to argue 
that there never was a workers state. Obviously in the 1920's it is 
not possible [other than for stalinists]  to overlook the 
bureaucratisation of the workers state, nor the content of Lenin's 
concept of state capitalism. After all the NEP created a market in 
the countryside which extended into the whole economy.  During this 
process, while the law of value was becoming a major force in setting 
prices, workers were losing control of the state.  There was a strong 
danger, argued by the Left Opposition, of a capitalist 
counter-revolution. This danger resulted in the Stalinist-led 
bureaucracy nationalising the countryside and abolishing the NEP.

Cliff and Co consider this nationalisation of peasant property the 
point at which a social counter-revolution occurred. The bureaucracy 
constituted itself as a bourgeoisie on the basis of nationalised 
property by suppressing the law of value.  This could be viewed as a 
national bourgeoisie engaging in primitive capital accumulation and
covering this counter-revolution with the ideological smokescreen 
of an `ultra-left' defense of "socialism in one country". 

The problem with this is that is doesn't account for the fact that 
most of the economy was already socialised by the revolution. The 
nationalisation of peasant property does not constitute bourgeois 
property, nor can socialised industry become  bourgeois property, 
unless the bureaucracy uses  the state to smash the plan and 
re-introduce the law of value. 

[This is what we have seen in the last ten years where the bureaucracy 
has used its state power to overthrow the plan and re-introduce the 
law of value in the former SU and eastern Europe including Albania.
In other words still mediating the contradiction between the plan and 
the law of value, the bureaucracy can no longer reproduce the plan so 
throws in its lot with the bourgseoisie. This was one of the outcomes 
predicted by Trotsky which I will deal with later].  

However, for the state caps, bourgeois property can be defined as 
private property or state property, with or without the law or 
value. This leaves the characterisation of the mode of production 
to be decided at the level of the state. This is not surprising, since 
state-centred analysis is typical of petty-bourgeois analysis, 
as it is through the instrument of the state that the petty bourgeoisie
attempt to reconcile classes.

This explains why it is not by means of Marxism that one arrives at the 
concept of state capitalism in the SU,  but by a superficial impressionism 
[i.e."class"] combined with formal logic ["capitalism without the law 
of value"].  This method supports the class view of the SU taken by 
the petty bourgeoisie which tries to reconcile the working class to 
the bourgeois view of the SU that `socialism' creates a `new class'
and therefore offers no way out for workers.  The petty bourgeoisie's
role as class conciliator is to prevent any working class 
independence and to present socialism as a utopia.  Because the SU 
fell short of that utopia, it was necessary to divert workers from 
the defence of the SU as any sort of historic gain,  and from the task 
of a  political revolution to remove the bureaucracy: ie Trotsky's 
programme.   

Trotsky's analysis of the SU was marxist in its method. The SU was a 
workers state because a workers revolution overthrew bourgeois state 
power and socialised, more or less, the means of production.  It 
degenerated under the bureaucratisation of the state as workers were 
excluded from state power. But it remained a degenerate workers state 
so long as the socialised property,  the plan and the monopoly of 
foreign trade, prevented the law of value from becoming the dominant 
mechanism of social production.  

The SU was therefore at the level of complex reality a post-capitalist 
transitional society in which the basic contradiction between the law 
of value internationally and its suppression by the plan etc. was 
mediated by the struggle between the working class and the bureaucracy.  
The bureaucracy was a parasitic caste on the backs of the working class, 
unable to constitute itself as a class so long as it was dependent on 
socialised property. This contradiction worked its way out in the form 
of the class struggle over state property. As he shows in "In Defence of 
Marxism",  it took dialectics to understand this concrete complexity.

So for example, when the SU invaded Poland Trotsky explained that 
it was necessasry to bloc with the Red Army  as a means of defending 
workers property in the SU from Fascism. Workers internationally had 
a duty to defend workers property unconditionally.  That means 
without demanding that the bureaucracy be overthrown or the national
rights of Poland be respected first.  Why? Because though the bureaucracy 
was a barrier to socialism, and in defending state property by bureaucratic 
methods, actively held back the world revolution, state property was 
a massive gain resulting from the October revolution which enabled the 
degenerate workers state to escape the trap of imperialist super-exploitation. 
Nevertheless, the strategic aim of the working class was to defend state 
property by overthrowing  the bureaucracy and  opening the road to socialism. 

It was on this question that Trotsky said that if we couldn't defend 
existing gains we could not make new ones.  


Dave.



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