Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 15:09:10 +0000
Subject: M-G: LOV and state capitalism


Walter and Lew,

Both your last posts on LOV and state capitalism take up a number of 
points.  In the final analysis they come down to method.  How to 
determine the nature of Soviet society. How to determine the social 
relations that existed in the former SU after 1917? And whether or 
not these social relations were overturned, and if so,  when? 

Lew says there was no socialist revolution  since capitalist 
social relations remained in place. Walter says there was a socialist 
revolution but the social relations that resulted were overthrown after 
1939 and replaced by capitalist social relations.

My response to both Walter and Lew, is that they have a common 
failing in their method, which is to take surface forms as 
manifestations of social relations, rather than the deep structures 
which have to be uncovered by using dialectics.

My attempt to show that Trotsky was able to apply dialectics in 
following Marx and Lenin in his analysis of the SU as a 
contradictory, transitional society,  seems to have failed so far. 
Lew says I am just taking Trotsky at his word, and anyway Marx 
did not allow for a workers state with bourgeois forms.  Walter says 
that I am mistaken in attributing to Marx the view that in the  
socialist transition the principle, norm,  etc "from each according to 
his ability to each according to his work" will apply. My point in 
making this claim is to show that Marx fully expected bourgeois norms 
of distribution to survive under socialism. If we can't agree on this 
at least we don't get anywhere.

I know that Walter has read Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. I 
invite him to re-read it and see if Marx doesnt mean that, until any  
new proletarian dictatorship has been able to create the conditions of 
plenty and do away with the reward/ incentive for work and replace it 
with distribution according to need, then "bourgeois norms of 
distribution"  as Trotsky calls them, will survive.

If we can agree on that point [and Lenin's application of this 
argument to a backward, encircled workers state that Marx cannot have 
foreseen, only means that the bourgeois forms, including state and 
ideology will be quantitatively more pronounced] then we can move 
on to analyse what Trotsky means by a `dual state' where the bourgeois 
norms of distribution are in conflict with `workers relations of 
production'.

Lew says that relations of distribution follow from relations of 
production. So they do. But Marx, Lenin and Trotsky are not talking of 
bourgeois `relations' of distribution which correspond to bourgeois 
relations of production.  If that were the case, payment by 
labour-time and the inqualities that follow, would be determined not 
by the state, but by the market and the LOV, presupposing capitalist 
social relations. Rather they refer only to  bourgeois NORMS of distribution 
that survive and are in conflict with proletarian property relations. 
What Lew  sees are  the bourgeois norms on the surface and deduces from 
these that capitalist social relations must remain dominant.  But that is not 
even to apply the foresight of the dead Marx, not to mention the cult worship 
of the lives and works of  Lenin and Trotsky who were  both under the 
impression that they had made a social revolution.  

If Walter an I can agree [Lew will not] that Marx and the Bolsheviks fully 
understood the survival of bourgeois distributional norms as 
NECESSARY to motivate work and the develop of the productive 
forces, and that this would generate `bourgeois' aspects of the state 
and ideology, then the survival of these forms for us, does not put 
in question the proletarian property relations, unless and until, the 
minority that benefits from these norms succeeds in overthrowing and 
replacing those property relations.

The question is then: when does the quantitative deterioration of the 
bourgeois norms of distribution, and their attendant state apparatus 
and ideology, [the stalinist bureaucracy and the ideology of socialism 
in one country realised by 1936 etc] - the "superstructure" as Paul 
calls it - become qualitative?  When does the reward for labour-time 
become so grossly unequal that it transcends bourgeois norms and  
now reflects bourgeois social relations? 

In my view this can only happen when  the bureaucrats 
convert state property into their private property so that they can 
claim part of the surplus-labour as a property right. Lew tacitly 
acknowledges this from the start no doubt, and says 
that the nomenklatura had ways and means of `accumulating' 
surplus-labour. No doubt, but they couldnt claim this as a `right' any 
more than the mafia can except by `laundering' the proceeds of crime 
as legitimate capital. This is no way to run a capitalist business. 
If you do not have a property right, you cannot accumulate as a 
capitalist and you have no incentive to develop the forces  of production. 
This means that you have to parasitically live off the surplus-labour of
workers pretending that you don't while the fund for developing the 
economy is run down. This in part accounts for the limits to growth 
and the necessary stagnation and ultimate collapse of the bureaucratically 
planned economy.

Correspondingly this  overturn can only happen when  workers are 
no longer paid wages that are bureaucratically calculated against 
the bourgeois norm of labour-time, [which alienates workers from 
any conception of workers property as a collective property right and 
acts as a corresponding discincentive to work, even though the rate of 
surplus-labour extraction is far less than under capitalism] 
but receive wages that represent socially necessary labour time as 
determined by the LOV?  

In my view, neither of these preconditions developed and coincided 
to anywhere near the  extent necessary to  over turn the property relations 
until the post 1989 period.  On the contrary every attempt by the world 
capitalist economy to bring about the collapse of the SU by means of 
invasion, isolation, etc failed until the 1980's. The reasons for 
this resistance and final collapse cannot be found in the theory that 
the SU always was capitalist, or reverted to capitalism in 1939.

But before I get into all this, lets hear from Walter, in terms of the 
question of social relations. I seem to have missed some of his 
earlier posts, so I hope I havnt missed this. What qualitative change took 
place around 1939 to make a social counter-revolution?

Dave.



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