From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 21:32:12 +0000
Subject: M-G: LOV and State capitalism


>Lew says:
 
> This is where we really differ. You say that there were bourgeois
> "norms" of distribution and "proletarian property relations", but this
> is meaningless assertion (and I mean meaningless as far as the working
> class were concerned and would be if it were ever offered again).

"Meaningless as far as the working class is concerned".  There have 
been producing classes before in history that were not wage-labour. 
Part of the problem with capitalism is that it disguises the unequal 
relations of production as equal relations of distribution. What is 
"meaningful" for the workers, depends not on their perception of their 
immediate interests, but recognition of their class interests. This 
was why Lenin went to great lengths to account for the experience of 
bourgeois norms, of state capitalism, and the NEP, to prove that they were 
necesssary in the class interests of soviet workers and poor 
peasants, and should not be seen as evidence of the failure of the 
revolution, and the persistence or restoration of capitalism. 
 
The
> working class were under the cosh of wage labour and capital.

This is what has to be proved by the analysis of the basic 
contradictions and social relations.  You cannot just assume that 
because inequality exists that therefore wage-labour and capital 
exist. 

 Marx's
> labour theory of value reveals that they presuppose each other,
> reproduce each other on an expanding scale, and that the working class
> must be dispossessed from the means of production for the whole thing to
> function. 

Yes that is true that wage labour depends upon dispossession of the 
means of production, but it does not follow that in the SU such was 
the case. The bureaucracy did not own private property and depended 
for its privileges on state property.  It was constrained by this 
fact in having to limit its desire to become a ruling class, and 
conversely, although dispossesed of political control  over the plan, 
workers still had some collective "possession" of state property
which meant that despite the extraction of surplus-labour they had 
jobs, a living wage and a social wage. 

> Then there is commodity production and labour power. You
> effectively reject all that (and unpacking the law of value would
> unravel your use and understanding of the term) and ask the working
> class to deny their own experience and accept that there is some deeper
> truth at work. 

Does the working class under capitalism understand the law of value? 
Why should the law of value exist when workers "experience" tells 
them that this is so?  By taking the everyday experience of workers 
as evidence for the LO, instead of proving that labour-power is sold 
as a commodity on the market, rather than sold at administered prices 
to the state, you are saying there is no need for Marxism or marxist 
method.. 
> 
> >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.
> 
> You accept that the bureaucrats behaved much the same as the ruling
> class elsewhere, were exploiters living off the backs of the workers,
> but again hang it all on a *de jure* qualification instead of the *de
> facto* situation. 

"Much the same" at a surface, and general level in the sense of 
living off surplus-labour. They had to do it surreptitiously though 
appealing to the ideology of socialism, and not their own separate 
class interests.  How can you be a defacto ruling class when you have 
no private property to accumulate and pass on in your own name to 
your descendants?  It was because the bureaucracy could not establish 
itself as a de facto class and accumulate capital that by the 1980's it had
 to opt for restoration and attempt to turn state property into de 
jure private property.  

> Who is being superficial here? I think the mafia is a
> good analogy with the Western capitalist class in its early stages. But
> if not the mafia, what about the Vatican? The bureaucrats there do not
> have property rights, yet in many ways it is a paradigm case of
> capitalism.  
> 
By running the Vatican, the mafia, the capitalists and the 
bureaucrats together you are just creating an ahistorical, or general 
abstraction "ruling-class-in-general", rather than using Marx's 
method to analyse each historically specific society and its unique 
social relations. For you, each of these are all distinct legal 
relations, but they are all the same "de facto" and thats what 
counts.  While it may be true that they all live off surplus-labour, 
that tells us nothing of the dynamics of the particular societies 
they represent.  There is nothing then that separates feudalism from 
capitalism from a degenerate workers state for you. How do you 
explain the French Revolution if the old ruling class is "de facto" 
no different from the new? The same applies to 1917. You cannot 
distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the 
proletariate, even as a" bourgeois state annointed with socialist 
oil". The political positions that flow from this analysis are that 
of a normative model of communism without bourgeois hangovers, 
and a working class that can spontaneously  mobilise itself to fight 
for communism without the complications of having to deal historical 
specifics, or messy transitions.  This is idealist marxism. 

Dave.



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