Date: Thu, 3 Apr 1997 15:21:54 +0000
Subject: M-G: LOV and state capitalism


> Date:          Wed, 2 Apr 1997 16:44:45 +0200
> To:            marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU,
>                marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> From:          Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
> Subject:       M-G: Re: LOV and state capitalism
> Reply-to:      marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU

I'm glad Hugh has come back again on this question.  I hope that 
Walter and Lew come back on this post too.  Hugh writes:

> The bust-up between Lew and Andrew A about "crude communism" is related to
> the larger debate about the difference between a capitalist and a socialist
> mode of production that Dave B has been conducting with various state
> capitalists.
> 
Yeah. Now that the raving Stalinists are debated with us by proxy there is 
more time to develop some of the finer points among Trotskyists and 
Stat caps. 
On the above point Lew is literally correct while Andrew is 
substantially correct. Marx doesnt say this in so "FEATTLTEACTW" 
in as  many words, but thats what he says in other words. So...
 
> And I don't think there's much more to say about that.
> But when it comes to the practical application of these principles in
> relation to the Soviet Union, there is a lot that needs to be said. Dave B
> has said most of what needs to be said against the state capitalist
> position, so I'll try to concentrate on what hasn't been said.
> 
> I don't usually engage in polemics with the state caps on state capitalist
> ideas, for two reasons. First, the differences between them and Trotskyism,
> though deep, are not at all the main contradiction of the current period,
> and sort under the general polemic with objectivists and empiricists, in
> other words, centrists (ultra-lefts are centrists on a wobble -- like a
> comet nearing the sun!). In general, the state caps and we are on the same
> side of the barricade. I take this as basic until proved otherwise in
> individual cases -- until some more principled class-based division perhaps
> turns up. 

I don't see the differences between Trotskyists and state caps as the 
main contradiction in ANY period. Its because most of them came out 
of Trotskyism and contributed to the fatal weakening of the post-war 
Trotskyist movement that I see demolishing the state cap argument as 
important. The method is bad.  It leads not only to wrong conclusions 
about the SU but on other fundamentals, like the "spontaneity" of 
workers consciousness. We have to remove the gangrene before it infects 
other scratches. 

Second, I see the state cap view as parallel to the Maoist view
> of the Soviet Union as Social-Imperialist after 1956. In other words, an
> ideological construction to justify retroactively a distasteful political
> and superstructural development. In the same way as the Maoists never
> succeeded in proving their contention that the Soviet Union had changed its
> economic spots overnight, the state caps run into terrible problems
> pinpointing the actual transition to the state capitalist phase. Here on
> the list we already have two incompatible versions -- one gives 1939 as the
> date, and the other claims that the Soviet Union was state cap from its
> inception. Other contending dates must be 1922-24 (NEP, death of Lenin) or
> 1927-29 (Thermidor, forced collectivization, liquidation of Kulaks), and
> there will be others.

The different versions of state cap however come out of the same 
method which Trotsky took apart in In Defence of Marxism. So while 
its obviously an ideological adaptation to visible horrors of "Stalinism", 
 its the underlying method used to justify it that is the problem, and in 
turn, of course, the class basis of that break from dialectics. 
For me this is not just a problem for state caps but also bedevilled 
post-war Trotskyism too as a result of the isolation of the 
movement from the working class [of which Stalinism was the main 
cause] the adaptation to empiricism, and the liquidation of the vanguard into 
various petty bourgeois movements.  The split between objective and 
subjective reality [which should have but wasnt united in the 
revolutionary party] also had a stalinophile side reflecting its obverse 
stalinophobe side.
> 
> For my money the only "rational" state cap view would be that the SU was
> state cap from its inception, run by a bureaucratic class that was
> counter-balanced initially by the voluntarist but effective leadership of
> Lenin and Trotsky and their agitational effects on the working class, but
> subsequently took over the helm completely once Lenin was out of the way
> and in a few short years had established itself as the unassailable
> political expression of the new economic order with the expulsion of
> Trotsky and the destruction of the Left Opposition.

[snip]
 
> So much for the "rational" state cap view of a bureaucratic state that
> never was proletarian, and Marxism.

Agreed,  this is why I concentrated on trying to drive home Trotsky's 
point that  the "appearances" of the survival of capitalism are also 
real at the level of distributional norms,  but nothing more, and had 
been predicted as necessary by Marx, understood completely by Lenin 
and then applied by Trotsky in his arguments against the state caps.
 
> But there are big problems highlighted by the traditional state cap view of
> a perversion of the state form from proletarian to state capitalist.
> The Stalinist counter-revolution is accepted as such by state caps, but as
> against Trotskyists they see it as the introduction of a new form of
> property, as a reversion to a capitalism of a new variety. They transform a
> political change into an economic change. But they rest their case on
> surface phenomena, on institutional symptoms such as relations of command,
> hierarchies, inequalities, favouritism etc. They don't show how *class*
> relations rooted in property give rise to these phenomena. They don't do
> this, because they can't. They work backwards from the symptoms of
> inequality to an economic cause. 

Yes their method requires them to start at the surface and to cut up 
reality into `nations', [which have states which they regard as their 
private "property"]  and of course to abstract from history to the 
universe in applying the notion that the law of value as a timeless 
law [which means its outside the control of the working class, and 
thank god the working class cannot trample all over us]. 
And since it is the superficial and the timeless that is combined in 
state cap theory, that is why its demolition is necessary to restore 
marxist method on this question.
 
[snip] 

 And here we come to aspects that Dave hasn't put enough stress on in his
> otherwise excellent posts.

> The most important thing about the character of the Soviet Union was it's
> transitional character *INTERNATIONALLY* speaking. Both Lenin and Trotsky
> made frequent statements to the effect that if the revolution didn't
> succeed in the more advanced countries of Europe, particularly Germany,
> then the revolution in Russia was doomed. They were proved partly wrong.
> The revolution in Russia proved both tougher and more inspirational than
> anyone had a right to expect.
> But the world market was still dominated by the imperialists and the
> capitalist mode of production was still the most advanced force of
> production in the world. And this is the key to the dialectical process of
> the completely different trajectories of the political development of the
> regime and the economic development of the foundations of the state in the
> Soviet Union.

Well I dont think I neglected this question. The premise of my
argument which is drawn, as I see it, straight from Trotsky,  is that the
fundamental contradiction faced by the SU was that of the law of value
operating internationally, and the planned property relations also
reflecting the strength of the international working class. The
concept of the SU as a transitional society means that it is caught
between the past and the future, both present in the form of this
contradiction.  The internal dynamics of the SU are therefore
expressions of this contradiction mediated by the relationship between
the planned property relations and the bureaucratic dictatorship. So 
that the future [ the forward thrust to a workers plan] is is held back
 by the past [by the bureaucracy having to resort increasingly to the 
LOV to substitute for the collapse of bureaucratic planning]. 
These contradictions, rather than pardoxes, are fleshed out very well 
in Hughs next paragraphs.

> The bureaucracy was completely dependent on the institutions of the
> state-owned means of production for its power and its privileges. In the
> early days -- around the mid-1920s -- developing commodity production along
> with the growing social power of the rural bourgeoisie, the kulaks,
> threatened this power and was strangled when the land was nationalized and
> forced collectivization was undertaken. But this extension of the
> anti-bourgeois gains of October was not accompanied by any political gains.
> The political course of the bureaucracy was becoming more and more
> counter-revolutionary, as Trotsky details in his many books tracing this
> development. This dialectical process was possible because of the
> contradictory position of the Soviet Union as a huge centre of the
> transition of the working class into new socialist humanity with no
> bourgeoisie keeping it locked and barred out of the means of production, on
> the one hand, and a poor, weak and backward economy in relation to the
> world market, on the other. Nothing but paradoxes -- at the same time great
> political gains, with the potential for a new socialist humanity, in
> conjunction with great political defeats, with the degenerated bureaucratic
> clique that usurped power, and terrible economic weakness, with poverty,
> starvation and a constant threat of the resurgence of petty commodity
> production on an immense scale, in conjunction with amazing economic
> progress in production and planning in certain prioritized areas.
> 
> This much can be seen with a mainly national perspective on the Soviet
> Union. What needs to be emphasized is the dependence of a single national
> economy on the world market *regardless of its bourgeois or socialist (or
> pre-socialist transitional) character*. The proletarian state could remain
> intact because of the international pressure of the working-class on the
> bourgeoisie during the Depression and during and after World War II, but it
> was faced with tremendous pressure from the high levels of productivity and
> the resulting low prices in the imperialist world market. If, as happened
> in 1925 in the Soviet Union, you have a goods famine, you get high prices
> due to market pressure. This in itself is a threat given low prices on the
> world market. But something very significant failed to happen in the Soviet
> Union, precisely because the economy was *not capitalist* -- a
> corresponding rise in production of the goods being demanded did not occur,
> because the "socialism at a snail's pace" Stalin-Bukharin coalition that
> controlled strategic production policy failed to respond to the challenge.
> The planning and adjustment of production in a collectivized economy is a
> political matter -- *political* economy -- and it has both a national and
> an international setting. The international setting for the early Soviet
> Union was encirclement by a world market dominated by non-free-competition
> US monopoly capital. The pressures arising from this could *only* be met by
> political resistance on the part of the proletarian state and by a
> strategic policy of expanding the advanced, collectivized, planned part of
> the economy as optimally as possible in the shelter of the state's
> political protection -- including the protection provided by the support of
> the working class in other countries. When the collectivized state industry
> was expanded by Stalin during the Five Year Plans, it was too late and was
> carried out at the cost of the political support of the Soviet masses. The
> foreign policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy, while aiming to subordinate
> everything to the national interests of the Soviet state, effectively
> disembowelled the body of national and international support for the Soviet
> state -- most specifically by dooming the most powerful proletariats of
> Asia (China) and Europe (Germany) to beheading and crushing historical
> defeats.
> 
> The economic forces underlying all this become very clear if you read
> Eugene Preobrazhensky's absolutely indispensable book The New Economics (eg
> Oxford 1965). It has the following sections:
> 
> 1 The method of theoretical analysis of Soviet economy
> 
> 2 The Law of Primitive Socialist Accumulation
> 
> 3 The Law of Value in Soviet economy
> 
> Appx Once more about Socialist accumulation: reply to Comrade Bukharin
> 
> 
> Given the heading of this present thread, at least the chapter on "The Law
> of Value in the Soviet economy" should be compulsory reading.
> 
> I'll be back on this later.
> 
> To round off -- the *process* involving the proletarian state or semi-state
> after the revolution is not, as a superficial reading of Engels and Lenin
> might suggest, a one-way ride to withering-away. It can move both forward
> and *in reverse*. The historical implications of the history of this
> century are best understood by seeing the consolidation of the Soviet
> Union's collectivized economy as a trememdous step forward for the
> organized proletariat in its struggle with bourgeois world domination, and
> seeing the degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy that directed this
> economy (consolidating it in spite of itself) as a tremendous step
> backwards for the proletariat in its struggle. In the end, the political
> degeneration was seen to have the power to attempt to push the
> collectivized foundations of the economy back over the line to private (ie
> monopoly capitalist) ownership in conjunction with the capitulation of the
> bureaucracy and its consummated desertion to the bourgeois camp. But it
> should be noted that this process of pushing back the collectivized means
> of production to capitalism is still *unfinished*. Also it should be noted
> that this degeneration has been exceedingly *slow* in terms of selling back
> out to capitalism economically speaking, having taken long decades in spite
> of the de facto alliances with fascists and imperialists practised by
> Stalin and his successors, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. And this
> in spite of the total domination of the world economy by capitalism and the
> superficially indisputable political domination of the world by imperialism
> (all the "imperialist victories" Doug H and others on the list never tire
> of telling us about, like Vietnam).
> 
> When Engels and Lenin talk about a proletarian state in the process of
> abolishing itself, this must be seen in the context of the international
> revolution. As long as imperialism has international hegemony, the
> proletarian state needs to be powerful to defend its own interests against
> the empirically more powerful imperialist states. The individual, isolated
> "proletarian" state is still a long way from being the "representative of
> the whole of society" (that is world society). As long as state power is
> necessary it will manifest itself in institutions of coercion that need to
> be controlled by the political base from which they spring. What the
> experience of the Soviet Union in the period of its creation and
> consolidation under Lenin and Trotsky, and in its subsequent further
> simultaneous consolidation and more importantly its *degeneration*  under
> Stalin and his successors shows us is that there is no objectivist shortcut
> to socialist society. In our present epoch of wars, revolutions and
> transition to socialism the political imperatives are more significant than
> ever. And this means building revolutionary internationalist
> Bolshevik-Leninist parties to fight for a socialized economy and for a
> healthy regime of proletarian democracy to run such a new economy.
> 

I couldnt agree more. The nature of the task facing us is more 
crucial than ever.  Although the contradictions of capitalism are 
more pronounced and the polarisation of classes greater then in the 
1930's [I don't agree that capitalism "totally" dominates the world 
economy]  we have a weaker marxist vanguard. While the stalinists may 
have lost much credibility they are regrouping as [Malecki's term] 
the 9 and a half `international'. The problem with them is that they 
are still defending stalinism as "socialism" and as many on this list 
know,  crypto-stalinism is far from dead, and often seen as the 
'lesser evil' compared with capitalism.  This means that far 
>from a positive model of socialism, [which the petty bourgeois left is 
always demanding up front before they commit themselves -well who 
needs them?]  we have a massive legacy of anti-communist, anti-marxist 
propaganda to overcome.  This means that we have to start from a point 
further back than the 3rd or 4 th Internationals did, to re-establish basic 
marxism as the ideology of the working class.  The huge gap between 
the objective rottenness of capitalism and the subjective weakness of 
the revolutionary leadership requires even more [if that is possible] 
effort to bridge by thoseTrotskyists and other marxists who are able 
grasp the significance of this task. 

Dave
Revolutionary Communists Unite!
For a New Bolshevik Leninist International!
For Permanent Revolution [AND on this list]!  



     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---