Date: 23 Dec 96 20:00:55 EST From: neil <74742.1651-AT-CompuServe.COM> Subject: M-I: state caps. vs. worker socialism dear friends, the issue of commodity production has much to do with the analysis of economic base and class realtions of exploitation in a given society or world system in the production relations.. Commodity production identifies relations of class exploitation. Commodities have both use value and exchange value. People need them , they are acquired by buying and selling. In Capitalism even human labor power takes the form of commodities bought and sold (& worn out and dumped!) by the capitalist wages system, east and west. One of the key aspects of the communists programme is to do away with buying and selling in the transition to socialism. The working people will directly and indirectly get back the full value of their labor andwill ceased to be robbed and dominated over by parasites. In other words in building real socialism , there will be no commodity production or production for sale and profit and workers will not be worked like cattle and driven as appendages to machines and computers, etc. Workers will get free access under socialism. There will be no ruling classes under communism. The point about Stalin & Co. claiming Russia had "achieved socialist commodity production" was another of his ideological cover-ups for the Russian bloc state cap rulng class regimes. On the distortion of the state cap analysis by the Maoists trends, I merely wanted to show how absurd they were/are. Saying Russia was socialist under Stalin and then capitalist under Khrushchev is no marxist analysis at all. My previous analogy was extreme using consecutive dates-- but there just was no QUALITATIVE change in the actual production realtions between Stalin and Khrushchev-Gorbachev. Where was the revolutionary overthow/change in the ECONOMY? Thre was a change of ruling class exploiter groups fighting for political power-- Russia had been state capitalist under Stalin since the mid 20s and reamained so under the Khrushchev-Brezhnev-Gorbachev era. Today most the state cap ruling class has easlily moved over to embrace western style capitalism in the ex-USSR bloc. The workers are still getting royally screwed. In some cases they hve to fight like hell to get paid even paltry wages!! Neil --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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