From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 23:29:51 +0000
Subject: Re: M-I: Albania and state capitalism


>Dave wrote:
> >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.

>Lew replies: 
> There is nothing Marxist about Lenin's (or your) charecterisation of "a
> transitional society in which the workers had state power, but needed
> the law of value to allocate social labour..." I know of nothing in Marx
> or Engels' writings which would support such an assertion. Indeed, the
> entire thrust of the Marxian anaysis is directed against the law of
> value and its anti-working class imperatives (that is to say, the
> accumulation of capital out of the surplus value pumped from workers and
> the misery such an economic system engenders).

Dave again:>
Lew shows what happens if you read Marx like a blueprint of what a 
workers state would look like, and then reject any possibility that 
some transition will be necessary in the real world to get there.  
Marx wasn't around to deal with the problems the Bolsheviks faced. 
But I bet he would have said "go for it!  Take as many steps back as 
you need to survive until a world revolution comes to you rescue and 
you can break free of the law of value into workers administration". 
The misery of workers in this situation was nothing compared with the 
horrors of semi-colonial absolutism and imperialist war and 
semi-feudal reaction.  

Dave says: 
> >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.
> 
>Lew answers:
> There is another perspective. Using Lenin's own claims about the
> benefits of state capitalism from 1917 onwards (many commentators
> wrongly isolate the phrase to the period of the NEP) and how it would
> provide the state structure for "socialism" it is possible to trace the
> changing fortunes of private capitalism (Trotsky - and Stalin -
> basically identified capitalism with a private capitalist class) and
> state capitalism, till by the late 1920s state capitalism came to
> dominate. 

 Dave again:
Yes but as I argued this `perspective' is superficial because it 
equates Lenin's `state capitalism' in which the law of value was 
under the control of the workers state with the post 1929 concept of 
`state capitalism' which suppresses the law of value but apparently 
constitutes state property as bourgeois property.  I see the logic of 
your position which is that there never was a workers state there was 
just an advanced bourgeois-democratic revolution.  Again, 
this reflects the empiricist, normative method of judging  the 
"failure" of the workers state to live up to a pre-conceived 
dream.  Ironically, the world bourgeoisie viewed the new workers 
state as living up to their worst nightmare. And this nightmare was 
not over for them until 1991!
>

Dave wrote: 
> >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.  
>
Lew replies:
> Explain "more or less". Are you saying that the means of production came
> under the ownership and control of the working class, more or less? Wage
> labour and capial continued to exist and they presuppose that the
> workers are dispossessed from the means of production. The sale of
> labour power, that uniquely capitalist commodity, increased in extent.
> This was the concrete reality which workers faced and against which we
> must counterpose the abstraction of  "the plan" and "socialised
> property". No wonder that Marxism became a joke in the eyes of the
> working class when presented with this interpretation. And this process
> was overseen by the Communist Party, who were to provide many of the
> functions of the capitalist class.
>
Dave again:
Yeah I should have said state property rather than `socialised' 
property. I meant bourgeois property was `more or less' expropriated 
because while much was some wasn't.  That fact that the bourgeoisie 
was not totally expropriated does not mean that there was no workers 
state. In a revolutionary transition, a revolutionary class takes 
state power and procedes to overturn the existing social relations 
and create new ones.  [the bourgeoisie returned the complement after 
1989 in the SU and EE]. There is no timetable or blueprint for how this 
can be done under specific historical conditions, especially ones 
which are highly unfavourable. The whole point of Lenin's use of the 
term `state capitalism' was designed to counter the ultra-left 
illusions among some workers that a socialist society would fall 
ready made from the sky. In this Lenin was continuing the leading 
role of the party as educator of the masses and setting practical 
revolutionary tasks.  

 Dave said: 
> >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.  

 Lew replies: 
> Or to re-phrase the Old Man, if we are to make new gains we have to stop
> defending Trotsky's position. Trotsky and Trotskyism make a fetish out
> of legal forms (planning, nationalisation) but are blind to the ways in
> which the economy functions in practice. The legal status of businesses
> is just as inconsequential as the myth of the economic plan. What is
> important for the workers is the functional dynamic of the place they
> work in - how they get their living - and not the legal fictions of
> "planning" and "social ownership".
> The hostility of orthodox Trotskyism towards an analysis of the USSR as
> state capitalism no doubt derives from the fact that their own inherited
> Leninist position is itself one where "socialism" means state capitalism
> in practice. They are the main propogandists of state capitlism.  
 
Dave again:
No. Trotsky did not make a fetish of legal forms.  Planning was not 
something that merely flowed from the fact of state property. It was 
the production of use values as opposed to exchange values. It was no 
legal fiction that state property ["social ownership" but not 
democratic control] enabled "planning" to actually produce concrete 
use-values. They may have been crude, flawed, and in short supply, 
but they met needs. That, at the level of social relations of production is 
what separated a workers state, no matter how deformed by bureaucratic 
dictatorship, from a capitalist state.  The term "functional dynamic" is a 
meaningless term by comparison with Trotsky's materialist analysis of 
the contradiction between the law of value and the plan in the SU.
As for Trotskyists hostility to the notion of state capitalism.  Yes 
we are hostile to a political position  that rewrites Marx's analysis of 
capitalism in order to write-off the gains of October.





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