File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-25.232, message 4


Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 09:20:03 +0000
From: Lew <Lew-AT-dialogues.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: State capitalism


In article <199703201126.XAA16138-AT-mailhost.auckland.ac.nz>,
dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz writes
>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.  

Marx is famous for not providing blueprints for the future.
Nevertheless, he and Engels were quite clear what was the root of
working class problems: wage labour and capital and generalised
commodity production; and to keep the working class producing surplus
value for the priviliged elite, a machinery of state is required. This
social system is every workers enemy, and our emancipation as a class
can can only come when capital no longer exits and we can start to
produce for our needs. This is what Marx argued for and what anyone who
calls themself a Marxist must also accept. But at no point in 1917 or
after was the rule of wage labour and capital under threat; on the
contrary, under Communist Party control the capitalist economy was
expanded, often with brutal methods. If Marx had been around at the time
I would imagine that he would have repeated the disclaimer when told
what was being done in his name, viz - that he was not a Marxist. In any
event, it is certain that the CP dictatorship over the proletariat has
done more than any bourgeois propaganda to delay working class self-
emancipation by bringing Marxism into disrepute. 

> 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!

Again you assert that the law of value (whatever you precisely mean by
that) was under control/planned. In a sense this was true: the
state/party ruling class re-distributed surplus value from the
profitable sectors of the economy (such as light engineering) to non-
profitable ends (notably the military). When there were no more profits
to re-distribute the USSR went bust. But dictatorships the world over
have employed such methods, and I see no reason why workers should want
to see them emulated. By "empiricist" I take it you are not referring to
epistemology but have some other idiosyncratic usage; but "normative" I
do take as a slur - a slur on Marx's scientific socialism.

>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.  

My point entirely is that the Communist Party did not overturn existing
social relations (except feudal ones) but rather consolidated and
expanded the emerging capitalist social relations, specifically those of
wage labour and capital. You appear to regard this as incidental or of
secondary importance; I regard it as being central to Marxism. Working
class self-emancipation of course necessarily precludes the leading role
of the party. Lenin's conception of a vanguard party played no small
part in bringing about state capitalism, ensuring that workers were
dispossessed in the realm of political democracy as they were
dispossessed in the social relations of production.

>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.

Your acceptance of the fact that there was "social ownership" but not
democratic control shows that "social ownership" and "the plan" were
legal fictions, meaningless as far as the working class were concerned.
Every country in the world has its own historically evolved mix of
private and state capitalism, and although some of these regimes provide
some goods and services free (eg health) that makes them no less
capitalist for all that. Workers are under the domination of capital,
just as they were in the USSR, and would be in a Trotskyist "workers
state".
-- 
Lew


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