Date: Sun, 8 Jun 1997 01:05:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: shmage-AT-pipeline.com (Shane Mage)
Subject: Re: M-I: state capitalism


Andrew quotes Marx in reply to Neil:

>> Are you saying that  Stalin was right when in 1950 he admiited
>> the dominance of commodity production but said "In the USSR,
>> it is not the same as capitalism, we have socialist commodity
>> production in the USSR"? Get that trick bagger, "socialist commodity
>>  production'! This is just rubbish and has nothing to do with socialism or
>> communism but everything to do with lame alibais  for defense
>
>Let us take a look at Marx on this matter. Wouldn't you just shit if I
>were to quote Marx talking about the initial stage of communism having
>characteristics of bourgeois social relations and operating on the same
>principle of commodity exchange as that which regulates commodity
>production? Coming on here and telling me to read Marx, and then thinking
>your made the big play by throwing Stalin in my face about "socialist
>commodity production" and whatnot--Oh man, wouldn't that be embarrassing?
>
>Marx wrote in *The Critique of the Gotha Programme* that the first stage
>of communist transformation would be "in every respect, economically,
>morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old
>society from whose womb is emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer
>receives back from society--after the deductions have been made--exactly
>what he gives to it.... The same amount of labour which he has given to
>society in one form he receives back in another [there's that 'from each
>according to his ability to each according to his work' thing some people
>on this list want to deny so badly].

Hold on here.  When this barbarous phrase first appeared, Trotsky
immediately pointed out the contradiction between its two parts--as long as
people must depend on payment for their work in order to live, they cannot,
absolutely cannot, be said to be contributing according ro their
"abilities."  They are subject to the law of value that compels them to
contribute according to the social demand for their labor-time.  Only in
communist society, where the "springs of social wealth" flow so freely that
noone need be compelled to labor in exchange for   subsistence at a fully
human standard, can individuals freely choose how to express themselves in
accord with their "abilities," without regard how society-as-a-whole (ie.,
the market) values those abilities.

>Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulates the
>exchange of >commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values.
>Content and form are changed, >because under the altered circumstances no
>one can give anything except his
>labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership
>of individuals except individual means of consumption. Hence, *equal
>right* here is still in principle--*bourgeois right*, although principle
>and practice are no longer at loggerheads."
>
>Well, he goes on. But the point has been made. Here, in socialist society,
>the initial stage of the work towards communism, the same principles that
>regulate the exchange of commodities are still in force and society is
>stamped with the mark of capitalist society. Was Stalin, therefore,
>entirely wrong to argue that the Soviet Union also had characteristics of
>capitalist society?... Seems to me that Stalin is talking about the
>production of
>commodities in socialist society. Did socialism in the Soviet Union
>operate on exchange relations during Stalin's rule? Seems it did, since it
>was the socialist stage...But the first stage of communism is not
>full-blown communism, at least according to Marx (and Engels, Lenin,
>etc.). And neither was the Soviet Union full-blown
>communism. Rather it was socialism...

To call the Stalinized USSR "socialist" in this way is the purest petitio
principii.  The class nature of the Stalinized USSR is the class nature of
the ruling bureaucracy (as Trotsky said, when the state owns the means of
production the nature of the society depends on who "owns" the state).  In
his last years, Trotsky wrote that the nature of the Soviet Union had "not
yet been determined by history."  He saw the bureaucracy as determined by a
still-unresolved contradiction between the capitalist nature of its
production and exchange relations and its origins in the greatest
revolution in human history.  In 1997, nearly sixty years later, I don't
see how we can deny that the nature of the Soviet Union has indeed been
decided by history, and decided in a way that wipes out all assertions of
its "socialist" (in the Marxian, as contrasted to the National, sense)
character.  The fact that "privatization" in the [ex]Soviet Union changed
nothing in the class owning and controlling the means of production except
the form in which its heirs inherited their privileges (a change, to be
sure, for the worse, just like privatization in the rest of the capitalist
world) is proof that the bureaucracy, which in fact had its origin in the
bloody counterrevolution that we call the Great Purges and not in the
October Revolution, was indeed a capitalist class and an organic part of
the world capitalist system.

Shane Mage




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