Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 14:45:56 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: What's in a Name?: Definitions, Theories, and Reality [Re: M-I:


I agree with Carrol that the debate on whether to call the Soviet Union
"state capitalist," in itself, is rather sterile, and in any case it is too
late for this debate to have any power to intervene in the course of
history that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the economic
and other degenerations that afflict it and other countries now restored to
the status of the real capitalist periphery.

But I am concerned about the future of theory as well as praxis of marxism,
and as I wrote earlier, to characterize the Soviet Union "state capitalist"
changes the definition of capitalism, hence our understanding of
capitalism, in a way that diminishes the explanatory power of marxism. So
that is why I think it is rather important for Andy and Louis to win this
debate.

I think the proponents of the "state capitalist" theory are utopian in
their conception of socialism (as Louis Proyect pointed out in his replies
to them on the Cuban question) and empiricist in both their understandings
of capitalism as reality and of marxism as a theory to explain it and its
ideologies.

The utopian quality of their arguemnts, I believe, is most clearly
evidenced in the way they regard the abolishing of the market and the state
ownership of the means of production as a "minor" change. No living (or
dead for that matter) capitalist has ever regarded this change in the mode
of ownership as a "minor" affair. Most of the time, they resort to ruthless
repression when even a mildly nationalistic and social democratic
government tries to even buy, let alone expropriate, capitalist properties.
Fascism is a historical example of how a segment of the capitalist class
would use a certain form of statism and corporatism to manage an economic
and political crisis, but even then the private appropriation of surplus
value was not seriously challenged.

The empiricist character of their arguments can be seen in their lack of
interest in identifying and explaining the *generative mechanism* that
produces and reproduces the social relations of capitalism, gives it a
possibility of as well as tendency toward a crisis, and endows it with
human agents who are motivated to manage and/or postpone a crisis, and so
forth. The "state capitalism" theory doesn't go beyond description of
perceptible features and into the investigation of causal relationships.
Empiricism also makes theory static.

Paul proposes the concept of "control," and I agree with him that this
concept does open up new horizones of research, but I side with Andy that
"control" does not have the status of the *generative mechanism* which
makes economy capitalist.

Yoshie




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