File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9706, message 208


Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 16:40:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: state capitalism (fwd)


List,

I sent this in the wee hours of the morning. Came back returned. Took me a
minute to figure out what happened. As you can see, I left the "m" off of
"marxism." Now that that us straightened out, here goes. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 04:55:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
To: arxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: M-I: state capitalism

List,

On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, boddhisatva wrote:

> If the state *explicitly* owned everything and the party *explicitly*
> controlled the state, they are, for all intents and purposes, legally
> and in every other way - the same.

If the means of production have been nationalized, then this means the
people as a whole, if organized nationally, own the means of production. 
Whether the people have effective control over the means of production is
an empirical question. It is most likely a matter of degree. On a
comparative basis, considering the total size of the economy, the workers
and peasants saw a much greater, and more equitably distributed, share of
the production output. This would seem to be evidence that the fruits of
national ownership paid off in the expected direction. 

We should be clear on what a state is. The state is that organ in certain
social formations that administers the affairs of a particular class, the
ruling class. In capitalism, this is the capitalist class. In socialism,
this is the worker and peasant classes. (In communism, theoretically,
there would be no state because there would be no social classes.) Again,
the responsiveness of the state to the people is an empirical question,
and varies depending on levels and sectors. There have been times that
capitalists have found the capitalist state less responsive to their
desires and needs. I have never thought concessions won by working class
and popular movements during this century diminished greatly the
capitalist nature of the US social formation (although there are some
Americans, e.g., the John Birchers, who believe it did), but maybe I am
wrong.

Suppose a revolutionary communist party seized control of the federal
government of the United States and socialized all privately held means of
production (take the weak case, say they nationalized the means of
production), expropriating the capitalist class. The revolutionary
communist party in control of the government now runs the economy at the
national level. Would you still say that the United States is a
capitalist country?

Again, what of degrees and fundamentals? Did the fact that fascism
abolished liberal democracy make Italy any less a capitalist country in
the 1920s? (Capitalists ideologues will tell you it did.)

> Therefore, the party CLEARLY exercised control over the means of
> production that was based on OWNERSHIP.  

The question is what kind of ownership. Was it ownership as exists under
capitalism, where an owning class holds and controls capital privately and
extracts surplus value from workers in wage-labor relations and realizes
this value in a commercial market in the form of profit, accumulating
capital to further increase this class' hold over society and increasing
the rate of future exploitation of labor power? Or was it collective (or
public) ownership of the means of production in a transitional socialist
society under siege conditions with a community party running the economy
with centralized planning, with the goal to raise the level of productive
forces for both the purpose of defending the country from capitalist
aggression and to create a level of productive capacity for the
transformation of the social formation to sustain greater levels of
socialism? And what were the goals of the leadership? To control
production in the fashion they did (at the national level) for personal
gain? Or because they were working to raise the productive forces?

In the Soviet Union, the private ownership of the means of production had
been abolished (with minor exceptions). There was no unemployment (not
structural, anyway), and social services (housing, medical care,
transportation) were available to all citizens at no, or minimal out of
pocket cost. Education and other cultural experiences were generally open
to all (of course, there were admission standards to higher education). 
These are the characteristics of a socialist society, not a capitalist
one. Was it ideal socialism? Depends on one's ideal. It was working
socialism.

There is still to be resolved (although probably not here) the basic
disagreement over what socialism is. Boddhisatva and some others here see
socialism as basically communism. The two terms are roughly synonymous. 
Under this definition we must have something very close to communism to
say we have socialism. But this is not what Marx and Engels argued, not
that there is anything inherently wrong with deviating from Marx and
Engels.

What is generally overlooked in the desire to paint the Soviet government
as a totalitarian monolith, is that the working class *was* represented
almost at all levels of government. Workers and peasants formed the
largest proportion of government members, and they worked to make sure
that state policy conformed with the needs of the people they represented.
The Soviet Union was so successful for so long precisely because the
system worked for the majority of the people. What is often argued is that
since pluralism and competitive elections were not present in the state
socialist system that the people had no say-so in political affairs. But
this is a bourgeois standard. A single party does not represent
totalitarianism if people are constantly moving in and out of the party
and the party adapts to the changing consensus of the people and to
changing material conditions. (In many of the Soviet-style countries,
there were multiple parties, anyway.)

The Soviet experience should be criticized. While it is true that in local
and often in regional governmental levels the working class and peasant
class representatives were proportional to the numbers in the working and
peasant classes, as an observer moved up in government levels there were
decreasing numbers of workers and peasants representing the people. At
the top, at the level of national planning, there were practically no
workers or peasants. This was not something that is to be regarded as a
positive development. This was a bad thing. But it was something to work
on, something more to democratize. The Soviet system was a substantial
improvement over what existed before. This is not something that the
capitalist world can claim--that workers and farmers have substantial
representation in government, particularly in day-to-day affairs of
production. Fix it? Yes. Abandon it? No.

The focus, unfortunately, has generally frozen on Stalin. There was
considerable history in the Soviet Union after Stalin. The system was
increasingly democratized during these decades, and movements were made
towards greater degrees of socialist character. In 1986, the revised
Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reaffirmed their
commitment to continued socialist transformation towards the goal of
communism. Although still under siege, the Soviet Union continued to make
progress. The 1960s and 1970s saw considerable advancements throughout the
socialist world, advancements in political affairs and especially in the
level of productive capacity (e.g., by the mid-1980s, the socialist world
accounted for more than 40% of the world's industrial production, whereas
they accounted for 30% of the world's population).

Defense of the accomplishments of the first socialist era in world history
are too easily dismissed as "Stalinist apologia." A fair and honest
appraisal of what transpired during the historical period is not Stalinist
apologia. The anticommunism that dismisses such an appraisal in such
knee-jerk terms is reactionary, left or right. The question we debate is
not whether the Soviet Union and the rest of the socialist world had or
still has problems. We all grant that there have set-backs, "deformities," 
unexpected emergences; we should have this discussion. The primary
question is whether the Soviet Union was a form of socialism or
capitalism. A secondary question is whether it was neither and therefore a
new and unique social formation.

> This was not capitalist
> ownership, but how can you possibly say that it was socialist ownership
> when the vast majority of the proletariat was explicitly excluded from
> expressing control over the means of production for the stated, legal
> reason that NOT THEY but the explicitly, legal subsidiary of the Communist
> party - the state - did? 

As I already argued, the vast majority of the proletariat and the peasants
participated in their government and had degrees of control over the means
of production. National planning was carried out by the Communist Party at
the highest levels of government. All in all, despite their excesses, they
didn't do such a bad job. Life for Russians was a hell of a lot better
under communist rule than it was before it or after it. 

> 	Your argument simply ignores the fact of counter-revolution.  It
> ignores the fact that there was no significant history of capitalist
> ownership in Russia.  

I think you might want to go back and check the history on this, that is,
your point about capitalist ownership in Russia. What is meant by
"significant"?

> Ownership, (and let's be clear - an essential part
> of the feudal state is that the sovereign feudal order OWNS everything) 
> went from the Tsar to the Bolsheviks.  Never, ever, was the central
> condition of socialism - "workers control the means of production" -
> either a fact or an intent of any regime in Russia.

I must repeat my criticism of this point. This is a misunderstanding of
feudalism. "Sovereign feudal order" is a meaningless term. The feudal
system endured for centuries, while empires came and went. Beneath the
broad strokes of popular history (the recording of the Carolingian Empire,
the Ottoman empire, etc.) the lord-vassal relationship formed the core of
feudalism. There was no state in the sense that it could be compared to
the Soviet state (or any modern state). State(s) fragmented, came and
went, communication was poor, no large region was ever really unified,
etc. (I don't want to bore the channel with the details of feudal
society). As I said in an earlier post, feudalism was, at best, a
federated, decentralized system held together at the macrolevel by a loose
hierarchy of loyalties among lords. In so far as the state held any
power, towards the very end with the rise of feudal monarchy, traditional
state functions, such as taxation, standing armies, and a state
bureaucracy, were secondary concerns and capacities, and were not really
centralized and well-coordinated even then. The deepest reach of the state
system was through the courts, and, again, this was towards the end of
feudalism, at the dawn of the emergence of nation-state and the capitalist
mode of production. (It would be this juridical extension, combined with
emerging national movements, that would form the basis of the
nation-state).
 
> 	Once again, the reason that you are not seeing you error is that
> you ignore the fact that the capitalist *revolution* established civil
> law, and that ideology is essential for socialist development. Civil law
> is the idea that people can govern their own affairs with the state only
> as referee.  

Not exactly. The division of the productive sphere into private and public
parts, i.e., into civil society and into political society (the state and
formal government), in capitalist society was a liberal-democratic trick. 
It created polyarchic domination, or bourgeois democracy, where the formal
machinery of government had the appearance of democratic redress, but
where the core of social production was placed off limits to the majority. 
The state has never really acted as a referee; that is liberal ideology.
The state under capitalism advances the capitalist interests by being
passive when it comes to the majority's needs and aggressive when it comes
to the needs of capitalism and the ruling minority. Imperfections in the
system see that people get their way occasionally. But real power is
class power and, because it is dissimulated in the private sphere, it
secures the lion's share of consensual domination through the dominant
institutions of civil society. Sure, when consensual mechanisms break
down, the coercive arm of the bourgeoisie--the state--comes out in the
open to sweep away the subversives. But societies which rely on this sort
of overt showing of the class character of the state do not last too long.
(One species, the inclusive dictatorship, does fairly well, and some
neo-Weberians argue that they can last indefinitely, but the crudest of
these systems, what academics call the exclusive dictatorship, don't do
well at all. The core capitalist countries are forever cleaning up their
messes.) In any event, I fear this error, of falling for the shadow and
missing the substance, is what gives so many democratically-minded people
faith in notions of market socialism.

> This was the basis for the ideology of the American and
> French revolutions. It was an essential and dialectical advance for
> society.  Socialism must follow the dialectical road that that advance
> paved. Socialism, in essence, must seek to expand the realm of civil law.
> Socialism asserts that people have the capacity to govern themselves
> without a fetishized state.  This is why the state logically falls away. 
> This is the reason that socialism rejects bourgeois-democracy.  Not
> because it is bad, but because it is insufficient to express the will of
> people to live as they did before the secular fall of man.  The civil law
> which capitalists created to undermine the feudalist imperial state will
> undermine the capitalist state. 

You are overtheorizing, or something in excess, on this point. The French
bourgeois revolution (there really was no American revolution, it was a
forced circulation of bourgeois elites and the creation of a national
state), like all bourgeois power grabs using the ideology of
liberal-democracy, was a trick to maintain power in the hands of elite
property owners at the same time enlisting the farmers and workers in a
war to overthrow monarchy and the landed aristocracy (who were really more
often assimilated than eliminated). It was a partial, co-optive
"democracy." Wallerstein nailed this when he wrote recently that "it must
be remembered that democracy and liberalism are not twins, but for the
most part opposites. Liberalism was invented to counter democracy. The
problem that gave birth to liberalism was how to contain the dangerous
classes, first within the core, then within the world-system as a whole. 
The liberal solution was to grant limited access to political power and
limiting sharing of the economic surplus-value, both at levels that would
not threaten the process of the ceaseless accumulation of capital and the
state-system that sustained it." I believe that Gramsci developed this
point quite well, and there are numerous other theorists who have exploded
this deception. This is to be found in Marx, as well, in his discussions
of civil society. What is important to note here is that while the
capitalist system help put the population in a better position to realize
a better life under socialism, the bourgeois political apparatus, and the
institutions embedded in civil society, served to stymie this
transformations.
 
> 	The Soviet system is simply a (positive, beneficial)  deformation
> of the Imperial state. This is why, for all their sophistication in 
> other areas, the Russians probably have a less civilized business
> climate than Peru.  They never developed the infrastructure to honor,
> protect or design legal relationships among citizens.  Everything was
> the province of the state.  Again, this is not socialism.  

This is Alec Nove's argument, btw--see his article "The Fall of
Empires--Russia and the Soviet Union" (1994). (I can come up with the full
reference if you need it.) 

> Unfortunately your argument seems
> to insist that state control plus good intent equals socialism.  You say
> you are a materialist, but instead of analyzing the actual mechanism of
> Soviet state power, you look at their Bolshevik pedigrees and their
> rhetoric.

This is an odd charge for somebody who just wrote "the Russians probably
have a less civilized business climate than Peru" and "they never
developed the infrastructure to honor, protect or design legal
relationships among citizens" to make. I regard such arguments as cultural
idealism.
 
> 	Who cares what their motivations were?  Certainly materialists
> shouldn't care.  

Why shouldn't a materialist be concerned with motivations? We are
historical materialists, us Marxists, not vulgar materialists. Marx never
claimed that ideas didn't matter, rather that they emerged from an
objective social and material context. In the Preface to *A Contribution
to the critique of Political Economy*, Marx specifically said that we
become consciousness of the contradictions in society and at the
ideological level battle it out. That the leadership of the Communist
Party were consciousness of the contradictions in the capitalist world
system, and were consciousnessly struggling to transform their society
through the spread of consciousness and the raising of productive forces,
is central to the issue of praxis. Many workers are not class
consciousness, not subjectively aware of their objective class interests. 
Are you suggesting that we don't try to help them become subjectively
aware of their objective reality of social class because "motivations
don't matter"? The capitalist class is aware of their interests generally,
and we can discern quite a lot from understanding their motivations (of
course, this must go hand in hand with an analysis of the social and
material context in which those motivations are expressed and carried
out).

> We should care how their power was constructed and
> perpetuated.  If it was not through the proletariat , we must reject its
> claim to be socialism.  Do you really believe that the Soviet regime
> perpetuated its power through the proletariat?  The Russian proletariat
> seems not to.

I don't want to sound elitist, but I don't think generally the working
class is aware of their objective class interests anywhere in the world
(many are, of course, but most?). And we sure won't make any advances in
the consciousness department if we agree with a bunch of insufficiently
conscious workers and peasants that socialism is a lost cause. According
to this logic, I might suppose there is good reason for forgetting about
transforming the US society, for organizing socialist and communist
parties here in America, since it is obvious that the workers and farmers
here are so overwhelmingly in support of the American system of
capitalism. Stop off in a Waffle House in Valdosta, Georgia and ask the
workers and farmers there what they think of communism or socialism. They
will tell you, pointedly, that they don't like it and they don't want it. 
They are wrong.

Go back to the second decade of this century. A global crisis of
capitalism and world war created a context for revolution. And there were
organized communist movements vying for the role of leading the world
communist movement. It certainly isn't up to us to say that Russians
should have waited for some optimum level of development of the forces of
production. Revolutions had been breaking out over a long period of global
instability and imperial restructuring. The revolution in 1917 signaled a
break in capital's domination. The Bolsheviks were not only organizing the
Soviet Union but the entire global movement. And things appeared to be
moving towards a global movement. Bavaria and Hungary in 1918-1919,
radical movements in Italy and Great Britain, central and northern German,
in Bulgaria. The communist movement in China was on the rise, and
throughout the colonial world communist movements were gaining steam. 
There was a general strike in Great Britain in 1926. All of this was
coordinated by the Comintern. 

These developments were the work of class consciousness individuals taking
risks for the working and peasant classes, working to develop
consciousness among the masses. Their work was paying off. Boddhisatva,
the working class will not come automatically to a consciousness of their
social location. Particularly not when the capitalist class, who owns and
controls the means of ideological production, is engaging daily in a war
for the minds of the people. You want to start with democracy. I would
love nothing more than that. But if the people do not arrive at a class
consciousness sufficient enough for democratic transformation of society,
then do you suggest that we just throw up our hands and say, well the
people have spoken, and leave it at that? And if, according to Marx, the
political superstructure lags behind transformation in the base of
society, then is it quite possible for there to be a socialist mode of
production without the corresponding political superstructure not in place
yet? Especially considering that it took a revolutionary political
movement to consciousnessly reorder the social and material base of
society? 

It was this mentality, a shrinking from the task, that began to unravel
the world communist movement almost from the beginning. Reformists in the
leadership and brutal suppression halted the movement. Bavaria and Hungary
fell, and in Germany and Bulgaria movements defeated. Then the rise of
fascism throughout Europe saved capitalism there just long enough. In
China, the communists were crushed, cadres driven into the country-side
(where they would radicalize the peasants). By the mid 1920s, Russia was
alone, surrounded, and under siege. 

Russia remained alone through the second World War, where they were
invaded and nearly crushed by reactionary capitalist forces. Yet they
liberated the people from the grip of fascism, and spread out into Europe
to put a buffer between the people and the capitalist encirclement. And,
liberated from capitalist domination, the communists parties of various
nations throughout Europe came to power. In the case of Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, for example, the communists came to power through
democratically elected coalition governments. In many countries, China,
Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Albania, for example, communist parties rose to
power with little or no help from the Soviet Union. It is crucial to
recognize in all of this that the danger to the communist project wasn't
over with the defeat of Germany. The US and planners for the world
capitalist class developed a comprehensive strategy for the suppression of
the worker movement. The siege continued.

I know we all know the history, but it goes to the question of intent and
historical context and conjuncture. What were the communists in Russia
trying to accomplish? What did they have to do to survive? Do I agree with
everything they did? No, of course not. But hindsight is 20/20 and ideals
are so often to be damned. On balance, considering the context and the
starting point, considering all that transpired, the project by the 1970s
was a considerable success. Could it have been better? You bet. Is it
better today? Right now? Are Russians better off that they were 30 years
ago? 

The proletarians you mention there in Russia may not subjectively believe
the Soviets were for them. But objectively, they were much better off then
than they are now.

I am reminded of the story of the spray painted scrawl across a building,
I believe in the former Yugoslavia, that read "BRING BACK COMMUNISM!" 
Beneath it somebody else had later written in spray paint, "WE NEVER HAD
COMMUNISM." Beneath this, in yet another hand, was scrawled, "THEN BRING
BACK WHATEVER IT WAS WE HAD!!"


Love,
Andrew Austin







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