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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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