Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 18:37:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: state capitalism Comrades, Lew has distorted my argument. 1. He says that the SU destroyed the old capitalist class but not capitalist property relations. This is wrong, both factually and theoretically, and his statement was phrased as a restatement of my position and then incorrectly assessed as a non sequitur. I did not say that the Revolution destroyed the old capitalist class (although it certainly did). I said, very clearly and purposely, that the capitalist class was eliminated. This means that capitalist property relations were dissolved (the capitalist class is a category embedded in capitalist property relations). And even if there were capitalist relations in the Soviet Union (which there were not), this does not mean that the Soviet Union was a capitalist social formation! A social formation can only be characterized as capitalist when the capitalist mode of production predominates. This is why state ownership in the US does not make the US a state socialist society, because the capitalist mode of production predominates. Same with the fascism, where the state takes a large role in securing exploitative relations of a capitalist sort--since the capitalist mode of production predominates, fascism is a form of capitalism. The predominate mode of production in the Soviet Union was socialist, therefore the social formation is correctly understood as socialism. Because the state took such a massive role in organizing economic activity, and since the governmental process was not democratic in the communistic sense, the Soviet social formation is correctly characterized as *state* socialism. No non sequitur here, Lew, just straight-forward Marxist analysis. 2. I said that the capitalist mode of production, and this holds in both the ideal-typical sense and empirically, has a corresponding superstructure of the character I have described. For most of capitalism's history, once it predominated as a mode of production, and the general character of the world system and the corresponding interstate political system, these characteristics-- liberalism, the profit motive, consumerism, etc.--have dominated. Fascism is an aberration, without question emerging from capitalism (indeed, many Marxists argue that liberalism, with its emphasis on rationalization, must exist for fascism to emerge in the form that that it did, both in fascism's hyperrationalism and in its reaction against liberalism and democracy). To say that capitalism's typical and historically regular corresponding superstructure is negated by a historical system that only emerged in a few nation-states and was demolished in a failed bid at world conquest *by* other capitalist nations (and, of course, since Lew believes that the Soviet Union was a capitalist nation, then by all the capitalist nations in the world--those who participated in the war) is to go badly off the rails. This argument does not mean that fascist tendencies do not run throughout the global system. They do. But they are being treated by many to be some sort of new organizing principle of global capitalism. I too used to hold this position a couple of years back. I was wrong. Andy Austin --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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