File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9706, message 526


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





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