Date: Sat, 5 Jul 1997 10:44:05 +0100
From: Lew <Lew-AT-dialogues.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: State capitalism


In article <199707040855.JAA22205-AT-indigo.ie>, Karl Carlile
<joseph-AT-indigo.ie> writes

>Karl: Hi Lew! If, as you claim, the Soviet Union was state capitalist 
>how then did exhange relations prevail and beyond that again value 
>relations?

Hello Karl


The main features of state capitalism are:

1. State ownership of the principal means of production.

2. Generalised wage labour.

3. Generalised use of money and monetary calculation.

4. A free market for consumer goods in the form of agricultural products 
   and light industrial products.

5. A market for means of production which is co-ordinated by the state.

6. Widescale central planning. Planning takes the principal forms of 
   state departments allocating supplies and directing products within 
   the sphere of heavy industry, setting production targets, fixing 
   prices and directing the intersectoral flows of capital.

7. A sizeable black market.

This model applies not only to the former Soviet Union but other similar
regimes. It enables us to generate a number of predictions. The value
realationship of generalised wage labour leads us to suppose that their
is a class division and class struggle within society. There is plenty
of evidence, in *Workers Against the Gulag* and elsewhere of a bitter
class war, to the extent that that is possible in a police state. On the
other hand, there is ample evidence of a well-entrenched ruling class,
recorded in Voslensky's *Nomenklatura* among others, living on a
priviliged income. They are mostly the same people who were bureaucrats
under Brezhnev and are now plutocrats under Yeltsin with the privatised
businesses.

The concept of value is of course more complicated than this, as I'm
sure you realise Karl. But commodity production and exchange are an
integral part of that concept, and they explain the commodity nature of
labour power and how it is used to extract surplus value out of wage
labour. In pre-capitalist modes of exploitation the result was surplus
labour or product, but it is only under capitalism that the surplus
takes the form of monetary profit. This explains why the former Soviet
Union was able to go into transfer payments on such a huge scale. How
else were they able to finance things not only like health and
education, but the vast military-industrial-complex. The only viable
explanation is that they were able to do so because they, via central
planning, were able to re-distribute surplus value from the profitable
sectors of the economy such as light engineering. Of course, in the long
run such a re-distribution hindered the development of the forces of
production and fatally undermined the competitiveness of the economy in
a global market.

I hope I've answered your question, Karl. But there is one more thing I
would like to add. I would argue that when it comes to identifying
social formations and the change from one formation to another, this
"realist" approach is the only sound methodology. An "empiricist"
approach cannot do this and, indeed, assumes that which it is meant to
explain. In this latter approach for instance, interesting and relevant
for other purposes though they are, no amount of data concerning
literacy levels, mortality rates, growth of GDP etc etc,  can help in
identifying social formations and their underlying dynamic. 
 
-- 
Lew


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