File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9707, message 29


Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 19:19:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: M-I: clarification


List,

My account is acting funky. I had to postpone the previous message a
couple of times and call it back up because sentences were disappearing,
etc. Looks like I still hadn't solved the problem when I sent it off.

The sentence that was cut off simply noted that Palestine was under Roman
rule at that time. The second sentence about wage labor and capital being
a necessary but not sufficient condition was meant to stand alone.

Lew has an undialectical and very mechanical view of what constitutes
economic structure and process. Capitalism is a social relation. Lew sees
only some necessary components and leaps to an unwarranted conclusion. 
Moreover, and this was what I was really asking, even if we suppose that
capitalist relations existed in the Soviet Union, it is a huge leap to
conclude from the mere presence of capitalist relations that a society is
capitalist without any evidence. 

My previous error in supposing the Soviet Union was state capitalist is
precisely because of an insufficient understanding of what capitalism is.

Andrew Austin




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