Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 10:34:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: State capitalism


On Wed, 2 Jul 1997, rakesh bhandari wrote:

> OK, then why did Marx emphasize  that the dual conception of labor was the
> pivot of the whole critical conception; why did Marx declare with rare
> bravura that this was his most important discovery (for a collection of
> relevant citations, see Henryk Grossmann's Marx, The Classical Economists

Rakesh, the reason I keep stressing over and over again the need to study
specific societies and histories is that this is the only way such
categories as labor and exploitation start to take on meaning. The reason
I am always writing about *places* like Nicaragua, Cuba, Algeria, Costa
Rica, the former Soviet Union during the period of the NEP, the United
States in the 1930s, etc. is that this is the only way *class relations*
can come into focus. Marx, above all, was interested in class relations. 
One of the greatest misrepresentations of Marx's concept of class is the
tendency some thinkers have to anatomize it, to put it on an operating
table and dissect it. There is nothing like this in Marx and the best way
to avoid this mechanical, schematic approach is to apply your Marxist
analysis to the living class struggle. 

The point I was making about "Capital" is worth repeating. This work would
not have been possible unless Marx and Engels had not been so traumatized
by the violence and oppression of the industrial revolution. Re-read
Engels' "Conditions of the Working Class in England" and you will discover
the source of the anger that moved them to come to a scientific
understanding of the nature of class oppression. Hegelian philosophy,
Ricardo's economics and French utopian socialist thought were the
ideological forerunners of the Marx-Engels research into capitalist
society, but it was capitalist society itself that compelled their
attention and turned them into revolutionaries.

What happens when you lose track of society itself is that your
philosophical categories start to become completely detached from reality. 
Let's take for an example the whole question of wage labor. A study of
capitalism reveals that in instance after instance several things have to
happen. The rural economy, based on village-communal subsistence farming,
is an obstacle to capitalist development. The nascent bourgeoisie has to
attack this economy and has a variety of means available to it.  Marx
wrote about the enclosure acts and the introduction of taxation. In order
to pay taxes, the peasant needs money. The way to get money is to be a
part-time wage laborer. In order to create a mass of wage laborers, the
state enacts enclosure laws that throws the peasantry off the land. This
process is taking place in Mexico today just as it did in 18th century
England, the focus of Marx's investigation. 

Central to the success of capitalism is "free labor". This of course is a
big lie. What truly characterizes the relationship between boss and worker
is *coercion*. In exchange for a pittance wage, the worker is obliged to
work long hours under unsafe conditions. The only way the workers can
protect their interests is by forming unions that the bosses resist with
violence. The main method, however, of enforcing work discipline is the
power of the boss to FIRE the worker. If a union contract exists, the boss
will discover other means of intimidation. Today, this takes the form of
runaway shops. Workers are blackmailed into working long hours in unsafe
conditions because the boss will move the factory to another country.

So what were the conditions of wage labor in "capitalist" Cuba during the
relatively self-sufficient years of Soviet support? Were the workers
subject to the sort of insecurities that exist in Mexico's "maquiladoras"?
These were Raul Castro's observations in 1979:

"The lack of work discipline, unjustified absences from work, deliberate
go-slows so as not to surpass the norms--which are already low and poorly
applied in practice--so they won't be changed...In contrast to capitalism,
when people in the countryside worked an exhausting 12-hour workday and
more, there are a good many instances today especially in agriculture, of
people...working no more than four or six hours, with the exception of
cane-cutters and possibly a few other kinds of work. We know that in many
cases heads of brigades and foremen make a deal with workers to meet the
norm in half a day and then go off and work for the other half for some
nearby small farmer; or to go slow and meet the norm in seven or eight
hours; or do two or three norms in a day and report them over other days
on which they don't go to work..."

What kind of capitalism is this that has such a brazenly undisciplinable
workforce? The answer is that it is not capitalism at all. The bastardized
socialism that existed in the former Soviet Union and that exists to a
lesser degree in Cuba *guaranteed* a job. Moishe Lewin's new book
"Russia-USSR-Russia" is filled with references to the general slackness of
the Soviet factory system. Any Soviet emigree will describe the situation
in less scientific terms: "In Russia there was plenty of unemployment, all
of it taking place on the job." 

The collapse of the Soviet Union is ultimately tied to the failure of the
system to have the sort of technological and human dynamism--both
managerial and worker--that the West had. The Soviet bureaucrats who
wanted to change the system envied the labor *discipline* that existed in
the free market west. If a worker did not perform, they could get the ax.
Under such pressure, the miner would have no choice except to go and dig
coal no matter whether a mine would collapse or not. Under such pressure,
the fast food servers would have to serve a hamburger in 20 seconds flat
or they would find themselves on the street.

This is not the way that socialism should operate needless to say.
Socialism should inspire people to work harder than they do under
capitalism because the work is for the good of society rather than the
profit of the entrepreneur. Also, socialism should welcome technological
innovation because the replacement of living labor by a machine will not
cause the misery of unemployment but merely a change in the sort of work
one does.

At any rate, what existed in the former Soviet Union was not capitalism of
any sort. The reason it is tempting to use the word capitalism is that
there was social inequality and repression, the superficial features of
class society. As Marxists, we need to dig a little deeper to understand
these societies--and when we do, we discover that there is an entirely
different set of social relations. The workers were free from insecurity
but did not rule society. The state attempted planning but the planning
turned out to be undemocratic, thus it had an irrational character. The
problem was stagnation and inefficiency rather than the sort of brutal
exploitation that marks the class relations of a genuinely capitalist
society. 

In understanding the sort of bastardized socialism that existed in the
former Soviet Union, we have an obligation to remind ourselves of its
advances. Against a backdrop of 70 years of imperialist aggression, the
Soviet Union transformed itself into a major industrial power, provided a
safety net of health, employment and housing--no matter how
second-rate--to every member of society and assisted national liberation
movements across the planet. Now that the Soviet Union has transformed
itself into something that looks like a typical third-world cesspool, we
should be reminding ourselves of what has been lost rather than what never
existed. The loss of genuine socialist measures is much more grievous than
the failure to deliver a pure form of communism that was never objectively
possible to begin with.

Louis Proyect




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