Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 20:30:06 +0100
From: Hugh-AT-pseud.pseud
Subject: Re: M-INTRO: Johannes' questions


Justin writes some good stuff, mainly on Hegel, but also the following,
which isn't so good:

>This presumes that there have been socialist societies. In Marx's sense,
>there have not. For him, the sine qua non of socialism was that the
>working class rules. That was not the case in the USSR or the ex-Bloc
>countries.

a) True enough, there have not been socialist societies in Marx's sense.
Marx saw socialism as taking over from where capitalism left off. The USSR
etc came to exist in a world market dominated by imperialism and at a
tremendous material disadvantage to the leading imperialist nations.

However, the USSR was indeed a state in which the working class ruled. In a
world divided into two major classes (the bourgeoisie (owners of capital)
and the working class (owners of and dependent on the sale of labour power)
-- we'll ignore the landlords (owners of the land) for the sake of
simplification and because they've fused almost completely with the
bourgeoisie), then a state is either bourgeois or working class. It is
complete utopianism to claim anything else as this means inventing a new
class or classes from the top of your head.

If you claim the USSR was bourgeois, you have big problems dealing with the
role of publically owned means of production and the state monopoly of
foreign trade and the role of central planning. You also have even more
trouble dealing with the relations of production in which every citizen had
a given place in the productive system as their birthright and consequent
rights to child care, education, culture, health and age care.

The orthodox Marxist position on this is that the USSR was a state with a
primitive socialist economic base (see Preobrazhensky's book The New
Economics), ie non-capitalist and non-feudalist, post-capitalist in fact,
but in a world under the thumb of more powerful late capitalist
(imperialist) economies and their protective states. Over this foundation
however, a non-proletarian regime usurped power in a prolonged
counter-revolutionary struggle lasting for several years in the 1920s. The
Stalinist regime was anti-working class except for the very foundations of
the society, which it needed to defend for the sake of preserving its own
privileges as the ruling caste -- if the imperialists took back power, the
Stalinists would be regarded as just as reprehensible as the genuine
revolutionaries.

What happened after 1968 was that the position of the ruling bureaucracies
grew weaker and weaker throughout the Soviet bloc, so that by the late
1980s, the leading Stalinists were ready to hand back the country to the
bourgeoisie rather than let the working class take power and exert its
democratic rights. The reasoning was that it would be easier to cut a deal
to retain privileges etc with the bourgeoisie than it would be to cut a
deal with the workers.

For the basics of this analysis you'll have to read Trotsky, The Revolution
Betrayed. As for 1989 and afterwards, consider the following prediction
made by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme, the founding document of the
Fourth International, adopted in 1938:


        The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a
        *degenerated workers' state*. Such is the social diagnosis. The
        political prognosis has an alternative character: either the
        bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in
        the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and
plunge
        the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the
        bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.

(The USSR and Problems of the Transitional Epoch)

There's a lot more to say on all this.

Justin continues:

>You also assume (as Marx did, mostly) that markets and socialism are
>incomptable. That is one of Marx's fundamental mistakes, in my view. I
>think a market society can exist without capitalists and with social
>ownership of the meand of production. This is very cryptic. We can talk
>about it more if you like.


Justin's nostalgia for the bourgeois society he knows and loves and can't
imagine dissolving shines through here. For Marx, and anyone with a
smattering of economics, markets are places where commodities are
exchanged, they are the only possible mechanism for this, as the
commodities are produced independently by independent producers without
general planning for the allocation of resources in production and
distribution.

So-called market socialists are merely confusing supply and demand, which
are constant categories in any human society, and have to be brought into
balance one way or another, and markets, which are the mechanism used by
commodity-producing societies for balancing supply and demand against each
other. In non-commodity producing societies, such as socialist society will
be once it's left capitalism well behind it, other mechanisms will be used,
such as consumer reports, producer reports, branch monitoring reports,
eco-system feedback and so on. The conscious nature of the balancing out
will be quite explicit, not a dirty business secret as it is in the
centralized planning of today's big monopoly corporations. The reports will
be available for public scrutiny and huge debates will ensue regarding the
best possible allocation of people's labour and material inputs.


>>"CAPITALISM IS NOT GOING TO COLLAPSE IN ON
>> ITSELF!"
>
> Well, Marx didn't think it would either. That is why he saw a need for a
> revolutionary class to organize


True again, except that Marx saw the need for a revolutionary *party*. He
saw no *need* for a revolutionary class, because one already existed, in
the working class. He had no need to suck one out of his thumb, to *wish* a
revolutionary class into existence.

This distinction is absolutely central and absolutely essential for
understanding Marx's thought. The working class as the historical bearer of
the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the setting up of
non-exploiting socialist society is the single deepest red thread running
through his work, from the Communist Manifesto and before, to the final
pages of Capital.

Take it from me, any talk about the revolutionary capacity of the working
class being played out or never having existed is pure non-Marxist
moonshine. But this topic will return again, we can be sure of that.


By the way, I want to congratulate INTRO on having Justin on board. He can
make points clearly and in a very civilized way, there is little venom and
less malice in him. He's an outstanding representative of a variant of
utopian socialism. He finds it difficult if not impossible to supersede the
bourgeois setup in his thought, but he spits in its eye and speaks what he
sees to be the truth without fear or favour. (And I'm not trying to be
patronizing when I give this characterization of him.) He has suffered
materially in his chosen career because of his commitment to Marxism.

(Perhaps I should give my characterization of others on the list, but it
hasn't seemed necessary. I think it's necessary here because of the depth
of disagreement that will appear between my positions and Justin's. With
some people it's possible to disagree and still have useful exchanges.
Justin is one of them.)


Cheers,

Hugh




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