Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 04:41:43 +0100
From: Jorn Andersen <jorn.andersen-AT-vip.cybercity.dk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Stalin and industry


At 08:47 28-10-96 -0500, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>I have never understood the Cliffite version of the state capitalism
>intrerpreetation of the USSR. Marx defines capitalism, itr seems to me
>correctly, in terms of geberalized commodity production in which a
>dispossesed working class produces stuff for wages that is sold by a
>possessing class that owns the productive assets. Capitalism therefore
>requires:
>
>	1. Private ownership of productive assets
>	2. Wage labor
>	3. Markets (generalized commodity production).
>
>The USSR did not have (1) or (3). Instead it had:
>
>	1. State ownership of productive assets
>	2. Wage labor.
>	3. A command, nonmarket economy, governed by a plan.

Jorn:
Please excuse me for the extensive quoting here.

Justin correctly defines capitalism as generalized commodity production,
i.e. production for a market. His three points characterizing capitalism
are a little more problematic, although not outright wrong. But I think we
have to go a little more into what this means. What is essence and what is
form? Which are the relations between these points?

1. The most fundamental thing is that workers do not have control over the
means of production, but that this control is private, i.e. restricted to
another class. The meaning of private is not necessarily a lot of
individual capitalists, but that they are a distinct class. A specific
group in society, not society as such.

Unless you take that as your point of departure, you will focus on a
specific *form* of capitalism, which had almost outlived itself at the time
when Marx and Engels died, i.e. the capitalist with the high hat employing
a few hundred workers at most.

2. The other fundamental feature of capitalism is the drive to accumulate.
This is imposed upon the capitalists by competition. "Accumulate,
accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!". What makes capitalism
different is not the *existence of* markets, wage labour, private ownership
etc. And not even of accumulation. But that the drive to accumulate is
built in and made general. As Marx said: "Competition makes the immanent
laws of capitalist production to be felt by each capitalist, as external
coercive laws." Either you accumulate or you're out of business.

The means by which this drive to accumulate is forced upon the capitalists
is usually "the market". But the market should not be seen only as a
marketplace for commodities, but also as the market for finance, for access
to technology, raw materials etc.

But to think of competition today as only coming through the market does
not correspond to reality. There are a lot of other means which regulates
and enforces competition. The most important of these are the increasing
intervention by *states* into the sphere of economy in the age of imperialism.

Justin:
>The Cliffite line treats military conmpetition with the West as a
>functional equivalent for markets. While such competition doubtless was
>part of the motive for economic development in the USSR, it was not market
>competition. It did not operate, for example, to minimize costs, increase
>productivity, or put inefficient enterprises out of business. Its dynamics
>were quite different from those of markets.

Jorn:
I think you are turning things upside down. 
Let's first agree that there was dynamism in the USSR. If you take a look
at growth rates they could easily compare with many Western economies in
f.x. the post-war period. In, say 1950-70, they were bigger than the US
(not to mention less well-doing economies), but smaller than Japan and
W-Germany.

Where does this dynamism come from? True, not from inside the USSR (as well
as it did not come from inside the US per se) - but from international
competition. The problem with most views of the USSR is to start from
seeing the USSR in isolation from the rest of the world. You wouldn't do
that with the US, Japan or W. Germany? You would not be able to explain the
high growth rates of esp. Japan and W. Germany, the long boom after WW2 or
poverty in Africa without first looking at the world as a whole. So why the
USSR?

For the new stalinist rulers international competition was *the* decisive
element. Everybody accepts that, except for when they try to work out how
the economy works. It is used to explain (and excuse) the horrors of
stalinism, but not to explain how this affected the economy. Capital,
competition etc. - i.e. the economy as such - in essence is not a thing but
a relation, a social relation. Under capitalism these relations are
constantly developed.

Stalin was quite clear, that "those who lag behind are beaten" and that the
USSR had to catch up with "the rest of the world" very fast, or be crushed.
So the USSR had to compete militarily.


But does this involve competition throughout the economy? Did it mean that
efficiency in the USSR had to be measured against efficiency in the West,
or that costs had to be minimized? Yes and no. We have to look at it in a
historic context.

In the beginning what was important was not efficiency, but the absolute
amount of guns, tanks, steel etc. which were produced. No matter what the
costs, production had to be increased at a litteraly deadly rate. Marginal
efficiency was really low, but production *was* drastically increased - not
to feed the population, but to feed the war macine. In many ways living
standards was lower in the early-mid 30's than in the mid-late 20's.

This process is best compared to the phase of primitive accumulation, which
in England took maybe 200 years or more, but which in Russia took less than
twenty. The english industrial revolution was brutal, but in the USSR so
much more - concentrated 10 times. In the process peasants were forced into
the factories and food production industrialized.

But there are limits to how long such a road can be followed. Especially
after WW2 there were not many peasants left and it also became clear that
the USSR had to participate in the international division of labour in
order to minimize costs. That's the material background to Khruschev's
first opening up. At this stage increasingly efficiency and comparing costs
became important. But the drive behind it all was still military competition.

It is true that the *internal* workings were different to the West, but
this point should not be exaggerated. Also in the West it became
increasingly dangerous to let big companies go out of business. Also in the
West the market dynamics were kept within limits. And remember that we are
talking up to almost 1970 about boom years. When the *international* crisis
then hit, this of course became more of a problem in the USSR, that there
were not the same internal mechanisms to re-organize (just as it is a
problem for a number of banks and large companies in the West).

Justin:
>The Cliffite line also treats state ownership as sort of "collective"
>private ownership of productive assets. The gain of truth in this idea is
>that the productive assetrs were not opwned and controlled by the workers,
>who had no real say in their management at either the point of production
>or at the investment level. But this is not enough to make the ownership
>and control of these assets private. While state officials did cream off
>some of the surplus for their own private use, this was in the nature of
>consumption rather than investment. They were more like rentiers than
>xcapitalists.

Jorn:
We agree, that it is wrong to focus on the private consumption of the
ruling class. As Marx said: "The capitalists own private consumption is a
robbery perpetrated on accumulation." But what this ruling class did was
much more: It *acted*. It forced upon the mass of workers all sorts of
mechanisms to increase production. It manouvred internationaly to increase
its powers. It "revolutionized the means of production". Too look at them
as more or less passive "rentiers" simply does not fit reality.

But first of all they took part in a *class struggle* against the working
class of their countries. It is a myth that there was no resistance - there
was. Also within the USSR.

Such great battles as those in the mid-50's in Berlin, Poland and first of
all of Hungary in 1956, and again in Poland in 1970, 1976 and first of all
1980-81 will forever tell us about the class nature of these regimes.

Justin:
>I agree that the USSR was niot socialist. Socislism involves:
>
>	1. Worker control of production
>	2. Collective ownership of productive assets
>	3. The abolition of wage labor.
>
>The USSR lacked (1) and (3) 

Jorn:
Agreed.

>and only approximated (2).

I see no such approximization.

>Its nature is, in my view, still incompletely understood. 

This is already too long, so I won't go into the problems with these
theories which "incompletely understood" the nature of the USSR ;-) 
I think the most basic mistakes by most of them are - in differing
proportions:

1. To see the USSR in isolation from the rest of the world
2. To have a unrealistic idea about social reality in the USSR - especially
by focusing on the form of class realtions rather than their social content.
3. To compare such unrealistic ideas with an equally unrealistic idea of
the workings of capitalism in the West.


Yours

Jorn



--
Jorn Andersen

Internationale Socialister
Copenhagen, Denmark
IS-WWW: http://www2.dk-online.dk/users/is-dk/



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