File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-11-23.164, message 5


Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 22:39:40 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Stalin and industry



I won't go on with this discussion of state capitalism if it's only me and
the ISo/SWP who is interested; I'm not _that_ interested. ANy votes to
continue?

1. Neil mentions the existence of wage labor in the USSR as the defining
point in whether its (or any) economy is capitalist. This seenms wrong to me:

	a. First because I think there iss ome doubt about whether the
Soviet workers were properly wage laborers in the sense tahtr WEstern
workers are; whether their compensation should be described in terms of
wages. Much of their income was in the form of vested rights to direct
state support in the form of subsidized rent, utilities, food, free
medical care and education, and a practically guaranteed job from which it
was in practice impossibkle to fire anyone. That's not a labor market
anything like those taht prevail even in the social democratic West, much
less in the USA. Moreover, in the absence of generalized commodity
production, it's not clear that it's right to describe the USSR as having
a labor market strictly so called.

	b. But even if it is and the Soviet workers are wage laborers, it
doesn't follow that their wages were paid by capitalists. Capitalists are
not defined by the fact that they pay workers wages but by the faxct thatr
they own productive assets privately and invest them for profit. Neither
condition applies to the managers in the Soviet state. 

2. Jorn says

> 
> 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.
> 
No, that's not what private means. This ignores the individual,a narchic
character of capitalist production. A group can be a class and one with
interests opposed to society, or to otheer groups, including the workers,
without being capitalists.

> 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.
> 
No, I won't. Capitalism withg giant corporations is still capitalism in
the relevant sense. Ownership is private. Investment decisions are
uncoordinated, at least relatively speaking. (Corporate or monoploy
capitalism involves wage labor and production for market, obviously.) 

I am aware that state cap fans like to treat the USSR as if it were a
single great monopolistic corporation. There are certain analogies here,
mainly due to the similarities in the structure of large bureaucratic
enterprises. But the USSR was not in the business of making a profit for
its investors. (Had it been, it might have reformed and survived.) Its
behavior can be better explained, externally, by the "realistic" model in
world politics theory of a Great Power State Actor, which sought to
maximize not profits but prestige and power, limited by the specific
nature of its internal structure. Internally, as I said, we do not have a
terribly good explanation of its behavior, at least economically. I think
Hayekian arguments about planning inefficiencies go a long way towards
explaining its deficiencies and much of its behavior. 

> 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 drive to accumulate is a consequence of capitalism and not a defining
feature. You accumulate or go out of business because if you don't keep
your profit margins up, you run out of money and investors flees for
greener pastures. Neither of these happenedd with the USSR. It had no
investors. It didn't run out of money. (It ran out of political confidence
because of defects in its planning system, followed by an unwise attempt
to dismantle taht system without having anything to put in its place.)
With regard to capitalism, accumulation is a consequence of generalized
commodity production with a class system.

> 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.

Um, You think finance (money), technology, raw matertails, etc, aren't
commodities in capitalism? Of course you know they are. But yoiu're trying
to finesse the issue. In the USSR, intrernally anyway, and in the COMECON,
finance, etc, weren't commodities. They were respectively, rather
imperfect means of marking quantities of goods and attermpts to pruice
their costs and technical inputs and outputs. But this is a fatal
confession for the state cap viewpoint. If they weren't commodities, the
system wasn't capitalist.
 
> 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.
> 
Sure, But that isn't capitalist competition. Athens and Sparta competed.
That didn't make them capitalist.

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?

Well, the Soviet economy was largely autarcic until the 1970s. Although,
its high growth rates in 1950-65 had a lot to do with their baseline.
AFter WWII, the USSR had nowhere to go but up.

> 
> 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.

This just underlines taht there are noneconomic, noncapitalist forms of
competition. We knew that. Doesn't help the state cap case.

> 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. 

Maybe success in the internationbal and military comopetition maent that
the USSR had to "catch up with and overtake" the West, in the old
formulation, but the fact is that because of its internal structure it was
unable to do this, to meet Western standards of efficiency oir effectively
reduce costs. And a lot odf the reason for that is that it lacked some
essential features of capitalism taht force capitalists to do this. You
argue in effect, that the system couldn't survive if it wasn't capitalist.
Well, it didn't survive, in part, arguably, because it wasn't capitalist.

> But the drive behind it all was still military competition. > 

But can't you see that this admission is fatal to your theory?
>
Jorn:
> 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.

But since not all exoploitation is capitalist, why does class struggle in
Stalinist countries prove that they were state capitalist?

--Justin












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