Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 19:51:58 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re:  Red pom-poms (was POCMPPMP)


I wrote:
>
>>Well, it means you run the state, which means you've got to have a
>>successful socialist revolution first, which is what me and my citational
>>friends are working for while Doug is telling us that ownership in a
>>bourgeois state matters less than workers or managerial control.

and Doug, trying flattery(?), insisted that his sceptical, unhistorical
view is the only alternative:

>Hugh, you're obviously not a stupid guy, so why are you so fucking
>thick-headed? I said that there's no easy equivalence between ownership and
>control, and gave two concrete examples, the Soviet enterprise (which
>conferred formal ownership on the workers through the agency of the state,
>but gave them no control) and the modern capitalist enterprise in America
>(where the shareholders have spent the last 20 years trying to turn their
>formal control into actual control). How do "you run the state"? Who
>exactly is "you" and what exactly is "the state"? If by some miracle all
>the people who work for the U.S. government today were replaced by
>committed socialists tomorrow, would that be enough? Or do you change the
>structures and mechanisms of the state too? If so, how?
>
>I know you won't or can't answer these questions, but they're worth asking
>anyway.

It really is symptomatic how this is guaranteed to get Doug's knickers in a
twist!

However, I can and will answer the questions, but as I said two minutes ago
in another post, Doug won't be able to take it in.

The short answer is mediation.

The longer answer is as follows:

In the Soviet Union the working class (or the proto-socialist class of
associated producers) owned the means of production exactly as Doug says,
through the state. Since the power of the class has to be mediated through
representative bodies, the behaviour and policies of these bodies is
central for how production and distribution works in concrete terms. The
whole of the history of the Soviet Union consists of the struggle for
political control of these bodies between the classes of the world market
and their various agents in the Soviet Union. When the petty-bourgeois
agents of imperialism got control of the Soviet state machine (the regime)
under the leadership of Stalin there was a growing alienation and lack of
influence by the great mass of the workers of the Soviet Union over
production and distribution. It was a tremendously contradictory nation.
The relation of the workers to the means of production by way of the
dictatorship of the proletariat can be seen in all the rights to
employment, health care, education, recreation, cultural activities and so
on that were enjoyed as a right within the Soviet Union.

It's obvious that sometimes the facilities weren't as flashy as
corresponding facilities in some advanced imperialist welfare states, but
they were there, and when the dictatorship of the proletariat was handed
over to the imperialists by the Stalinist bureaucracy, it was soon shown to
the world that nothing whatever would take their place, certainly not the
flashy gear of the old prosperous Swedish welfare state that once was.

It's also obvious that the bureaucracy abused its powers to kill and
brutalize and silence its opponents or potential opponents, and that this
was in terrible contradiction to the social foundations of the dictatorship
of the proletariat set up by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in 1917
by the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky.

As for the US, just read The State and Revolution by Lenin to get some
answers to those questions. Just taking over the bourgeois state and
filling it with socialists is not enough, the bourgeois state machine must
be smashed. (Marx realized this as early as 1871 -- it was the most
important lesson of the Paris Commune for him. This is why Yoshie's right
about the limits of teaching radical or even revolutionary ideas within a
bourgeois educational institution.

As for the poor old shareholders who have no real control Doug is just
breaking my heart...

In our imperialist world of transition to socialism (or barbarism if we
don't get there first) there are many very contradictory elements due to
extreme monopoly distortion and extreme socialization of production and
distribution despite the way the relations of production are rooted in
individual ownership rights.

Anyway, everybody is officially subject to the law, however rich they are,
so occasionally even very rich people don't get away with murder. And all
these managers do everything because they are delegated to do so by the
owners. The owner hires the manager, not the other way round.

It's the owner or his delegated representative who decides what's necessary
for a company to work, not an employee. Employees of whatever rank have no
legal right to do anything or decide anything in the name of the company
except by the owner's say-so.

Now, as Marx himself wrote in Capital III, this can lead to contradictory
situations, if there is no clear individual owner, in a joint-stock
company, say. In fact he went so far as to analyse joint-stock companies as
the abolition of capitalism from within its own framework.

But all this just means more money for lawyers and a huge grey area of
unclear jurisdiction where powerful individuals can litigate and manoeuvre
for control. What they are manoeuvering for, however, are precisely
ownership rights.

All this huge waste of intellectual effort and could-be-productive energy
to cheat and  steal and get the rights to exploit people weaker and poorer
than yourself!

So ownership and state power it is. Nothing else.

Cheers,

Hugh











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