To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Zeynep Tufekcioglu <zeynept-AT-turk.net>
Subject: Socialism in a backward country -I
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 02:00:48 +0300


Hugh wrote:

>This in turn gives us the solution to the 'bootstrap' problem. In a number
>of postings a month or so ago, I emphasized the way Marx (and Engels and
>Lenin and Trotsky) stress the creation of elements of a mode of production
>managed by the immediate producers in voluntary association. A typical
>quote is:

        This social character of capital is first promoted
        and wholly realized through the full development of the
        credit and banking system. On the other hand this goes
        farther. It places all the available and even potential
        capital of society that is not already actively employed
        at the disposal of the industrial and commercial capitalists
        so that neither the lenders nor users of this capital are
        its real owners or producers. It thus does away with the
        private character of capital and thus contains in itself,
        but only in itself [an sich], the abolition of capital
        itself. (Capital III, Part V, ch 36 'Pre-capitalist
        relationships', about 6 pages from the end of the chapter.)

...

>The problems arising from being 'born out of thousands of years of class
>societies' are epitomized by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,
>when he writes that socialism will be born covered in blood and with birth
>marks due to the capitalist society where it spent its pregnancy. These are
>more cosmetic than structural flaws and as such quite manageable - even if
>they cause a lot of stress and strain.

Zeynep:
-I honestly didn't get this one. What is cosmetic, rather than structural,
and -how do we manage. I did read the Gotha-Erfurt.

>Bringing in the lessons of the October revolution, Zeynep writes:

>>This is an important aspect of Soviet Union's failure. One shouldn't compete
>>with capitalism say, in terms of tons of steel produced, but maybe in terms
>>of free time of the workers, social development of all, participatory
>>decision making, equality for everyone...
>>
>>I know we can't eat equality and participatory decision making. But, if
>>socialism is a superior system, the collective planning processes, the
>>declining of alienation, the lack of social loss due to market anarchy
>>should mean a better, more productive system as a whole (again productive
>>not in the capitalist sense of the word).

>I think the way to get around this in conceptual terms is to distinguish
>between the Soviet state - a workers' state with an economy organized on a
>quite different basis from a capitalist one - and the Stalinist regime,
>which Trotsky (in The Revolution Betrayed) compared to the Nazi regime.
>This way you don't have to force a contradiction between production (tons
>of steel) and quality of life (participation, social development and
>cultural life). A democratic workers' regime is as necessary to the
>successful production of steel as it is to the production of a healthy,
>attractive society. It's a hell of an advertisement for the advance of a
>workers' economy over capitalism that the Soviet Union under Stalinist
>mismanagement could produce as successfully as it did for so long.

Zeynep: That is exactly my problem, Hugh. That solves the problem maybe in
conceptual terms. We call the Soviet Union a "workers' state", or a
"degenerated workers' state", then say if it weren't for Stalin, or
"Stalinism", it would have been possible some other way. We can even explain
in a more sophisticated manner that Stalin was not personally responsible of
course, but He also was the product of the fact that the revolution
happenned in a backward country, and the leading working class cadres were
killed during the war that followed the revolution, and Russian
authoritarian streak manifested itself again.

... * continued in next message, the e-mail program couldn't handle it
because it was long*



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