File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1996/96-06-marxism/96-06-26.161, message 60


Date:         Fri, 21 Jun 96 10:02:53 EDT
From: Walter Daum <WGDCC-AT-CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject:      state capitalism and transition period



Neil wrote (21 Jun 96 02:37:13 EDT):

>Of course there will be a transitional period between capitalism and
socialism after workers councils with party overthrow the bourgeois power!
But one big mistake -- fatal -- in the communist movement previously was
not to see the need to move IMMEDIATELY after socialization of bourgeois
productive property incl. the banks to get rid of the commodity money and
wage labor. ...>

Neil then quotes Marx from the Critique of the Gotha Program to justify
labor time cards to replace money wages.

The trouble with Neil's argument is that Marx here is discussing NOT
the transitional period between capitalism and socialism BUT rather the
first stage of communism itself. And by then class divisions will have been
ended, all people will have become producers, not parasites, and the problems
of getting rid of the last remnants of capitalist operation can be attended
to. Money will already have essentially withered away.

The transitional period before capitalists and capitalism has been overcome,
however, is another matter. Here if you want to see what Marx had to say
check, for example, his writings on the Paris Commune, the first, partial,
example of such a worker-ruled transitional society.

One of the things the Commune did immediately, which Marx approved of highly,
was to "do away with the state hierarchy altogether and replace the haughty
masters of the people into always removable servants, a mock responsibility
by a real responsibility ... paid like skilled workmen."

That is, wages were not abolished but generalized: people in government
posts got workers' wages, not ruling-class stipends.

The problem with the Bolsheviks and the early Soviet workers' state was not
that they didn't share the goal of eliminating capitalism and all its forms;
they knew the forms could not be eliminated until the content based on
sacrcity had been overcome.

How the revolution degenerated and was overturned is a much longer story.

Walter


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