Views on State Socialism

i think the dominant view here is opposed to state "socialism" so i'm surprised you'd think there is suspicion towards those opposed to it, was there any particular posts or threads you had in mind?

I've been on this site for years and i can't think of any consistent posters that have argued for state socialism.

My view? Fuck "state socialism". It's nothing but tyranny and diverts all activity into counterrevolutionary bullshit. Fredy Perlman's The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism has an excellent section examining state socialism as a kind of nationalism based on oppression as the unifying, stupefying factor rather than ethnicity, language or culture. This would explain the obsession of the Soviets with "workers" and their glorification in art and culture. The USSR couldn't offer the workers an end to their oppression as workers so instead it used workerism to glorify the condition of being a proletarian, when the real point of communism is for the proletariat to abolish capitalism and itself.

If you mean "state socialist" programs like free healthcare, education, and welfare then I think these should be supported; however it is important to recognize that they were not handed down to the workers by a benevolent state but were struggled for. They can only ever be transitional demands.

Even things like state healthcare provision are not simply workers' victories. In the UK, for example, the cost manufacturing capital was having to spend on health programs for employees meant that it supported state provision instead. Class struggle is only one aspect of the creation of things like state healthcare and education, these things are also produced by the necessities of the reproduction of the working class according to the specific demands of (segments of) capital in that time and place.

Baronarchist,
I think that what's called state socialism or socialist policies are ways of regulating the social relations of capital in response to class struggle and the necessities of capitalist production/valorisation, and that's as true of 1920s Russia as anywhere else. They have good points and bad points but basically they exist because they are good ways to produce workers capitalists want to employ and keep them healthy enough and contented enough to keep going to work day after day. After all, if capitalism can't do that it can't exist.

You were probably reading posts by ICC or sympathisers. I know everyone loves to slag off the ICC, but genuinely i've talked to a few who buried deep within a councilist aura of 'left communism' have some dodgy but hard to tease out views on state socialism.

Basically they say; if the revolution is not internationalised fast enough or there are other difficult circumstances peculiar to that area (eg. massive peasantry), then set up a state capitalist/socialist system as a holding action (and supposedly this is compatible with worker's councils). This is essentially what the bolshevik party under Lenin did, and they wish to defend that.

I very much disagree with this view....

I think you're misunderstanding the position of the ICC and its sympathisers. I think that, in the initial stages of the revolution, before capitalism has been defeated internationally, state capitalist measures are inevitable. I don't call for them (and I think this is where you misunderstand the ICC and its sympathisers and indeed others who don't believe that the transition to socialism can be instantaneous), I just think there isn't any significant choice.

In an isolated territory, socialism is impossible (because I'm not a 'state socialist', I don't believe in 'socialism in one country'). So 'socialist measures', the idea that the revolutionary working class of a pareticular country can impose the correct (socialist) policy, is the dark concession to Stalinism that lurks in Councilist ideology. If it's not socialism, it must be capitalism; a class society in which the working class has not yet managed to abloish classes and institute production to fulfill human need. What will be necessary in that initial period is production geared to the world revolution.

So, because it isn't communism, it must still be capitalism. If it's capitalism based around the proletariat's siezure of state power, it must be state capitalism. I don't know what else to call it.

Of course, if the world civil war goes really really well and capitalism is overthrown in a matter of days, or the SPGB manage to abolish capitalism through Parliament (everywhere in the world) the problem goes away.

No, they're not "simply workers' victories". They are, as you say, often useful to some capitalists and are in any case capitalist responses to growing class struggle. The point is that they are granted when the working class is strong in order to pacify it and then are snatched back when the class is weak again.