Critique of state capitalism theory

I haven't read all the text because of time. But some thoughts:

I think that the October revolution and the world-wide revolutionary wave of 1917-26, following on from 1905 and the Commune, was the greatest ever triumph of the proletariat. I think that the proletarianisation of the masses is an essential step for the strengthening of the revolution within the perspective of communism.

It was the Italian, Dutch and German Lefts, no doubt along with elements of anarchism, that, in looking at the mistakes and defeat of the proletariat within the counter-revolution, developed the analyses of state capitalism: the necessary separation of party from state; the development of imperialism, the trap of national liberation, the police role of the unions and stalinism, fascism and democracy as expressions of state capitalism overall.

All states are state capitalist. All states are imperialist from the largest to the smallest. The wealthier states have the most advanced war economies and these same states have used privatisation and liberalisation to strengthen the national capital, ie, state capitalism. The current expression of the economic crisis clearly shows the development of state capitalism in all states regardless the political colour or the ideological bent of the ruling faction.

Hello! I found this one on the net, and I believe it is a quite good article:

http://www.ibrp.org/en/print/5288

I have read the ICC book on the Italian Left Communist, and I liked that book very much too. But I do not really understand why the IBRP document say: "For us, one of the biggest confusions is that when we say we are of the Italian Left Communist tradition, we often get identified with Bordiga and Bordigism". I do not hope that Bordigists politics lead into state capitalism. I support both the IBRP and the ICC. I have sympathies with anarchists and syndicalists and "council communists" too. Perhaps the politics of Paul Mattick and Anton Pannekoek, are a good tool for fighting against state capitalism.

pannekoek-bakunin

Comrades! I feel that all states in the world are, more or less state capitalist. The USSR became state capitalist in the mid 1920ies. And then all other states did succed them in this (like Nazi Germany).
Just a thought...

http://www.internationalism.org

pannekoek-bakunin

I think it's a fairly basic principle of communism that it can only be created through the mass activity of the working class themselves. It's also a fundamental characteristic of terrorism that it cannot be a mass activity - any terrorist group that wants to remain undetected can only function as a small, closed, underground group. Therefore, no matter how good their intentions are, even the most successful terrorist group (and most of them are stunningly unsuccessful, although to be fair, so are most revolutionaries), can only succeed in bringing another elite to power, not in bringing about the emancipation of the working class.

I think the history of the IS tendency since then (alliances with the labour party, support for various dodgy nationalist movements, total lack of internal democracy) proves that beyond doubt.

Totally agree with Farce above but don’t agree with Anarcho mostly.

Certainly capitalism never ceased to exist in Russia throughout the revolution and threatened and shaken though it was, it made a decisive and brutal comeback that was the basis for the counter-revolution. By 1920, things were going wrong for, and major errors were made by Bolshevism and the Bolsheviks, not least the seizure of power by the class party. But politically and practically, many revolutionary elements were still very much active in Russia in the early and mid-20s and the re-ignition of the forward movement depended on events outside Russia. By 1928, with Stalin’s declaration of “socialism in one country”, the working class and its revolutionary minorities in Russia had been definitively crushed and the world revolution battered.

Cliff’s “analysis” of state capitalism wasn’t a “joke” but a very shrewd ideological move by the left wing of the bourgeoisie. “Neither Washington nor Moscow” as a slogan in 70s Britain was a response to the loosening grip of Stalinist ideology. The Stalinists were very strong in British trade unions throughout the 50s, 60s and early 70s and prior to this a vital component of British imperialism during and after WWII. This analysis responded to the growing incredulity among the rising generation of criticising US imperialism while supporting that of Russia with its attendant with its police state and butchery. This though didn’t stop the IS and the SWP from supporting all sorts of capitalist gangsters in the “national liberation” proxy wars of the Cold War – sometimes supporting Washington, sometimes supporting Moscow but all the time supporting Britain’s national interest as they saw it.

I am sure Baboon knows only too well that Cliff's theory was developed long before the 70s . What Cliff did in his theory of state capitalism was to re-characterise the social formation in existence in Russia solely in response to a perceived change in political control rather than of the social and economic reality. The essential features of the Soviet economy were just the same before 1928 as afterwards: commodity production, wage labour, capital accumulation and all the other features which defined it as specifically capitalist.It was Cliff's purpose to absolve Lenin and Trotsky of responsibility for the development of Soviet society and blame it all on bad old Stalin.

I came across this which might interest some.

" He [ Bill Casey] was delegate to represent the Seamen at an International T. U. Conference in Moscow. This, being one of the earliest "Missions to Moscow" was beset with difficulties all the way. Passports were forged; passages were "stowing away," Dutch, German, Polish and Russian frontiers had to be "hopped." Guides were often un-reliable; "go-betweens" were often in the pay of both sides; sometimes both had to be discarded until bona-fides were definitely established, a delicate job under the conditions then prevailing on the continent. The ultimate arrival in Moscow, after much suffering, danger and perseverance, was hailed as a masterpiece of undercover work. Once at the gates of the Kremlin, most delegates became insufferable Bolshevik "Yes-men" whereas Casey and his co-delegate, Barney Kelly (another adherent of the S.P.G.B.) soberly tried to obtain a truthful estimate of the position. A few days sojourn in Moscow drew the following observations from Casey:
"Production was in a straight-jacket, lethargy and indifference permeated the whole economy; the people were entirely lacking in a sense of time. Without the normal industrial development of production and some measure of buying and selling (war-communism was the order of the day) drift and indifference would gradually strangle the economy of the Soviet".
These observations were greeted with disgust and dismay by the other delegates. However, before they left Moscow, Lenin introduced his "New Economic Policy" which, in essence, provided for the very things which Casey opined was needed to stabilize the Russian economy. In contrast to their hostile reception of Casey’s prognostications, the "yes-men" cheered and echoed Lenin’s belated pronouncements. Back in Australia, he submitted his report to Tom Walsh (then a leading Communist and foundation member of the Australian Communist Party), General President of the Australian Seamen’s Union. Walsh rejected the report and refused to publish it on the ground that it criticized the Bolsheviks and the Russian system. "

The SPGB description of Russia as state capitalist was not only from an abstract theoretical position but also eye-witness evidence .

I'll point out again how nestor, Amelie Lanier and whatever group exists around them are super keen on the distinction between the Soviet Bureaucratic/managerial regime (state-capitalist or not) and State Enterprises in the West. Yet they are very coy about stating what historical tendency the Soviet Union actually represented and what position they'd take in relation to it ("Social Experiment"? Ha, ha, ha).

The USSR did not have an effective market for commodities or capital, did involve a managerial bureaucracy over the working class, did appear to in various degrees of opposition to Western capitalism but in did not threaten it, did involve reproducing many aspects of Western capitalism but in a somewhat more egalitarian fashion, did not represent a stepping stone to Socialism but was absolutely doomed to its final return to market-orient capitalism (well, unless there had been an anti-Stalinist revolution). That's the USSR without worrying about the label capitalist or state-capitalist as such. Sure, if the only thing happening is you all have a bug up your asses about not calling this tendency capitalism, fine but it looks to me much more likely that this line of argument is an effort to avoid seeing the USSR as still an enemy of the proletariat.

So clarify your position on that ye clever sophists and definition twiddlers. It's not some small or irrelevant point, it's not a bogus question like your questions about why Baboon's theory doesn't predict the fall of the Soviet Union (Baboon's theory doesn't predict the assassination of JFK or the 911 attacks either, it's not the job of a theory to predict all eventualities..) or why the West armed itself against the USSR(does the US arming itself against Hitler and Iran prove that these countries had a different social system?). It, The question of the nature of the USSR Visa-vis the proletariat, is one of the "Burning Questions Of Our Time".

I supposed I'm a bit worked up about this but it is worth considering that for most of the history of the USSR, Stalinism was a vicious force for counter-revolution world-wide and did a fair amount to create the present political reality (though certainly Stalinism itself was still an aspect of Capitalism and the Spectacle). So I don't think those who consider themselves communists should pass over this reality in silence, even the silence of "of course we know all this..."

The state capitalism theory has more to do with a desire to denounce than an explanation of real socialism. But it won't fool anybody to insist that real socialism was really somehow “capitalism” in order to protect socialism's good reputation against its bourgeois detractors. It has none to lose. We would rather take Lenin and his comrades at their word and criticize what they say they were trying to achieve, rather than attributing secret motives to them which can only be exposed by a materialist method or deep insights into the grand design of history. State capitalism theory – as represented by its defenders on this thread – acts as if communists would be truly stumped for criticism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc if its practitioners weren't really deceiving everybody about what they were up to. After all, if they wanted to be billionaires and were merely a “substitute” capitalist class, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by abandoning their economic system a lot sooner!

Contrary to Mr Hughs, who claims the Soviet Union was the “enemy of the proletariat,” Lenin and his comrades were great adorers of the proletariat. Like Mr Hughs, they always spoke in its good name. Lenin and his comrades had no criticism, but only respect, for the single most important achievement of the capitalist mode of production: the proletariat in its service as a social productive force. They saw it as worthy of all praise and all support. They had nothing whatsoever to criticize about work being a source of wealth. On the contrary, they saw the whole system of wage labor, morally and economically, as such a valuable achievement that they wanted to take it away from the bourgeois class in order to perfect it: they had the lofty aim of giving the proletariat its rights, recognition and due appreciation. What they criticized about capitalism was that the proletariat was denied the fruits of its labor when this went to enrich “parasitic” private owners, and that the seemingly neutral bourgeois state actually sanctioned this unfair distribution of wealth and power.

So the so-called real socialist countries practiced a criticism of capitalism, based on Marx's analysis, by eliminating the private ownership of the means of production and thus the private power of money. By acknowledging the working population’s “right to work” and by setting low prices for the necessities of life, they did indeed eliminate to a great extent the misery that arises in the market economy when even the most basic means of subsistence become commodities. Beyond that, the situation of the people – working and environmental conditions, quality of use values, benefits from technical progress – did not improve significantly.

The starting point of criticism by the founders of real socialism was not criticism of commodities and money, but of the injustice of private enrichment. Similar to social reformers of the market economy who demand government intervention due to “unfairness,” these more radical critics also did not note the reasons for poverty. By classifying the buying and selling, as well as the handling of prices and profits, as useful and harmless, they simply took the assets and means of production from the capitalists in order to transfer them to the state. This was not the same as increasing the role of the state in capitalism, or statifying capitalism, but the launching of a new system with its own logic. They abolished the centerpiece of the whole capitalist system: the extortion power of property and the extortion of the propertyless – the two “constraints” that work together in a free market economy so well automatically. They actually put something new in the world, a political-economic system of its own kind – one with its own hardships for their adored proletariat.

The CPSU did not solve the contradiction inherent in commodities and money – that production of use values is controlled by a purpose foreign to the production of use values, namely the abstract value, money – but left it up to government planning authorities. They did not share Marx’ criticism of the law of value. Rather, they saught to apply the law of value in a planned manner instead of eliminating the laws of commodities, money, and profit production. As a result, they replaced the conflicts of interest arising from market economy competition by just as many conflicts of interest imposed by the state. Instead of determining the requirements for food, clothing, housing, leisure goods, infrastructure, means of transportation, etc.; instead of binding research, development, and production to a purpose of producing high-quality use values taking contractual labor conditions into consideration; instead of organizing the distribution of goods, a planned economy using commodity-money levers was created by the countries of real socialism. The production and distribution of the wealth of society was stimulated and controlled through prices and profit margins set by the government. The subordination of use value to exchange value was kept, not as in the market economy for the purpose of making private deals, but for the purpose of controlling production and distribution according to results desired and considered useful by the state. The companies in real socialism were correspondingly creative in managing the predetermined contradiction of use value and exchange value. The demand for optimization of the main parameters of planning – overfilling quotas and profits – was consistently implemented by dealing ruthlessly with the production factors material and labor. Defective use values, pollution, and poor working conditions were associated with overfilling quotas oriented not to use value, but to profits. Since sales were guaranteed through prices set by the state, the production of unusable goods was ones means of fulfilling quotas.

The consequences of the contradiction of pursuing the purpose of regulated supply with use values while at the same time pursuing the purpose of increasing abstract value, money, were put down to “planning mistakes” and “defects”. As a countermeasure, the planning authorities thought up various regulations regarding the quantity and quality of products. The target conflicts constantly arising between quality, quantity, and profit goals were creatively solved by the real socialist companies, each in its own way. Moral appeals for exemplary behavior, despite the commodity-profit lever for the sake of building the economy, were quite popular. But morality changed nothing in the reasons for “planning mistakes” and “flaws”. State sanctions and suppression of the dissatisfied population were thus necessary even in real socialism. Since commodities, money, and wage labor were not abolished, the subjugation of people to the law of value was not criticized but only regulated by the real socialist state, the success of the real socialist economic system was measured – just as in the market economy – by efficiency in increasing money. Under Gorbachev the lack of success of the real socialist commodities economy – as measured by this market economy criterion – was eventually taken as a reason to give up the consciously practiced “implementation of the law of value” and capitalism was seen as the superior economic system.

The misery of real socialism, the attempt to apply the law of value for the benefit of the population, shows what the misery in the market economy makes so obvious every day: production of wealth in society as a commodities economy controlled by the purpose of increasing abstract wealth measured in money degrades people and their material needs into mere means of this form of producing wealth.

RC said

So lets all take them at their word then shall we , eh ? There is no secret , Lenin said it plain enough . Most of which are well known.

In September 1917 BEFORE the overthrow of the Kerenky government in "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat":

From his " Left wing childishness and petit-bourgeois mentality" in 1918

Then nearer the end of his life Lenin explains the Workers' NEP State-Capitalism in 1922

There have always been two views of the Bolshevik revolution and regime in the SPGB. One is that Lenin, etc were genuine socialists who were inevitably bound to fail to introduce socialism because the conditions weren't there for this and that their method (minority dictatorship) was wrong. The other is that they were elitists ( Jacobinists , Blanquists) from the start who were always going to establish the rule of a new elite even though they labelled themselves socialists. In other words, rather than Bolshevik elitism was an inevitable product of the decision to build state capitalism in Russia in the aftermath of the October revolution, it was the other way round, the decision to build state capitalism was an inevitable product of the Bolsheviks' elitism.

So was Bolshevism an attempt to establish socialism that was bound to fail or was it an attempt to establish state-capitalism that succeded?

I think the concensus opinion now is that the whole Russian anti-Tsarist revolutionary tradition, not just the Bolsheviks, was elitist, and in a direct line of succession from the Jacobin elitism of the French bourgeois revolutionaries via the detour of Kautskyism "trade union consciousness". There is also a strong case for saying that, in view of the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie in the classic sense, the (bourgeois) task of clearing away the obstacle that Tsarism was to the further development of capitalism in Russia fell to another social group, the Intelligentsia .Because most of the revolutionary intelligentsia despised bourgeois culture their anti-Tsarism revolution, when it came, took on a "socialist" garb.The Bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie.

Socialism could only be contemplated when the time and material conditions were right.

Our position , much of it shared by Martov , is that when faced with capitalism and the impossibility of socialism, because the time is not right, all the workers can do is make the best of it.

Seems to be in keeping with Engels advice to those in Italy in the 1890s

I agree with the position above but there are specifics that need to be explained about the implosion of the Russian economy and its imperialist bloc in 1989 and specifics to the near collapse of the banking system around a year ago. Though both I would insist come from the Marxist analysis of the fundamental crisis of capitalism; overproduction and production for profit and the ever-present and insurmountable (for it) competitive nature of capitalism as Farce says above. I don’t think that the development of state capitalism as a global phenomenon and the development of imperialism throughout the 20th century can be separated out.

A brief to response to mikail f on the SWP: The latter itself is a state capitalist organisation and generally tries to represent the interests of British national capitalism with a working class slant. When I said above that the SWP sometimes supported Washington and sometimes supported Moscow, I should clarify that it generally supported Russian imperialism throughout the Cold War from an anti-American point of view. This didn’t make it such a maverick from the point of view of British imperialism because, despite all the woffle about the “special relationship”, there’s been a strong anti-Americanism within the British bourgeoisie since WWII that continues to this day.

The “Suez crisis” of 1956 was a seminal moment for US/British relations, as the US disciplined the latter in no uncertain terms for conducting its own imperialist adventures, something that the US would no longer allow. In World Revolution no. 297, Tony Cliff is quoted in the Socialist Review (August 1958) as supporting President Nasser of Egypt, who was backed by Russian arms and security forces and, as an imperialist gangster himself had his own nationalist agenda and whose security forces had murdered many Egyptian workers. Cliff said he and his regime should be supported because it “represented national independence and progress”.
The SWP supported the Russian-backed Vietcong in the Vietnam War and supported one black bourgeois gangster after the other in the proxy imperialist wars that raged across Africa during the Cold War. At one stage, in Biafra from memory, it changed its support from one side to the other as the US and Russia switched support for their local pawns.
The SWP has supported the “Iraqi resistance”, Hamas, Hizbollah, the Irish nationalism of the IRA and Sinn Fein, though when it suited them rejected the “sectarianism” of the nationalist – critically of course, in order to give more emphasis to its rank and filist ideology. As it says in WR 231 of the SWP: “they will always find a faction of the bourgeoisie that they want the workers to support”

@Farce, baboon
Antagonism belongs to imperialism, or to be more precise, to capitalist countries. We can enter more detailled into the subject if desired, but for the time being I wish to state it just like that. Now, after World War II we have the new situation that the capitalist big powers abstain from belligerent actions against each other, form NATO and start „containment“ policy against Soviet Union. And this is what I was referring to. The hostility against Real Socialism (I do not enter into the debate whether this was Socialism or not, I merely use the denomination they gave themselves) was owed to the fact that it did not allow capitalist use by foreign powers, itself it did not wish to make capitalist use of other countries. It therefore refused to follow the rules set up by capitalist countries.

As far as the successor states of socialist states go (with the exception of China and Cuba, special cases that I also don’t want to discuss at this point), their economy was more or less destroyed, ceased to exist. Whether Hungary or Russia, or Albania, most of their former industry and agriculture is in ruins, and they have either been conquered by western companies, producing a lot less than before, or they have, as Russia with the help of the income from natural ressources and its considerably larger interior market, managed to get some profitable production going. In essence – their economical system nowadays bears little resemblance to the former one, and the state capitalism theory shows a proud ignorance towards the economical change they have undergone since 1990, the whole process of privatization, and so on.

With all the noise being raised now about the crisis one should not let oneself be fooled about the fact that no change of system is in sight.

@ajjohnstone
The debate about: Was it right to make a revolution? Should they have waited? Were the conditions given? What cocktail of conditions does a good revolution need? – is entirely worthless and intellectually unsatisfactory. Moreover it is, to use one of your expressions, entirely „elitist“, that is, wise guys sit together and discuss about the chances, the duties and the future of their foster child, the proletariate.

The Bolsheviks, in my esteem, did not understand the economical system of capitalism, and therefore the socialism they pictured before and established after the revolution was rather uncomfortable for their subjects, first trying to replace the planning of economy by competition, and later competition by force.
Even if Lenin saw their system as "state capitalism" it doesn’t mean it really existed. I say that it is not a possible system. Capitalism needs a market and competition, only then can the law of value be effective.

Lol

Two fragments:

...

** So, if Stalin [edit from Lenin] saw the system as "Real Socialism", then it was Real Socialism.

** Contrawise, if Lenin saw the system as "state capitalism", then it wasn't state capitalism.

I won't start to unravel all the implication of this. But one obvious implication of their argument is that 'capitalism' is term we understand and should only use in a very exact sense whereas 'Socialism' is a throw-away term that we really don't give a crap about. Yea!(yes, that's sarcasm).

"I know what you're thinking and ain't true no how" (Lewis Carrol's Tweedle Dum)

Uh, sorry, so we should use Stalin's vocabulary but not Lenin's?

You folks are great at Marshalling points but as others have mentioned, many of these don't seem to help your general argument...

Edit: I have edited my original post to reflect Nesto's correction. [sarcasm]I mean, let's give uncle Joe his due[/sarcasm]

I think there is a thesis that is worthy of consideration and debate; that the economic system in Soviet Russia after say 1928, to pick a date, didn’t fill all the capitalist criteria of state capitalism.

I think Hillel Ticktin in a debate with the SPGB said it wasn’t state capitalism under Stalin, it was worse than that.

Actually it may come as some surprise but Karl took some time before he came to some kind of description of the distinctive features of capitalism, there were only two in fact and he mentions them in chapter 51 near the end of volume III of capital.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch51.htm

The ‘problem’ was that other economic systems eg feudalism also involved exploitation and the extraction of surplus labour and thus surplus value out of the labouring class.

This requires the correct understanding of what surplus labour and surplus value rather than the common and incorrect one but that is another issue.

He decided that 1) capitalism required or was defined by labourers being ‘free’ to sell their labour power as a commodity.

And 2) by its mechanism of producing commodities and the market system etc it develops an economic system that has its own anarchic ‘overwhelming natural law’ that is beyond human control which its participants are compelled to obey.

As to the part the capitalist play, that is to extract surplus value from the labourers and convert it into more, and more efficient, labour saving means of production eg machines and factories etc. eg capital.

In capitalism the ‘capitalists’ that don’t do this and merely consume all their surplus value fall behind those that do expand and accumulate capital and take advantage of more efficient ways and technology of producing stuff and thereby are able undercut the price of those that don’t.

The capitalist class are merely the handmaidens or ‘bearers’ of an economic system that they have barely more control over than the workers themselves.

The workers in Stalin’s Russia probably did not have complete freedom to sell their labour power in the sense that it involved more compulsion and was more like slavery proper as on the plantations of the Southern USA and ‘West Indies’. As well in the more palpable example as Stalin’s labour death camps for political dissidents, that played no small part in the accumulation of Soviet capital.

To say that because this kind of thing wasn’t ‘real capitalism’ because they used slaves proper and therefore it was ‘real socialism’ is beyond absurd.

Nevertheless where people used slaves proper, as in soviet Russia, in a global capitalist environment it this didn’t preclude them having a capitalist outlook on things.

You could also make the thesis that the post 1928 Soviet economy was to a lesser extent left alone to the ‘natural laws’ of the market system and capital accumulation. Even a ‘state capitalist’ one, where state capitalist enterprises are left to sink or swim on their own economic and market orientated merits.

And that to some extent the economy was under a planned control by a political and theocratic ruling class.

Even given this, the motivation of soviet ruling class in Russia still appeared to be to accumulate capital, means of production, factories etc.

The soviet ruling class themselves clearly benefited from the expansion of the means of production as there was that much more surplus value created, out of which they could consume part for themselves as ‘revenue’, so emulating their capitalist brothers in the west.

In fact Tsarist Russia to some extent encouraged the development of capitalism as well, as they also liked the spin off effects of railways and anything else they could cream of from the industrial proletariat via the direct exploiters.

Even for them there was a militaristic aspect as well, as they realised that capitalism tended to convey technological advantages and thus military ones on a nation state and the ultimate form of economic competition, war.

To some more or less extent the same could be applied to Soviet Russia.

As to what real socialism is Stalin laid it out in his ANARCHISM or SOCIALISM? Circa 1907

Where in the old tradition he uses communist and socialist society interchangeably.

As it was.

The Stalinist have done more harm to the notion of communism and Marxism than the capitalists could ever have dreamt up themselves.