What is the co-ordinator class?

Id agree with syndicalistcat view of the USSR. I did an essay paper on the class composition of the USSR, it was probably the best work I did while at University, but alas because I was heavily influenced by trotskyism at the time its probably not ever going to see the light of day. I can look back at it for specifics if need be though....

If I remember rightly Marx had specific points on what he considered a class to be. And a primary criteria for this example, is that the class is able to recognise itself and its interests and organise itself as such.

The rulers of the USSR dont comply with this model, because the leadership was composed and recruited of the best elements of society. That is to say any one of any good standing - atheletes, management, scientists, and whomever had achieved excellence in their field was recruited to the Communist Party. So what you ended up with was a bureaucratic form of meritocracy at the epicentre. I think this kind of thinking fitted well with the "degenerated workers state" school of Marxism, of which I belonged.

Now this class structure is completely alien to capitalism, or feudalism where ownership could be handed down to your offspring, this didnt happen in the USSR as such, perks may have existed, but the sons and daughters of the CP leadership werent guarranteed the same position or status. Therefore you couldnt strictly in the Marxist sense describe them as a class.

Since when does class have to be heritable?

The communist party easily fulfils this criteria.

So you have a bureacratic class managing the state's capital = bureacratic-state-capitalism.

Re: the opening post. My understanding of the co-ordinator class is that its just a section of the middle class, the other sections being the petite-bourgiosie, professionals and academics, etc. The coordinator class comes into special consideration in class analysis coz it actively manages capital, including labor power, on capitalist's behalf. So its allegiance lies with capital, whereas the other sections of the middle class will vacilate. I've never really understood what exactly is new or novel about coordinatorism but am willing to hear more.

We posit class as a hypothesis to explain what we see in terms of how people act, the things that go on in society. A class I think of, like Marx, as a social relation between people in virtue of their roles in social production. Class is a social power relation. It stratifies society into groups with antagonistic interests. People end up having certain interests in virtue of their position in this structure of social relations.

I think we need the hypothesis of the coordinator class to explain a worker's experience in this society, as the "bosses" they mostly have contact with aren't the capitalist elite. Nowadays the owners of big capitals are wealthy and powerful enough, in countries like the USA, to shield themselves from unwanted contact with the unwashed masses.

The coordinator class can be defined as those who have a relative monopolization of conditions other than ownership that give them power in social production, power over workers. This can be position in a managerial hierarchy, or concentration of some expertise particularly needed for management of firms. Managers track and discipline workers. That is a primary function. That's because, when firms hire labor power, they can't be sure the "owner" of the labor power will willingly do what the owners seek, profitable work activity. Lawyers play a role for example in breaking strikes and in guarding the legal interests of the firm. Accountants, in the role of finance officers or top financial advisors or consulants, protect the financial integrity of the owners' firm. Architects design buildings and factories and so on in ways that serve capitalist interests. Engineers sometimes design equipment or software in ways that facilitates control of labor.

Once capitals became so big they couldn't be supervisored by the capital-owners directly, they were forced to hire this other class, they were forced to cede them a realm of power. During the past 30 years of declining real worker wages in the USA, coordinator class incomes have risen. This reflects their participation in the exploitation of the working class.

Meritocracy is the characteristic ideology of this class. They justify their position as the ones who are entitled to give the orders in virtue of their alleged smarts, degrees, education, expertise, experience.

Tracking in education systems in the USA and other advanced capitalist countries sifts out the people who will go thru college and become cadres of the coordinator class. Another reason for the expansion of the coordinator class in the 20th century was growth of the state, due to the state's response to popular protest, to create social welfare programs, regulation of the system, not to mention the huge military/industrial machine. And the trade union bureaucracy and big NGOs also provides another area of job growth.

The size of this class varies among capitalist countries, depending on the accumulation strategy of the capitalists. In countries with strong social-democratic regimes in the post-WWII era, such as Sweden and Germany, this class was smaller becuase a different strategy for motivating workers was used, of investing in areas of production involving higher skill content, paying higher wages thru increasing worker productivity that way, and providing higher social wages via the state. The coordinator class seems to be largest in the Anglo-Saxon countries, with their more aggressively "free market" policies.

This class does not include all of the so-called "middle class." I think there are really three intermediate strata between the big capitalists and the proletarian class:

(1) coordinator class (managers and top professionals)

(2) small business class (they don't own enough capital to avoid doing some of the direct coordinator work themsevles)

(3) lower level professionals (teachers, writers, commercial artists, social workers, application programmers)

I think this third group are kind of in a borderline or fuzzy situation. One of the characteristics of capitalism as a dynamic system is that it is always working to attack areas of work autonomy of various groups, and proletarianize them, and thus occupations can lose their autonomy...this was what Taylorism did to a lot of occupations, and in the USA this sort of thing is going on with schoolteachers, via capitalist educational consultancies selling their pre-cooked plans and curricula to school districts. Eric Olin Wright had a concept of a "contradictory class location" -- a position that has some features of two adjoining classes, and this seems to fit the situation of the lower-level professional layer. They have a worker-like situation, and often form unions and strike against management, but also may have some greater professional autonomy, and a certain craft elitism towards other workers.

But because of their worker-like subordination to management, capital and the state, i think this layer is a potential ally of the working class proper.

Of course, a key idea of the coordinator class also is that it has the potential to be a ruling class. And the idea is that this is exactly what happened in the USSR. The capitalists were eliminated, but a profesional/managerial hierarchy, which couldn't pass its class status on to its children via inheritance of property, was the ruling class.

I think the evidence is that coordinatorist modes of production are unstable, in the context of world capitalism. That's because the coordinators dominate the working class. They had to make some concessions originally to get mass support but over time they can use their elite position (and it helps when they run a repressive state) to privatize the nominally public assets, and create a private property system for means of production. This will strengthen their position by further entrenching their power. Hence I think there is a tendency for coordinatorist systems to evolve towards capitalism.

Many of the arguments for the thesis that the USSR was capitalist revolve either around external relations of trade and finance and military competition, or else the existence of money in the USSR. But the first argument doesn't show that the USSR was capitalist, because capitalist historically didn't come into existence all at once. It spread gradually. So for generations there were external relations between countries with capitalist modes of production and non-capitalist systems.

Similarly, the existence of money in the USSR doesn't show it was capitalist because, as Marx pointed out, wage labor only exists if money can exist as capital. To exist as capital, money-capital has to be able to purchase labor power and other resources, set up its own control of the labor process, and sell to the market the commodities produced and then receive the revenue of sale, thus making a profit.

But in the USSR the relationship between sale of items and the financial resources available to plant managers was only very indirect, via the central planning apparatus.

Now I have to go the gym...

t.

I think Wayne Price's analysis ( The Nature of the 'Communist' States ) is a good one:

Furthermore, Wayne Price goes on to talk about internal competition in the USSR, a prime factor of capitalism.
Wayne Price also talks about the "coordinator class":

Engels also talked about the "coordinator class", noting in Anti-Duhring:

Also called Mandarins, Albert Meltzer wrote in What is the Middle Class?:

I'm probably going to catch shit for this but one of the only really coherent takes on this that I've read are the Ehrenreichs' mid-late-70s essays on the "Professional-Managerial Class". I also recently picked up an old South End Press volume called Between Labor and Capital which anthologizes some of the initial debate over their PMC essays but it's in the to-read stack.

I think this is some of the most important stuff we can try to untangle, especially those of us living in capital's established core strongholds, where PMC actors' choices do muck up the orderly process of the fundamental class antagonism between the creating class and those associated with the principle of ownership. But some of the "third class" rhetoric puts me off, because I think that we fundamentally misunderstand this class both if we place it in the middle (Between...) or somehow make them an essential left mirror of the owners of capital (as in 1968-era critiques of "bureaucrats and capitalists").

I'm still working this out but it seems more relevant that many professionals who are socially in this class or class faction (which acts collectively to protect its own interests, and even develops various perverted politics stemming from fantasies of its own dictatorship) are not external to the production process in the same way that the boardroom set and its overseer lackeys are. (Certainly not all of them--and crucially, most of these professionals are rewarded for their acquiescence with a slow trickle of family wealth, which when deposited in banks and funds makes them also passive capitalists. But that is a separate issue.)

Any proletarian project -- any project organic to the proletariat as such -- needs to involve dissolving this "third class" as a class. Not subordinating them or driving them into the arms of their dependent patrons, but destroying the basis of the existence of a separate knowledge class. They aren't a meritocracy that capital has drawn up out of the proletariat: they are merely the increasingly visible outline that lends shape to capital's real historic goal, a deskilled and dependent working class.

i think MJ is on the right track. i first started thinking about a theory of this class back in the '70s/'80s period from reading much of the same literature of that era as Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, who developed the coordinator class theory as a response to, and correction of, the Ehrenreichs' theory. It's important to look at the role of this class in the actual production process. Three important books of the 1970s era that focus on this are: Labor and Monopoly Capital by Harry Braverman, The Forces of Production by David Noble, and "The Five Dollar Day." Another important essay in the discussion in that period is "What do bosses do?" by Steve Marglin.

Taylor and other "efficiency experts" in the period from the 1890s to 1920s were employed by the capitalists in major firms to assist in analyzing the skilled occupations and breaking them down into parts, so as to redefine jobs. This has two rationales. One was to shift power off the shopfloor, to dis-empower workers. This is why this led to a huge amount of class struggle at the time. The other part of the rationale was to be able to replace expensive, skilled labor with less expensive unskilled labor. But in the process, a new class is created which holds all the fragments together, which orchestrates the whole thing. The book "Five Dollar Day" looks at this in the transformation of the Ford Motor Co., and the huge increase in the numbers of managers, engineers and so on that had to be employed to transform the labor process. He also shows that the benefit to the capitalists from this change was not what the "efficiency experts" had estimated. Working class resistance to the more intense exploitation of the new system was severe.

Not all capitalists at the time wanted to follow this strategy either because of cost or because they feared the conflict with the working class this would engender. There was quite a bit of conflict between capitalists and engineers and "efficiency experts" at the time, which was the focus of some of the writing of Thorstein Veblen, and led to his "technocratic" idea that the capitalists were superfluous. That Veblen saw a conflict between the coordinator class and the capitalists was partly a reflection of criticisms of capitalist waste by engineers, and is also an indication that the coordinators are not simply a reflex of the capitalists' interests.

Now I'll respond to the quote from Wayne Price about the USSR.

This is historically incorrect. Virtually all pre-capitalist class societies had markets and thus commodities. Ancient Athens engaged in a great deal of trade, selling its pottery and other crafts and agricultural commodities. In ancient Greece and Rome slaves were used to produce commodities for sale. Sex became a commodity, as Romans ran brothels using female slaves. The existence of currency goes back thousands of years. In his book "The Great Transformation", Karl Polanyi, the economic historian, points out that a difference between capitalism and earlier markets is that in those earlier societies markets were controlled, they existed only within social structures, they were subordinate to social aims. The market didn't govern the society in the way that it does under capitalism. In the medieval guild system there were commodities, in the sense of things sold, but the guilds controlled the prices, quality, and so on.

In the Soviet Union the revenue from the sale of things that were produced did not go directly to the plant managers, of the plants that produced those things. The allocation of resources to the plant was via the central planning mechanism, not via control over revenue from sale. Thus it's hard to see how a market governed production in the way it does under capitalism.

It's a mistake to suppose that money is the same as money-capital. Money could exist even in a society without class division. Money might exist as consumer credits, as a social accounting tool...these in fact were advocated by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program. In fact it would be very unwise to propose simply doing away with money since an economy needs a way of limiting effective demand to what it intends to produce. After the Cuban revolution in 1959 Castro and Che Guevara decided they'd show their communist intentions by making phone service free. The result was that you had to wait for hours to make a phone call.

Wayne talks about a social surplus being appropriated by the ruling class. There was a social surplus. That is, there was more produced than was consumed by the working class who do the production. And the social surplus was controlled, collectively, via its characteristic state administration system, by the ruling class. Appropriation of a surplus by a class other than the immediate producers, in some way, is a characteristic of every class society.

This is the problem with the "state capitalist" analysis of the USSR: It must interpret the meaning of "capitalism" so abstractly that it becomes hard to differentiate capitalism from other forms of class society. And that means it reduces the explanatory usefulness of class theory. The state capitalism theory of the USSR is an attempt to pound square pegs into round holes.

Engels and Kautsky, in the late 19th century, began talking about "state capitalism." What they had in mind was what was going on then in Germany: state ownership of the railways and post office, growing government regulation of industry, factory acts, and so on. And it was in exactly this sense that Lenin talked about "state capitalism" at the beginning of the Russian revolution. Lenin advocated a period of capitalist development in Russia -- a view he held in common with the Mensheviks, except that I think Lenin thought it need not last as long as the Mensheviks thought. But the of "state capitalism" would be nationalization of a few industries and state regulation of the rest of private industry. This was part of Lenin's rationale for his "workers' control" decree in 1917. The idea was to encourage the workers' movement to "control" the capitalists, and thus help the Soviet state regulate the capitalists. "State capitalism" thus didn't mean elimination of the private capitalists, for either Engels or Lenin. What forced Lenin's hand was the invasion of Russia and the onset of the civil war in July 1918. That's when the widespread nationalization of the Russian economy took place, because the Bolsheviks didn't trust the capitalists to not sabotage.

And quoting Engels about salaried functionaries doesn't show that Engels had any theory about the role of this class. And that brings us back to MJ's point, which I discussed at the beginning, the role of the coordinator class in the labor process.

t.

T.,

So when in the process, a new class is created which holds all the fragments together, is what we're looking at the increasingly visible outline that lends shape to the deskilled pieces of the working class?

My understanding of the role of this third camp within the labor process is definitely influenced by Braverman, or at least by some of the pointing-off-in-the-distance he does in the middle of that book while talking about deskilling. I thought the PMC theory was a good complement to that, especially because it makes the meaning & failure of the New Left really click for me--the focus on the autonomy of the university, for starters. (Is there any word that means both meaning and failure, because in this case they're identical.)

I'm skimming the Albert & Hahnel response to the Ehrenreichs in that South End volume ("A Ticket To Ride: More Locations On The Class Map") and unless I'm missing something their departure hinges on the idea that the coordinator class, as a class, is only a subset of the overall professional-managerial sector, and that others in this sector are in "contradictory middle strata" that are part-worker, part-coordinator.

Okay, so they're OK with one fold, as long as this second fold is also made so a fourth group comes out, the "contradictory middle strata":

OK, we can all recognize these people. But doesn't the usefulness, or at least central importance (if I understand the later pareconist emphasis correctly) of focusing on this third "coordinator class" break down if, once we upgrade them to a planet in their own right, we immediately have to talk about the importance of a fourth group, this belt of largish asteroids who we say aren't yet a class? At some point this veers off into counting angels on a pin, or wittering Poulantzian wonkery about factions and fractions, doesn't it?

This is why I'm agnostic about this whole three-class thing. Any particular form of privilege some workers might be riding, be it knowledge-hoarding professionalism, craft protectionism, racial supremacy, coordinatorialism, the privilege of a salary--fuck, the privilege of a wage, regulatory power granted by the state, etc., needs to be eradicated by an ongoing circulation of struggles to directly transform production itself. If that process causes various crybabies to flee into the waiting arms of the capitalists that's their problem, and we'll know in hindsight where their ultimate class affinity lay.

(Side note: I'd like to say more in response to your comments re: state-capitalism. I disagree with your take on that Polanyi book, not about precapitalism, but about its implications for whether we should really view the capitalist mode of production itself as not having the kind of relatively socially embedded markets found in the old command-economy bloc. But it's past time to embed myself.)

Every time I start getting bored with this board a thread pops up that reminds me why I bother with it. No if only I wasn't skint I could pop over to ABE and start buying some of these books.

I don't think this line of reasoning holds up really. i mean with Toyotism/'lean thinking' and the like, disciplinary/surveillance functions are devolved to ever-lower tiers of the corporate hierarchy. i know 'managers' with hire and fire powers who are on £6.50/hour and are essentially proletarian.

i also think the distinction between owning/managing capital is not a class distinction, insofar as the point of capital is that it is simultaneously an abstract, spectral vampire imposing 'its' needs on humanity via human agents, and a concrete social relation reproduced by our labour every day. 'Owners' of capital are forced to operate according to it's 'laws' just as much as managers of it are. all the owner/manager distinction represents (i'm thinking manager as in directors of a company, not line managers) is a leisure/power trade-off within the bourgeoisie; richard branson supposedly loves to be 'hands on' and exercise power over his capital directly, others prefer to play golf and leave the legwork to some well-remunerated functionaries; it's not a class distinction.

Of course we can get all sociological and discern all sorts of different 'classes' with apparently antagonistic interests, 'small businessmen', 'directors + senior management', 'shareholders', 'workers', 'self-employed', 'professionals - lawyers & architects', 'professionals - teachers and social workers' - but the point is they are all arrayed across a social relation that is essentially bipolar: captial-labour.

I think the idea of a separate "co-ordinator class" is not very useful. It seems to me to be based on a critique of a bad misinterpretation of what Marx said. The capitalist is a rich businessman who wears a top had and outright owns the means of production. Of course by this definition, the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist. Capitalism or the capitalist class is seen as undermined because of increasing division between ownership and management...

In order for capital to continue sucking surplus value out of labor it needs there to be a class of people who are forced to work by their separation from the means of production. It also needs a class who (while still alienated, and subject to the laws of capital) materially benefit and are enriched by exploitation, and therefore see the movement of capital as their own, they perform the capitalist function. Capital doesn't need robber barons with big top-hats. A state bureaucracy can perform this role (although less efficiently).

I agree with Joseph K on the point that management and ownership are not the basis for separate classes. They are not more antagonistic than other competing capitalists. Also, it's not as though high-paid management who receive a salary instead of directly owning the means of production somehow proves a Marxist class analysis wrong. Marx analyses management in Capital Volume 3. He argues that profits tend to separate into interest and profits of enterprise. There is some push and pull between profit of enterprise (wages of superintendence) and interest, since if one is higher the other is lower. Productive capitalists actually running an enterprise tend to develop the view that their activity of managing the employees is wage-labor, for which they receive "wages of superintendence". For Marx this is wrong. Marx writes of this capitalist, "He forgets, due to the antithetical form of the two parts into which profit, hence surplus-value, is divided, that both are merely parts of the surplus-value, and that this division alters nothing in the nature, origin, and way of existence of surplus-value."

I think a much more interesting category to analyse than "the co-ordinator class" is the middle class.

Joseph K. writes:

Your argument here is based on a false premise. You're assuming that i define coordinator class in terms of occupational titles, like "manager." This is not the case. As I said, the class is defined by virtue of its having a relative monopolization of empowering conditions other than ownership. The coordinator class position isn't defined by a laundry list of occupations. The occupations are pointed to as examples of this class, in certain contexts. In other contexts someone with this occupational title would not be in the coordinator class.

I also discussed what i called the boundary line or fuzzy boundary area between the coordinator class and the proletarian class, and the fact that this exists in part because of the dynamic tendency to proletarianize occupations that had been above the proletarian class, such as RNs and teachers. This applies to line supervisors or assistant managers, too. If you're an assistant manager at Seven-11 you have a basically working class situation, with only a very tiny amount of privilege relative to the other workers.

t.

So some of (edit) those contradictory middle strata are being reproletarianized?

If we're going to avoid an occupational laundry list what sorts of criteria would you use for recognizing the coordinator class besides their collective function in the abstract?

Autonomy in their work, control over the labor of others, expert adjuncts of management in controlling other workers, are some criteria I would propose. For example, in "The Working Class Majority" Michael Zweig says that RNs, despite having four-year college degrees, are part of the working class due to the degree of supervision they are subject to and relative lack of autonomous decision-making they are currently allotted.

When school districts adopt these new pre-cooked curricula for schools, with a worked out in advance "what you will do" set of instructions to teachers, so that their autonomy is reduced to nil, we can see them being proletarianized too.

t.

A very interesting discussion, and one that has gone on within the workers' movement since at least turning of the 20th century. Marx and Engels both sort to understand and explain the socialisation of capital as seen through the development of trusts, monopolies etc. The replacement of the individual factory owner by the board was an expression of the centralisation and concentration of capital. This process of socialisation of capital enabled a massive development of the means of production. However, with World War One, this process reached the end of its historically progressive nature. The dynamic towards the international centralisation and concentration of the means of production came into direct conflict with the nation state. The world market was fully developed and divided up between the different imperialism and the only way to survive was to wage war -in all its aspects- on ones rivals. In order to do this, as WW1 demonstrated, it was necessary for the ruling class to allow the state and its civil service to defend the national interest through the total mobilisation of society during war and the orientation to the whole of society towards coming wars. In order to do this the state had to try to overcome and suppress the rivalries between the different fractions of each national bourgeoisie.
As treeofjudas pointed out at the beginning of this thread, Marx was already analysising the tendency of the state to become autonomous in the 1850's when he analysised the meaning of the rise of Napoleon the Third. This did not mean the emergence of a third coordinating class, but the need for the bourgeoisie to allow the state a degree of autonomy in order to maintain its control over society.
The emergence of state capitalism was the development of this tendency to a new level, because the very survival of the each national capital depended upon its ability to mobilise the whole of society for war, its ability to defeat the proletariat and the need to suppress all rival interests within the bourgeoisie to that of the national interest.
Stalinist Russia expressed this in its most brutal form. The old bourgeoisie was crushed but the new one emerged within and took control of the state i.e., Stalin's taking of power. It was only the brutal terror of state capitalism that could allow the total crushing of the revolutionary proletariat and that the Russian Capital could set about the nightmare development of the Russian war economy in preparation for the next world war.
The rise of Stalinism, and fascism led to a whole debate about the idea of a new class etc. The foundation of these new theories was that some how Stalinism whilst not being Socialist, did represent something different because private property had been abolished in Russia. The same argument that was used by the Trots to defend the Russian state as a degenerated workers' state. The fundamental error of this position was that it did not understand that capitalism is not defined by private property but by the relationship between capital and labour.
In the USSR, as syndicalist says, it was at the state level that planning took place. However, this did not mean it was not based on the same aims as all other capitalist nations at the time: the brutal exploitation of the working class and the development of the war economy.
The difference between the USSR and the 'democracies' was that the 'democracies' had the economic and military strengthen not to need to use the open iron hand of the state. And whilst many of the state capitalist measures they had used during the war were dismantled, there was a constant concern within the bourgeoisie and its state about how best the state could try and keep the economic, social and political contradictions of decadent society under control.
Many reading this will disagree with the concept of decadence, but the question of the emergence of state capitalism cannot be separated from this.

But wouldn't most coordinator-class folks (blindfolded and enjoying their last cigarette) argue pretty vehemently that their autonomy is restricted by the logic of the market, or at least by those pulling the purse strings, the shareholders or whatever, every bit as much as they restrict the autonomy of their own underlings?

And what about bourgeois economists, sociologists and urban planning theorists who go about their daily lives as salaried employees of universities, think tanks, and consulting firms, supervising at best a tiny and often sympathetic research staff? If anyone embodies potential coordinator-class autonomy it's them. Do they fall under expert adjuncts of management?

Hi

Castoriadis would say so, despite being one himself. Their autonomy is not restricted by the logic of the market, it is enhanced by it.

Love

LR

ernie:

According to Marxism, the position of the capitalist isn't defined in terms of "ownership" because that is a legal notion, and thus part of the "superstructure." Nonetheless, this just means there is a power relation -- call it personal appropriation -- that corresponds to property ownership ( base to superstructure).

The truth is, a property system is crucial for this class, it is a material fact about a society, because it enables them to entrench their power, pass on their class position to their children via inheritance of wealth.

The coordinator way of life makes it harder to pass on your class position to your children. You can live in a separate area so that your children socialize only with others from well-educated and elite families, and build separate school systems, and put pressure on your children to use it, to build up their "personal capital" of knowledge. The capitalist class position does not support a meritocratic ideology since it isn't based on any personal trait that one has the power, altho some apologists have tried to develop theories of "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking". But the coordinator class tends to develop a meritocratic ideology characteristic of that class, that its superior education, expertise, smarts is what justifies it being able to
make the decisions (to the degree they do...in capitalism they are subordinate to the profit making aims of the firm, enforced via the board of directors.)

And what exactly is "capital"? For Marx it is a social power relationship, mediated by market governance/allocation. The capital (owner) uses its money-capital to buy labor power and other resources on the market, sets up an authoritarian work control regime to ensure that labor power is used in ways that profit them, sell the resulting products, and reap the revenue of the sale. Due to their class monopoly over means of production, they can force price of labor power low enough ("You don't accept what we offer, you can starve") so that costs are less than revenue, and thus they make a profit. Thus capital presupposes a social matrix, a social context. This social context was missing in the USSR. Plant managers did not get the revenue of sale directly. Plant managers did not have direct market relations with other firms. Allocation of resources and quotas for production was via the state plan.

the property system is part of how this social matrix is constituted. that's because it sets up a system of legal rights to buy and sell certain things. and it is thru the buying and selling of labor power and other resources that allocation in production takes place.

ernie:

I am not syndicalist. Syndicalist (mitch) is a different person. I am syndicalistcat (tom).

Brutal exploitation of the immediate producers occurs under any class system. Again, the "state capitalist" advocates end up defining "capitalism" so broadly that they lose the ability to differentiate between different types of class system, which impedes our understanding of social history.

Here you're trying to define the difference between the USSR and the developed capitalist countries by purely political aspects, their governance systems. This is a very unmarxist method, I'll point out.

Moreover, I think your account of the reasons for the relative brutal and oppressive nature of the Soviet regime is wrong. A part of the dynamic of the coordinatorist central planning system in the USSR is that plant managers had quotas they were expected to fill. their personal prospects were dependent on their doing so. To make sure that they could do this, they had an incentive to lie to the planning elite (Gosplan) and colluded with their workers on this since the workers also had a stake in a working less hard.

Managers had an incentive to hoard resources needed to fulfill the plan. The upshot is that managers tended to over-hire workers. Workers had an incentive to go along, since the more over-stocked with
labor the plant was, the less hard they had to work. But this resulted in a systematic labor shortage. During the earlier years of the central planning regime, under Stalin, moving peasants to industry, and bringing women into the workforce, beefed up the labor supply so that the tendency to hoard labor didn't create a crisis, but led to rapid growth of output. Harshness of the regime also meant they had to have a very large coordinator class, because its role is to supervise and discipline labor.

But with a chronic labor shortage, if there had been a free market in labor, this would have driven up the price of labor -- workers would have been in a very good
position to demand better conditions, better housing, and so on. This is why severe repression was needed.

Now, to respond to MJ:

Within capitalism, the coordinators are a subordinate class. But they have been ceded a substantial realm of control, relative autonomy, as well as high incomes (participation in the exploitation of labor). And the market is a restaint on even the capitalists.

Management of what? The university, yes. They are also expert advisors of government administrators (a part of management). And bourgeois economists are certainly expert adjuncts of corporate management and the think tanks that
serve them. Their expertise is purchased by the capitalists and coordinators to play a certain role, as technical allies. Being technical allies of the capitalists is a role that coordinators serve.

Consider a law firm. Despite its organization as a "firm" it is a coordinatorist entity. We can see this as follows. The father of a friend of mine in college owned a small factory in south-central Los Angeles that salvaged auto parts. He had maybe 50 to 100 employees. When he retired, he could sell that plant. It had value independently of him. He was a capitalist who had capital he could sell.

Now consider a law firm. Its value is in its client list, connections, the talent and expertise of its lawyers. It has no real value appart from the actual lawyers. This is why it is really a coordinator entity, in its class position, social role.

t.

Hi

Spot on. The partners are highly paid and enjoy high social status too, which is key. Where we differ is in seeing industrial entrepreneurs and politicians as a separate elite from the coordinators. The coordinator class is the ruling class, and that's why the USSR was, indeed, capitalist. Not capitalism as a philosophical abstract, but as it really is, expressed in material outcomes.

Love

LR

LR re law firm:

I was talking about coordinators in American capitalism. Occupational groups may be of different class position in different social matrices...compare doctors in USSR (women, not well paid, etc.) with doctors in USA. Doctors in the USSR were arguably more like what i call the "lower level professionals" in the USA. This probably was an effect of patriarchy. Race and gender structures also impact the division of labor.

Politicians are sometimes capitalists, sometimes coordinators, in the USA. Holding a position like member of a city council, a state legislator or congressperson does not automatically make one a capitalist.

Your claim that the USSR was capitalist "because the coordinators were the ruling class" makes no sense. If you think the USSR was capitalist, it'd be nice if you provided an argument since I argued it isn't.

t.

Hi

Accepting your caveat regarding gender discrimination, the USSR’s professional strata enjoyed enhanced social status, remuneration and access to various perks of Party membership, such as beach holidays in Odessa.

I can’t speak for the U.S., but over here such legislators (even at the local council level) enjoy significant access to and influence over capital and are drawn from either the local business community or various worthies, Head Teachers, Accountants, Doctors and the like. Just as capitalism is about managing how capital is deployed, rather than owned, capitalists are all about managing, rather than ownership.

The defining feature of post-war capitalism is the dominance of the bureaucracy, marshalling capital to maintain the incomes, assets and social status of various bourgeois strata, including “professionals”, entrepreneurs and apparatchiks. The likes of Castoriadis made assertions along these lines, even Cliffite Trotskyism was founded on the notion of the USSR as state-capitalist (asserting the Stalinist bureaucracy constituted a new class). But such esoteric critiques are unnecessary, because Lenin himself insisted from 1918 onwards that the task was to build state capitalism and that Socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people. (In “Left wing childishness and petty-bourgeois mentality” and “The threatening catastrophe and how to fight it” respectively, I understand).

Love

LR

LR:

Sure. They were part of the ruling class. The coordinator class was the ruling class in the USSR.

Accountants, teachers, doctors aren't capitalists, in the advanced capitalist countries. They're coordinators. The capitalists are about managing their investments, the big capitalists anyways. The smaller ones have to do quite a bit of the coordinator gut work of supervising workers.

Within advanced capitalist countries, the coordinator class has been a growing and important class since the late 19th century. Entrepreneurs typically own a significant stake in the business. They are capitalists. You are conflating them with professionals, like lawyers, accountants, engineers. Their situation and the basis of their life prospects are different. Their level of power is different. The coordinator class is a subordinate class within capitalism.

Lenin's use of "state capitalism" in the period 1917-1918 is borrowed from its use by Engels and Kautsky. They used the term "state capitalism" with Germany in mind; they were referring to the state running some industries such as the railways and post office, for the benefit of the capitalists, and regulating the system as a whole. Lenin in 1917 did not advocate immediate nationalization of the economy. He advocated taking over some key industries and regulating the rest, to allow the capitalists to continue to develop the country. Eventually he did envision that the "state capitalism" would be transformed into socialism, through the elimination of the capitalists and the imposition of central planning over the whole econony. Lenin said contradictory things and was inclined to through out various one-liners. So, quoting him here proves nothing. And anyway, even if he thought state socialism was state capitalism, why think he was right?
We're not Lenin followers.

t.

Nice and challenging topic.

Pardon me posting some fairly rough thoughts but I hope to get this out before the discussion moves on entirely...

* The point that the USSR was not capitalist certainly sticks in the throat of the usual Marxian analysis. I believe most Marxian analyses of the Soviet Union are indeed deficient. SyndicalistCat is right that there was no effective market for capital, that the factory managers that controlled the factories did not base their decisions on profit in the usual sense (However, we should note that the USSR did have something of a labor market - even during the height of Stalinism).

* Looking at the USSR historically, you see a system that arose as a dictatorship over the working class by the communist party and by a bureaucratic group (which I would only call a "class" in the sociological sense). The system "fell to pieces" quite suddenly during the Gorbachev era.

* Command economies versus market economies have a number of "gray areas". The USA, Germany and other capitalist nations have had a command-based economies for periods of time. These command economies were operated for the benefit of the capitalists, from whom the control was "barrowed". While this command was happening, it could be argued that the country did not operate in terms of the command of profits - factories were ordered to produce products and paid a set price - owners still benefited from the extraction of surplus labor not longer could control how to disposed of their barrowed factories (not that they necessarily minded this profitable state of affairs). Further, a large capitalist enterprise that ultimately must make a profit can still operate internally as a "command system" with bureaucratic fifes carved out by managers and controls more based on ideology than the ultimate bottom line - though naturally this kind of thing happens more in offices and less on assembly lines. During WWII, the "class" of war profiteers certainly made money disproportionate to any particular investment mirroring the corruption of the Soviet System.
With all this, I would say that capitalism, the pursuit of profit, exists not as an absolute, moment-to-moment control system but rather as a tendency coming out of the circulation of commodities and, especially, the relation of wage labor.

* I would describe T's position as command-based. He looks at who are the commanding, controlling "class". When a given clique actually gives orders, then it is the ruling clique. I would take a system-based approach - this looks immediate control and the tendencies inherent in social relations. The capitalist system is the "most natural" result of "free labor", of a situation where wage-earners can be raised by a call for workers and sent to do anything that one hiring would wish. Thus we can see the tendency of "worker coops" to fail or become ordinary capitalist enterprises (but we don't deny they counter-act the immediate logic of capitalism). This is to say that immediate profits only drive decisions as a very long term average (over space and time). Further, the USSR was a clear "exceptional case" to the tendency of market forces to take over - in the sense that a massive police state was necessary to maintain the bureaucratic/party order, the power of the bureaucratic order being also cemented by the co-opted working class revolution, with a working class who saw the entire capitalist world put the USSR under siege. And even with this effort, the political order failed to maintain itself over time - the tendencies of "free labor" prevailed over the particular political order (an order which indeed prevented capitalist management of the economy for 50-70 years). The USSR seems very much an "exception that proves the rule" rather than simply an entirely distinct relationship of production.

* Tom's theory is a three-class description. Yet it should be noted now that scale of capitalism results in many further potential "classes" and "conflicts". There's the conflict between presidents and vice-presidents of companies, between vice-presidents and lower management, consultants and inside bureaucracy, ad infinitum. What is the criteria for deciding which conflicts are real? Many similar questions could be asked concerning his managerial perspective (managerial in the sense that he sees change happening as a change in management - self-management in this case).

* The fundamental problem I see with a command-based analysis like Tom's is that must take the political ruling structure on face value on some level. We cannot analyze just the formal structure of the Soviet Union but also the bureaucratic interests. As Guy Debord pointed out, Stalinism served the whole bureaucracy since the most bureaucrats would lose power and standing if a market system were put in place. But the process of production using waged-labor evolved over time to show the weakness and incapacity of a command system. Thus the system imploded in a coup and seemed to be replaced by "capitalism" in a matter of days, thus presenting a paradox. If "state socialism" can become "capitalism" in a day, why can't the reverse happen or for that matter, why can't any regime by imposed by the fiat of a coup-leader (notice that Libya is officially a society based on "self-management" despite being effectively a dictatorship of the higher cadre and effectively, in my opinion, a state capitalist society).

* It is crucial to be able to describe "abstract forces" like both wage labor and management concretely. The working class has both a collective and an individual instance and so does the capitalist. A worker is someone who sells their labor to buy back their survival - they are unconcerned or unable to be concerned with the immediate results of their labor. A *full developed* capitalist has a sum of capital which they enlarge through the buying and selling of fixed and variable capital. A *proto-capitalist* has control over surplus labor but doesn't necessarily have an official market to benefit from this possession. Still, we can see how in both the West and the East, official-capitalists and proto-capitalists transform into each other. In this process, we can high bureaucrats, explicit capitalists and mafia/criminal types all transforming into one another in a very not “ideal” capitalist system. The Soviet Union clearly fits within this overall framework.

Best,

Red

Hi

Um. We seem to have stepped into a parrallel reality where Brinton never existed. The idea that Ben Bernanke (as a coordinator) as subordinate to the CEO of some 50-man startup is somewhat unconvincing.

If nothing else, it demonstrates that the question is not so much "was the USSR capitalist?" but "what is the meaning and content of socialism?".

Love

LR

red:

I was talking about a class, what the nature of that class position is, how that class emerged, what its life prospects and characteristic ideology are. I wasn't describing an entire mode of production. Somehow Red has confused the discussion of this class with a theory of capitalism as a mode of production. He's simply mistaken in the view he attributes to me. Rather than trying to be a mind reader, I'd recommend actually responding to what someone writes.

Later he refers to what he calls my "managerial perspective" and asks about divisions between presidents and vicepresidents etc etc. As I pointed out, the position of the coordinator class is not to be defined in terms of an occupational label, like "manager", because occupations can have different powers and positions under differnet circumstances, in part because capitalism is a dynamic system that is constantly changing the division of labor.

Red's comment about various internal conflicts in management seems blissfully unaware of the fact that there are internal hierarchies in ALL classes within a class society. Consider the small capitalist garment manufacturers or small capitalist sewing contractors. In the USA four firms, Wal-Mart, K-mart, Target and JC Penney, control over 60 percent of the market for clothes. Wal-Mart is so gigantic it can tell a garment manufacturer "This is the price you're going to get, take it or leave it." They simply throw these less powerful capitalists up against the wall. They force them to do things that are illegal, like pay their workers below the legal minimum, to survive. That is hierarchy of power, within the capitalist class. And you have hierarchies internal to the working class -- on the basis of skill, the color or racial hierarchy, gender hierarchy.

t.

Syndicalistcat wrote:

I don't follow the 'logic' of your argument here or, to be honest, in many other places. My problem, no doubt, but one shared by quite a few others on this and other threads.

Why do the different theories which cohere around the term 'state capitalism' make it "hard to differentiate capitalism from other forms of class society"?

It's true that the tendency for the state to become numerically bloated, to attempt to control all aspects of social and economic life at times of heightened struggles between classes, at times of war, is quite marked at certain periods of previous class societies. For example, in Roman society, during the reign of the emperor Septimus
Severus (193-211) of the emperor Dioticien (284-305); or in declining feudal society when royalty attempted to strengthen itself by creating powerful interventionist administrations.

It's precisely such historical examples that allow us to recognise similar trends developing vis-a-vis the capitalist state from and even before the dawn of the 20th century to today, as Ernie in particular outlined.

But this in no way negates the specificities of the capitalist mode of production: generalised commodity over-production, the creation of a world market, a class of propertyless labourers with nothing to sell but their labour power and a capitalist class which appropriates the surplus value extracted from the exploited class.

The question of state capitalism, as Ernie (and others eg Lazy Riser)have indicated is by no means limited to the USSR: like generalised imperialism it's a product of global capitalist society at a particular stage of its development.

In Britain, immediately prior, to World (World as in global) War One, the 'appropriation' by the state of this or that capitalist enterprise for the war effort, on top of the direction of the main branches of industry, left some individual capitalists gasping 'but this is socialism'! No, it was state capitalism, and it was mirrored elsewhere in Europe.

Mirrored too in the political apparatus: the shedding of the sham of capitalist democracy with the formation of coalition governments, war cabinets comprised of all main parties.

This political tendency to 'one party states' didn't of course end after WW1, even if some factions of the ruling class (and indeed, the proletariat) believed the war to have been an 'abberation.' Where the workers had been most brutally defeated (Russia, Germany) such political line-ups mirrored the further statification of the economy (under the Nazis and Stalin). In the US too, the state began to take an even more central role in the life of the national economy in the aftermath of the '29 crash: The New Deal not only saw the state intervene nationwide, incurring massive deficits, to end the widespread struggles of the unemployed, this political/economic state capitalist policy was also a preparation for controling and preparing US society for the next world war. They may have taken different juridical forms, but both the US and Russia displayed strong state capitalist tendencies in this period as today: tendencies which attempted to cheat the law of value, to rush headlong into war production.

I won't go on to the state capitalist Marshall Plan which was necessary to relaunch construction in Europe and to re-arm it against its new rival, the USSR. Neither here will I go into the question of privatizations' - driven by the state, of course - except to warn again, against a purely superficial, juridical examination of this phenomenon.

The point I'm trying to reinfroce is the generalised tendency in capitalism's economic and political life towards a concentration of capital, of state capitalism, some of its expressions, and some of the circumstances which engender it.

Russia was a capitalist country before World War One. It remained one after the revolution, and the subsequent removal of many (though by no means all) 'private capitalists' in no way made it a different mode of production, or its new ruling elite anything other than appropriators of surplus value, of capital, a capitalist class. The nationalisation, or even total state control of a national capital is certainly nothing to do with communism, but neither is it some 'third' system: it's capitalism which ever way you look at it and the struggle to reach that understanding within broader and broader layers of the proletariat is hindered by arguments such as those you've forwarded.

You chide Ernie for relying too much on political description and say it's 'unmarxist':

Ernie said:

And Syndicalistcat replied:

Leaving aside the fact that Marx's was a critique of political economy, I think you should pay more attention to politics and 'forms of governance'.

You say:

But when marxists talk of a revolution they don't mean merely the coming to power of a new political class, but one that bears within itself, represents, new social relations, a new mode of production. Neither a new class nor a new mode of production was instituted in Cuba, or Russia or anywhere else unless you are again conflating approriation by the state and its functionaries with a completely different form of society.

In fact I find many of your arguments closer to sociology than to marxism. I find the only justification you give for delving at such length, and in such detail, into the composition of the "co-ordinator" class is

True, the proletariat must know its class enemy, the workings of capital. By examining the tendencies that produce state capitalism, by understanding it as a product of the "epoch of wars and revolution", by grasping its political implications - that the ruling class's democracy is a sham and that there is nothing to be gained by following this or that bourgeois party - by seeing in it capitalism's (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to overcome its inner contradictions, workers can more quickly and more clearly see what capital has in store for them and act accordingly.

Failing to see the coordinator class as also a "class enemy" is what led many to think of statist nationalization and central planning as socialism, that is, as a proletarian mode of production. Seeing only the capitalists leads to a failure to understand how a system that leaves the relative monopolization of empowering conditions in the hands of an elite, even tho these are not based on capital ownership or private appropriation, and this disarms people from seeing the basis of a new exploitative mode of production.

Lurch talks a lot about the state, but fails to look at the actual mode of production, the labor process, nor does he provide us with a theory of the state.

Lurch doesn't really raise any points that I haven't already responded to, so i will leave it at that.

t.

this is only true if by 'capitalist' you mean this fella:

For those of us treating capital as a social relation premised on alienation, whether we're being robbed by a private boss with competitors or a monopoly boss that also hires the cops directly (i.e. the state) makes little difference to our class position. i see no class distinction between ownership/control of capital - whoever owns-controls capital fulfils the function of capitalist, whether personally appropriating surplus value or not.

If all you're saying is that people with certain administrative skills are better poised to become new administrators, that seems a given1. but this is why lib coms argue for direct appropriation of the means of production, which precludes any new ruling class emerging because there is no basis for class rule (alienation). Obviously in such a classless situation, issues of knowledge-as-power come to the fore - could doctors exercise disproportionate power in lib com hospitals? but this (imho easily overcome) risk applies to any scarce skill - plumbers or brickies etc - not just 'co-ordinator class' ones. none of this is to say i don't see senior managers with no shareholdings as class enemies - i just don't see them as a class distinct from those with shareholdings.

• 1. thought i'd try a footnote. hegel fans, isn't this the master-slave dialectic, where the mediation becomes dominant?