A side point to syndicalist and syndicalistcat, since you're both in the same organisation and have similar names, it might be worth syndicalistcat (cos you were here last 
) changing your name perhaps to stop the confusion a lot of people have with your identities?
If you PM me or one of the other admins we can change your username for you.
It should be obvious that you do not need capitalists to have capitalism. As long as workers are separated from the means of life and have to sell their liberty to those who own/control them, there is capitalism.
The "state socialist" countries are obviously state capitalist. A bureaucracy controlled the means of life, state appointed managers ordered the workers about and the latter could change jobs. Just as state-owned railways are a form of state capitalism. See "An Anarchist FAQ" for more discussion:
http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/1931/secB3.html#secb35
Also, we should remember that "state capitalist" has been used by many different people to describe many different things. Even the term "state capitalist" when applied to the USSR does not mean the same thing. Tony Cliff called Russia "state capitalist" but his analysis was terrible -- essentially, it was capitalist because it competed militarily with capitalist countries and existed within the global economy (in that case, the slave-states of the US were capitalist as were Native American tribes fighting US troops!).
It is right to say that the Marxist account of a two class system based on property is simplistic -- and wrong. As Bakunin and other anarchists noted, inequality, oppression and domination can exist independently of property and economic class. As such, any hierarchical system can create or turn into an explicitly oppressive class system. As the USSR proved (in other words, Bakunin was right!).
It is right to say that the Marxist account of a two class system based on property is simplistic -- and wrong.
well '2 classes' is simplistic if you treat it as a system for classifying people and not a way of understanding a social relationship which is bipolar, within which various roles and functions are arrayed.
As Bakunin and other anarchists noted, inequality, oppression and domination can exist independently of property and economic class. As such, any hierarchical system can create or turn into an explicitly oppressive class system. As the USSR proved (in other words, Bakunin was right!).
Well the USSR certainly proved that class rule is based on ownership-control of the means of production (i.e. the means of life). i don't think any forms of oppression/domination are independent of class, they are interwoven and exist in a world dominated by capitalism.
Syndicalistcat wrote:
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.
IMO there are many issues you have failed to address both on this thread and others. In particular,
* the fact that state capitalism is a univeral tendency of modern capitalism, not confined to Russia or the former so-called 'socialist' countries;
* the fact that you have nowhere demonstrated that the capitalist mode of production ceased to exist in Russia or elsewhere;
* the fact, irrespective of your good intentions (which I don't doubt) you tend to reinforce major planks of bourgeois ideology - ie that Russia was a 'different' form of society (and evidently one opposed to 'traditional' capitalist society) or that in societies such as Cuba, a fundamental 'revolution' has ocurred.
* the fact that Russia was (and remains) fully implicated in capital's universal tendency towards more or less permanent warfare. That war has existed in different societies isn't in itself proof that Russia was not capitalist: it's for you to prove that.
What makes production specifically capitalist production is the separation of the means of production from the producers, their transformation into a means of buying and commanding living labour power with the aim of making it produce surplus value, or in other words the transformation of the means of production from a simple tool in the production process into something which exists as capital (and the form of this capital isn't really the point).
For me, you have not been able to demonstrate that this fundamental character was altered in Russia.
I also disagree that "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."
The confusion between state capitalism and socialism was a product
a) of the persistence of early weaknesses in the proletariat's analysis of capitalist social relations (viz the concrete measures proposed in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, proposals which the authors later freely admitted had become 'antiquated' by the development capitalism itself and by the experience of the workers - the Paris Commune chief among them;
b) of the specific instance of the revolution in Russia where the working class for the first time seized - and soon lost - political power on the level of an entire country, a loss first and foremost the result of the isolation of this event, of the crushing of revolutionary attempts elsewhere. That is another, if related discussion.
First of all syndicalistcat I apologize for getting your name wrong.
On the discussion, I think Joseph K point about seeing the capitalist as a gentleman in a top hat is what lays at the root of your understanding of this question.
When you say
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.
It is not clear who you are arguing with. Lurch, Joseph K and Lazy riser have no problem with seeing that capitalist state as the enemy nor is there a hint of equating nationalisation with socialism. Could you please clarify to whom you are referring?
To respond to lurch's detailed response to your argument with a discursive:
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.
This is not really adequate. As far as I can tell you have not responded to the historical development of state capitalism over the past 100 years, the nature of privatisation etc. As for a lack of analysis of the mode of production etc Lurch was developing upon the analysis of the rise of state capitalism I had made in my post.
However, if Lurch or I have not given enough theoretical analysis of the question of the nature of state capitalism and the relationship of this to the Russian experience (which certainly is probably the case) the following article certainly does:
The Russian Experience: Private property and Collective Property
[url=http://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience
Here are some extracts which should be of interest:
A third tendency tries to find the solution in the negation of Marxism. “This doctrine”, it says, “was true as long as it was being applied to capitalist society, but what Marx didn’t foresee, and what ‘goes beyond’ Marxism, is the emergence of a new class which is gradually, and to some extent peacefully (!) taking over economic and political power in society at the expense both of capitalism and of the proletariat.” This new (?) class is, for some, the bureaucracy, for others, the technocracy, and for yet others, the ‘synarchy’.Let’s leave all these speculations aside and get back to the main issue. It’s an undeniable fact that there is a tendency towards limiting the private ownership of the means of production, and that this is accentuating each day in all countries. This tendency is concretised in the general formation of a statified capitalism, managing the main branches of production and the economic life of the country. State capitalism isn’t the speciality of one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We’ve seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler’s Germany, in ‘Labour’ Britain and ‘Soviet’ Russia.
We can’t in the limits of this study go into an in-depth analysis of state capitalism, of the historic causes and conditions determining this form. We will simply say that state capitalism is the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development. Another remark. A characteristic trait of state capitalism seems to be that it develops in a more accentuated manner in direct ratio to the effects of the permanent economic crisis in the various capitalist countries.
But state capitalism is not at all a negation of capitalism, still less does it represent a gradual transformation into socialism as the reformists of various schools claim.
On the mode of production:
Capitalism is the separation between past labour, accumulated in the hands of an exploiting, directing class, and the living labour of another class. It matters little how the possessing class distributes its wealth among itself. Under capitalism, this distribution is constantly being altered through economic competition or military violence. However important it may be to study the way this distribution is carried out, this isn’t what we’re looking at here.Whatever changes may take place in the relations between different layers of the capitalist class, looking at the social system of class relations as a whole, the relationship between the possessing class and the producer class remains capitalist.
The surplus value extracted from the workers in the production process may be distributed in different ways, the parts going to finance, commercial, or industrial capital may be more or less large, but this changes nothing about the nature of the surplus value itself. For capitalist production to take place, it’s a matter of complete indifference whether there’s individual or collective ownership of the means of production. What determines the capitalist character of production is the existence of capital, i.e. of labour accumulated in the hands of one class that commands the living labour of others in order to produce surplus value. The transfer of capital from individual, private hands into state hands doesn’t signify a change in the nature of capitalism towards non-capitalism, but is simply a concentration of capital ensuring a more rational and efficient exploitation of labour power.
What has been shown up as false here isn’t the Marxist conception, but simply a restricted understanding of it, a narrow and formal interpretation of it. What gives a capitalist character to production isn’t the private ownership of the means of production. Private property and the private ownership of the means of production also existed in slavery and in feudal society. What makes production capitalist production is the separation of the means of production from the producers, their transformation into a means of buying and commanding living labour power with the aim of making it produce surplus value, or in other words the transformation of the means of production from a simple tool in the production process into something which exists as capital.
In relation to your point about Lenin and State capitalism agrees that Lenin was in error on this point:
The mistake of the Russian revolution and of the Bolshevik Party was to have put the accent on the condition, on expropriation, which in itself isn’t socialism or a factor that pushes the economy in a socialist direction, and to have neglected or relegated to second place the basic principle of a socialist economy.There’s nothing more instructive in this matter than reading the numerous speeches and writings by Lenin on the necessity for a growing development of industry and production in Soviet Russia. For Lenin the development of industry was identical to the development of socialism. He used openly and more or less indifferently the terms state capitalism and state socialism, without really distinguishing them. Formulations like ‘socialism = soviets plus electrification’ expressed the stammerings and confusions of the leaders of the October revolution in this domain.
It is very characteristic that Lenin’s attention was fixed on the private sector and on small peasant property, which according to him were the source of the danger of the Russian economy evolving towards capitalism. In so doing he completely neglected the much more decisive and concrete danger coming from state industry.
History has clearly shown that Lenin was wrong on this point. The liquidation of small peasant property could and did involve a strengthening not of a socialist sector, but of a state sector whose development meant the reinforcement of state capitalism.
There’s no doubt that the difficulties the Russian revolution ran into because of its isolation, and because of the backward state of its economy, would have been gradually attenuated by the development of the world revolution. It’s only on the international scale that there can be a socialist development of society and of each country. It remains the case that even on an international scale, the fundamental problem resides not in expropriation, but in the basic principle of production.
On the proletariat's response to the development of state capitalism and all of the ideologies that it has produced
Every society needs an economic reserve fund in order to ensure the continuation and enlargement of production. This fund is drawn from an indispensable amount of surplus labour. At the same time a quantity of surplus labour is required to meet the needs of the unproductive members of society.Capitalist society is tending to destroy the enormous mass of accumulated labour drawn from the ferocious exploitation of the proletariat. In the aftermath of the revolution, the victorious proletariat will be faced with ruins and with a catastrophic economic situation, inherited from capitalist society. It will have to reconstruct an economic reserve fund.
This means that, at the beginning, the amount of surplus labour the proletariat has to perform will be as great as it was under capitalism. Thus the socialist economic principle will not, in its immediate application, be able to be measured quantitatively in the relation between paid and unpaid labour. Only the trajectory, the tendency towards altering this relationship can serve as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production.
The proletariat and its class party will thus have to be extremely vigilant. The greatest industrial conquests (even where the part going to the workers is greater in absolute terms, but less in relative terms) can easily involve a return to the capitalist principle of production.
All the subtle arguments about private capitalism disappearing through the nationalisation of the means of production can’t hide this reality.
Refusing to be misled by this sophistry, which aims at perpetuating the exploitation of the workers, the proletariat and its party will immediately have to embark upon an implacable struggle to halt any tendency towards a return to capitalism, and to impose by all the means available an economic policy that leads in the direction of socialism.
In conclusion, we will cite the following passage from Marx to illustrate and summarise our thinking: “The great difference between the capitalist principle of production and the socialist principle is this: with the first the workers confront the means of production as capital, and can only set it to work to increase the surplus product and the surplus value in the interests of their exploiters. With the second, instead of being occupied by these means of production, they use them to produce wealth in their own interests.” (Source unknown in English).
syndicalistcat, these are only extracts and hopefully the whole article will provide the theoretical underpinning to the analysis of state capitalism that you say that lurch and I lack. It would be well worth your effort to read this article, which was written in 1946 by the Gauche Communiste de France. There is very little that is new under the sun.
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.(...)
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."
What Marx is describing here is not hired management, but private capitalists who borrow money to run their business. Total profit is then divided into profit for the productive capitalist and interest for the money-capitalist (or bank). Now, I would agree that this formula can also be used to describe today's situation, where the role of productive capitalist is often performed by salaried executives, while the actual owners increasingly take on the role of finance capital. Marx himself, however, did not argue this.
So rather than being based on a "bad misinterpretation of what Marx said," identifying capitalists with formal owners of capital is in fact based on a (too) literal reading of Marx. I would agree that it is not very useful, though.
anarcho: "It should be obvious that you do not need capitalists to have capitalism. As long as workers are separated from the means of life and have to sell their liberty to those who own/control them, there is capitalism."
What follows from your premise is that the USSR was a class society. So you've just redefined "capitalism" to refer to all class societies. That makes "capitalism" completely useless. This is typical of those who adopt the "state capitalist" analysis.
To tsiatko: Of course there were differences in income within the USSR. It was a class society. A variation of 24 to 1 between those at the top and the *poorest* peasants and workers is less than in capitalist countries. Bonds are borrowing. In the '30s the USSR was super-exploiting the working population to drive the development of heavy industry, to industrialize Russia. There were a variety of components to that. If you pay your coordinators a high level of consumption compared to others, you cement their loyalty, and selling them bonds means that you don't have to actually pay them all of that promised consumption now, you agree instead to pay it to them later, at an even higher level. Loans existed in the middle ages. Loans existed in ancient Athens. For the interest income to be a capitalist income, it would have to exist as money capital, which they could then loan out at will for interest or invest. The basic capital relationship, as described by Marx, is that you start with M, a certain amount of money-capital, you buy labor power (variable capital) and land and equipment (constant capital) and then
you set up some management structure to ensure the workers work, and then you sell the commodities for an amount of
money, M', and if it's greater than M, you've made a profit. Could the bondholders in the USSR do this? Well, no.
lurch: "the fact that state capitalism is a univeral tendency of modern capitalism, not confined to Russia or the former so-called 'socialist' countries"
Your view is outdated. The neoliberal trend of the past quarter century has been privatizing, deregulating...the opposite of the "trend to state capitalism." And what IS "state capitalism"? According to Engels, it was the greater economic role of the state in the regulation and control of capitalism, but where there is private appropriation of the surplus, via a market economy. This is not what the USSR's mode of production was.
lurch: "the fact that you have nowhere demonstrated that the capitalist mode of production ceased to exist in Russia or elsewhere"
I gave an argument. You can respond to that argument if you care to.
lurch: "the fact that Russia was (and remains) fully implicated in capital's universal tendency towards more or less permanent warfare."
The tendency to warfare and an arms race is a product of the nation-state system. It is true that capitalism is expansive, and has a form of imperialism that makes this more virulent. However, Russia, when it was coordinatorist, as it no longer is, had a mainly defensive relationship to imperial capital. The vision of "Communist expansion" was the Cold War bogeyman...and you accuse *me* of falling prey to bourgeois ideology.
lurch: "of the specific instance of the revolution in Russia where the working class for the first time seized - and soon lost - political power on the level of an entire country, a loss first and foremost the result of the isolation of this event, of the crushing of revolutionary attempts elsewhere. That is another, if related discussion."
The working class never gained political power in Russia. You're buying into Bolshevik propaganda. The main soviets were not run by the working class. The Petrograd Soviet had been formed in 1917 top-down by members of the professional intelligentsia in the leadership of the Menshevik, SR, and Popular Socialist parties. They concentrated all power in the executive committee. The plenaries had little power. They were treated as a rubber stamp by the party leaders, who were not of the proletarian class. This is discussed in Pete Rachleff's essay "Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution":
http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm
When the radical left in Russia in the fall of 1917 adovcated "all power to the soviets", they thought the multi-tendencied executive committee of the Soviet Congress would become the government. Instead the Bolsheviks sprung their surprise: a demand that they be given power via the Council of People's Commissars. They they proceeded to try to run the country top-down from that committee, controlled by party leaders, who were mainly drawn from the professional intelligentsia. This included creating a central planning body, the Supreme Council of National Economy, in Nov. 1917, which eventually became Gosplan. This was appointed from above, and was charged with the responsibility of planning the entire economy. Of course top-down central planning naturally leads the elite planners to want to control management on site to ensure their plans are carried out. So it is no surprise that by the early spring 1918 both Trotsky and Lenin were beating the drum for "one-man management."
The working class cannot gain power through a political party, but only when they actually control the making of the decisions through mass democratic bodies.
Felix: By a "productive" capitalist I think you are describing an entrepreneur, who owns capital, whose life prospects are in fact around returns to investment, but who also directly is involved in the management of the production process. This is NOT the same as the coordinators since their life prospects, their primary source of status and income, is thru their work not thru their ownership and financial management of their investments.
t.
Hi
That makes "capitalism" completely useless.
Hardly a crime. Besides, as a word in itself, it is completely useless. Russia is still coordinatorist, good word though.
Love
LR
anarcho: "It should be obvious that you do not need capitalists to have capitalism. As long as workers are separated from the means of life and have to sell their liberty to those who own/control them, there is capitalism."
Tom: What follows from your premise is that the USSR was a class society. So you've just redefined "capitalism" to refer to all class societies. That makes "capitalism" completely useless. This is typical of those who adopt the "state capitalist" analysis.
Red: Not really. While if you say "anywhere that there is wage labor, you have capitalism", then you are indeed making any class society into capitalism. If you say "anywhere there is a working class, a class entirely dispossessed from the means of production, you have capitalism", then you are describing a smaller subset of class societies. Feudalism may have had wage labor - indeed some estates involved all compensation calculated in money - but it didn't have a working class - a dispossessed group forced to seek work where-ever it could find it. This doesn't prove anarcho's point that this is always capitalism but it shows you not quite treating his/her point fairly.
Red
Red, you're using the term "working class" pedantically, to refer to Marx's wage-labor relationship. But it need not be so interpreted, as used in ordinary language.
t.
I am using the "working class" in the sense that anarcho is rather obviously using it - those "separated from the means of life and [who] have to sell their liberty to those who own/control them". You still aren't addressing the argument when you a working class in this sense you have capitalism. You are just unfairly lumping it with the argument that whenever you have labor for wages then you have capitalism.
Red
I think the question is, what do we mean by "capitalism"? In the tradition of Marx, i try to understand a society in terms of its basic institutions, and especially its class relations. When we talk about "capital" or "wage-labor", we're talking about a power relationship in social production. The property system is an essential feature of capitalist societies. One of the things that had to change from feudalism to capitalism was for the lords to gain the legal right to buy and sell land, and to dispossess their tenants -- these were not rights that were part of feudalism.
Capitalism is an arrangement where there are people who privately own capital, and as the system has grown, they also develop institutions such as corporations to hold and manage capital collectively, for the owners of the capital. Capital is a power relationship that presupposes a market economy. It does NOT presuppose perfect competition -- that has never existed, and is just one of the fantasies of neo-classical economic theory. A market involves agents who can act relatively autonomously in the dispossing of, or use of, assets, and allocation of resources within this framework is dependent on the bargaining power of the agents. Because the capitalist class has a monopoly of ownership of the means of production, this gives it a decisive kind of bargaining power in relation to the immediate producers, who do not own their own means of production. The capitalist firm buys labor power and other resources on the market, has its own internal control structure over the labor process to ensure that labor power is used in ways that will profit the firm, and this profit is realized by sale of the products on the market, with the revenue from sale going to the firm, and a profit is made if this is greater than the money-capital advanced to purchase labor power and equipement and so on in the market.
Because of the growth of capitals, the system evolved to the point that firms have a very elaborate division of labor in which professions and managerial positions are developed to serve as part of a structure for control of labor. The coordinator class emerges as a main class in virtue of the role it plays in social production, as the class that supervises labor and the running of the firm.
The major capitalists -- the guys in top hats, to use ernie's saying -- mainly retreat to the role of financial managemnt, management of their investments; for example, on boards of directors. Some entrepreurial capitalists remain -- someone like Larry Ellison. In smaller capitals the owners may still need to do some of the coordinatorist work. But we no longer live in the era of entrepreneurial capitalism where this was the main situation.
Accumulation strategies of the capitalists vary between countries, depending mainly on class struggle, and also over time. After World War II, in the advanced capitalist countries, the capitalists were forced to make various concessions to the mass of the population, such as expanded social wage via state welfare programs, recognition of unions and other mechanisms for incorporating worker's voice such as works councils. In countries like Sweden and Germany, where this social-democratic concession was deeper, concessions were more of the strategy to gain worker motivation to abide by the firm's aims, whereas in the USA and to a lesser extent other Anglo-Saxon countries, concessions were weaker and have unraveled more rapidly in the neo-liberal period. A key difference is that when capitalists take a more authoritarian approach to labor management, it requires a much larger coordinator class -- and this class is larger in the USA than in Sweden or Germany or Holland, for example.
The neo-liberal trend since the late '60s derives from the fact that the concessions of the immediate postwar period were derived from the struggles in the period between 1900 and the late 1940s. With that era of struggle past, and the unions bureaucratized and in "labor/capital partnership" mode, the balance of forces had shifted, and this enabled the capitalists to unravel previous concessions, and the profits crisis of the late '60s/early '70s provided a motivation.
The Soviet Union, by comparison, is a centrally planned coordinatorist mode of production. Allocation of resources in social production was not via the market but via a central state planning process. The ruling class included the generals, party appartchiks, Gosplan planning elite, industrial managers.
Not all coordinatorist systems are based on central planning, tho. Yugoslavia's "market self-management" was a form of coordinatorism based on state ownership, and internal domination of firms by the coorindator class, and externally via the state, but was not a capitalist system.
Similarly, if we look at the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain, they are a coordinatorist scheme. The workers nominally have rights of decision at the annual assemblies but in practice the professionals and managers dominate. They even have a rule that the workers cannot go outside and hire management consultants to help them understand the plans proposed by the managers and finance and engineering professionals.
t.
Thanks for repeating your basic position for us Tom. Despite your claims otherwise, it seems to fit the description I gave earlier - managerial analysis, or as others have said, sociology - or institutional analysis (not that I think that's what Marx did). Anyway, the key thing for you is who rules.
I would say that an alternative approach is "material interests" analysis rather than an "institutional analysis". Looking at the interests of the groups involved inside and outside of their legal position. Doing this, we can see that the coordinationist have an interest in becoming capitalists, in being able to make their temporary position permanent through the institution of ... explicit capitalism. And in most nations today, the group of corporate managers, generals and highly paid consultants merges quite well with the group of folks who live on their investments.
The main hicup in this approach is the way the USSR and allied countries continued quite a while without becoming explicitly capitalist.
But even in the USSR, the "coordinationists" had an interest in establishing fully fluid capitalist relations - it is just that the historical situation (the revolution, Stalin's rise, etc) made such a transition difficult for the bureacracy - so it took seventy years. Indeed, your discussion of the USSR doesn't touch on how it wasn't a random example of a state arising but the product historical revolutionary struggle between the working class and the bourgeois (the only thing that the Trotskyists are right about in their analysis of the USSR).
This goes with the further point (which is how I'd explapolate's Anarcho's idea) that when you have a working class (a dispossessed with nothing to sell but their labor), the exploiting class would tend to become "classical" capitalist and that "alternatives" are pretty darn similar.
Best,
Red
Marx thought that he had escaped from philosophy to science, he thought he'd developed a "scientific" way of looking at the history and dynamics of social formations. (There is a book entitled "Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy" by Daniel Brudney, which discusses and evaluates Marx's claim to have left philosophy behind. He concludes that this was a failure.) So, as I interpret him, Marx did indeed think he was a sociologist/political economist, but he also viewed practice as prior to theory, and his theorizing in the service of revolutionary practice.
red: "And in most nations today, the group of corporate managers, generals and highly paid consultants merges quite well with the group of folks who live on their investments."
"merges quite well with" is a phrase that obscures, avoids having to deal with the fact these folks are not capitalists (unless they really live as capitalists, and manage only in virtue of that).
red: "But even in the USSR, the "coordinationists" had an interest in establishing fully fluid capitalist relations - it is just that the historical situation (the revolution, Stalin's rise, etc) made such a transition difficult for the bureacracy - so it took seventy years."
yes. that's why I say that coordinatorism is an unstable mode of production, at least when it exists in a large capitalist context, as it has always done.
red: "I would say that an alternative approach is "material interests" analysis rather than an "institutional analysis"."
And what creates these "material interests"? People have material interests in virtue of their position in institutional or social structures.
t.
Very brief response to some of Syndicalistcat's comments.
1: lurch:
"the fact that state capitalism is a univeral tendency of modern capitalism, not confined to Russia or the former so-called 'socialist' countries"
Syndicalistcat
"Your view is outdated. The neoliberal trend of the past quarter century has been privatizing, deregulating...the opposite of the "trend to state capitalism."
I did warn you not to run into superficial statements based on appearances and juridical approaches but you went ahead anyway. a) Privatisatioon (organised by the state) is not antithetical to state capitalism. b) the "neoliberal trend" sits very happily alongside state capitalism in attacking the working class: Britain under Blair and Venezuela under Chavez illustrate this all too well.
2) Syndicalistcat
"The tendency to warfare and an arms race is a product of the nation-state system. It is true that capitalism is expansive, and has a form of imperialism that makes this more virulent. However, Russia, when it was coordinatorist, as it no longer is, had a mainly defensive relationship to imperial capital. The vision of "Communist expansion" was the Cold War bogeyman...and you accuse *me* of falling prey to bourgeois ideology.
I'm afraid you're descending into drivel. The pact with Hitler, the sacrifice of millions of Russian workers and peasants for the defense of the (capitalist) motherland; the subsequent occupation of vast swathes of Europe (Poland, Hungary, East Germany etc, etc); the arming of 'national liberation' gangs across Africa and Asia and the Middle East to do battle with those supplied by America; the missiles to Cuba, support of Vietnam... Just because the American ruling class also points out all this doesn't make it untrue. 'Defensive' my arse. Get a grip.
3) Finally, on the political power of the proletariat in Russia post 1917. From your post it appears the proletariat was completely absent from this event. I agree with one thing tho, a lesson of the Russian Revolution is that the workers cannot take power through a party.
In reply to lurch: The state has always been essential to capitalism. The ultra-lefts here have not responded to my challenge to provide a theory of the state. And if neo-liberalism is consistent with "the universal trend towards state capitalism," then what does "the universal trend to state capitalism" mean? And this character talks about "drivel"...
t.
"merges quite well with" is a phrase that obscures, avoids having to deal with the fact these folks are not capitalists (unless they really live as capitalists, and manage only in virtue of that).
How a-bout "have interests such that they won't challenge literal capitalists when they happen not to have money in the bank and tend to become capitalists". The point is that while they are distinct, they aren't necessarily going to act like a antagonistic interest group (and in the US, a "coordinationist" is indeed quite likely to wind-up rich and thus a capitalist - notice the salaries of corporate presidents).
But even in the USSR, the "coordinationists" had an interest in establishing fully fluid capitalist relations - it is just that the historical situation (the revolution, Stalin's rise, etc) made such a transition difficult for the bureacracy - so it took seventy years.
yes. that's why I say that coordinatorism is an unstable mode of production, at least when it exists in a large capitalist context, as it has always done
Well, I think that rather than calling it an "unstable mode of production", we should just drop any idea that it is a "mode of production" and simply call it an aspect of capitalism - especially considering that it couldn't/wouldn't have existed except in the context of world capitalism - indeed I'd say that's the point of a lot of arguments here. The point of seeing something as a system is that while nothing will perfect example of the system, the deviations to norm tend to work themselves out. Equivalently, one could say an unstable mode of production is an oxymoron - modes of production would have to be stable to be useful analytical tools.
"I would say that an alternative approach is "material interests" analysis rather than an "institutional analysis"."
And what creates these "material interests"? People have material interests in virtue of their position in institutional or social structures.
Not entirely. In this example, the bureaucrats of the USSR didn't institutionally own their factories but they had possession and that gave them an incentive to (eventually) set up a way to convert that possession to ownership. The larger point is that as long as there is a society which has accumulates a large mass of exploited wage labor/alienated labor, there will be an incentive to treat this accumulation like a pure commodity and return to "classical" capitalism. By this token, it justified to say any system with a working class is going to be capitalist.
Best,
Red
It's important to "see" coordinatorism -- have a theoretical understanding of it, so as to have a programmatic and strategic orientation that can avoid empowering a coordinator elite as an outcome of a revolutionary process. This means undertanding the role that coordinators play in social production, and the basis of their power, which lies in the way that social production is organized. This class position is based on a relative monopolization of empowering conditions other than ownership into the hands of an elite. Since the late 19th century, at least, capitalism has systematically tended to redesign the division of labor, stripping skill and autonomy from groups of producers, and re-organizing conceptualization and decision-making into the hands of a
hierarchy of professionals and managers, such as we see in
both the corporations and the state.
The liberation of the working class from subordination to an exploiting class can't happen without dissolving the power this class has over the working class.
All too many left-communists have converted marxism into a relgion, so they don't want to hear about the coordinator class because the Old Man didn't talk about it.
red: ""I would say that an alternative approach is "material interests" analysis rather than an "institutional analysis".""
my reply: "And what creates these "material interests"? People have material interests in virtue of their position in institutional or social structures."
now red says:
Not entirely. In this example, the bureaucrats of the USSR didn't institutionally own their factories but they had possession and that gave them an incentive to (eventually) set up a way to convert that possession to ownership.
You've just contradicted yourself. When you refer to the managers, central planning elite, generals, and party apparchiks of the USSR -- the "bureaucracy" as you call it -- you're talking about a group whose power and "material interests" are not separable from that very position they held in that system.
t.
Syndicalistcat wrote:
In reply to lurch: The state has always been essential to capitalism. The ultra-lefts here have not responded to my challenge to provide a theory of the state. And if neo-liberalism is consistent with "the universal trend towards state capitalism," then what does "the universal trend to state capitalism" mean? And this character talks about "drivel"...
You don't have to be a Trotskyist to argue that Russia was neither a capitalist economy nor a socialist economy but some sort of 'third' system: for example the left communist Pannekoek in his later years tended towards this view. However, in their 'critical' defense of Soviet imperialism, most Trotskyist currents were obliged to adopt this stance. (1)
And when I discuss with a militant, in this case Syndicalistcat, who defends the 'third option' view and appologies for the vast capitalist, imperialist machine that was the USSR and its 'Soviet bloc' thus:
However, Russia, when it was coordinatorist, as it no longer is, had a mainly defensive relationship to imperial capital. The vision of "Communist expansion" was the Cold War bogeyman
then I am confirmed in my view that what we're hearing here is another version of Trotskyism, with all the anti-working class position that this current implies.
If I am mistaken, no doubt someone will correct me. And my analysis doesn't mean I don't want to continue this debate. But to identify where, fundamentally, you are coming from and what your detailed analyses imply are at this moment more important than my view of the state (which you can glean from the IBRP thread in Forums/ Organise where you will get two Left Communist organisations and their suppoprters discussing the issue for the price of one).
A further elaboration of the question of state capitalism is however necessary and I or others will return to this.
(1) True, Tony Cliff's Trotskyist SWP and its forebearers called Russia State capitalist but they still defended it against the 'greater evil' of US imperialism, and continue to this day to take sides in inter-imperialist butcheries, inviting the working class to do the same.
As Chomsky has pointed out, the main foreign policy aim of American imperialism since WWII has been to oppose any form of economic nationalism that closes off a country from imperial capital to invest there, and exploit directly the resources and labor of that country, or restricts this exploitation. "Anti-commmunism" was just a propagandistic pretext for such a policy, as is clear when the same policy continues today despite the demise of the Soviet Union and China's transformation towards capitalism. The international institutions built at U.S. insistence after WWII, World Bank, IMF, etc and the various "structural adjustment programs" and so on, are designed to pursue this policy of an open realm for imperial capital. Production lines of imperial capitals stretch across boundary lines, and from the first into the third world. The computer industry in the Bay Area no longer has most of its production facilities in the USA...producton of microchips, circuit boards etc were moved to places like Malaysia, Mexico, Central America, and now to south China, where labor can be even more severely exploited.
The old Soviet coordinatorist ruling class was tied to its state, to the territory ruled by that state. To expand their area of exploitation required expansion of their territory, or puppet regimes based on its own armed forces, as in Afghanistan (an area under Russian influence for a long time) or eastern Europe. After WWII, Yugoslavia was the least developed country in Europe...74% of the population were in agriculture. Stalin wanted Yugoslavia to specialize in ag exports to USSR, and USSR would sell them tractors and other manufactured goods. The Titoist leadership of Yugoslavia wanted to develop their country industrially, so they broke with Stalin. Without his armed forces there in Yugoslavia, Stalin couldn't prevent this.
They did exploit other countries, thru political means, or thru aid dependency...as in the Spanish Civil War, when the USSR cheated the Spanish Republic on arms deals, stole its gold reserves. But these are external relationships. The Soviet system was based on exploitation in its territory as this was the reach of its central planning apparatus.
Exploitation via external trade, via external bargaining power, is not the same as direct exploitation of labor.
Capitalist imperialism works through export of capital so that capital extends across borders and exploits labor directly in the peripheral countries.
I'm not saying the USSR wasn't imperialist, but that it's imperialism was different.
If I say that the coordinatorist mode of production is a system where class oppression -- and other forms of oppression such as national and gender oppression and gay oppression -- continue to exist, then I'm obviously not "apologizing" for that system.
t.
It's important to "see" coordinatorism -- have a theoretical understanding of it, so as to have a programmatic and strategic orientation that can avoid empowering a coordinator elite as an outcome of a revolutionary process. This means understanding the role that coordinators play in social production, and the basis of their power, which lies in the way that social production is organized. This class position is based on a relative monopolization of empowering conditions other than ownership into the hands of an elite. Since the late 19th century, at least, capitalism has systematically tended to redesign the division of labor, stripping skill and autonomy from groups of producers, and re-organizing conceptualization and decision-making into the hands of a hierarchy of professionals and managers, such as we see in both the corporations and the state.
Here, if you substitute the term "group" or "section" for class, I wouldn't object that much. Many left-communists talk about the tendency of capitalism towards state-capitalism as one important tendency of capitalism so don't think that "seeing" the problem is that hard. The tendency towards state capitalism should be taken into account in struggle but so should the tendency neo-religious "fascism", liberal democracy and consumer society. But we don't need to create a concept of class/"mode of production" for each new administrative configuration of the system (does Iran have a different "mode of production" - clerics are neither coordineations nor capitalist in the usual sense).
But I suspect that your focus on coordinators also comes because your "vision" of a new society (parecon - complex rationing) would actually be dogged by the possibility of their re-appearance and you can see the need for "eternal vigilance" as the price of your freedom. A situation where the bulk of production was freely distributed to the community as a whole would not have to problem of having to constantly watch "the controllers" that your complex rationing scheme would introduce since these controllers wouldn’t exist. And indeed, I don’t see amount of watching that could prevent controllers/coordinationist from [i]leveraging[/is] their power to return things ultimately to full capitalism.
Anyway, I be no means reject your "coordinationist" position simply because it doesn't appear in Marx. In many ways, I take my positions from the Situationist International which did look at lot the technical elite as a force. Indeed, I heard your entire exposition of your positions a while before I read any Marx.
It simply that I've seen that an analysis that looks primarily or solely at the legal or political relations cannot see how society changes in an extra-legal fashion - your analysis is a fine description but it doesn't reveal the dynamics that underlie the change from one description to another (except in an ad-hoc fashion).
Anyway, moving on to a long back-and-forth.
Red-begins: I would say that an alternative approach is "material interests" analysis rather than an "institutional analysis".
Tom replies: "And what creates these "material interests"? People have material interests in virtue of their position in institutional or social structures."
red now says: Not entirely. In this example, the bureaucrats of the USSR didn't institutionally own their factories but they had possession and that gave them an incentive to (eventually) set up a way to convert that possession to ownership.
Tom further says: You've just contradicted yourself. When you refer to the managers, central planning elite, generals, and party apparchiks of the USSR -- the "bureaucracy" as you call it -- you're talking about a group whose power and "material interests" are not separable from that very position they held in that system.
Red: There are two material "fields of actions" here which give rise to two kinds of material interests. The field of action given by the bureaucrat's official capacity is the field of action of a manager, they officially had the same authority as manager in the West, they were beholden to the owner (the state, which manifested in a multitude of forms). The other "field of action" which a manager involves all those ways that they can "abuse their power" - how they can use the officially limited control over a particular factory to profit beyond their salary as well as gaining a more permanent place with the implicit power structure. This field of action ultimately leads (certain, especially powerful) bureaucrats to actually not want their limited position as manager and instead aim for the official position of owner. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, this "abuse of power" reached high levels, with the institution of the "mafia" becoming well entrenched (I believe quite a difference from the idealism that originally drove a good part of the revolution, however unfortunate we might consider the Bolshevik dictatorship). The entrenchment of corruption happened specifically because there was a contradiction between the official roles and the EFFECTIVE power available to those with the official roles.
Please note, I said originally the bureaucrats interests "not entirely" due to their official, not that their material interests were utterly distinct thing. Official position is a large determiner of material interests but interest outside official position are also important. Remember that the path of a planet seems like a straight line at any moment with gravity providing only a "small deviation" - thus the "small deviations" in social systems can give rise what is the ultimate tendency that social systems "rotate around". An analysis using the concept of alienated labor tending to become fully a commodity can show how these deviations undermine a state-capitalist/"coordinationist" regime tend to return to the orbit of "normal" capitalism.
Best,
Red
People in particular positions only have "fields of action" due to the institutional structure, which you fail to see.
Red: "A situation where the bulk of production was freely distributed to the community as a whole would not have to problem of having to constantly watch "the controllers" that your complex rationing scheme would introduce since these controllers wouldn’t exist. And indeed, I don’t see amount of watching that could prevent controllers/coordinationist from [i]leveraging[/is] their power to return things ultimately to full capitalism."
There could be some things distributed free in a socialized, participatory economy. But individuals and communities need to have finite budges, and there needs to be evaluation of inputs and outputs to production, in order to have an effective, not wasteful use of our time and other resources. And you qualify your comment by saying "the bulk of" production. What about the rest?
A way of life based entirely on "free distribution" is not feasible for humans today (as opposed to hunter/gatherer bands tens of thousands of years ago, maybe). That's because we need to know the social costs of what we request to be produced, the benefit actually provided (is this what people really want?) and we need a way to motivate people producing the things we want rather than what we don't want. If a mode of production is not effective for people it won't survive.
You're thinking that the coordinator class is not something to worry about is itself a lack of realism in your viewpoint, a failure to appreciate the failure of socialism in the 20th century.
t.
syndicalistcat, your clarification that you do see the USSR as imperialist is to be welcomed. However, you still end up in the tangle that lurch points out. You say that Russian imperialism was different to that of the US because that of Russia was based on the occupation of other territory. There is no denying that the USSR did occupy Eastern Europe and used a much more brutal and direct method of controlling the local bourgeoisie's: what else could it do it could offer no economic incentive for them to toe the line, nor could it threaten to leave them to the tender mercies of the West (because they would happily taken up the offer). On the other hand, the US could get the members of the Western bloc to toe the line because it had economic and military incentives to offer. They were willing to participate in its bloc military, economic, financial and cultural bodies because they gained not only protection from the Russian bear but also economically. However, when needs be, it could be as brutal and crude as the USSR if its was unable to use its more sophisticated 'democratic' methods. The populations of Latin America, Africa and Asia suffered as much, if not more, terror than those in the Eastern bloc. Hundreds of thousands died, if not millions, in the bloody terror that was inflicted during the Cold War by the allies of the US. What was the difference between being tortured to death in a cell in Bolivia to suffering the same fate in Hungary? Despite your intentions you end up down playing the military and political brutality of the Western bloc!
Another aspect to this question that your posing of US imperialism being some how different to Russian imperialism, is that it only sees two imperialisms. Every country is imperialist. Every national bourgeoisie out to defend their national interests. The only difference being the level of military and economic power they have in order to do this. Do you agree?
I have been informed that the link I gave to the quoted article is not working so I will give it again. It would be interesting to hear your response to this article. It is a detailed and deep theoretical response to your position written 60 years ago. The 3rd system analysis is not new.
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience[url=http://]
It would also be interesting to hear your thoughts on these previous analysis. What do you think of the Trotskyist analysis or Socialisme or Babrbarisme?
I agree that every nation-state is imperialist by nature. I wrote a piece that argued this at the time of the first Gulf War, at:
http://www.workersolidarity.org/iraq3.html
As I recall, the ICC actually liked this analysis at the time.
But the imperialism of the capitalist countries isn't just based on military force, tho, yes, this is part of it, but also on direct control and exploitation of labor in the dominated countries, they build their production lines accross national borders, outside their own state territory. They have an elaborate international order that enforces the maintainance of favorable internal policies of that state which facilitate exploitation by the imperial countries. While it is true that all nation-states are tendentially imperialist (e.g. domination of the Sandinista regime over the Atlantic coast peoples was a form of mini-imperalism by one of the poorest countries in the world), nonetheless there are obviously great differences in military and economic power, and we can distinguish the imperial capitalist countries from the dominated peripheral countries, in the world capitalist order.
t.
Sydicalistcat, you use the term "ultra-lefts". What do you mean by that? Left-Communists? Trotskyists? Anarchists? The term itself is a STALINIST term, and is meaningless except to shit on everyone to the left of yourself, which was how and why the Stalinists first invented the term.
Capitalism for us is a social relation. Capitalists can either control the capital, or own it. It makes no difference which. A worker is exploited by the capitalist who accumulates and controls the capital. The USSR did indeed have capitalists. The state itself, in the classic Marxist understanding of it, is the excretion of the bourgeoisie and cannot be separated from capitalism itself. The state isn't a neutral player. It cannot be taken over by anyone and simply expected to function in a manner different from the way in which the capitalist class would have it act. This is why when Marx, writing about the experience of the Paris Commune, wrote that the machinery of the state had to be smashed. A position which is more anti-state than anything I see coming out of the mouths of most of those who call themselves libertarian.
Think of it this way. A capitalist by nature of his collective power can call himself anything he wants because he controls capital and thus probably controls the monopoly of ideology and ideas as well. If that capitalist calls himself a Communist, an Anarchist, or "Democrat", it makes no difference because the material facts of their power speak for themselves.
The USSR saw workers being paid wages, the "Soviet" government issuing bonds and keeping gold reserves, it saw Taylorism borrowed straight from western managment experts of the time and it saw the accumulation of capital that manifested itself in connection to the power and privileges that the state as a sort of USSR incorporated was able to afford its ruling class. The New Economic Policy was spoken of by the rank and file members of the bolsheviks, anarchists and ordinary workers as the "new exploitation of the proletariat" because they weren't fooled by the nice talk about the NEP.
A capitalist isn't just a cigar chomping guy in a top hat out of a monopoly game or an old Stalinist newspaper. Again when you operate on a definition of Capitalist and Proletarian that is clearly identical to the Stalinists who used to tell me that you weren't a worker if you didn't work in a factory and you weren't a proletarian if you weren't in a labor union working in a factory in direct heavy production industry. Thus if you were a worker earning a wage like any other worker but were involved in a "service" then you weren't a worker. Likewise the Stalinist vision of a capitalist that the left today have largely and uncritically inherited, is one of a lone individual capitalist engaged in "free enterprise". It is a conception that bears nothing in common with the reality of life as a worker or the reality of the power of the capitalist class as an international class.
State-capitalism, grew out of the imperialist epoch. It was born in the run up to the First World War and was signified by the reality faced by capitalists that they couldn't slaughter enough people with arms supplied by private industrialists and thus needed the state to fill the void and build the modern capitalist war machine. Throughout the twentieth century we can see the state filling a greater and greater role in the preservation of capital itself. Such that in the US one can see in cities in the rust belt, where I am from, that the dead factories closed at the very same time the downtown jails were expanding. You can see it on the dates written in the corner stones. State-capitalism is any capital controlled or owned by the state. The leftists who refused to understand this thesis were supporters of Stalinism, Social-democracy and state-capitalism. The idea was that this state monopoly capital could halt or ameliorate the effects of the decline of capitalist rates of profit and thus restore the sick system to profitability. What it achieved in fact was the colossal amount of debt and bad debt we have today. Literally the product of over forty years of state-capitalism trying to preserve the system from crises. The fact that prisons in the late-nineteen eighties in the US were one of the fastest growing sectors of the US economy is state-capitalism.
Ironically, the concentration of capital whether in the hands of the state or any other actor only increases the contradictions of the system. The USSR had both inflation, falling profit rates and paid wage labor. Now what makes a worker a worker. Classically the one thing that makes a worker a proletarian is the fact that they are paid the wage, not who their boss is, or if he's turning a "profit" or not. It is the wage that shows the social relationship of exploiter to exploited.
"This universal trend towards state capitalism" occurred as a fact everywhere. One can see the state capitalist sector growing in the US with the arms industry at the end of the Great Depression or through the Tennessee Valley Authority's electification and waterway damming projects. In the UK this period of the growth of state capitalism saw Rover automobile nationalized, it saw US Steel becoming almost a protectorate of the US government, it saw the growth of state interference and intervention in the economy, not to favor workers with reforms or a more stable society to live in but to save the capitalists miserable butts after they dragged humanity through a Great Depression and two world wars.
Obama's bailout of Wall Street is direct state-capitalism. Other forms, such as "private contractors" who do business exclusively with the government or the military are also representative of forms of state capital.
Have you heard the capitalist dictum of "nationalizing the losses and privatizing the gains"?
That is what state capitalism is all about. It gets to the nature of the state as well because the state has as its job the preservation of capital on behalf of a capitalist collectivity that claims a popular "mandate" to rule through capitalist elections which by their nature are scams.
Pannekoek in the forties at least understood what state-capitalism was. Those who argued for the USSR being a type of "third system" neither capitalist nor socialist were often engaged in some sort of apology for it, the Trotskyists being a prime example of this. Even the Socialist Labor Party in the US never wanted to just come out and say the USSR was capitalist, that workers there were exploited by people who paid them in wages...you know...CAPITALISTS.
Read the works of Trotskyists in the thirties, they were so tied to their own role in support of Soviet state-capitalism that they refused to see the USSR for what it was. They let appearances of things distract them from the real material basis of soviet society, which was one of exploitation for workers, privileges for the "bureaucrats". Now Trotsky could never come out and say these "bureaucrats" were capitalists because he had helped put them in power in the first place.
Such erroneous conceptions about the USSR supposedly "non-capitalist" economy should've evaporated when the Soviet Union fell because at least by then it was apparent that the capitalists of the soviet union were capitalists because not only because they could exploit workers but becaise they could simply take state enterprises that were the "property of the people" and sell them off by salting off the workers with junk bonds in the place of their "ownership" of these state enterprises...which then were snatched up at rock bottom prices by the same capitalists that sold them the junk bonds in the first place. Russian capitalists around Yeltsin sold the enterprises off and thus demonstrated the final proof of who really owned what in the former USSR.
The collapse of the USSR confirmed everything those who supported the state-capitalist thesis had said about the USSR as to who owned it and who the ruling "bureaucracy" really was, in fact just another name for a capitalist class.
All capitalists are imperialist by nature. Didn't Adam Smith understand that if you put four capitalists in a room they will start plotting against each other? Consider South Africa or Rwanda and how they have attacked their neighbors. Capitalism breeds imperialist war. It sounds trite and cliched but I think that history has shown this fairly clearly. How does one define a third world state and a "first world state". Would one include Mississippi or Louisiana as "first world"? If so, they've probably never been to those places. Mexico is considered a "developed" first world country. However, the shanty towns around DF and Tijuana say something else entirely.
The real difference between the capitalist form represented by the USSR and the capitalist form represented by the western powers is one of minor details. What counts is the fact of exploitation.
There is no theory needed for workers to understand they are being exploited when they can experience their own exploitation and see who is responsible for it. In a Stalinist state-capitalist, or "command" economy the exploiters become associated with the state itself and the state becomes the first and last enemy of workers.
In less than two weeks time hundreds of neo-Nazis and racists will descend on the coastal town of Dover calling for Britain to “close the border”. It is vital that anti-fascists and anti-racists...
A short account of the West Siberian uprising against the Bolsheviks.
Michael Heinrich argues that Marx was not after a “Marxism” as an identity-defining “truth.” Rather, he was more interested in the critical business of undermining certainties.
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Lawyers are generally workers - and the ronin lawyer can be high paid piece workers. When a lawyer works, they are not independent - they work for their client(s). They create surplus value - saved costs - for their employers.
My concern with all this "coordinator" mumbo-jumbo is that it accepts Stalino-Leninism at face value. Syndicalistcat accepts the stalinist "fact" that prices were set by bureaucracy, etc. Where is the proof of these assertions? Can we see figures which show that the USSR violated the rules of capitalism more than other equivalent industrializing countries?
True, the USSR "coordinator" class did not "own" the economy in a traditional sense - stocks. But it isn't asked if they could own/gain financial interest it various enterprises in other ways.
Here are a couple of Stalin era articles advocating a "state-cap" analysis:
OK, so there's bond holders in Stalin era USSR. They are expecting a super-huge rate of return on their investment. Who are those bond-holders comprised of?
The bond holders of 1930s USSR sound like present day capitalism where many workers hold small amounts of corporate share and are thus "petit-capitalists" in the eyes of capitalism.
Of course who who, out of the millions of USSR bond holders, benefited?
Humm. 43 trillion US 2005 dollars worth of industrial bonds held - mainly by Russians. The nomenclature get 24 times what the poorest workers/peasants earn.
So:
Who bought these highly profitable bonds?
Who benefited economically?
Who (supposedly) set the prices and how?
Who played the lottery and who got paid interest?
Humm I wonder...