Characterising the Soviet Union - a critique of a perspective in LINKS journal ::posted Sat, 30 Aug 2014 00:00:56 +0000:: ift.tt/1qQwLO7 Im interested in having a better understanding of the Soviet Union and one that employs and tests Marxist ideas. By political necessity Trotskiests to have always been the ones to make extensive arguments about the Soviet Union from a Marxist perspectives and while they have some useful points I often find them pretty mechanical and simplistic. For example theres the following argument by Barry Sheppard, contra Cliffs State Capitalism theory, that the Soviet Union couldnt have been part of capitalism because there was no endless accumulation: No capital accumulation The fact is that the bureaucracy in its over half century of bureaucratic rule had not amassed anywhere near the capital necessary to buy the means of production. This fact contradicts the theory of state capitalism. If the USSR was capitalism of any kind, vast amounts of capital would have accrued to the bureaucracy, but this was not the case. As Marx explained in volume one of Capital, the capitalist system is characterised not by the formula of C-M-C, of earlier commodity production, whereby independent producers created commodities (C), sold them in the market for money (M), which was then used to buy other commodities, completing the circuit of C-M-C. Rather capitalism is characterised by a different circuit, M-C-M’, that is, the capitalist brings money into the market and buys commodities such as raw materials and machines etc. and one other crucial commodity, labour power sold to the capitalist by workers. The capitalist sets these commodities into motion in capitalist enterprises and new commodities are produced, which he then sells on the market for money. Since the crucial commodity of labour power has the ability to create new value greater than the cost to the capitalist of labour power, the commodities that the workers produce but the capitalist owns have greater value than that of the original M the capitalist started with and when those commodities are sold for money, M’ is greater than M. The circuit can then be renewed with M’-C-M”. In the Soviet Union there was no such M-C-M’ circuit and no capital accumulation. That explains why after a half century of supposed state capitalism there wasn’t enough capital in the former USSR to buy the privatised means of production. If M-C-M’ had existed, there would have been enough money capital to do so. The theory of bureaucratic collectivism did not face this difficulty. According to this theory, the economic privileges the bureaucracy enjoyed stemmed from a non-capitalist mechanism. The fact that the bureaucracy had not amassed enough capital to buy the means of production in the return to capitalism indicated that bureaucratic collectivism – if that’s what it was -- did not exploit the workers and peasants to the degree that capitalism does. If what existed in the USSR was bureaucratic collectivism, then it was certainly short-lived, not long enough to be considered a new historical stage or a new type of exploitative society as its original theorists believed. On the scale of history the collapse of the USSR makes clear that the choice remains, capitalism or socialism, not a third way. It is clear that the social force that carried through the return to capitalism was the bureaucracy itself. It was not the workers or the peasantry. Both “third camp” theories have no explanation why the bureaucracy would want to do this and excluded this possibility, unlike Trotsky, who predicted it. For Trotsky’s view, I’ll quote from the Transitional Program for a brief synopsis: The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The bureaucratisation of a backward and isolated workers state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation – not only theoretically but this time practically – of the theory of socialism in one country. The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism. From this article: ift.tt/1qQwLOe This seems really weak to me on Marxist grounds. It argues that: (a) If the USSR was capitalism of any kind, vast amounts of capital would have accrued to the bureaucracy, but this was not the case. (b) Capitalism is characterised by an M-C-M movement and no such movement occurred in the USSR (c) As evidence, after a half century of supposed state capitalism there wasn’t enough capital in the former USSR to buy the privatised means of production, something that would have been possible in a Capitalist society. Each of these points are quite unclear. Firstly, while large amounts of capital might not have accrued to individual bureaucrats - just as many CEOs in contemporary capitalism dont necessarily control a lot of capital as individuals - its not at all clear that the state and state enterprises didnt accumulate a lot of capital administered by and in the interests of the ruling bureaucratic class. Secondly, its unclear at what level we are supposed to observe an M-C-M movement. At the level of the firm? As the dynamic that characterises the economic activity of the nation state? Or as a transnational world-system? My reading of Marx, or more accurately the reading of Marx that I find useful is that capitalism is characterised by a transnational system in which capitalist enterprises operating under an M-C-M movement sufficiently permeate the economic life of society to as pull the majority of people in that society into their logic /and/ they become intertwined with state power and to a certain extent subordinate state power to this logic (this isnt meant as a comprehensive definition of capitalism, only a sketch of how M-C-M might be useful in understanding capitalist society). Giovanni Arrighi in the Long Twentieth-Century argues that you can observe the dominant capitalist class in societies follow medium to long term historic patterns of M-C movements (investment in production) and C-M movements (financialisation). While I wouldnt claim to know nearly enough about the USSR to definitively characterise its economic dynamics, I dont think its obvious that the state and state enterprises werent engaging in something like capitalist accumulation in the long term with the middle of the century being characterised by a C-M movement and the beginning of a M-C movement being observable. Thirdly, the concept of having enough capital seems a little bizarre - the authors presumably referring to money capital and theres no reason individuals or organisations would necessarily be sitting on large piles of money capital just because the society or individual organisations followed a M-C-M dynamic. Marx writes in chapter 4 of Capital Vol. 1 - where the author gets this formula - of how unlike the miser the capitalist is constantly driven to invest their money into more commodities. The massive privatisation that did occur certainly unleashed a more open and brutal form of capitalist exploitation but theres nothing about the historic case of this transfer of wealth from state to individual hands that particularly invalidates the idea of state capitalism. Its also super unclear who he means should have had the capital to buy the state assets. The actual individuals or the state bureaucracy? Or idk. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? submitted by jackprole[link] [comment] [Forwarded by the MyLeftBlogosphere news engine. Link to original post below:]
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 08:12:49 +0000
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