Re: [A-List] accumulation/financialisation - a query

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

CB,

Leninists work for the overthrow of capitalism. Marxists believe in
scientific dialectic materialism which predicts the inevtiability of the
replacement of capitalism by socialism as a natural outcome of
capitalism's internal contradiction. That is why liberal Marxists such
as social democrats believe that socialism can only take place in
advanced economies with structural antigonism between a capitalistic
bourgeoisie class and a proletariat class. A class struggle emerged
after the French Revolution left much of Europe with economic and
political systems in which the bourgoisie governed the polteltariat. The
October Revolution was an unexpected anomaly because circumstances
caused it to take place in a semi-industrialized feudal country the
majority population of which was peasants rather than factory workers,
and the conflict was between landlord and peasants rather than
capitalist and workers. It is then a revolutionary task to create a
proletariat class as quickly as possible through rapid
industrialization, not merely to catch up with the moer advanced West,
but to hasten revolutionary dialectics. Thus the modernization
strategies of the Soviet government was fundamentally different thatn
that of Peter the Great. Social engineering had to be speeded up to fit
revolutionary dialectics. This new proletariat class, not having existed
before the revolution, had not had the experience of being oppressed by
capitalists. Oppression in pre-revolution Russia was mostly of a feudal
nature. This peculiar incongruity between revolutionary theory and
actuality gave impetus to the internationalist to carry the revolution
to where it belongs –in the advanced countries. The pragmatic tolerance
the bourgeoisie and the kulaks by the NEP between 1921 and 1927 restored
symbiotic trade between urban centers and the rural periphery but did
not advance the revolution. In reaction, Trotsky advanced the concept of
“permanent revolution”, an incessant drive for proletariat dictatorship
on all fronts in all parts of the world, even in countries where the
proletariat did not exist, such as China.

Below is the opening excerpt of my article in progress on:

The Causes and Effects of the Sino-Soviet Split

<>The October Revolution produced the slogan: ‘All Power to the
Soviets’. In 1917 this was the means by which the minority Bolsheviks
won the leadership of the Soviets. Democracy was not an objective of
October Revolution; it was a target. The first edition of Stalin’s
Problems of Leninism which appeared in April 1924 asks: “Is it possible
to attain the final victory of socialism in one country, without the
combined efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries?” The
answer was: “No, it is not. The efforts of one country are enough for
the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. This is what the history of our
revolution tells us. For the final victory of socialism, for the
organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country,
especially a peasant country like ours, are not enough. For this we must
have the efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries.” <>

The strategic key words on internationalism were ‘final victory’, which
cannot be achieved with just ‘socialism in one country’. But ‘final’
does not necessarily mean immediate; it means in the future. And
international communism was focused not on the whole world, but on “the
proletariat of several advance countries”. The October Revolution was an
unexpected anomaly because circumstances caused it to take place in a
semi-industrialized feudal country the majority population of which was
peasants rather than factory workers, and the conflict was between
landlord and peasants rather than capitalist and workers<>. It is a
revolutionary task then to create a proletariat class as quickly as
possible through rapid industrialization, not merely to catch up with
the more industrialized West, but to hasten revolutionary dialectics.
Thus the modernization strategies of the Soviet government was
fundamentally different than that of Peter the Great<>. Social
engineering had to be speeded up to fit revolutionary dialectics. This
new proletariat class, not having existed before the revolution, had not
had the experience of being oppressed by capitalists. Oppression in
pre-revolution Russia was mostly of a feudal nature. This peculiar
incongruity between revolutionary theory and actuality gave impetus to
the internationalists to carry the revolution to where it belonged – in
the advanced industrialized countries. The pragmatic tolerance the
bourgeoisie and the kulaks by the NEP between 1921 and 1927 restored
symbiotic trade between urban centers and the rural periphery but did
not advance the revolution. In reaction, Trotsky advanced the concept of
“permanent revolution”, an incessant drive for proletariat dictatorship
on all fronts in all parts of the world, even in countries where the
proletariat did not exist, such as China. <>

By the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in June 1924, Trotsky’s
internationalist priority of world revolution was rejected as naive
advanturism. In the second edition of Problems of Leninism published in
August 1924, the very foundation of international communism was
reordered. The Soviet Revolution needed to be protected first and
foremost on account of effective, coordinated hostile reaction to
revolution in the advance countries. The role of the Comintern was
accordingly reduced to opposing foreign counterrevolutionary
intervention against the USSR, rather than fighting prematurely for
untimely revolution in the capitalist countries or to forster socialist
revolution in pre-industrialized countries that had no proletariat
class. The Comintern needed to act as an instrument of Soviet diplomacy
in a world order full of hostile anti-communism states. This meant that
the Communist Parties in various countries had to seek friendly
relations with whatever influential sections of society they could, in
the interests of promoting state-to-state ‘friendship with the Soviet
Union’, temporarily sublimating the class interests or perceptions of
the workers. This change in the line of the Comintern was demonstrated
in two events in the mid-1920s - the British General Strike in 1926, and
the defeat of the upsurge of workers in China in 1926-7. The General
Strike in Britain fractured the British communists and gave birth to the
anti-communist, anti-Soviet British left. At the Party Congress in 1927,
The Central Committee under Stalin defeated Trotsky “leftist
deviationism” by a plurality of 854,000 to 4000 votes. In exile Trotsky
stigmatized Soviet policy in this period as “Stalinist”.

Henry

Charles Brown wrote:

> From: "Jurriaan Bendien"
>
>
>
> There are few good books nowadays analysing the "real capitalism" of our
> time more systematically, and past texts are to a large extent out of date.
> Essentially what someone like Grossman did was to assess abstractly the
> interaction of some main factors influencing the rise and fall of the rate &
>
> mass of profit over time. Ernest Mandel, who was influenced by Grossman
> (though also critical of him) did more or less the same. But I think there's
>
> much more to social and economic analysis than that, and Marxist discussions
>
> of money & credit, and of international trade, are often rather weak. Few
> Marxist authors actually propose viable alternative policies which are any
> different from left-social democratic or centre-left policies.
>
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Hello Jurriaan.
>
> Might the weakness of Marxist discussions of reforms of captialist money,
> credit and international trade be because Marxists are supposed to focus on
> overthrowing capitalist finance, not reforming it ?