RE: Doug Henwood/Mark Jones exchange (from LBO-Talk)

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a RE: Doug Henwood/Mark Jones exchange (from LBO-Ta,
el 30 Apr 00, a las 17:34, Mark Jones dijo:

> Well, well, Nestor, you continue to surprise me with your elegant
> thought-processes. But what does this exactly mean:
>
> > The whole long debate on the autonomy of economic forces, a debate
> > where the Soviet bureaucracy put to work some of the best minds in
> > economic policy of their time (Varga, Lange, and others), would have
> > been spared with just presenting the points of view of Social
> > Democrat economists, such as the Swedish school of welfare state
> > economics.
>
> Mark Jones

Coming from Mark, this may be the beginning of a debate, or more
accurately a fencing contest. So that, if the sabre is to be
unsheathed (Mark dislikes light fencing foils, and it would be
uncourteous to propose a duel with _facón_), let us at least be clear
on what shall the bout deal with.

Let us begin by a general introduction repeating things that have
been said once and again, ad nauseam. But they must be stated yet one
more time. I suppose we can take them as our common ground.

The historical setting of the first proletarian revolution in history
was not the setting predicted by theory, nor theoreticians.  Lenin
explained that the weaker links of worldwide capitalism were to be
shattered first, and Russia was among the weakest. So, backward
Russia revolted first and, unfortunately, the ensuing Soviet Union
remained encircled, in a sense, for a whole century (I suppose that
the future historians will speak of the 20th. century as the century
of the Great Siege).

OK, all of this is known by everybody here so I will leap forward.

One of the most tragic consequences of all this was that most of the
energies of the first human communitty consciously aiming at the
construction of a classless society, that is a true _community_,  had
to be diverted to very different tasks. First and foremost, the task
of keeping that society alive against all odds (odds that included
the hydrophobic reaction of the bourgeois world, etc., no oddity at
all!). Second and not less foremost, to build up the material
foundation for something resembling socialism to begin to have some
actual grounding on a terrain that had been ravaged to the marrow of
its own possibilities to hold some kind of civilized human life.

This is also shared knowledge, I guess, so that I will leap forward
again.

The way in which this hunger-striken, desperate, incredibly idealist
community found a climbing path up from the bottomless well where it
had been forced into implied an enormous amount of human suffering.
This time, the suffering was not to be rewarded with lies, as usual
in class societies: standards of living, in the long range, climbed
for _all_  in the SU, and good health care, as well as high culture,
were immediately  available to large tracts of the population, and as
time passed by these tracts were notoriously enlarged.

In the end, whatever one can say on the political atmosphere of the
late 30s in the USSR (1), the fact is that people at large were
clearly better off, and were ideologically convinced that everything
that had happened in the USSR since 1917 was worth living (and thus
dying for). This was demonstrated in the extraordinary fighting will
displayed by Soviet people during the aggression from the West, an
aggression spearheaded by Germany and then continued by the
"democratic" powers. These were the doubtlessly _heroic_ years of the
besieged fortress. I am intentionally _not_ thinking of why did the
Revolution remain besieged. This is another issue, though it might
help explain something of what happened in the realm of economy.

Now, under these conditions the Soviet Union was impelled to
establish a system of "primitive socialist accumulation" (this is
also known, what I am going to talk about, however, is not equally
clear, so far as I know). The Gulag itself, in a way, acted as a
means of accumulation (2). The problem is that once people engage
into a certain kind of economic relationship, this relationship will
tend to mould their whole being, their ideas, their lifestyle,  even
their instincts and dreams. That is, since society is a unitary
structure which cannot exist unless it produces itself materially,
the actions that people engage in during the productive activity tend
to shape the ideas those people hold as valid, even though people
will not be aware of that. Allow me, for the sake of brevity, call
this fact as the generation of a _Zeitgeist_, a "state of mind of an
age".

And, here comes the great problem, the Zeitgeist generated by
primitive accumulation in the conditions of extreme centralization
and, to an extent, arbitrary rule by the administrative groups (which
took in return an enormous chunk of the social production), was one
in which the realm of the economic was to be set in an EXTERNAL
relationship with the remaining areas of human life. Though we were
building socialism, we had to accept privileges and strict command
from the administrators. We had to abide by their will, which was
certainly enlightened, but was so to say "superhuman".  They would
guide us to greater realization of ourselves, they could show how our
lot was actually improving. "Remember the civil war, remember what
did we have here immediately after the civil war ended" may have been
in a sense the watchword of the times.

Thus, the extreme necessity in which the Soviet Union found itself
(herself? my English fails me again!) led to a division between the
economic and the non-economic in societal things. Stalin himself
broached the issue, because he understood that there lay a Gordion
knot there, and after him came Eugen Varga and others. The basic idea
is that in the Soviet Union, where the core of the system was not
based on the generation of value and on extraction of surplus-value
for accumulation by individual bourgeois, the battle for
consciousness was essential in a measure unparallelled in the
capitalist world.

Under the conditions of capitalism, the very fabric of social
relations generates a reified consciousness once and again. This is
the process of fetishism of commodities that Marx spoke about. The
separation between the ruthless hell of workplaces and other
("democratic") areas of life, which is based on the idea that economy
has rules of its own, and furthers this idea deeper and deeper in the
consciousness of people, is functional to the capitalist and to the
capitalist society as a whole. This separation is a precondition for
the law of value to work its way through any expression of human
life, and for capitalism to cancerously invade the whole of social
activity.

But it is not functional, nor does it stem "naturally", from everyday
experience in a non-capitalist formation. However, under the double
oppression of necessity and bureaucratic rule, everyday experience in
the Soviet Union was in great need of an ideologic surrogate for this
fact of the society that we are bent on destroying for ever. This
surrogate was found, among others, in the work of economists who,
conferring to the society-nature metabolic activity some kind of
"mystical" preeminence on any other human activity, argued in length
for the subsistence of "economic laws" into socialist society.
Probably the greatest victim of this was György Lukács, who recanted
in full of his positions of 1922 (_Geschichte und Klassenbewustsein_)
as the century wore on, and the bureaucratic rule imposed itself on
the Soviet Union.

This movement had a philosophical consequence as well: that of giving
an enormous importance to a book that Marx and Engels had merrily
decided to leave to the criticism of mice (_The German Ideology_) and
to dismiss in practical life the _Theses on Feuerbach_, which Engels
himself considered the nutshell of dialectic materialism.

So that, to sum up: both Social Democrats and Stalinists shared the
notion that economy was a _different_ realm of human life, not only
in an epistemological sense but basically in an _ontological_ sense.
Their planning was not based on people's desires, it _took them into
account_, but as SOMETHING external to the realm of economy. Thus,
the bourgeois separation between fact and value (a separation that
even Hegel had begun to overcome, and Marx / Engels had thrown to the
dark cellar of philosophical theratologies) appeared again in the
Soviet Union. The difference with Social Democrat planners, however,
is that while the latter did not question themselves at all, Soviet
planners had to permanently convince themselves of the worthiness of
their task. This, too, speaks well of the Soviet Union.

I suppose that the objections by Uhlas to my posting are also
answered here.

A hug to everybody and wait a minute, I am going to fetch my sabre
right now!

===========
(1) and you know, Mark, that I have cartloads of things to say on
those times which you will probably not accept as good material, or
at least you would dismiss as idealistic and dangerous rambling of
the mind. But I want to deal with one thing at a time.

(2) I will say something terrible now: Through the Gulag, the Soviet system 
generated
some kind of "socialist slavery", where you had around 3 to 5 million people
generating value and constructing great public works for just the food and some
elementary  housing. I am talking in strictly
_economic_ terms, of course. There was no exchange of equivalent at all in the 
Gulag
system, something bourgeois economists get angry with, but we should look at in 
a
different way (no matter whether we agree that it was an excellent thing to do, 
or
not). There was forced labor and there was no
payment. This is, at best, serfdom, and at worst slavery. At least on my book.





Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx