Re: On Nestor's "analysis"

["Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown rejects my refutation of his statement ("Without the
protection by the state power, the capitalists would not last very long")
and my calling it an 'anarchist myth'.  He says that my responses
demonstrate the nonsense of my position: "You are calling a Leninist
analysis of the role of the state in capitalism "anarchist" . That is
ridiculous on its face."

Let us look at the facts.  Capitalism emerged as a mode of production in
Europe in the 16th century.  There was no state power assisting it.  If
anything, there were state powers blocking it, taxing it, slowing it down.
If capitalists needed their interests to be protected, they had to buy their
influence.  It was until the 18th and 19th centuries that European
capitalists succeeded at organizing state powers specifically devoted to
protect their interests.  This is a historical fact.

In Russia, 1917, the Bolsheviks smashed the state power devoted to protect
the capitalists.  Capitalists in Russia were left with no state power to
protect them and under a hostile state power.  In 1921, Lenin had his NEP
initiative passed.  It was thought out as a 'temporary' policy that allowed
for private capitalists, small and medium, to trade relatively freely.
Lenin considered the temporary and controlled restoration of some measure of
capitalism in Soviet Russia as indispensable to revive the economy.
Capitalists were forced to pay heavy taxes, while heavy industry and foreign
trade were legally off limits.  In his writings about the need for the NEP,
Lenin argued that, even if their state power had been smashed, capitalists
subsisted in Soviet Russia and had to be tolerated for a while.  Capitalism,
Lenin said, regenerated itself spontaneously out of the evolution of
commodity production while commodity production emerged spontaneously out of
the pre-capitalist conditions existing in Russia.  Furthermore, in Lenin's
view, in building the technical and economic basis for socialism, the enemy
was 'backwardness' (Lenin's word for pre-capitalist modes of production) and
the allies were capitalists!!  Politically, even if other parties had been
forbidden in Russia, the capitalists could buy influence in the CP and erode
proletarian leadership.  Communists had to be vigilant to prevent that from
happening.  Moreover, while influential Bolsheviks called the activity of
the Soviet nationalized industrial sector 'socialism', Lenin repeatedly
termed it 'state capitalism'.  Lenin liked to call things by their names,
and he obviously thought that one way or another (objectively) the Soviet
industry was reproducing capitalism in a certain fashion under the Soviet
state!!

These facts prove, without a doubt, that WITHOUT the protection of the
state, capitalists can grow and establish their own state powers, they can
outlive their state powers for very long, and they can even persist under an
irreconcilably hostile state power.  The practical implications of these
facts are huge.  But to explore such implications we need to recognize the
facts first.
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