Re: [Marxism] RE: USSR, Democracy, and the Environment

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Where in Detroit this old message from September 29, 2003, was found.
Reprinted without alteration.


>Soviet socialism was a part of the twentieth century's accommodation with
the vast upheavals of the nineteenth century, when masses of peasants were
decanted from the land and sent to work in satanic industrial cities. In fact,
Soviet socialism exhausted its historical potential by 1945. From that time
onwards it became a deeply conservative force, a roadblock in the way of 
history.
Once it was swept away, a fortress of old resistance to the curses of
capitalism, nothing was left to prevent the final emergence of a truly global 
capitalism
and its social counterpart, a truly global working class. <


Comrade Mark J was insightful and there was much overlap in our individual
thinking. Sovietism, Soviet Power and the USSR really existed socialism as it
existed at a specific point in the curve of industrial development. The state
was legally empowered with the right to weld the social power of capital. There
did not exist a mechanism in Soviet life that would allow the social power of
capital to pass into the hands of individuals.

The theory problem within the Marxist movement is a refusal to identify the
meaning of the bourgeois property relations. Capitalism means social capital in
the hands of private individuals, connected on the basis of the
infrastructure and market relations - exchange. This possession of the social 
power of
capital by individuals allows for a circuit of investment based on competition
between capitals seeking expanded value. This quest for expanded value - maximum
profits, creates the developmental curve of capitalist commodity production.

Under Soviet socialism nothing could pass into the hands of individuals
except means of consumption. The bourgeoisie is very clear on the difference
between the private property relations and socialist property. The bureaucratic
structure of society is not a property relation. The form of democracy in a
society is not a property relationship. Money is not a property relationship in
itself, but an expression of value - generally speaking.

Ownership of socially necessary means of production is a material
relationship. No individuals owned the factories or physical assets of the 
industrial
infrastructure in the Soviet Union. How can this not be understood? Who in the
Soviet Union owned the apartment buildings and houses? Who owned the material
properties of the energy infrastructure?  Who owned the raw materials and the
implements used to extract the raw materials?

The existence of a black market, theft of property on a grand scale or the
bureaucratic administration of things is not a property relation. The elementary
is misunderstood. Society is formed on the basis of the unity of productive
forces - the material power of production at a given state of development, and
productive relations. The material power of production determines how people
are organized in the actual process of production based on the existing form of
energy, the kinds of tools, instruments and machinery being used in the
context of a definable infrastructure. Productive relations are the laws in a
society defining property rights and the relationship of people to property in 
the
process of producing.

The reason production relations are wedded to the laws in a society defining
property is because machine society spontaneously organizes people on the
basis of cooperation by definition. How people come together to utilize a given
state of development of technology is called a social relation of production,
but this does not define ownership rights.

The bourgeoisie and then the modern bourgeoisie Marx speaks of, owned real
materially existing property. Marx is to be understood as stating commodity
production on the basis of the ownership rights of the bourgeoisie, as he 
deploys
the social power of capital. Hence, capitalist commodity production. The
industrial system is not a property relations but a mode of production.  The
ownership rights within this mode of production is the property relations.

Soviet socialism was not ugly to the majority of humanity who had not entered
or attained it state of development of the industrial infrastructure. Today,
the obvious is becoming very clear to the workers and intellectuals in the
imperial centers of world capital.

Melvin P.







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