Re: [Marxism] RE: USSR, Political economy of scale

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 5/17/2004 12:40:53 AM Central Standard Time, stolz@xxxxxxx
writes:

>In the end, Soviet workers did built socialist housing for themselves, but
it was too late.  The little girl died some time in the process.<

Vadim Stolz


Comment

The Marx standpoint demands that we learn how to pose every question in its
historically concrete setting and unravel the social process so that it makes
sense in the realm of political economy.

The Soviet proletariat and peasantry (agricultural workers) has written the
most glorious chapter in the history of the world working class movement. Its
victories are monumental, its defeats painful and its errors historical. Marx
of course stated that the proletariat would have to fight 50, 100, 200 years of
civil wars and international wars to make ourselves fit as ruling class. The
Soviet proletariat - as the advanced detachment of the world proletariat, led
us through more than half of the Marx prophecy, as it attempted to weld the
best and brightest of humanity into a strike force against bourgeois property.

The purpose was to free humanity from the unbounded power of exchange of
commodities. Human beings should not live to work and produce products -
commodities for exchange and profits. Rather a portion of our lives should 
include
contributing to the social welfare of humanity.

What the Soviet proletariat accomplished was to build an industrial society
without the bourgeois property relation.  The bourgeois property relations
means more than contributing ones labor to society. What is meant is that ones
labor contributed is only accepted if it promises a profit to an individual or
section of society. Profit is a bad word . . . surplus is not.

I would venture to say that the majority of humanity in Asia, Africa, Latin
America and the so-called Middle East, have to this day not attain the high
standard of living, scientific and artistic pursuits and happiness created by 
the
Soviets. This elementary truth is not understood by the ideologists.

The former citizens of the Soviet Union are discovering this truth as they
slowly emerge from one of the most complex class and political struggle in human
history. Lenin described this complexity with his characteristic acute
insight:

"Why do we do these absurd things? The reason is clear: firstly, because ours
is a backwards country; secondly, education in our country is at its lowest
level; and thirdly because we are receiving no assistance. Not a single
civilized state is helping us. On the contrary, they are all working against 
us. We
took over the old state apparatus, and this was unfortunate for us. In 1917,
after we captured power, the situation was that the apparatus sabotaged us. This
frightened us very much and we pleaded with the state officials: 'Please come
back,' They all came back, but this was unfortunate for us."

The danger to the communist revolution has many sides. In the historical
sense the danger of counterrevolution is rooted in the development of the 
material
power of production or the productive forces. This is an economic
relationship involving the state of development of technology, the degree of 
utilization
of human labor, and the magnitude of products - commodities, produced for
exchange.

In history the danger to the bourgeois revolution and the bourgeoisie as an
economic class of property owners, during the transition from agriculture to
industry was abated once society achieved a degree of evolution  - a
technological regime, that made it impossible to go back to landed property 
relations and
its political expression as feudalism.

In the 21st century we should not confuse political feudalism with its
economic content as a property relations where the primary form of wealth is in
land. What breaks up this society and recast landed property relations is a
transition in the form of wealth from land to gold and the growth of 
manufacture,
which sets the basis for the universal emergence of exchange as the way of life
of society.

Here is the political, economic and theory context to understand the
"internal danger" that emerged within the Soviet Power during the time of Mr. 
Lenin
and the complexity of the social struggle that led to the collapse of Soviet
Power, the dismantling of the Soviet State and finally the overthrow of its
socialist property relations in the industrial infrastructure - a mere seventy
years later.

The danger of restoration of a decaying and dying social order (class) can
only be abated and finally overcome, when its economic basis is liquidated by
history. Society cannot return to economic or political feudalism because there
no longer exists anything - an economic infrastructure of political
infrastructure, to go back to.

Gone With The Wind.

One is of course referring to the question of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is
a tricky question and I would like to examine its economic content instead of
ones conception of political democracy.

Mr. Lenin of course makes it clear that the danger to the revolution was the
revolutions own weakness or why call back the old state officials and place
bureaucrats in positions of responsibility? It would seem that the Soviet
Revolution lacked the economic legs - in the sense of the development of the
technological regime underlying exchange, to stand upon. We experienced 
something
like this during the Civil War.

It appears that one must treat this question as historical and not from the
standpoint of the ideologists and screamers. The bureaucracy - according to the
ideologists and screamers, grows out of the state power, specifically police
action and organs of repression.

Marxists of course know that bureaucracy has its genesis in the evolution of
the division of labor in society (not the state) and is recast throughout
history on the basis of changes in the technological regime. The industrial
bureaucracy, whether in America or the Soviet Union is radically different from 
the
feudal bureaucracy and nothing can explain this difference other than the
standpoint of the development of the technological regime.

The industrial bureaucracy is not the state and any worker (or college
professor) who has labored in an institution of 50 or more people understands 
the
elementary truth. There is nothing on earth more bureaucratic than an industrial
facility or the sum total of the industrial infrastructure. The state itself
is bureaucratic by definition but the industrial bureaucracy is infinitely
broader than the state.

The dispute with the ideologists is that they explain bureaucracy on the
basis of calling the police to restore order amongst outraged citizens seeking
consumer goods or the state coercion used to implement labor discipline, wihtout
explaining why the bureaucracy - the administrative agency of an economy
order, needs police help. The ideologists "forget" that the Soviet State was
different from the bourgeois state and involved infinitely more than the armed
bodies of men. The entire system of what was called the dictatorship of the
proletariat - Soviet Power, was in fact the emergence of a new kind of state.

What made this state "new" according to its advocates and the historical
record, is that it protected an economic order that prohibited the private
ownership of the social power of capital.  It seems to me that the bureaucracy 
of the
"new state" outlawed - made it a crime, to convert possession of money or
wealth into ownership of means of production and the individual hiring of labor.
Even with all of this,  . . .this does not explain the bureaucracy.

The technological revolution - not the state power, is creating the objective
(not simply the subjective) material basis for the liquidation of bureaucracy
as a characteristic administrative feature of production and social
relations.

The complexity of the social struggle in the Soviet Union was not limited
solely to the struggle against the backwash of the practices of the old State
apparatus. A "new bureaucracy" sprung up during the time of Lenin in the new
political environment created by the affirmation of Soviet Power. Thus,
bureaucracy did not evolve into a grave danger and obstacle to the Revolution 
as the
result of the "degeneration of the Soviet State." Rather it was present -
according to Lenin, as the weakness within the revolution itself.  From day one
bureaucracy was the most dangerous enemy of the Revolution.

The number of bureaucrats in the Soviet Union - throughout its history, was
not limited to the species directly related to the old classes, to the old
state apparatus. Soviet conditions enshrined in law prevented the formation and
emergence of a bourgeoisie. What emerged after the puny buffoon Nitika
Khrushchev disoriented the world communist movement and was removed from power 
was a
caricature of the bourgeoisie in tune and political alignment with the world
bourgeoisie.

Conditions were such that even good Communists who did not possess the
necessary revolutionary stamina and ideological firmness to sustain them through
such a long historical process were drawn into the reactionary vortex of
bureaucratic practices. Therefore, the Leninists method of dealing with the
bureaucrats demanded that it be applied even more firmly and forcefully to the
Communists themselves who degenerated. To this very day the hallmarks of 
communists
insurgents is ideological commitment and the unyielding demand for 
centralization
of task and adherence to a strategic line of march.

Men and women have of course fought for the ideas of communism two thousand
years before Marx was born and when political and economic communism was not
possible. Folks have fought for and dreamed of various kinds of socialist
societies before Marx and Engels were a gleam in their mothers eye. One must 
have
the manliness and courage to fight along the historical line of march and the
societal advance at each juncture in the development and evolution of commodity
production . . . and its decay.

What this means is that one must fight even when a decisive victory cannot be
attained. The history of the abolitionists movement in America proves the
wisdom of such a line of march and this movement took shape at least 70 years
before the overthrow of the slave power.

The struggle against the bourgeoisie in Russia has had a particularly violent
character, and was accompanied by certain inevitable errors. The struggle
currently unfolding in Russia - as the social movement seeks its new forms of
expression, promises to be even more violent. These painful experiences have to
be assimilated and understood.

It is a fact that the growth of bureaucratism gradually formed a bureaucratic
center that divided the revolutionary center from the people and prevented
them from functioning in harmony. While setting up and consolidating the Soviet
State apparatus and the building the industrial infrastructure and thus
carrying out a historical task, that made possible the economic success of the
Soviet Union, Stalin had to do two mutually exclusive task at the same time: use
the bureaucracy as an organ of administration and fight it simultaneously. This
explains why it was impossible to decisively defeat the bureaucracy.

The question of the bureaucracy is historically concrete and no human agency
is going to defeat the bureaucracy because like the law of value and the
commodity form, it is a product of history. Something fundamental to history - 
the
material power of production or the mode of production in material life, has
to change to render bureaucracy obsolete along with the state as the state.

It was not for nothing that Comrade Stalin stated, "the greatest enemy of the
Soviet people holds a party card." What the ideologists and Western liberal
call paranoia was in fact an acute understanding of the historical process.

What emerged in the Soviet Union was a complex social struggle where every
segment of Soviet society attacked the bureaucracy - reactionaries, progressives
and communists alike. The bureaucracy blocked the next stage of the
technological advance as the bottom line. This is in fact the revolutionary 
process and
reaction seized power or carried out the insurrection.

All the various progressive social elements involved in this struggle should
understand the complexity of what took place and prepare for the final assault
on bourgeois property. In this regard one comrade wrote that the Soviet Union
exhausted its historical potential in 1944/1945. This is nothing more than
rotten bourgeois ideology. Historical potential according to Marx means all the
room the productive forces contain within itself before it begins its leap -
transition, to a new level based on the injection into the production process
of a new qualitative ingredient.

One can disprove this absurd proposition that the Soviet Union has exhausted
its historical potential by tracing its industrial development between
1944/1945 and say 1970.

That is to say that industrial society would reach the limits of its boundary
expansion more than forty years later, with the injection into the production
process of computers, digitalized process and advanced robotics and
industrial socialism hit the wall in the historical sense or exhausted its 
historical
potential.

The subjective political factors in the form of policy, ushering in the
collapse of the Soviet Power is another story for later.



Melvin P.





_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism