Re: [Marxism] RE:It's those damn petty-bourgeois at it again!

[Einde O'Callaghan <einde@xxxxxx>]

M. Junaid Alam wrote:

> My last 2 cents on this.
>
> I think it's pretty clear from Collum's latest postings that State
> Capitalism is moral outrage at the failings of the USSR wrapped in the
> pretenses of a theory. It's moral disappointment masquerading as
> political science.

Drawing on a short message written by an admitted non-specialist to damn
 a whole political tradition is as wonderful example of scientific
socialist analysis, I suppose.

It might, of course, be more worthwhile to actually examine some of the
theoretical works that defined that political tradition. I suggest
taking a look at the original state capitalist analysis written by Tony
Cliff in 1947/48 when he rejected the traditional orthodox Trotskyist
"degenerated workers' state" theory after having been delegated to write
a defence of this theory by the leadership of the Revolutionary
Communist Party, then the British section of the Fourth International.

This is available in full on-line under the title "The Nature of
Stalinist Russia" at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1948/stalruss/index.htm

While marking the text up for on-line publication I was once again
struck by the remarkable similarity between Cliff's predictions about
the future trajectory of the Russian system and the actual course of
events during the collapse of the Stalinist (or post-Stalinist or
whatever else you want to call it) system - even if, as has often been
the case with Marxist analyses from Marx onwards, the timescale was
wildly over-optimistic.

Other, rather different, state capitalist analyses were offered by CLR
James and Raya Dunayevskaya - I suppose in your eyes these two profound
Marxist thinkers were also driven by moral outrage.

Einde O'Callaghan

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