Re: [Marxism] If Marxism is a Science...

[DCQ <deeseekyou@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 1, 2005, at 8:27 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Yes, that is an inappropriate invitation. Social democracy is
> characterized today by support for US imperialism's war on terror,
> while the ISO and the SWP are on the front lines opposing it.

Thank you. We're getting back down to earth, finally.

> I didn't have an Internet connection for most of the day (had to
> upgrade the firmware in my Linksys wireless router), but I just want
> to make a brief observation. Capitalism is marked by a relentless
> drive to rationalize and cut costs, while serious scholars of the USSR
> like Alec Nove have noted exactly that failure in the system. As the
> joke goes, there is no unemployment in the USSR, yet nobody works. The
> only way to enforce labor discipline when workers are so alienated is
> by introducing a labor market and the whip of unemployment. In my
> flame wars with Murphy on apst, I kept insisting on this point but he
> kept insisting back that unemployment--as we know it in the USA--was a
> serious problem. He could not back this up with data, so I am not sure
> what great discoveries are to be found in his prize-winning book.

I'll just make the comment here that it would only have been young/new
activists or hacks that would have claimed that the IS position was
that bureaucratic state capitalism was *identical* to free market
capitalism. If that were the case, then there would be no need for a
different label. Anyone with a brain could understand that the
economies in the east and west worked in different ways. The conclusion
Cliff came to was that, despite the many differences, there was a
fundamental similarity in the extraction of surplus value from a
working class alienated from the means of production by a privileged
caste of people. More specifically, Cliff recognized that bureaucratic
state capitalism was, in his word, a partial negation of capitalism
(not the complete negation of capitalism that socialism would be). But,
building his theory on Lenin's, Bakunin's and others' treatments, Cliff
noticed the similarities between monopoly capitalism and what went on
in Russia. In the same way that a monopoly has no *economic* motive to
rationalize and cut costs (raw greed is not an economic motive, so it
doesn't count ;)  ), Russia's economy had no internal economic motive
to do so either. The only aspect of competition for Russia was external
and non-economic--namely the threat of western imperialism (or, put
another way, military competition with the west).

In fact, one of the problems that developed with the IST (including the
ISO) was that people (even, or maybe especially, at the highest levels)
began substituting shorthand notations for full-blown analyses. What is
commonly understood to be the IS position (west=free-market capitalism;
east=state capitalism) is a gross oversimplification and reification of
Cliff's very nuanced and subtle analysis. Free-market capitalism, of
the kind analyzed by Marx, does not exist in the west, and has not for
well over a century. We live in a form of monopoly state capitalism. We
have hundred and hundreds of thousands of small-businesses (half of
which go under every year), but the economy is dominated by a handful
of monopolies or oligopolies (computers, microprocessors, software,
media, telecommunications, oil, airlines, autos, etc.). These
monopolies need the state to actively enforce their monopolies though
such various means as Fed monetary policy, tax policy, regulation,
labor policy, etc. and resource allocation such as military and
transportation and education spending (and this is without considering
the cronyism and corruption we get on top). This is far beyond even the
"executive committee of the bourgeoisie" that Marx and Engels
discussed. [There are still market forces, but these are more or less
international (US vs Europe vs Japan vs China vs India) or imagined
(Ford vs GM, or Exxon-Mobil vs Chevron-Texaco).] This is a real fusion
of the state and capital.

Wow...I'm really exhausted and didn't mean to go on for this long.
(I'll apologize for anything I got wrong in this half-conscious ramble
tomorrow. G'night.)

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