Re: [OPE-L] response to John Holloway

[John Holloway <johnholloway@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [OPE-L] response to John Holloway

> Paul,
>
>     Thanks for your intervention and sorry for not replying sooner. Thanks too for the mention of John Collier, of whom I have not heard in many years.
>     
>     I agree with you that the relation between the political and the economic is modified in the USSR. What is clear is that the two practices (the political and the economic) remain distinct, and that the exclusion of social control is probably just as pronounced as under mainstream capitalism. You say that >The key issue is how the mass of the working population can exercise effective control over the political level< but that, I would argue, involves the dissolution of a distinct political level. But probably, this is a point which I have now repeated too often.
>
>     Best wishes,
>
>     John
>
>
> John Writes:
> It is fundamental to the argument of the book that the _expression_ “a state of the Paris Commune-type” makes no sense at all. The state is a particular form of social relations grounded in the separation of the political from the economic ...
>  
> Paul C
>  
> I think this eternalises the capitalist form of state and acts as if the 20th century never happened.
>  
> The distinguishing feature of socialist states was the close enmeshing of the political
> and economic levels. In the CSSR or USSR there was no economy distinct from the state,
> this I would argue, is a necessary consequence of planned economy.
>  
> In the socialist mode of production the extraction of the surplus product is inherently
> political, whereas in the capitalist mode it is primarily economic. It occurs through the
> planned allocation in material terms of part of the social product to non-wage goods.
> As such you can not separate out the planning process from the economy, and the
> planning process is inherently political.
>  
> It is from this fundamental relationship that the dominance of the political/ideological
> level under socialism stems from. In this sense, as John Collier remarked, socialism
> is more similar to feudalism than capitalism in some ways.
>  
> The key issue is how the mass of the working population can exercise effective
> control over the political level - what forms of mass democracy will allow that.
>  
>