old USSR

[James Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis writes: >News and Letters shares the Johnson-Forest "state capitalist"
theory
which, if anything, is a completely undialectical understanding of states
like Cuba and the former Soviet Union. This theory won't accept anything as
deserving of the name socialism unless it is blemish-free. There has to be
full democracy, worker's control of the economy, equality of income, etc.
The problem is that these societies come into being when there are a million
mitigating circumstances. Whatever flaws they had, they did not produce on
the basis of profit, but social need.<

I don't have any brief to make in defense of the Johnson-Forest tendency or
News and Letters. I can't say whether the "state cap" analysis is
"undialectical" or not (though simply asserting that it is "completely
dialectical" doesn't make it so).

To me, however, it just doesn't make sense to lump the old USSR in the same
category as Algeria or the US TVA, a clear "state capitalist" enterprise.
There really is a difference between a planned economy with the vast
majority of the means of production owned by the state, on the one hand, and
an unplanned capitalist economy with some means of production owned by the
state (state capitalism), on the other.

It also doesn't much make sense to simply assert that the old USSR was
"socialist" and then ignore how the lack of full democracy, workers' control
of the economy, etc. affect the _nature_ of that socialism, the goals of the
central plan, and the definition of what is meant by "social need." We can
see a thoroughly corrupt socialism with a central plan aimed at serving a
small minority that defines "social need" as preserving their rule. We have
to remember that when Marx and Engels used the word "socialism" in THE
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, it did not always refer to something good. (In fact, it
may have never referred to something good, since they described themselves
as communists.)

The News & Letters folks, despite their obvious limitations, were and are
concerned with the key issue of _state power_ in the old USSR. This issue is
expecially important when the state owns the vast majority of the means of
production and employs the vast majority of the workers (as in the old USSR).

Who "owned" the state? Absent workers' democracy, the only obvious owner is
the party bureaucracy. This party became as entrenched as the mandarins of
Imperial China, even if individual party bureaucrats never were secure in
their tenure. Somewhere Lenin wrote that classes define themselves in
struggle with each other. Even if he never said it (and there's little point
in citing his tarnished authority), it seems to be a valid point. There are
many examples where the state's party bureaucracy fought like hell with
military force to maintain its power. The party bureaucracy defined itself
as a ruling class, one not that different from the theocratic rulers of
Pharoanic Egypt.

Maybe "mitigating circumstances" explain the rise of this type of class
society (what I call "bureaucratic socialism," BS). But we have to face the
fact that it was a class society.

Jim Devine
jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
"Peace will come to the world when L.A. has a professional football team
again."
-- Sports for the Millenium.