Re: old USSR

[James Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with what Harry said to John Gulick about the labor-power market in
the old USSR: it existed. Of course, the labor market was different in the
USSR. See below.

I see the non-existence of commodity production (and its replacement by
production for the plan) and the state monopoly of the ownership of the
means of production as making the old USSR non-capitalist. In fact, in
class I draw one of those damn 2 x 2 boxes, with commodity production and
capital ownership along one yes/no dimension and wage-labor along the
other. Both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism have wage labor, but
differ along the commodity producing/private ownership of capital goods
dimension. Systems without wage-labor include US antebellum slavery and
independent commodity production (which both involve commodity production
and private ownership of the means of production) and pure feudalism (which
does not).

Harry writes: >The J-F Tendency, and N&L as far as I have seen, made quite
an extensive point of shifting the discussion about capitalism and
socialism away from the issue of ownership which preoccupied Trotsky and
many others. They focused on, examined and redefined capitalism in terms of
the relations of production which is what they felt Marx did. The issue for
them was not who owned what but what people did with the power that they
had to control the means of production. And what their examination of
Stalinist USSR revealed to them was that the Soviet govt was basically
doing the same thing Western capitalists were doing, namely extracting as
large a surplus value as possible (which the workers and peasants resisted
and fought back against) and plowing it into an expansion of the the means
of production which was used in turn to extract ever more work, all while
minimizing, as it were, the diversion of production into meeting the needs
of the workers.<

My sketch of the USSR did not simply stop with a discussion of ownership.
After all, the CP didn't _officially_ or _legally_ own the state in the old
USSR. When we're talking about ownership that isn't official or juridical,
we're talking about social relations.

Despite the similarities between the USSR and capitalism (which might push
one to think of the USSR as "one big corporation"), there were also many
differences. The USSR definitely attempted to imitate capitalism in terms
of authoritarianism in production and accumulation.

But the absense of a significant reserve army of the unemployed (a key
difference from capitalism) meant that even though there was wage labor,
the authoritarianism in production wasn't very effective after awhile.
Workers "pretended to work" (often spending time waiting in line to buy
necessities instead of doing their jobs) at the same time the managers
"pretended to pay them" (because the money wouldn't buy much, given
shortages of goods). The quality of the product suffered greatly and this
became crucial when products became complex.

The central plan worked at promoting accumulation for awhile, in a manic
imitation of capitalism more than a literal translation. But the failure to
solve the problem of production and the evaporation of labor reserves
eventually caused the plan to grind to a halt.

Harry also said the following, about which I have no comment:
>This said, another thing should be emphasized. For them "state capitalism"
refered not just to a system of ownership (a secondary issue as I said) or
even to a definition one might apply to the situation in any give country,
but to a whole state of capitalist development. In this they were a little
like Horkheimer who wrote an essay on "state capitalism" using a different
analysis but thinking at the same level. So for them "state capitalism" was
used somewhat like the term "Fordism" has been used in recent years to
characterize a whole epoch and englobed both what was commonly called
capitalism and what was commonly called socialism. Later on they extended
the analysis from the USSR to China and other "socialist" countries coming
to roughly the same conclusions based on the same reasoning. So I think you
could say that they called "state capitalism" "STATE capitalism" not
because the state owned the capital but because of the central role of the
state in both Soviet style socialism and Western style Keynesianism.<


Jim Devine   jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
"A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and
human beings dear."  -- R.H. Tawney.