Re: The USSR and the economy of politics . . . the politics of economy.

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 5/17/2004 12:40:53 AM Central Standard Time, stolz@xxxxxxx writes:

 

>In the end, Soviet workers did built socialist housing for themselves, but it was too late.  The little girl died some time in the process.<

 

Vadim Stolz
 
 
Comment
 
The Marx standpoint demands that we learn how to pose every question in its historically concrete setting and unravel the social process so that it makes sense in the realm of political economy.   
 
The Soviet proletariat and peasantry (agricultural workers) has written the most glorious chapter in the history of the world working class movement. Its victories are monumental, its defeats painful and its errors historical. Marx of course stated that the proletariat would have to fight 50, 100, 200 years of civil wars and international wars to make ourselves fit as ruling class. The Soviet proletariat - as the advanced detachment of the world proletariat, led us through more than half of the Marx prophecy, as it attempted to weld the best and brightest of humanity into a strike force against bourgeois property. 

 

The purpose was to free humanity from the unbounded power of exchange of commodities. Human beings should not live to work and produce products - commodities for exchange and profits. Rather a portion of our lives should include contributing to the social welfare of humanity.

What the Soviet proletariat accomplished was to build an industrial society without the bourgeois property relation.  The bourgeois property relations means more than contributing ones labor to society. What is meant is that ones labor contributed is only accepted if it promises a profit to an individual or section of society. Profit is a bad word . . . surplus is not.

 

I would venture to say that the majority of humanity in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the so-called Middle East, have to this day not attain the high standard of living, scientific and artistic pursuits and happiness created by the Soviets. This elementary truth is not understood by the ideologists.
 
The former citizens of the Soviet Union are discovering this truth as they slowly emerge from one of the most complex class and political struggle in human history. Lenin described this complexity with his characteristic acute insight:
 
"Why do we do these absurd things? The reason is clear: firstly, because ours is a backwards country; secondly, education in our country is at its lowest level; and thirdly because we are receiving no assistance. Not a single civilized state is helping us. On the contrary, they are all working against us. We took over the old state apparatus, and this was unfortunate for us. In 1917, after we captured power, the situation was that the apparatus sabotaged us. This frightened us very much and we pleaded with the state officials: 'Please come back,' They all came back, but this was unfortunate for us."
 
The danger to the communist revolution has many sides. In the historical sense the danger of counterrevolution is rooted in the development of the material power of production or the productive forces. This is an economic relationship involving the state of development of technology, the degree of utilization of human labor, and the magnitude of products - commodities, produced for exchange.

 

In history the danger to the bourgeois revolution and the bourgeoisie as an economic class of property owners, during the transition from agriculture to industry was abated once society achieved a degree of evolution  - a technological regime, that made it impossible to go back to landed property relations and its political _expression_ as feudalism.

 

In the 21st century we should not confuse political feudalism with its economic content as a property relations where the primary form of wealth is in land. What breaks up this society and recast landed property relations is a transition in the form of wealth from land to gold and the growth of manufacture, which sets the basis for the universal emergence of exchange as the way of life of society.
 
Here is the political, economic and theory context to understand the "internal danger" that emerged within the Soviet Power during the time of Mr. Lenin and the complexity of the social struggle that led to the collapse of Soviet Power, the dismantling of the Soviet State and finally the overthrow of its socialist property relations in the industrial infrastructure - a mere seventy years later.  

The danger of restoration of a decaying and dying social order (class) can only be abated and finally overcome, when its economic basis is liquidated by history. Society cannot return to economic or political feudalism because there no longer exists anything - an economic infrastructure of political infrastructure, to go back to. 

 

Gone With The Wind.

One is of course referring to the question of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a tricky question and I would like to examine its economic content instead of ones conception of political democracy.

 

Mr. Lenin of course makes it clear that the danger to the revolution was the revolutions own weakness or why call back the old state officials and place bureaucrats in positions of responsibility? It would seem that the Soviet Revolution lacked the economic legs - in the sense of the development of the technological regime underlying exchange, to stand upon. We experienced something like this during the Civil War.

 

It appears that one must treat this question as historical and not from the standpoint of the ideologists and screamers. The bureaucracy - according to the ideologists and screamers, grows out of the state power, specifically police action and organs of repression.
 
Marxists of course know that bureaucracy has its genesis in the evolution of the division of labor in society (not the state) and is recast throughout history on the basis of changes in the technological regime. The industrial bureaucracy, whether in America or the Soviet Union is radically different from the feudal bureaucracy and nothing can explain this difference other than the standpoint of the development of the technological regime.

 

The industrial bureaucracy is not the state and any worker (or college professor) who has labored in an institution of 50 or more people understands the elementary truth. There is nothing on earth more bureaucratic than an industrial facility or the sum total of the industrial infrastructure. The state itself is bureaucratic by definition but the industrial bureaucracy is infinitely broader than the state.

 

The dispute with the ideologists is that they explain bureaucracy on the basis of calling the police to restore order amongst outraged citizens seeking consumer goods or the state coercion used to implement labor discipline, wihtout explaining why the bureaucracy - the administrative agency of an economy order, needs police help. The ideologists "forget" that the Soviet State was different from the bourgeois state and involved infinitely more than the armed bodies of men. The entire system of what was called the dictatorship of the proletariat - Soviet Power, was in fact the emergence of a new kind of state. 

 

What made this state "new" according to its advocates and the historical record, is that it protected an economic order that prohibited the private ownership of the social power of capital.  It seems to me that the bureaucracy of the "new state" outlawed - made it a crime, to convert possession of money or wealth into ownership of means of production and the individual hiring of labor. Even with all of this,  . . .this does not explain the bureaucracy.

The technological revolution - not the state power, is creating the objective (not simply the subjective) material basis for the liquidation of bureaucracy as a characteristic administrative feature of production and social relations.
 
The complexity of the social struggle in the Soviet Union was not limited solely to the struggle against the backwash of the practices of the old State apparatus. A "new bureaucracy" sprung up during the time of Lenin in the new political environment created by the affirmation of Soviet Power. Thus, bureaucracy did not evolve into a grave danger and obstacle to the Revolution as the result of the "degeneration of the Soviet State." Rather it was present - according to Lenin, as the weakness within the revolution itself.  From day one bureaucracy was the most dangerous enemy of the Revolution.
 
The number of bureaucrats in the Soviet Union - throughout its history, was not limited to the species directly related to the old classes, to the old state apparatus. Soviet conditions enshrined in law prevented the formation and emergence of a bourgeoisie. What emerged after the puny buffoon Nitika Khrushchev disoriented the world communist movement and was removed from power was a caricature of the bourgeoisie in tune and political alignment with the world bourgeoisie. 
 
Conditions were such that even good Communists who did not possess the necessary revolutionary stamina and ideological firmness to sustain them through such a long historical process were drawn into the reactionary vortex of bureaucratic practices. Therefore, the Leninists method of dealing with the bureaucrats demanded that it be applied even more firmly and forcefully to the Communists themselves who degenerated. To this very day the hallmarks of communists insurgents is ideological commitment and the unyielding demand for centralization of task and adherence to a strategic line of march.
 
Men and women have of course fought for the ideas of communism two thousand years before Marx was born and when political and economic communism was not possible. Folks have fought for and dreamed of various kinds of socialist societies before Marx and Engels were a gleam in their mothers eye. One must have the manliness and courage to fight along the historical line of march and the societal advance at each juncture in the development and evolution of commodity production . . . and its decay.
 
What this means is that one must fight even when a decisive victory cannot be attained. The history of the abolitionists movement in America proves the wisdom of such a line of march and this movement took shape at least 70 years before the overthrow of the slave power.
 
The struggle against the bourgeoisie in Russia has had a particularly violent character, and was accompanied by certain inevitable errors. The struggle currently unfolding in Russia - as the social movement seeks its new forms of _expression_, promises to be even more violent. These painful experiences have to be assimilated and understood.
 
It is a fact that the growth of bureaucratism gradually formed a bureaucratic center that divided the revolutionary center from the people and prevented them from functioning in harmony. While setting up and consolidating the Soviet State apparatus and the building the industrial infrastructure and thus carrying out a historical task, that made possible the economic success of the Soviet Union, Stalin had to do two mutually exclusive task at the same time: use the bureaucracy as an organ of administration and fight it simultaneously. This explains why it was impossible to decisively defeat the bureaucracy.
 
The question of the bureaucracy is historically concrete and no human agency is going to defeat the bureaucracy because like the law of value and the commodity form, it is a product of history. Something fundamental to history - the material power of production or the mode of production in material life, has to change to render bureaucracy obsolete along with the state as the state.
 
It was not for nothing that Comrade Stalin stated, "the greatest enemy of the Soviet people holds a party card." What the ideologists and Western liberal call paranoia was in fact an acute understanding of the historical process.
 
What emerged in the Soviet Union was a complex social struggle where every segment of Soviet society attacked the bureaucracy - reactionaries, progressives and communists alike. The bureaucracy blocked the next stage of the technological advance as the bottom line. This is in fact the revolutionary process and reaction seized power or carried out the insurrection.
 
All the various progressive social elements involved in this struggle should understand the complexity of what took place and prepare for the final assault on bourgeois property. In this regard one comrade wrote that the Soviet Union exhausted its historical potential in 1944/1945. This is nothing more than rotten bourgeois ideology. Historical potential according to Marx means all the room the productive forces contain within itself before it begins its leap - transition, to a new level based on the injection into the production process of a new qualitative ingredient.

 

One can disprove this absurd proposition that the Soviet Union has exhausted its historical potential by tracing its industrial development between 1944/1945 and say 1970.

That is to say that industrial society would reach the limits of its boundary expansion more than forty years later, with the injection into the production process of computers, digitalized process and advanced robotics and industrial socialism hit the wall in the historical sense or exhausted its historical potential.  

 

The subjective political factors in the form of policy, ushering in the collapse of the Soviet Power is another story for later.
 
 
 
Melvin P.