Economics and Law

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by andie nachgeborenen

Well, I don't want to get into this distraction on the Russian question, but
you could call the system bureaucratic collectivism (Schachtman's term) or
the command-administrative system (the perestroichiki's term), or
totalitarianism, or lots of things, but the fact is we don't really havea
good name for it. Stalinism is unfortunate insofarr as it suggests than man
was responsible for the whole thing, which is absurd, but it is also true
taht he shaped the system more than anyone else and that he exemplified the
social forces that created it. So I'll use it anyway. I don't care if it
isn't a Russian word, I don't think the Russians understand the Soviet era
any better than Western specialists. Which isn't very well -- I speak having
been one once.

As rto Charles and Chris' point that Stalinist repression was selective and
popular and that the regime took account of public opinion, of course. We
revisionist Sovietologists argued that point against the totalitarianism
school for 35 years. That doesn't mean, however, that Stalinism was
democratic or that it was controlled by ordinary working people the way most
of us here would want socialism to be. That is obvious too, don't you agree?
I mean, as the Old Man said, a worker's state wouldn't have a political
police.

Jks

^^^^^^^

CB: There is no absolute state of being democratic or not democratic. There
are degrees of impact of the opinions of the whole group on decisions by the
state. So, Stalinism was democratic to a degree; working people did control
the state to some extent. And even more, the overwhelming masses of the
workers and people in a self-determined, conscious, and free willed way
agreed with a significant amount of what Stalin did that you would consider
"undemocratic" but in the Bill of Rights, minority and individual rights
protection sense of "democratic", defenses against the "tyranny" of the
majority. The will , sentiment , opinion of the majority in Soviet Russia
during many of the Stalin years, which _is_ a first marker of degree of
democracy, would have shocked our petit bourgeois consciences.

The Old Man must have been dreaming if he said the workers _state_ wouldn't
have political police. Seems odd that he would say that since he subscribed
to the notion that a state, including a workers'state, is a repressive
apparatus, standing bodies of armed personnel, prisons, etc. Law is politics
and democracy is a form of state. When the state whithers away, there will
be no democracy, according to Marx. So, all police are political, including
police in democracies,including socialist democracies.

But my intuition is that had Marx been in Soviet Russia , he could well have
been a Stalinist in the sense that he expected a "dictatorship" in some
sense and he expected that violence was the midwife of every new society
being born or whatever. The personality from his writings just doesn't have
the type of petit bourgeois "sensitivity" about violence in the revolution
that I, petit bourgeois me, have.

As early as 1843 Marx said



"The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon,
material force must be overthrown by material force;"

(and the rest immediately following always seems worth quoting)

"but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the
masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates
ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To
be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man
himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of
its practical energy, is that is proceeds from a resolute positive abolition
of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is
the highest essence for man - hence, with the categoric imperative to
overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned,
despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the
cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor
dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm>

Of course, Marx fought a duel , too. Engels was a major in the artillery
corps during the German revolution.



Anyway, I think that there is an argument that 1) the Soviets had some
degree of greater attention to mass transport safety in that the Lada was
built like a tank and there was more non-automobile , mass transit in their
overall setup and 2) this might have reflected the impact of better
democratic processes, mass pressures and control, in this area than in the
U.S.



In general the Soviets may have been dealing with a "bourgeois commodity" ,
as Michael Perelman suggested, that was inherently difficult to improve much
beyond bourgeois safety standards. I don't know.