so I have no idea why your scare mongering about "getting killed" is "useful to think about", unless you mean useful in the anticommunist way
which isn't even how i think the debate played out in china, anyways, and is more a foreign rationalization. i think in china they reject most of the early ML thought on this matter and say that stalin and mao were wrong and that markets are simply a tool which can be used to further socialist development. it's not state-capitalism but rather a socialist market economy where the state leads through broad guidance rather than old-style planning.
getfiscal posted:this week i think it may be true that capitalism refers to a social totality that became hegemonic as a world-system and that it can only be displaced at the level of world-system. but somehow not in a trot way.... *shifty eyes*
yeah, by feudalism or extinction.
getfiscal posted:state capitalism isn't a mode of production. lenin believed it was a feature of capitalism in the early russian revolution when the economy was led by socialists but had not yet built the lower form of communism (socialism). you can't have state capitalism within a properly socialist economy because there is no labour market it can exploit. the reason why this explanation was abandoned was because the country couldn't function under these assumptions and never really fully accepted them in practice. the idea that making the means of production commodities in countries like china is somehow a successor of early russian 'state-capitalism' is a rationalization.
which isn't even how i think the debate played out in china, anyways, and is more a foreign rationalization. i think in china they reject most of the early ML thought on this matter and say that stalin and mao were wrong and that markets are simply a tool which can be used to further socialist development. it's not state-capitalism but rather a socialist market economy where the state leads through broad guidance rather than old-style planning.
okay you can say whatever you want, mode of production, form of economy, or branch of production, without any reference, but that doesn't matter seeing as you're not really providing anything else besides arguments about syntax and vague appeals to what you think may or may not have "played out" in china, or the murderous stalinist ussr, or whatever.
where are your sources about these debates? who was killed for expressing these views? do you have anything on the debate about multiple modes of production vs. your wallersteinian notion of 'world-systems'? furthermore, do you have citations about 'making the means of production commodities' referencing actual numbers? it would be helpful if you actually used marxism and a concrete analysis of actual socialism before you start making these strange arguments (I'm not the one arguing that state capitalism was dominant)
I personally have a lot to learn about it, but my guess is that the orthodoxy that developed under Stalin was wrong. The USSR pushed far towards trying to organize the economy as a simple materials balance problem and their policymakers decided that was causing a lot of problems, and they were probably right. Which is also why no other economy that witnessed this, except maybe China for a few short years, actually tried to copy them wholesale. And why the Soviets abandoned it in ideology as soon as it was possible to do so.
If it's actually possible in theory to transcend the commodity, then maybe, but it seems sort of irrelevant to present-day politics, and maybe an escape from it. I mean it's possible that small numbers of bureaucrats in the Soviet Union grew powerful enough to reverse the entire tide towards communism in Moscow in the 1950s but it seems more likely to me that they were doing something that a lot of people thought was a good idea. The idea that this explains the entire trajectory is also probably confused because politics still matters - the fact that Russia had 'shock therapy' doesn't make it evil that earlier they didn't try to plan everything by allocation. So in Marxist terms they were probably capitalist but I'm not sure the Marxist terms correspond to anything worth worrying too much about.
getfiscal posted:but I'm not sure the Marxist terms correspond to anything worth worrying too much about.
you've done it now
getfiscal posted:My sources would be the actual debates (such as between the Austrians and Lange, or between Lotta and Szymanski and others in the USA). There are also summaries of the economists involved in things like "Markets in the name of Socialism", although I think that particular book has problems. The idea that economics was supposed to become primarily descriptive under socialism is discussed in "Economic Thought and Economic Reforms in the Soviet Union" by Pekka Sutela.
I personally have a lot to learn about it, but my guess is that the orthodoxy that developed under Stalin was wrong. The USSR pushed far towards trying to organize the economy as a simple materials balance problem and their policymakers decided that was causing a lot of problems, and they were probably right. Which is also why no other economy that witnessed this, except maybe China for a few short years, actually tried to copy them wholesale. And why the Soviets abandoned it in ideology as soon as it was possible to do so.
If it's actually possible in theory to transcend the commodity, then maybe, but it seems sort of irrelevant to present-day politics, and maybe an escape from it. I mean it's possible that small numbers of bureaucrats in the Soviet Union grew powerful enough to reverse the entire tide towards communism in Moscow in the 1950s but it seems more likely to me that they were doing something that a lot of people thought was a good idea. The idea that this explains the entire trajectory is also probably confused because politics still matters - the fact that Russia had 'shock therapy' doesn't make it evil that earlier they didn't try to plan everything by allocation. So in Marxist terms they were probably capitalist but I'm not sure the Marxist terms correspond to anything worth worrying too much about.
you're everything bad about postmodernism
the marxist model of history is dialectical, which means different things are expressions of the same process. therefore, things cannot come into being until the conditions of their existence are already in place, and many features of capitalism seem to create themselves. for example, Marx says in Capital:
The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person.
what im getting from here is that all of the qualities of capitalism: wage labor, private property, labor power as a commodity, money, market, value-use value-exchange value, M-C-M', etc. all appear to come into being at the same time, even though most of them exist in past (and future) economies in similar forms.
this makes determining what is actually essential to capitalism vs what past forms are adapted difficult when Marx isnt here to tell us how to think dialectically. so let's look at some ppl:
for David Harvey growth is the key:
Capital is not a thing but a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money
for E.P. thomson the self consciousness of the working class is key:
I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships
Thus working men formed a picture of the organization of society, out of their own experience and with the help of their hard-won and erratic education, which was above all a political picture.
for Althusser class is about the mode of production and its reflection in ideology
The mode of production of a class society … is quite the opposite of a mere technical process of production. At the same time as it is the locus of production, it is the locus of class exploitation and of class struggle as well. It is in the productive process of the mode of production itself that the knot of class relations and the class struggle bound up with exploitation is tied.
only bringing these up to show that for different thinkers focusing in on a specific aspect of capitalism can lead to an entirely new way of thinking about it. these thinkers all have very different ideas based on what they are trying to emphasize. so instead of going deep into state capitalist theories from trots, which could be for a future post, let's instead ask what the value of thinking of socialism as a form of state capitalism is. let's consult with king trot Ernest Mandel on capitalism and state capitalism.
On capitalism:
Capitalism is the only form of class society in which commodity production becomes generalized, in which all elements of production (land, labor power, labor instruments. etc.) become commodities
Capitalist economy is an economy based on profit. Profit seeking is the sole motive force in all economic life. The accumulation of capital is regulated by the laws flowing from this search for profit. The law of the falling rate of profit is the law of development par excellence in capitalist economy.
Most prescient for trostskyism:
In Western Europe, basing himself on his assumption of capitalism triumphant, Kidron, as late as 1967, while recognizing that some slowdown of growth would probably occur, saw as the only possible strategy for the working class movement the perspective of … “mass reformism” from below. We, on the other hand, understanding, we believe, much more correctly the structural crisis of the world capitalist system, could make the prediction that notwithstanding the temporary increase in the rate of growth of the Western economy in the fifties and the early sixties, this remained a deeply crisis-ridden system, in which periodic social explosions, which would put the revolutionary conquest of power on the agenda, were unavoidable. The French May 1968 events have shown who has been right and who has been wrong in that respect, and what Kidron’s analysis objectively leads to: to furnish a theoretical apology for all those reformist and neo-reformist tendencies in the Western labor movement — to start with the French CP! — who all claim that no more than a defense of workers’ real wages and the like is possible today.
For the colonial and semi-colonial countries, Kidron’s medicine is an even more bitter one. As the colonial revolution can only lead to capitalism in one form or another-a current exercise of the British adherents of the, “state capitalist” theory is to explain even the cultural revolution in China by reference to the need “to step up capital accumulation”; presumably, if tomorrow, after Mao’s death, most of the decisions of the “cultural revolution” were reversed, the same explanation would then be given for the reversal. We had better stop chattering about “permanent revolution”. Anybody who comes to power there, including through a popular uprising, can only submit himself to the laws of competition of the world market. As these laws evidently play against the poor countries (and poor classes), workers and poor peasants in these countries can only expect higher burdens, nothing else.
...
If all this were true, one should have to draw two conclusions. One that it is useless to try today to make a socialist revolution in Ceylon; things could only become worse, and a socialist should limit himself to fight for modest democratic and economic reforms, postponing “revolution” till some better age. Second, that it would be utterly irresponsible to condemn, not only the reformist LSSP of entering a bourgeois coalition government, but also and above all the various reformist CPs of supporting national bourgeois governments (as the Brazilian, Iraqi, Persian, Indonesian CPs have done and the Indian CPs are doing now, one knows with what magnificent results!) Because they had no more choice than the reformist LSSP, and wasn’t it preferable, after all, to have the capitalists do the dirty job of squeezing the workers’ standard of living themselves, rather than do It for them under the false signboard of “socialist revolution”?
So Kidron’s politics lead to utter despair for a revolutionist. No revolution possible in the West; no revolution possible in the South; as for the East, insofar as the “objective conditions” are similar either to the West (in Russia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany) or to the South (China. Vietnam, etc.) why hope for revolution there? The only place to withdraw, for a revolutionist, in Kidron’s universe, is to the study, where intelligent commentary can be made about the failures of past revolutions and perspectives of new ones, in the 21st century.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1969/08/statecapitalism.htm
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
getfiscal posted:my guess (...) Stalin (...) was wrong
Getfiscal i like you but im sorry this calls for a ban
babyhueypnewton posted:anyway Crow is dealing with this question on a historical-material level, but lets talk about it in a more dialectical manner too. the real question is what is 'capitalism', what is 'socialism', and what is 'state capitalism' against regular capitalism with a state.
I think if you want to be a materialist it is helpful to think what counterfactuals or defences of positions actual mean in material terms. For example, if you reference E.P. Thompson or Louis Althusser, you'd also have to explain why they dedicated much of their careers and politics to criticizing Soviet ideology, if you're trying to use it to defend things they would repudiate. Which is why I brought up the fact that defending the Soviet Union in pragmatic terms, like saying that it doesn't matter if they moved away from old-style planning, or that it is understandable that they did in China, are using arguments that the leaders in these countries considered criminal. Which is something I think Maoists here fail to deal with when they endorse ultraleft positions in the Cultural Revolution when Mao jailed those people.
Also I think I understand now that if the idea is that we should think of an abstract model of society like communism and then force reality to conform to it (which is not a materialist way of doing things), and if it's bad if we deviate from that project in any way, then anything can be set up as a betrayal or failure because it hasn't been realized yet. But people who take that position should self-criticize then. Like who cares if a few thousand Cliffites, totally irrelevant in most countries, have a dumb position on state-capitalism (which is not anywhere near the same as the Maoist one which I talk about). Maoists actually controlled China and a lot of people still defend China today.
getfiscal posted:Just say the most left-wing thing and that's your solution.
catchphrase
getfiscal posted:I mean that materialist politics talks about strategy within a particular conjuncture and not primarily in general terms. If you could choose what an entire historical movement did then there is no political dilemma involved. Just say the most left-wing thing and that's your solution.
well, strategically, communism was utterly defeated...
getfiscal posted:babyhueypnewton posted:anyway Crow is dealing with this question on a historical-material level, but lets talk about it in a more dialectical manner too. the real question is what is 'capitalism', what is 'socialism', and what is 'state capitalism' against regular capitalism with a state.
I think if you want to be a materialist it is helpful to think what counterfactuals or defences of positions actual mean in material terms. For example, if you reference E.P. Thompson or Louis Althusser, you'd also have to explain why they dedicated much of their careers and politics to criticizing Soviet ideology, if you're trying to use it to defend things they would repudiate. Which is why I brought up the fact that defending the Soviet Union in pragmatic terms, like saying that it doesn't matter if they moved away from old-style planning, or that it is understandable that they did in China, are using arguments that the leaders in these countries considered criminal. Which is something I think Maoists here fail to deal with when they endorse ultraleft positions in the Cultural Revolution when Mao jailed those people.
Also I think I understand now that if the idea is that we should think of an abstract model of society like communism and then force reality to conform to it (which is not a materialist way of doing things), and if it's bad if we deviate from that project in any way, then anything can be set up as a betrayal or failure because it hasn't been realized yet. But people who take that position should self-criticize then. Like who cares if a few thousand Cliffites, totally irrelevant in most countries, have a dumb position on state-capitalism (which is not anywhere near the same as the Maoist one which I talk about). Maoists actually controlled China and a lot of people still defend China today.
this is a combination of anti-communist propaganda and misunderstanding of materialism. materialism doesn't mean some kind of anti-postmodern elevation of the author to supreme authority or a vulgar historicism. it means grounding ideologies in the socio-historical context that determined their conditions of possibility. saying "Althusser opposed the Soviet Union so how can you use his ideology to support it?!1" is as stupid as saying "Athusser changed his mind later and eventually killed his wife therefore his entire ideology boils down to that". We can use these ideologies because they are incomplete. Like I said, they are examples of focusing on a small part of Marx's analysis of Capitalism and seeing what is revealed. We then have to pull back out again and go beyond the author, the text, and even the material limitations that determined the work. I am not even using them for anything, simply saying that a certain pragmatism towards "State Capitalist" theory in our present materialist situation shows it has reactionary political consequences.
the anti-communism about purges and mao personally arresting people isn't even worth responding to.
NoFreeWill posted:getfiscal posted:I mean that materialist politics talks about strategy within a particular conjuncture and not primarily in general terms. If you could choose what an entire historical movement did then there is no political dilemma involved. Just say the most left-wing thing and that's your solution.
well, strategically, communism was utterly defeated...
it truly depressed me you're a graduate student and will succeed because anti-communism is so lucrative in academia you don't even need intelligence.
Lenin's point is that specific companies were being taken over by the state and run in the interests of the people. This trend and sector was referred to as state capitalism. Other sectors are listed in a quote that Crow himself provided. Lenin was defending this as a transitional step. It would be phased out as these state capitals were integrated into a common plan for production (in socialism, the lowest phase of communism, where these is no oppression of labour).
Mao's argument was that the Soviets were doing things (like the sale of motor tractor stations to farmers) that contradicted this tendency and that reforms across Eastern Europe were encouraging planners to treat the means of production as commodities rather than units for allocation. This is what Mao meant by state capitalism - that the trend towards socialism had been reversed and that the state was sectioning off capital into various administrative units that depended on profitability. This is not Tony Cliff's argument. Cliff's argument is that the Soviet Union was never socialist because of the pressures of the world market. I think stego was saying that Mao was right but that it doesn't matter too much because these developmental states were good things.
My other point was that getting all worked up about people debating these things is silly when Crow was posting points that would have been denounced. Like attacking people as anti-communist seems odd when you're doing it by making points that were considered anti-communist by communists until recently.
I wasn't even attacking socialism. I was suggesting that the categories that Mao used in his attacks on the Soviet Union seem more and more irrelevant to me now, and that makes the Soviet experience more understandable. The idea that China should have tried alone to crush the commodity-form or whatever seems crazy in retrospect. But saying that planning might not be able to be comprehensive any time soon doesn't mean you can't do anything, how is that a reasonable argument. That's more defeatist than anything. It's the same sort of logic people use to defend anything China does today on the basis that it raises productive forces or whatever.
NoFreeWill posted:the berlin wall falling down (controlled demolition?) and the breakup of USSR were some sick-ass anti-communist propaganda events organized by fascists and CIA
this but unironically
WILL DOMINATE
THE WORLD
cars posted:i first learned of the Communist Party of the United States of America as a teenager, from a Geocities site called Red Encyclopedia that was somewhere between Trot and libsoc in seriousness but they still carefully explained that CPUSA had campaigned for bill clinton and were considered a fucking joke by everyone
click the reputation on this post for a list of true '90s kids
getfiscal posted:~snip~
this makes a lot of sense to me. ive felt before that trying to understand states like the USSR, the PRC or cuba in a very large-scale way would be extremely difficult because socialism has had trouble (e.g. devastating imperialist war) developing the conditions for its reproduction and further historical development. like, the characteristics of capitalist production weren't clear immediately from the beginning and were contingent and could have developed a different way. in a similar way it seems like a tremendously difficult enterprise to try and unambiguously lay to rest questions about the microscopic character of the relations of production in the USSR or whatever, which were constantly being developed in new and different ways, without the benefit of hindsight and insight into the ways socialist economies begin to reproduce themselves after being able to subsume a much greater share of global influence and productivity.
Edited by c_man ()
c_man posted:socialism has had trouble (e.g. devastating imperialist war) developing the conditions for its reproduction and further historical development.
it's almost like evil always triumphs because good is stupid, or that the revolution in germany failing meant the failure of world full communism, or that, incredibly, systems that exploit humans and their environments most fully for energy always defeat systems that are just or sustainable.
getfiscal posted:I didn't say that the Soviet Union was "state capitalist", stego did. Crow then tried to say that Lenin defended the use of state capitalism. This is not what either Tony Cliff (which you linked to Mandel's critique) or Mao were talking about though.
Lenin's point is that specific companies were being taken over by the state and run in the interests of the people. This trend and sector was referred to as state capitalism. Other sectors are listed in a quote that Crow himself provided. Lenin was defending this as a transitional step. It would be phased out as these state capitals were integrated into a common plan for production (in socialism, the lowest phase of communism, where these is no oppression of labour).
Mao's argument was that the Soviets were doing things (like the sale of motor tractor stations to farmers) that contradicted this tendency and that reforms across Eastern Europe were encouraging planners to treat the means of production as commodities rather than units for allocation. This is what Mao meant by state capitalism - that the trend towards socialism had been reversed and that the state was sectioning off capital into various administrative units that depended on profitability. This is not Tony Cliff's argument. Cliff's argument is that the Soviet Union was never socialist because of the pressures of the world market. I think stego was saying that Mao was right but that it doesn't matter too much because these developmental states were good things.
My other point was that getting all worked up about people debating these things is silly when Crow was posting points that would have been denounced. Like attacking people as anti-communist seems odd when you're doing it by making points that were considered anti-communist by communists until recently.
I wasn't even attacking socialism. I was suggesting that the categories that Mao used in his attacks on the Soviet Union seem more and more irrelevant to me now, and that makes the Soviet experience more understandable. The idea that China should have tried alone to crush the commodity-form or whatever seems crazy in retrospect. But saying that planning might not be able to be comprehensive any time soon doesn't mean you can't do anything, how is that a reasonable argument. That's more defeatist than anything. It's the same sort of logic people use to defend anything China does today on the basis that it raises productive forces or whatever.
I don't think Mao ever made that argument, nor did the CCP. Mao's major outlines of revisionism are here:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom2.htm
and the clearest outline of capitalism being restored according the standards of the CCP is here:
https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/yugoslavia.htm
in fact I think the only time Mao used the word "state-capitalism" is to describe China:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_30.htm
you have a bad habit of "simplifying" arguments without evidence which makes it difficult to prove them wrong in good faith. I'm trying not to think you're trolling so please find evidence of your statements in the sources themselves (instead of what some random guy says about what Mao thought).
Crow posted:like i pointed out in my excerpts, state capitalism is a very specific mode of production that isnt dominant, it's transitional and used to achieve specific goals for the entrenchment of socialism, for the DotP, for the expansion of productive forces. its nonsense to say state capitalism was dominant in the USSR and Cuba or that it "persisted", when it so clearly has not.
so I have no idea why your scare mongering about "getting killed" is "useful to think about", unless you mean useful in the anticommunist way
how do you feel about Dunayevskaya's Theory of State-Capitalism where the alienation of labor is reasserted as the determiner if someone is laboring under capitalist relations or not? its an interesting turn that doesnt rely on the transitional state-capitalism lenin/syriza advocate
babyhueypnewton posted:you have a bad habit of "simplifying" arguments without evidence which makes it difficult to prove them wrong in good faith. I'm trying not to think you're trolling so please find evidence of your statements in the sources themselves (instead of what some random guy says about what Mao thought).
The debates in the New Communist Movement in the US centered on these points.
This book explains the US Maoist position early on:
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-7/index.htm
These are books that think the Soviet Union had a rightist leadership but that capitalism was not restored:
https://archive.org/details/SocialismInTheSovietUnionByJonathanAurthur
https://archive.org/details/TheMythOfCapitalismReborn
Some of the debates are here, the Szymanski versus Lotta one I discussed earlier:
http://bannedthought.net/USSR/index.htm
Those are some of the things I've read between Maoists and other ML types. The Hoxhaists have their own whole literature on it, especially Bill Bland.
Gibbonstrength posted:Hmmm. On the one hand getfiscal has a Buddha like appeal. on the other im concerned about crow crashing a bmp into my log cabin after the revolution. Seems im in a pickle
A BMP is a best management practice.