Keven posted: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.
It's Best Marxist Praxis
Going forward to communism means moving towards a unitary system of the ownership of the means of production by the whole people. A communist society in which several kinds of ownership of the means of production coexist is inconceivable. Yet Khrushchov is creating a situation in which enterprises owned by the whole people are gradually degenerating into capitalist enterprises and farms under the system of collective ownership are gradually degenerating into units of a kulak economy. Again, can one find an iota of communism in all this?
At this point Mao is more worried about outright criminality - he lists earlier a bunch of ways that factories are encouraging side production for sale on the black market and such. But the debate shifted to a broader issue of the logic of production, in part because the issue of profiteering was exaggerated.
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.html
getfiscal posted: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.
This is what I figured. What Mao said (or the Chinese Communist Party) is very different than what the NCM said, specifically in the west. This is not a nitpick but essential to the argument, since we just had a thread about the Sino-Soviet split and its meaning . To say that maoism is entirely distinct from Mao Zedong thought and came after Mao's death is stupid, but to believe the reverse and not differentiate at all between Mao/the Chinese revolution and maoists in the west/the RIM is to ignore that real material conditions lead to different theory.
This differentiation is important for a number of issues. For example, the "three worlds theory" is something that is confused for what Mao said instead of what "maoists" said. Looking back, we can see (like Stalin) that Mao was not all powerful and in fact was often used as a symbol by revisionist forces, and recovering the radical potential from the defeated Chinese revolution requires a careful reading and analysis of Mao's theory. One of the main reasons there is still great theoretical confusion as to Mao meeting with Nixon is that he stopped writing anything and his writings from the 70s seem to contradict this move entirely (many are about the immanent collapse of U.S. imperialism). In this case, we must support book worship.
domn posted: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 wayhow 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
https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm
State Capitalism theories fall into two camps: either redefine capitalism or redefine reality. The trotskyist argument is the former while Dunayevskaya is the latter. She makes a series of points to show that capitalism exists in the USSR. 1. There is a great reserve army of unemployed. 2. Wages were falling 3. The law of value determined prices 4. Workers competed for wages and bureaucrats competed as capitalists through the personal incentives system 5. Production was for profit 6. Workers are alienated from their labor because their unions/democratic organs have been integrated into the state 7. Workers produce products alien to them because the law of value determines their work. 8. Inequality increased. 9. The organic composition of capital was rising leading to a falling rate of profit.
The law of value, i.e., the law of motion, of the Russian economy has led to the polarization of wealth, to the high organic composition of capital, to the accumulation of misery at one pole and the accumulation of capital at the other. This is a given single capitalist society, an economy governed by the laws of world capitalism, originating in the separation of the laborer from control over the means of production.
So basically Dunayevskaya outlines all the qualities of capitalism and tries to find them in the USSR. Unfortunately, most of these things are factually wrong, and the only thing left is the "alienation of labor", which boils down to the liberal demand for "workers self management." You'd think these people would be happy with Yugoslavia, but I guess one's fantasy of socialism brought to life becomes an unbearable jouissance. Anyway, without the rest of capitalist relations of production and the generalized commodity form, any class society could be called "alien labor."
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.
what I tried to say, and did say, but you so ridiculously fumbled with your own silly handwaving, is that the cliffite theory of state capitalism 1) doesnt make sense, and 2) Is directly in contradiction to Marx and Lenin. try reading again
domn posted: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 wayhow 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
Honestly, the humanist reading of Marx is just not useful. Abstract 'alienation' takes last place after material considerations like clothing, feeding, educating, and healing the masses and winning revolutionary gains against the imperial bourgeoisie. Marx dropped this consideration of 'alienation of labor' pretty early in his life, and I dont see any reason to resurrect it, unless your idea is to attack the savage orientals or something as not measuring up to bourgeois moralism.
anyway heres Marxist Comrades Group (japanese branch of SWP) article on dunayevskaya's humanism http://www.mcg-j.org/english/e-theory/crideolog/raya.html
and heres an even better summary of her i found online from an anonymous reviewer:
Dunayevskaya made great play of her support for the excluded in particular the black masses and women. But when it came to her writing she made very sure that only those who had a privileged educational background in philosophy, especially in Hegel's 'Phenomenology' and his 'Logic', were allowed in. Members of the working class who attempted to understand her work would, through her obscure Hegelian style of writing, effectively be given the message 'keep out this is not for you, only for us well educated people'. Or did she really think that factory workers, bus drivers and refuse collectors sat around reading Hegelian philosophy ?. Because to anyone without knowledge of Hegel's work and his arcane terminology her writings would be gibberish. Her Marxist Humanism seemed to be limited, at least in her writing style, to those least in need of it. If ever there was a writer who excluded the masses from their writing Dunayevskaya was that writer. And Gogol's book completely and utterly ignores this. Raya Dunayevskaya's writings were a sick joke. A slap in the face to the vast majority of those she purported to be writing about.
Crow posted: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.
what I tried to say, and did say, but you so ridiculously fumbled with your own silly handwaving, is that the cliffite theory of state capitalism 1) doesnt make sense, and 2) Is directly in contradiction to Marx and Lenin. try reading again
Let's just celebrate the fact we both think Tony Cliff was dumb.