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Failure of Socialism in America

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Beylerbeyi View Drop Down
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  Quote Beylerbeyi Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Failure of Socialism in America
    Posted: 19-Dec-2008 at 14:23
We can define capitalism in different ways, one definition (more common) is 'the system in which the means of production are owned by private capital' (simplified), another one is 'the system which maximises profit' (used by Wallerstein et al especially). 

If we follow the first definition, it it possible to have a socialist market economy. Essentially, we have the market as normal, but the means of production (businesses) are owned by the workers (employees) themselves. Yugoslavia in the past had experimented with a similar system. Might also be relevant to Chavez's Venezuela.

If we follow the second definition we arrive to the conclusion that 'capitalism' is the diametrical opposite of a perfect 'free-market'. Because in a theoretical perfect free-market profit is minimised. Profit is maximised in monopoly situations, wheter it is by the hand of state (mercantalist/'command economy') or by private monopolies, it does not matter so much. There are many radical leftists, including Anarchists, Cliff-style Trotskyists, Left-Communists, etc. who view countries with command economies like the USSR as 'state capitalist'.

In reality, all countries have mixed economies. There is no such thing as a pure free-market or a command economy. In the 20th century a country got called 'socialist' or 'capitalist' due to their political stance. I.e. countries with similar economic systems got called capitalist or socialist depending on which camp they were in. 

Another observation on 20th century history is that countries with keynesian/social democratic mixed economies performed the best compared to more 'command' or 'free-market' economies worldwide. There are cases where free-market delivered good results (usually for small trade hub type countries like Hong Kong) and there are cases where command economies delivered good results (usually in industrialising backward countries). But overall, welfare states with market economies with heavy state intervention/planing performed the best. 
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  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-Dec-2008 at 15:51
I go along with that.
 
I might complicate it some by pointing out that the nominal 'owners' of capital are not necessarily the ones that control it. One extreme opposite arises where capital is nominally owned by the people, or the nation, or some such expression, but actually controlled by an inner political elite; another arises where capital is nominally owned by shareholders in a corporate organisation, but actually controlled by an oligarchy of mutually appointed executives.
 
My favourite example of the ingenuity that can go into the latter is the structure of the Mirror newspaper ownership in Britain in the '50s and early '60s. The overwhelming majority of shares in Daily Mirror Newspapers were owned by Sunday Pictorial Newspapers, and the overwhelming majority of shares in the Sunday Pictorial were owned by the Daily Mirror.
 
Both in my time were controlled by the chairman, Cecil King, who only had a very tiny personal stake in either company, and two boards of directors appointed by him.
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  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-Dec-2008 at 16:19
Originally posted by Beylerbeyi

There are many radical leftists, including Anarchists, Cliff-style Trotskyists, Left-Communists, etc. who view countries with command economies like the USSR as 'state capitalist'.


Yep. The term was originally coined by Marx, to describe economies using nationalization schemes. Nowadays we associate it more with the economy of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, but originally it just meant any economy with a signifigant degree of state-run industry that still maintained capitalist features like a wage system or rent. That definition would qualify the USSR, Cuba, and certainly China as 'state capitalist'.


Edited by edgewaters - 19-Dec-2008 at 16:20
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  Quote Beylerbeyi Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Dec-2008 at 12:53
Nowadays we associate it more with the economy of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, but originally it just meant any economy with a signifigant degree of state-run industry that still maintained capitalist features like a wage system or rent.

Not really. Germany or Italy are not called 'state capitalist'. 'Corporatist', sometimes. I don't think they need an adjective. They are just capitalists.

That definition would qualify the USSR, Cuba, and certainly China as 'state capitalist'.

Again, not really. One must also show that there is a self-perpetuating class akin to bourgoisie in capitalism, which runs this economy in those countries. Sure there were the bureaucrats, 'co-ordinators' or managerials in the USSR, but were they a self-perpetuating class? This question was debated a lot among the Marxists. Trotsky, for instance did not go as far as calling them a class.

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  Quote pikeshot1600 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Dec-2008 at 14:03
Would the bureaucrat/managers of the USSR be considered "self-perpetuating" in the form of making sure influence was exercised to provide jobs or positions for offspring or relatives in the Party structure?  Human nature being what it is, that sort of thing frequently trumps any kind of meritocracy, and the Party was the path to material goodies and to continued influence.  I don't know if any studies of this have been made since 1991.
 
As far as Trotsky's not calling the inevitable bureaucrats a class, he could not have done otherwise as that would have called into question an important aspect of the Revolution.  He was more theoretical than some of the others who wound up running the Party and the country. 
 
  


Edited by pikeshot1600 - 21-Dec-2008 at 14:06
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  Quote Beylerbeyi Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Dec-2008 at 14:28
Would the bureaucrat/managers of the USSR be considered "self-perpetuating" in the form of making sure influence was exercised to provide jobs or positions for offspring or relatives in the Party structure?  Human nature being what it is, that sort of thing frequently trumps any kind of meritocracy, and the Party was the path to material goodies and to continued influence.  I don't know if any studies of this have been made since 1991.


As I've written, this is a big debate among radical leftists. I do not want to go into this class debate but my personal opinion is that these countries cannot be called capitalist. Also no need to invent redundant concepts such as 'state capitalist'.
 
As far as Trotsky's not calling the inevitable bureaucrats a class, he could not have done otherwise as that would have called into question an important aspect of the Revolution.  He was more theoretical than some of the others who wound up running the Party and the country.


Trotsky's analysis of the USSR be more accurately called 'degenerate/deformed worker's state' rather than 'state capitalist'. And it of course applies to the period after Stalin consolidated his power, i.e. the 1930s. I don't think he refrained from calling it class because he would have betrayed the revolution if he did so, he already believed that Stalin betrayed the revolution. It's not like he's calling pre-Stalin period anything. The new bureaucracy was created under Stalin. But it has to be said that under Stalin the bureaucrats did not yet have the extra benefits they would enjoy later. Society under Stalin was very egaliterian (as long as you survived the purges that is). That's probably another reason why Trotsky called the bureaucrats a 'stratum' (and sometimes 'caste') rather than 'class'.
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  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Dec-2008 at 15:38

From what I know of Soviet bureaucracy it was indeed self-perpetuating and that was a betrayal of the revolution. It was more marked though in the satellite states where the elite intelligentsia and bureaucracy of the 'sixties and 'seventies were very often still the offspring of the self-perpetuating 'bourgeois' class of pre-1945. I don't think I ever met anyone privileged enough to be allowed to study in the West whose parents were not bourgeois (in the Marxist sense). 

Major political figures could well make a point of having had working-class of peasant backgrounds, emphasising 'peasant' rather than 'kulak' or 'worker' rather than 'foreman', but similar airbrushing of biographies is pretty well known among all societies, and anyway the bulk of the bureaucracy are not major political figures.
 
The USSR could well be accurately called 'degenerate/deformed' but it wasn't a 'worker's state', it was a bureaucrat's state.
 
As for using 'capitalist' as a single word, that only works given a common narrow definition shared by everyone. Even if one wants to take it to mean 'Marx's capitalism' you still have to say 'Marxist capitalism' to establish what you mean. I'd agree though that 'state capitalism' is an inappropriate term for Fascist and Nazi societies, since they preserved private ownership of capital. It's appropriate to the USSR and similar states since capital legally belongs to the State, and the State appropriates any surplus value that is going.
 
Control of capital, is, as I've pointed out, a different thing from ownership of it.
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  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Dec-2008 at 18:57

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi

Again, not really. One must also show that there is a self-perpetuating class akin to bourgoisie in capitalism, which runs this economy in those countries. Sure there were the bureaucrats, 'co-ordinators' or managerials in the USSR, but were they a self-perpetuating class? This question was debated a lot among the Marxists. Trotsky, for instance did not go as far as calling them a class.

Maybe for the Bolsheviks, because they had to justify their revolution, but not for Marx - his definition was simple and elegant, state capitalism was any sort of nationalization scheme that did not do away with capitalist institutions like the wage system. 

Going strictly by Marx, if there is a state, there is class rule - the state itself is evidence, because a state is nothing but an organ of class rule. Or, as Engels puts it:

"The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without . . .  it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel."

And again:

""But neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organisation with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict"

Moreover,  Marx observed  that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes" and that the working class would not be free of capitalism "without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class".

Bolsheviks, naturally, didn't think much of ideas like this (or pesky little things like the historical process of dialectic materialism, etc) and tossed them out the window - now they could have a "Marxist" revolution in a country that hadn't yet left serfdom behind, and set up a "communist state" (to Marx, this would be a contradiction in terms!). So we have Lenin stating:

"Socialism is merely a state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and to this extent has ceased to be a state capitalist monopoly"

... Which is precisely the opposite of what Marx envisioned. Of such ideas, Marx had instead written:

"Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labor" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway . . . a toiling people, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!"



Edited by edgewaters - 22-Dec-2008 at 19:16
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  Quote Al Jassas Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Dec-2008 at 19:23
Hello to you all
 
From what I read from the few posts above, I think defining what is communism and what is socialism is much more than defining Capitalism.
 
The reason is simple. Communism and socialism came as a response to the current situation in their days which they defined as capitalism. Now with all the confusion it is logical that since they say that they provide the "alternative" to define exactly what is the "alternative" they provide.
 
From the discussion above, which in my mind is pure rhetoric, it became apparent that the USSR was a capitalist state in the first place? so defining communism is important.
 
Is it the capitalisation of the state or the socialisation of society?
 
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  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Dec-2008 at 19:30
Originally posted by Al Jassas

Hello to you all
 
From what I read from the few posts above, I think defining what is communism and what is socialism is much more than defining Capitalism.
 
The reason is simple. Communism and socialism came as a response to the current situation in their days which they defined as capitalism. Now with all the confusion it is logical that since they say that they provide the "alternative" to define exactly what is the "alternative" they provide.
 
From the discussion above, which in my mind is pure rhetoric, it became apparent that the USSR was a capitalist state in the first place? so defining communism is important.
 
Is it the capitalisation of the state or the socialisation of society?
 
Al-Jassas

The definition depends on who you ask. If you ask Lenin or Trotsky, communism is simply state monopoly of the means of production. If you ask Marx or Engels, communism is a new society which has abolished the state and all forms of capitalist relations like wages, rent, credit with interest, and so on and in which labour is supreme in the economy - there is no currency except labour, and all labour is equal.

What we really need are distinguishing terms for two very different ideas, and this is originally why Marx coined the term "state capitalism" - to distinguish state socialism from communism.

What might be more useful for the modern reader is to call one, 19th century communism, and the other, 20th century communism, and note that the two are very very different in how they view the state.



Edited by edgewaters - 22-Dec-2008 at 19:41
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  Quote Darius of Parsa Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Dec-2008 at 20:14
Barrack Obama?

What is the officer problem?
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  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23-Dec-2008 at 11:35
Originally posted by edgewaters

What might be more useful for the modern reader is to call one, 19th century communism, and the other, 20th century communism, and note that the two are very very different in how they view the state.
 
I agree with your diagnosis, but the prescription doesn't really help, because there were other forms of communism than Marxist communism proposed in the 19th century, for instance the society described by Morris[1] in News From Nowhere to counter the one described by Bellamy in Looking Backward.
 
I don't think we can get away from using very special modifiers, like Maoist or Leninist or Stalinist or whatever. Same goes for socialism and capitalism.
 
[1] I know Morris had been a Marxist in his time; after the split he was still a communist.
 
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  Quote Beylerbeyi Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23-Dec-2008 at 11:35
Edgewaters,

Actually, it is not that simple, and that's one reason why I don't want to get into this discussion. 

Nevertheless, Marx's and Bolsheviks' positions are not that easy to clarify. Marx' views on a socialist revolution in Russia has changed during his lifetime. Also in the manifesto and in other places he includes nationalisation of important industries among the demands of the communist movement. And finally they are referring to different time periods and different countries. Marx may call the nationalisation of certain industries 'state capitalism', but it likely applies to states which are run by the bourgeoisie. Nationalisation under workers' rule is a different matter.

As to Lenin and Trotsky, they knew Marx far better than we did. They never claimed that the USSR was a communist state, AFAIK. Of course, as the state exists, it will be a tool of the ruling class, and they, like Marx, declared that the Soviet state was the tool of the ruling class(es), of the workers and peasants. To what extent this was true is in dispute (i.e. was it a really a workers' state, or a bureaucrats' state). Surely they never believed 'state ownersip = communism'. That's a caricature.


Edited by Beylerbeyi - 23-Dec-2008 at 12:31
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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02-Jan-2009 at 01:23
I think that the world's strongest imperialist force will undoubtedly be the last to be able to switch to socialism.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=qUN55zS4BPs
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  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02-Jan-2009 at 03:54

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi

As to Lenin and Trotsky, they knew Marx far better than we did.

Kautsky knew him alot better than either of those two. Wink
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  Quote Akolouthos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02-Jan-2009 at 04:13
Originally posted by brandnewworld

I think that the world's strongest imperialist force will undoubtedly be the last to be able to switch to socialism.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=qUN55zS4BPs
 
And again: please provide a bit of analysis of the video if you decide to keep it posted. Statements are great -- especially when they include explanations and defenses. Wink
 
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  Quote Cryptic Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Jan-2009 at 17:02
Originally posted by gcle2003

and while the other side were poor, this was because of the tragic early death of the father, leaving the mother to bring up three small children by herself - which could of course happen anywhere.
 
In fact I don't think Georgia suffered that badly from the depression, as long as you were white.
[
I agree.  The depression needs to broken down into two parts:
- The financial collpase impacting industrial areas and those areas supplying products to them.
-The dustbowl ecological disaster impacting poor share cropping counties in parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Mississippi.
 
Neither event impacted poor whites and blacks in most of the south. Sharecroppers of either race were existing largely on a subsistance agricultural economy and not on a "stock market" economy. Most of their food products were not exported to the industrial areas, but consumed locally. Even cotton was increasingly being produced by mechanized operations in Texas.  Local demand may have faltered in non industrial Lafayette, Louisiana, but not as much as the demand of industrialized Chicago collapsed.
 
Then consider heavily mechanized midwestern farmers in Wisconsin, Iowa etc. Their far more efficient and far larger production is exported to Chicago due to geography and better transportation networks. Furthermore, Midwest farmers were probably far more likely to have bank loans on advanced equipment or new land.  As such, they could not "lay low" as easily as the wealthy land owners of the deep south could with their inherited land and minimal, mule powered equipment. 
 
As the country western song says... "Somebody told us Wall Street fell, but we were so poor that we couldn't tell."  For sharecroppers outside dustbowl counties, that was the sad truth.


Edited by Cryptic - 13-Jan-2009 at 17:29
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