The democratic control of the productive forces is not some secondary concern, but is fundamental, because without it, what exists is not Socialism, but merely some form of social-democracy in which the interests of capital continues to exert itself, albeit mediated by the interests of a layer of petty-bourgeois, bureaucrats, who become the best adapted individuals for such a set of material conditions, whether those conditions manifest themselves benignly as bourgeois social-democracy, or malignantly as Stalinism or Nazism, or some such variant.
In a bourgeois social-democracy, the bourgeoisie remains the ruling-class, but the dominant form of property is socialised capital, which represents a heightened level of contradiction. The state immediately defends the interests of the ruling class, as owners of fictitious capital, but the interests of this fictitious capital is itself immediately contradictory to the interests of the socialised capital, which is the basis of the state and its continued existence. Hence, we have seen such states engage in QE to boost the prices of the fictitious capital owned by the ruling class, whilst implementing austerity that restricts the accumulation of real capital, again so as to hold down interest rates and boost asset prices. But, such policies are ultimately unsustainable, because eventually, the needs of the real capital will win out. It will break through, and asset prices will crash, and, then, as the ruling class turns its attention back to the search for revenues, i.e. interest/dividends, rather than capital gain, the state will again have to focus on measures that facilitate more rapid capital accumulation, and growth of profits, so that these additional revenues can be paid. This is a consequence of the fact that the dominant form of property is socialised capital, but the personification of that property, the “associated producers”, have not asserted their position as ruling class.
Under fascism, again the ruling class remains the bourgeoisie, but the interests of the socialised capital are more violently enforced by the state, which takes into its hands the direction of the economy. The regime under fascism and under Stalinism may appear superficially the same, but under Stalinism, the working-class is the ruling class, as a consequence of the fact that the other ruling-classes have been physically liquidated, and their social roots ripped up. Under all these regimes, a huge petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic apparatus appropriates to itself a large portion of social production. Under bourgeois social-democracy, it is the price that the bourgeoisie pays for itself being removed from its social function in production; under fascism it is also the price that the bourgeoisie pays for the state suppressing a revolutionary proletariat; under Stalinism, it is the price that the working-class pays for having carried through a revolution before being ready to exercise political power directly itself in its own name.
The socialised capital that is the material basis of all these regimes reflects the kind of regime that ensues. In the joint stock company, the bourgeoisie continues to exercise control, via its own bureaucracy, in the worker owned cooperative, it is the workers that exercise control, and yet they too employ professional managers to undertake this function on their behalf, and these managers may appropriate more or less power to themselves dependent upon the degree of control exercised over them. As Enron and Tyco demonstrated, the bourgeoisie itself faces this problem with the bureaucrats it appoints to act on its behalf, and must act every so often to call them into line. The capital of a worker-owned cooperative, as a transitional form of property, acts more or less as capital, as opposed to means of production, dependent upon its degree of development, and consequent freedom of movement, as well as upon the overall environment in which it operates. The more the company must compete with other capitalist firms, the more it must operate as capital rather than means of production. And, the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy, is like the managers in a worker-owned cooperative that continually dip their fingers into the till to feather their own nest.
In a workers' state, even a deformed workers' state, such as that which was created in Russia, the state itself can create the conditions in which this socialised capital, in whatever form, acts increasingly as means of production, rather than as capital. But, Russia and the USSR did not exist in a vacuum, and had to buy and sell in the global market. They had to compete with huge economies like the US, where capital continued to dominate, and this meant that the means of production in the USSR, also could not operate entirely as just means of production. Once again, this demonstrates why Socialism cannot be created in one country, even a huge country like the USSR, but requires a combined effort by workers in a sizeable number of advanced economies. In the same way that commodity production, and competition leads initially to the creation of capital, and its development into capitalism, so continued competition by a workers' state with capitalist states, leads inevitably back towards the domination of commodity production, and dominance of capital over labour.
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