Even if then we accept the characterisation of Russia, presented by Lenin after the revolution, as a state capitalist economy under the domination of a workers state, we are led to the conclusion that this is a transitional form of society based upon a transitional form of property – socialised capital. As Marx says in Capital III, Chapter 27,
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself...
This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects. It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.”
Its quite clear that such a transitional form of society, based upon this transitional form of property, will have many, widely varied paths of development, depending on the exact material conditions that each of these societies will be presented with, and that very fact will result in wide variations in the political superstructures that are developed in each of these cases. Marx, for example, argued that the period of dissolution of capital would be protracted. Just as its development had been. Engels comments that he and Marx had seen the worker cooperatives playing an extensive role in this prolonged transition period between capitalism and socialism.
Whether the productive relations in Russia were defined as being socialised capital – state, property, joint stock companies, cooperatives etc. - or socialised means of production, the reality was that this was certainly not private capitalist property, and, consequently, there was no basis for the existence of a capitalist class. In a capitalist state, even one where there is state capitalism, the capitalist class takes the form of owners of fictitious capital, coupon clippers, as Marx sets out in Chapter 27, and he and Engels describe in Anti-Duhring. But, this didn't exist in soviet Russia. The workers' state provided the required money-capital, or resources via allocation. The dominant form of property was, at least, socialised capital, in process of dissolution into socialised means of production, and, in most cases, was already socialised means of production.
There was no social basis for the existence of a capitalist class as either owners of real industrial capital, or as owners of fictitious capital. The ruling social class was the working-class, resting on this socialised capital/means of production, just as in a worker owned cooperative it is the workers who rest upon its socialised capital. The petty-bourgeois Third Campists ignored this underlying material reality and based themselves, like the Narodniks, on their own subjective sociological analysis of the political regime of the Stalinists. On that basis, they focused on the superficial aspects of the polity, and on the fact that the Stalinist bureaucracy wielded political power, not the workers, and that the bureaucracy appropriated to itself a disproportionate amount of social production. But, this is meaningless subjectivism and moralism.
No comments:
Post a Comment