When did the USSR turn its back on Marxism?

On a discussion list I presented a mainstream of Marxist development this way: "Marx and Engels in the 1840s through the Paris Commune to the October Revolution in 1917 and on to the Left Opposition and Fourth International - it's Bolshevik-Leninist built on rock-solid Marxist (and that's Marx and Engels) foundations".

DV asked me: "So at what point does your allegiance split off (or maintain the true centre) of that line, later in the SU? And why?

And I replied:

The change in the political character of the USSR can be located most simply in the year 1924. Lenin died in January, 1924, and during the year Stalin was able to consolidate his power in the Bolshevik party apparatus, principally by opening the floodgates to new members with interests that were bureaucratic and careerist rather than class-based and socialist. The struggle against this development can be traced in the history of the Left Opposition to Stalin and the bureaucracy, which Trotsky founded in 1923 while Lenin was still alive, albeit incapacitated.

Evidence of healthy working-class socialist internationalism is abundant in the records of the first four Congresses of the Third International (ie before 1924). After 1924 the politics of the Soviet government turn against  all the principles of the Bolshevik party that carried out the October Revolution and led the successful defence of the new non-capitalist workers state against the imperialists and reactionaries of the surrounding world and Old Russia.

The best brief account of the general development can be found in Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed (1936)  (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm)

The Stalinist bureaucracy instituted a new regime in the Soviet Union that Trotsky and the Left Opposition characterized as politically counter-revolutionary, although on a non-capitalist economic foundation. In other words, the USSR remained a workers state, but was run by a degenerate and counter-revolutionary regime

The catastrophe of the Nazi capture of power in Germany in 1933, resulting largely from the appalling anti-Marxist leadership provided by the German Communist party following orders from Moscow - Social-Democracy was called the main enemy of the German working class, rather than Nazism - drove Trotsky and his comrades to conclude that the Third International was beyond recovery and led them to prepare the foundation of a new working-class socialist international - the Fourth International. This was achieved in 1938, and the founding document - the Transitional Programme, "The Death Agony of Capitalism" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm)- is the best short presentation of modern Marxist perspectives in the imperialist world after the victories of Stalin and Hitler. That is in a world dominated by counter-revolutionary regimes from the US to the USSR. At the same time as the world was split into two antagonistic economic camps - capitalist-imperialist in the US and Europe, and non-capitalist  (what we could call proto-socialist) in the Soviet Union.

"No one's ever shown us a long-term working alternative to capitalism"

On a discussion group GA just wrote:

"nobody has hitherto managed to show in practice an alternative to a society harnessing the forces of capitalism that works, works in the long run, and works without serious side effects like dictatorship or other disproportionate limitations in the freedom of people to lead their lives"

I replied:

Well, it's not surprising, really, cos the history of human society doesn't work this way. The place of experiment has to be taken by real life commitment, on a huge scale. Comparing results needs an appropriately huge perspective both as regards time and place. 

We have seen perfectly clearly however that capitalism - as a long-term mode of production - does not work smoothly or beneficially for the mass of humanity. It proceeds from crisis to crisis, and the trade-offs in terms of health and well-being versus riches and technical advances are not worth making - from the point of view of the massive majority of people who merely produce the wealth rather than get to own and enjoy it. If today, after all these centuries, capitalism can do no better for the less well-placed than it's doing in Greece and Spain, let alone Haiti or Honduras, or South Africa or Rwanda, then it's an obvious failure. It is also totally incapable of systematically making use of the benefits of planned cooperation to apply available knowledge and techniques for the betterment of the majority of humanity. It can't even do this in the US (South Bronx, East LA), or the EU, let alone West Sahara or Eritrea. 

We have seen that certain important aspects of social progress - infrastructure, literacy, education, general (if basic) provision of health and education are much better managed in non-capitalist states, like the USSR, Yugoslavia, or China. This is quite amazing, historically speaking, given that the advantages became apparent so very rapidly. And given that the disadvantages inherent in the genesis and life of these states (non-hegemonic economic status, undemocratic governance removing the vast mass of the working people from planning and decision-making) are so very destructive and make them so vulnerable to aggressively hostile policies from more powerful capitalist rivals.

The road to social and  economic change and improvement will be created not by a small group of technocrats in an editorial office or library but by ordinary people getting together to run their own affairs free of exploitation and slave-driving, using free open cooperation with anyone they want using any ideas and techniques they want regardless of profits or patents. To do this, people will need ideas regarding political and economic and social organization, and they will have to fight to get their hands on these, since one of the major preoccupations of capitalism today is the stifling and extermination of these ideas and the organizations bearing them.

So, if you want a pre-validated successful non-capitalist society, you can forget it. Which means you either sigh, sit back and drink a resigned toast to really existing capitalism - Here's to Bhopal, Marikana, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan! - or you get stuck in to making better alternatives than the ones that have half-worked in really existing (but far from optimal) non-capitalist societies. Or get swirled about in the wind with the sands on the bank of the Styx - a fate Dante wished upon the congenitally indecisive trimmers who never made a choice and never took sides. These poor sods never even got let into Hell - Charon felt too much contempt for them. Blowing through cold, dark, empty streets for all eternity. 

The state of affairs at the moment

On a mailing list, GA posted the following, linking to an article in a Swedish daily ("We are living in the biggest bluff in history"):

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/vi-lever-i-historiens-storsta-bluff_7636778.svd#xtor=AD-500
One highlight from the article (translated on the fly):
"The IMF calculated the other year that the group of Americans that turned 65 in 2012 can count on the state paying out 333 billion dollars more than they paid in taxes. This jackpot is 17 higher than what those 25 year old at the time will have to make do with.
Europe isn't any better. A report issued by the EU Commission shows that with the welfare systems intact, the average member country's state debt will amount to 477% of the gross national product in 2060."
FWIW. Sorry I don't have the time to translate the rest. I hope GT will make a halfway decent job of it.

BR

GA 

I commented:

In other words -  either capitalism survives, or we do...

And capitalism is no bluff. It's very real. Its alleged benefits are all a bluff, but that's another matter altogether. 

What it really does is condemn most of humanity to a daily life of misery and pain and anxiety and insecurity. And that's those of us with work and an income. Shit, it can't even keep translators feeling bubbly, let alone people working in a factory or a sweatshop or a mine. Or scratching at debt-ridden soil. 

Meaningful daily activities, food, shelter and health - forget it. Food and shelter if you're lucky, maybe. If you're displaced or unemployed, tough luck.

What capitalism does do is waste an awful lot of the wealth produced by those working for it (let's call them "workers" :-) on things that are directly intended to repress, enslave and kill these workers. Armies and weapons. Not only intended, either, but doing it all day every day throughout the world. It also wastes an awful lot of our wealth on things intended to deceive us and brutalize us - advertising, media garbage (films, radio, tv, press).

It directly engenders its mirror image in mass organized crime - the arms, drugs and sex industries. No capitalism in America, no drug wars horrors in Mexico or Colombia. The freer a country is from US/imperialist influence, the freer it is from the arms drugs and sex industries..Just compare Guatemala and Cuba.

Capitalism is now so over-ripe and rotten it's liquefying. It still stands because it and its treacherous (for the workers) henchmen Social-Democracy and Stalinism have deliberately and brutally smashed anti-capitalist working class political and economic alternative leaderships. Capitalist China in 1948, for  instance, was as flimsy (as Peng Shuzi wrote) as a wooden house full of dry rot - one good kick and it would fall. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao was still capable (despite the counter-revolutionary orders/advice it received from Moscow) of delivering such a kick, and it did. Castro's army did the same in 1959 in Cuba. But since then mass mobilizations have kicked out regimes (Nicaragua and Iran in 1979, Spain and Portugal in the mid-80s, Egypt and Libya today) but they have been leaderless with regard to the economic system which is at the root of all the trouble. So fascist and comprador regimes have been replaced by still bourgeois, still capitalist regimes with little hope to offer the workers for a qualitatively better life, including political, cultural and economic power. The same process but in an even more perverted fashion took place in the Soviet bloc in 1990, when the rage of the masses flung out the oppressive Stalinist regimes - and simultaneously destroyed the non-capitalist foundations of the state. Bringing in equally or more oppressive regimes, along with new and horrific economic and cultural inequalities and destitution.

So that's the state of affairs at the moment. And the multiplying newspaper reports like this one just rub it in a little bit more painfully with every new day it's allowed to continue.

As Marx said, we don't make history in conditions of our own choosing, but we do make our own history - and it's time we started doing it again and with a sense of purpose. 

And that purpose should be: 

Out with capitalism 
In with socialism.

Communism - good on paper but doesn't work

Here's a short Facebook exchange about "communism" not working. Naz had been discussing things at home with her dad.


Naz: 
Hello chops I was having a talk with my dad about communism and he was telling me that it looks good on paper, but it doesn't work. If you nationalize land there's less production, he said south africa was more successful under apartheid because they had more production. He also included that Poland had a lot more progress in 3 years of Capitalism than in 40 years of communism! Explain!! 

Thanks 

Me: 

Hi! Depends how you measure being "successful", doesn't it.

Ask him that first. Success is what? And for who? Would he be among those enjoying the "success"? Why?

Poland. "Progress" is like success - depends what you mean, how you measure it and for who.

And Russia is more appropriate to look at when it comes to what happened under the Stalinist version of "communism". Poland and the other eastern European countries did make progress under the Soviet regime, but they were also badly hit by being treated as occupied semi-colonies and forced to be run for foreign interests by agents of the foreigners.

Despite this Polish women have suffered very badly since 1990, and education and culture have been under the thumb of a very primitive Catholicism since then, too. And the jury's still out on the effects on the peasantry (the mass of small independent farmers) of the return of capitalism. So far the governments haven't dared to attack them in the interests of agribusiness the way they do in most other EU countries.

As for Russia, I don't think anyone living there thought life between 1990 and 2000 marked an improvement over Soviet days, except in relation to certain limited areas of civic rights (there was greater formal freedom of speech, but you could get shot if you exercised it) and the availability of some foreign goods. In the USSR people had money but little to buy. In post-Soviet Russia people had no money (their Soviet savings were DELIBERATELY wiped out by Yeltsin and his pro-western friends) but lots of things they could (NOT) buy with it.

Also the majority of Russians resented being governed by a drunken clown and his robber baron oligarch cronies - and the MOB, which was a genuine product of reborn capitalism. People died younger, were sicker, committed suicide more, drank more, were worse housed, got worse education and health care, had to put up with the horrors of racism, terrorism and war, and watched US-style crime grow unchecked.

Progress and success for some...

Now that was between 1990 and 2000. After Putin became president in 2000 most ordinary Russians felt an improvement came. A lot of the most important resources were brought back in to national ownership (oil, gas). A lot of the least "patriotic" oligarchs were driven abroad, jailed or bankrupted. The mob was tamed. Russia started winning international sports competitions again (like ice-hockey). Russians were very proud of Soviet achievements, and felt humiliated by Yeltsin turning them into a mockery and selling their arses to anyone with a fistful of dollars.

I'm inclined to think that Yeltsin himself was sick of being the laughing stock of the world. From super-power to mange backstreet mutt in ten years flat....k

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons was to get his revenge on all the people who had been laughing at him to his face.

You should ask your dad what he thinks about Putin's Russia. By all the criteria of success he seems to use Russia is doing pretty well. But it's doing so by laughing in the face of the US and going back to greater state control. It's looking after its own interests, thank you very much. And of course it's tightened a lot of the civic freedoms that were relaxed after 1990.

Does that make the new Russia "communist" again?

It certainly looks like "our" (ie the West's) enemy again.

But of course the real question behind all this is what is "communism"?

Ask your dad what he thinks capitalism is, and when it started.

Ask him if he thinks capitalism in the US after independence was such a great success.

If he does, ask him if he really thinks the slavery of its first 90 years were such a great thing...

The thing is, new social systems grow, and even though they can be fundamentally stronger than previous ones (capitalism was fundamentally stronger than feudalism) their early years can be very ugly indeed.

Especially if they are surrounded by very hostile and powerful representatives of the old system doing their damndest to exterminate them, which was the case in the USSR.

And one last thing, if capitalism is so good and free and successful and progressive, how come it didn't just cheerlead the whole world to celebrate a capitalist white christmas after world war 2?

The poor people of China threw it out and laughed. Same thing in Cuba and Vietnam.

And all those millions of East Europeans just let themselves be corralled into slavery???

Stalin wanted to hand Yugoslavia to the West on a plate (like John the Baptist's head), but the Yugoslav's didn't want to be a head on someone else's plate and made their own revolution.

He did manage to hand Greece to the West, but not until the Greek people had fought and lost a revolution of their own.

Ask him to look at the world today. And ask him how attractive the rest of the world finds the US. Ask him how often he sees poor people in some war-torn part of the world running on the streets waving We Love America placards. Ask him why US soldiers don't dare walk around in jeans smoking Marlboros chatting and smiling to the locals.

Ask him what kind of success and progress a bunch of armoured SWAT goons smashing through a poor family's wall represents to the ordinary people of the world. US life on TV soaps is one thing. Murderous thugs in your back yard, pissing on your relatives' dead bodies and burning your sacred books, is another.

US forces don't even walk around smiling in places like Iceland any more.

Maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby looked like success and progress once. And John Wayne. But they're dead and no one wants them back. Their success has turned out to be a huge historic failure. US history is on fast rewind. Right now we're back in the Great Depression.

Have a great day, Naz! I

I'm taking the dog out for a walk now...

 ---

Judging China using western economic criteria

China is different - as I argue below in a FaceBook discussion

China's epic hangover begins - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk

China's credit bubble has finally popped. The property market is swinging wildly from boom to bust, the cautionary exhibit of a BRIC's dream that is at last coming down to earth with a thud.

December 15, 2011 at 10:53am

Choppa Morph China can't be judged using western economic criteria. In the first place western economic theory is bollocks - they can't understand their own economy (nation-based imperialism and world capitalism) for starters - just look at the mess in the US and Europe that they are helpless before and can't give any coherent explanation for. In the second place - and I assert this with tremendous confidence - China is not fundamentally capitalist. It's still a deformed workers state. The Stalinist USSR degenerated monstrously in the political field, less in the economic. China is monstrously deformed economically, less in the political field (Trotsky made direct comparisons with fascism, and was right - this can't be done with China, however much we detest its repression.
So it's a proto-socialist state that is mismanaging this appallingly - cos it doesn't understand or want to understand Marx's economic theory. But as such it isn't subject to capitalist laws of investment or credit. Above all it doesn't need to subject itself to western-style demands for short and medium term returns on infrastructural/large-scale productive investment. The USSR outperformed all the imperialists in terms of pave of development throughout the 30s. (Good stuff on this in The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky, of course.)
Mistakes will be made and losses and lurches - how not?! - but they will have nothing   the effect such things have in the imperialist world.
If China fucks up it will be because of political action by the top bureaucracy changing horses and selling out to imperialism - as in the USSR. I don't think the conditions for this are present now, for lots of reasons. The most obvious one at the moment is that imperialism is an visibly stinking and bubbling economic cesspool and who would voluntarily jump into that? The top bureaucrats can do very well thank you expanding their present positions as is.

December 15, 2011 at 10:53am ·   ·  1

Kriya Zur I don't think real estate and "property market" constitutes fixed capital investments... That is allowed greater flexibility in China than fixed Capital investments . Additionally, since land below the structure is all nationalized in China the real estate market appears very different than what it does in India which also means that the property market "swindling" in China would have much lesser effect

December 15, 2011 at 11:58am · 

R H S ‎> since land below the structure is all nationalized in China...
Just   in Australia....

December 15, 2011 at 12:06pm · 

Kriya Zur Eminent domain ?

December 15, 2011 at 12:07pm · 

Kriya Zur ‎@Robert : What acc. to you would be non-capitalist ownership of land then ?

December 15, 2011 at 12:24pm · 

R H S Not sure if state ownership is necessarily non-capitalist. In Australia you only can rent land, not buy. This gives income to the state and a certain 'grip' on real estate, but the overall effect does not seem to be very different from owning land and pay taxes over it perceived value.

December 15, 2011 at 12:45pm · 

Kriya Zur That still doesn't answer my question. Presuming that government ownership of land is merely another form of capitalism where private property technically doesn't exist, what then IS non-capitalist property ? Also there's a contradiction and vagueness in your comment you say that the government has a "grip" over real estate but then say that "the overall effects don't seem to be very different from owning land and pay taxes over it perceived value" . The contradiction is that there is no ownership of land by private persons and all land is owned by the government so how is the tenant able to SELL the land which he does not own ?

December 15, 2011 at 12:57pm · 

R H S The very word property is a capitalist concept, so I'm at a loss what you're looking for.
When the stae owns all land, the possesor of a certain piece of land does not sell, it, but just passes the lease contract to somebody else. He can charge whatever he  s, providing he finds a candidate. I assume however that 'the state' (/municipality/whatever) has a veto. Not very different from the western concept where the state may veto or regulate the *use* of any land, whoever the owner.

December 15, 2011 at 1:04pm · 

O C China is not so strong than we believe. Not all people live well. There is a big difference between towns and country. The last people live   Mao´s times.

December 15, 2011 at 3:11pm · 

Adhiraj Bose ‎@Robert : There cannot not be a Socialist property that is an impossibility. Every social form be it Capitalist or Socialist is based on how property is used and organized. In fact the very difference between systems in how property is organized between one and the other. Capitalism differs from Feudalism in that it can be freely transferred and owned by private persons excersizing their free will based on their wealth rather than their birth as it was with feudal nobility. Under Socialism the private aspect of ownership logically would stand abolished in favor of Social ownership. In transition this necessarily means the state having complete ownership of property. More important than that of course ... is who controls the state i.e. which class controls the state.

December 15, 2011 at 5:09pm · 

R H S Evidently we live a world apart, both geographically and historically. When we had a feudal system, in what we call the Middle Ages, a big and wealthy middle class existed and they transferred property between them all the time.
"Social ownership" as in 'Everything belongs to all of us and nobody is responsable'? I wish you a great future.
The question 'Which class controls the state' reveals where you're coming from; in a functional democracy there are no classes and the state is controilled by whover won the last elections.
BTW My son H S lived in Pune the last half year!

December 15, 2011 at 7:39pm · 

Kriya Zur ‎@Robert : Read up some English history then :-) and see how Common law came into existence. On the point of 'responsibility' have you heard of such things as COOPERATIVES ! :-) *( P.S : Amul cooperative is a $3bn enterprise :) )

December 16, 2011 at 9:35am ·  

Cuba - imperialism, bureaucracy, socialism

An article in Havana Times dealt with some pressing issues, and got a dismissive "workers control of the workplace" response, so I responded to both the article and the comment.

Cuba: Counter-revolution vs. Socialist Utopia

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=58814 

Pedro Campos
HAVANA TIMES, Jan 1 — The genuine counter-revolution doesn’t conceal itself, it protests openly against socialist utopia with arguments like this:

“No. It’s not possible. It can’t be done under the current conditions. We cannot develop large-scale cooperativism, self-management and the consequent democratization of society. The objective and subjective conditions don’t exist.

“We have to first develop capitalism, letting domestic and foreign capital develop the country. They will return to modernize the sugar industry and all other industries, ports and communications for us, though we need a strong and organized working class. Furthermore, imperialism is right here; it could easily appropriate self-managed cooperatives and enterprises and take advantage of democratization to get rid of the historic leaders and put the old oligarchy back in power.”
Those who express such notions — and reveal their leanings toward the new Chinese imperialism — cannot even fool elementary school children. In any case, imperialism, which is one sole entity, can paint itself blue, yellow or red and it would be very easy to appropriate the assets of the government.

These assets belong to “all” in words, but which in truth, the only ones who feel like they are owners are the members of the bureaucratic class, who are increasingly isolated from the people.

If properties belong to the people — to individuals or collectives, to work groups or community groups, to freely associated workers or the self-employed — then all of this would indeed be very difficult for imperialism.

It would not be the same to confront and expropriate a bureaucratic state, ready and willing to share economic power with foreign capital, as it would be to take on people who own the means of production and control their destiny.

The supporters of statism spout a line that sounds orthodoxly Marxist (“the great development of the productive forces of capitalism and the wealth it generates is what will bring on socialism”).

Yet they have destroyed the country’s economy, squandered its resources and compelled its youth, professionals and technicians trained by the Cultural Revolution to choose between leaving the country or selling churros [strips of fried dough] and ice cream cones.

They have in fact become the main brake on the development of new forms of socialist production.

The enemies of de-statization are opposed to the turning over the management and control of the profits of state-run enterprises to workers’ councils. The statists are the ones who are blocking the establishment of an extensive cooperative law for industry and services, while at the same time they prioritize wage exploitation by private wealth.

They are preventing the elimination of the multitude of absurd state monopoly regulations on the market, rejecting the urgently needed unification of the currency and impeding other changes.

In short, they are the ones who are retarding the development and strengthening of the Cuban revolutionary process. They are obstructing the socialization and democratization of economic and political power.

Whether they achieve their objectives or not, only time will tell. What is clear is that many young people, workers, professionals, technicians, homemakers and retirees who have spent their lives for this lamentable system of “state socialism” are unwilling to continue putting up with the deceit.

They’re demanding radical changes to the state-centric economic and social policies of the party/government.

These same people from below — on their own and without waiting for the readiness or approval of the established bureau-bourgeoisie — are carrying out various life-important economic, social, cultural and political initiatives outside of state institutions.

It is within those institutions where many are grabbing on, attempting to control everything possible in society while accusing their opponents complicity with the imperialist enemy.

Any initiatives from outside bureaucratic control are met with the slogan, “Either you are with us, or you are with the imperialist enemy.” For them, then, there are no more options.

One has to ask themself: Who have been the true accomplices of the imperialist enemy?

Have they been those who have shown through their policies that “socialism” — which has never existed — has been a social, economic and political disaster. Are they those who have succeeded in making most people not even want to hear the word “socialism”? Those who have made Latin Americans reject socialism as an approach to people bettering their lives and living more freely?

Are the true accomplices of the imperialist enemy those of us who want socializing and democratizing changes now, with less state and bureaucratic control over the economy and politics?

Alternatively, are they the supporters of counter-revolutionary immobilism, who are counting on foreign investment and private capitalism to save their state-centered bureaucratic wage-labor model of the neo-Stalinist cut, to later “try” to reintroduce the cycle of bourgeoisie expropriation by the “working class”?

Are the accomplices of the enemy the ones who have never set out to change production relations of capitalism?

Are they the ones who wish to deepen the revolution and change everything that resists it or are they those who in the name of change don’t want to change anything, so that everything remains the same, especially the same bureaucracy that has held political power for a half a century and has led the country to the current disaster?

Are they the ones who turn to various forms of violence and repression to combat those who peacefully advocate different ideas?

Likewise, the following will also have to be answered: Can the majority of those old, reactionary, conservative, stiff and accustomed brains, with their old, authoritarian, bureaucratic-centralism-educated ways of command and control change their mindsets, as is demanded by those at the heights of power when self-recognizing the incapacity of the centralized system?

Wouldn’t it be better to set aside those stuck in neo-Stalinism thought and instead empower the people, the younger generations, to democratically develop new forms of social, economic and political organization and new leaders demanded by the changing situation, instead of seeking a “cadre policy” aimed at ensuring the perpetuation of “everything that must be changed”?

I hope the party conference this January will help in finding answers to these questions, whether by action or omission.

2 RESPONSES TO “CUBA: COUNTER-REVOLUTION VS. SOCIALIST UTOPIA”

1. Grady Ross Daugherty says:

   January 3, 2012 at 2:32 am

   Like all Marxists, comrade Pedro apparently believes that only state property is socialist, and that socialist property can only be that owned by the state. The fact that he calls for democratic running of state-owned enterprise by the workers does not alter the fact that he is, in a programmatic sense, a state monopoly socialist.

   The old Utopians made the programmatic error of abolishing private productive property rights immediately. Those entering their exemplary communes put everything into the communal pot, and this was going to show the world how communism could be exampled and built right now, without a multi-generation bridge to is elimination.

   The Marxists speak of socialism as a bridge to a society without private property, then force the abolition of private property onto society at the beginning of the bridge journey. It has never worked.

   Marxism makes the same programmatic error as the Utopians, by making everything productive common, state property, as did Cuba by 1968. Pedro Campos still cannot understand that workers can only achieve democratic self-management of the workplace by owning it directly. He clings to the fantasy that someday, somehow the workers could and would achieve workplace democracy under state monopoly ownership socialism.

   Reply
   • 
     

     
     

     THIS IS MY RESPONSE:

     
     

     January 4, 2012 at 4:57 am

     Grady thinks that direct workers ownership of the workplace will bring socialism. If that ownership is capitalist – which it will be if the state hasn’t expropriated the capitalist bourgeoisie – then the workers will start off exploiting themselves and before long transform themselves into capitalists using the labour of workers imported from outside the workplace. This is anarchist, autonomist utopianism.

     
     But for a state to expropriate capitalism, it can’t be a bourgeois state – the bourgeoisie won’t expropriate itself. Individual bourgeois rivals – of course! But not the whole class. And to create a non-bourgeois non-capitalist state you need an anti-capitalist revolution that tears the means of production (land, factories, finance) out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, and takes them into its own hands defending them against the raging bourgeoisie/imperialism by force of arms.

     
     The problem of a non-capitalist state run by a reactionary privileged bureaucracy is one facing every workers (plus peasants) revolution. Revolutions can degenerate, and the harsher the pressure from imperialism, and the less well-developed the material preconditions for modern production, the easier this degeneration is. This was seen in the USSR in the 1920s in the losing battle fought by the revolutionary Left Opposition against the degenerating Stalin-led wing of the Communist Party. The defeat of the revolutionaries led to the political degeneration of the USSR and ultimately to its capitulation to imperialism in 1991. And made the successful anti-capitalist revolutions in Yugoslavia, Vietnam and China deformed from the start, since they took the degenerated Soviet Union as their model. No workers democracy – in fact, anything but workers democracy!

     
     Before the threat of imperialist restoration in China (the biggest threat) or Cuba (most important for Latin America and the Americas including the US) can be properly tackled, all this historical experience needs to be examined, understood and assimilated. Which means spreading and discussing in depth the issues and arguments in the 1920s when the revolutionary fire was still bright in the Soviet Union. Which means discussing the Left Opposition and most significantly the arguments and positions of its leader, Leon Trotsky, whose role in the October Revolution together with Lenin can be compared to the teamwork of Fidel and Che in Cuba, with the difference that Lenin and Trotsky were incomparably better versed in Marxism and more deeply rooted in working class revolutionary activity.

     
     Pedro passes over this completely. And this makes his well-meaning words a bit like foam on the waves. History and the workers revolutionary movement are the ocean and the Gulf Stream, speeches detached from these are liable to be flung in the air by a rock and swept away by the wind.