During the Leninist-Stalinist period (1917-1953), especially after the construction of the economic foundation of the socialist-communist society, the state property constituted of the two forms of socialist-communist property (state and collective/cooperative). It was the dominant and the most advanced form of property in the socialist economy of the Soviet Union to the level of which the collective/cooperative property was developing so that they will be finally merged in the unified communist property through the tractor stations. The latter were abolished by the bourgeois-socialdemocratic CPSU in 1958 and as a consequence not only the merging of these two forms of property was cancelled but their content was radically altered.

The state enterprises of the Krushchevian period were fully autonomous commodity producers that worked on the basis of complete economic self-sufficiency (= “Chosrastschot” = “Wirtschaftliche Rechnungsfuehrung”) guided by private-financial criteria (Profit-Efficiency) and had profit as their exclusive purpose. More accurately, the purpose of the state enterprises was the maximization of profit, like in the traditional capitalism of the western countries, and not, any more, the satisfaction of society’s ever increasing needs. The profit maximization, pursued through the price increases, was admitted by the soviet revisionists themselves: “there are enterprises the directors of which do not see only the reduction of expenses as the source of profit but also the illegal determination of prices. The directors of enterprises who set higher prices in their own orders, place their own private-business interests above those of the whole society and, in this way, they cause damage to the state” (“Soviet Science”, 8/1969).

So, after the launch of the capitalist reforms, the large enterprises of various branches in the economy of the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries that could increase their profit not through the increase of production and the decrease of expenses but through the increase of prices “in the example of the capitalist monopolies” (O. Lange) ended up to that point correctly predicted, already from 1957, by the world famous Polish revisionist economist Oscar Lange: “in the case of the larger enterprises, it is feared that they will come to an agreement among themselves and set high prices. If this happens then the enterprise will lose its socialist character and we will have a syndicated monopoly. Every enterprise, or group of enterprises, in an agreement among themselves, would be de facto owners of the means of production and not managers of the total social product and would pursue to extract the maximum profits through the determination of prices favorable to them. In this case, production would not serve the best possible fulfillment of the whole society and the driving force of production would be the pursue of profit by these individual enterprises, of their staff or the united enterprises and this would have nothing in common with socialism” (O. Lange)

Following the prevalence of the Khrushchevian revisionist counter-revolution the overthrow of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and its replacement with the “all people’s state” in the Soviet Union, the working class and the peasants lost the power, while at the same time the character of the cooperatives changed: from a socialist form of property, cooperative property became a capitalist one, the cooperatives were converted to a capitalist form of economy and operated, too, as individual autonomous commodity producers, as the state enterprises, on the basis of complete economic self-sufficiency and guided by the private-financial criteria of Profit-Efficiency.

Besides the presence of state and cooperative capitalist property in the economy of the Soviet Union, the capitalist reforms paved the path to the development of a private capitalist sector in agriculture, small industry, services, in different professions etc. Next to the state-cooperative sector, the emerging private sector became an important part of the economy thanks to the financial support from the state (laws, credits, etc.). The development of the private sector was such that the small capitalist property was formally recognized in various articles of the new Brezhnev constitution (1977). This capitalist property took much larger dimensions since: “small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XXV, pp.173 and 189).

The private capitalist sector under the form of “auxiliary household of the collective farmers” and “workers and employees” – terms that the Krushchevian-Brezhnevites used to conceal the private capitalist businesses in agriculture, in small industry and elsewhere – was under constant expansion and development, achieving an increasingly bigger contribution in the production of agricultural goods: “according to 1970 data, 38% of all vegetables, 35% of meat and 53% of eggs were produced in the auxiliary households of the Soviet Union” (Political Economy, v. 5, p. 310, Athens 1980). According to “Liternaturnaja Gazeta” (11/5/1977), the private capitalist sector includes 3.6 million hectares of arable land which produce 31% of dairy products, 59% of potatoes etc. Towards the middle 1970’s, the arable land increased to 7.5 million hectares yielding the 64% of potatoes, 42% of meat, 40% of milk, 65% of eggs, 20% of woolen of the total production. What must be noted is the constant increase of the volume of production coming from the private capitalist sector at the expense of the production coming from the cooperatives.

At the end of 1970’s, the salaries and the premiums that the business and other executives received were 15-20 times higher than the workers’ salaries. The situation was the same in the collective farms where the difference in salaries was as high as 1 to 30. According to the revisionist press, the largest part of the premiums, and in particular 82%, went to the pockets of the firms’ directors whereas the remaining 18% went to the workers despite the fact that they constituted the overwhelming majority, 80-90% of the working people in the firms (Tirana radio station, 4/2/1978); and this gap was constantly growing at the expense of the workers.

In the capitalist economy of the Soviet Union, the private capitalist sector wasn’t limited to agriculture with the emergence of the new kulaks but expanded in services, commerce, workshops and even industry. As mentioned above, private capitalist property was officially instituted in the bourgeois Constitution of 1977.
In 1978, “in the Soviet Union, the private holders own about 3.6 million hectares of arable land. They supply the market with the 28% of the total agricultural production and with 32% of animal products. The private sector in the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries has significantly expanded in the sphere of industry where it has infiltrated services as well as the production of industrial commodities complementing to a large extent the activity of the state-capitalist enterprises.

Thus, it is not about only small private artisans engaged in small-scale services and repair works that have little profit but a whole network of capitalists whose activities compete with the state-capitalist enterprises. The private capitalists have the gained the right to establish their own workshops, factories that are protected by the state. They are supplied with the necessary resources and the owners can today hire waged workers, that is to say, exploit cheap working Power. The emergence and the development of the private capitalist sector in the capitalist Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries is a reflection of the capitalist degeneration of their economy in which the laws of the capitalist mode of production hold full sway.

This sector enjoys the many-sided support – legal as well as material – of the revisionist state and it has become, next to the state-capitalist sector, dominant sector of the economic life” (Tirana Radio Station, 5/4/1978). In 1977, the private capitalist sector supplied the market with the “18% of total number of sheep, 18% of pigs and 32% of beef. The private capitalists sold 31% of the meat and milk in prices that were favourable to them. Moreover, they supply the market with the 34% of vegetables, 30% of eggs, 58% of potatoes and other foodstuff in increased prices” (Tirana Radio Station, 2/8/1977). “In the Soviet Union the private producer controls 65% of vegetable trade, about 40% of meat and milk trade and up to 80% of the fruit trade” (Tirana Radio Station, 7/4/1976).

There’s probably a difference between control and supply but I noticed that it says private capitalists controlled 65% of vegetable trade in 1976 vs supplied 34% in 1977. I don’t know what to make of that.

The exploitation of the proletariat through the extraction of surplus value, primarily, in the sphere of production and, secondarily, in the sphere of distribution and through the income redistribution at the level taxes and inflation, is secured, besides the capitalist production relations, by the bourgeois “all people’s” state: “the exploitation and the oppression of workers in the Soviet Union is organized and managed by the state. This is expressed, most and foremost, in the rights of enterprise and kolkhoz directors, in the management and selling of means of production as well as in the corresponding jobs. According to soviet revisionist press acknowledgments, in 5 large cities of the Soviet Union and in two industrial centers of the Republic of Lithuania, there are agencies that sell and buy job vacancies. The revisionist directors decide themselves about the amount of salaries and premiums, the hirings and firings or measures against the workers etc. In Kharkov, an enterprise manager launched 233 discipline measures against 125 workers and imposed money sentences to 350 workers. In 292 soviet enterprises, 70,000 workers were fired because they could not withstand the oppression” (“Tirana Radio Station”, 13/1/1976).
During the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period, the differences between the workers-farmers salaries and those of the new bourgeoisie members were huge: “the capitalist exploitation and oppression of the working class and the wider masses by the new soviet bourgeoisie that is in power is expressed in the income distribution that shows a sharp contrast between working people and the capitalist enterprise directors. While the average wage for a worker reaches 70 rubles and for a farmer reaches 35 rubles, the wage of an enterprise director is about 15 times larges without taking into account other kinds of income they receive in the form of bonuses, privileges and other extras. The director of an enterprise that makes electric lamps in Moscow receives 1,000 rubles as a month salary whereas the wage of a worker is between 60 and 80 rubles… The enterprise directors have the right to determine, according to their wishes, the workers’ wages. Using various pretexts, they push wages downwards or they do not give workers any bonus at all.

According to statistics, the 82% of the money sums given to the first 704 enterprises that adopted the new “Schtekino system” of labor rate increase, that is, they introduced the cruel oppression of workers, was shared by the directors, engineers and the technicians and only 12% of these sums was utilized as a “material motive” for the workers. It is, thus, self-evident that the high salaries and the large bonuses of the directors of the soviet capitalist enterprises come from the surplus value created by the workers” (“Tirana Radio Station”, 13/1/1976). “Depending on the position they occupy in the bureaucratic soviet revisionist state and party system, the party cadres, the higher clerks, the technocrats, the enterprise directors and others are getting 10-fold to 25-fold of the average worker’s wage. This is also true for the kolkhozes where the wage differences are about 1:30” (“Tirana Radio Station”, 4/2/1976).

In the 1980’s, the prolonged stagnation of the economy, the obsolete equipment of the capitalist enterprises, the large growth of the black market, the false “fulfillment” of the production plans in industry and agriculture, the systematic legal and illegal appropriation, theft, of the state property, the severe financial bleeding caused by the imperialist war in Afghanistan, etc. deepened the all-sided crisis that the capitalist-imperialist Soviet Union was going through and led its capitalist economy to total collapse and bankruptcy.

This author tends to consider any Soviet arms trading or intervention post-Stalin to be imperialist which I generally disagree with but that’s another discussion.

From the mid-1950s, among the bourgeois defenders of capitalism began to emerge various views suggesting a "new phase", a "new stage", in the development of the society. These views gave rise subsequently to the theories of the so-called "industrial society", or the theory of "convergence" of the two economic-social systems (capitalism-socialism).

At this point in the article they dive deep into investigation of where this “convergence” theory came from and how it ended up shaping the Soviet Union going forward. Some people might find it interesting but I’m only going to quote a small portion of it.

The reactionary anti-communist theory of “convergence” presents three basic claims: a) a general claim according to which the two social-economic systems, “capitalism” and “socialism-communism” will “converge” in the future to form an alleged “unified” industrial system, b) one specific claim according to which Soviet Union’s “socialism” in the 1950’s and 1960’s borrows certain “elements” from capitalism (“profit”, “interest”, “capitalist price of production” etc.) while the capitalism of the western countries borrows from “socialism” “elements” like “planning” leading to the convergence of the two systems towards each other that will result in the formation of a “joint” “capitalist-socialist” system(!) c) a second specific claim according to which this “unified-” economic system will constitute the future “ideal economic formation”(!).

The theory of “developed socialism” dominated later the new bourgeois constitution (i.e. the constitution of the restored capitalism) of the Brezhnevite period while the euphemistically called “advanced socialist society” found its full expression in this – a constitution which, for the first time, officially legalized and confirmed not only the state-capitalist (articles 10-11) and collective-capitalist ownership (article 12) but also the individual capitalist ownership (articles 13-17) in the Soviet Union’s society of that time. It also legalized the capitalist competition between the autonomous enterprises, the “socialist commodity producers”, and the capitalist profit (article 16). In this constitution, the content of the “advanced socialist society”, that is, of the Soviet Union’s restored capitalism is generally described.

The Khrushchevian concept of the “state of all people” bears no relation to Marxism. It is alien to Marxism because according to the Marxist theory there is no state standing above classes, that is to say, “state of all classes” of a society; this is a bourgeois view. On the contrary, the state has always a class character: either it is the state of the bourgeoisie or it is the state of the proletariat. In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism-communism, there can be either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This is why the famous English Marxist George Thomson, in 1971, very rightly emphasized that the “state of all people” declared by the treacherous Khrushchevian clique was in reality “a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, or to be more exact, a dictatorship of the new soviet bourgeoisie.

I think there’s a little too much emphasis on phrases like the "state of all people" instead of examination of how the party and elections were actually setup. The latter would give a better idea of class relations.




Moving on to the other viewpoint:

Why doesn’t the Soviet Union exist any more?
by Invent the Future (Part 1,2,3,4,5,6,7)

By the 1970s, resource extraction was getting harder and more expensive. Existing oil fields became less productive, and new ones had to be found. Hanson writes: “The depletion of oil, gas, coal and mineral resources in the European part of the USSR was forcing new natural-resource extraction to move east of the Urals – mainly to West Siberia. Extraction costs per unit of output were not necessarily higher in these new locations (though in some of them, in the far north, they were). However, these new regional developments required investment in transport, communications, housing and other infrastructure and the transport westwards of most of the energy and materials extracted, since the great bulk of manufacturing and urban settlement remained west of the Urals.”

On top of this, the supply infrastructure was starting to suffer from inadequate investment. Kotz and Weir point out that “by the mid-1970s the Soviet rail system had reached the limit set by its rail miles, and congestion began to slow deliveries. The failure to make timely investments in expanded rail miles and new sidings had created a serious bottleneck for the Soviet economy.”

Another important factor here is the tragic human loss from the war; horrific in its own right, it also had a knock-on effect on the postwar economy. Sam Marcy writes that “instead of having millions of excess worker-veterans returning, a whole layer of society, 20 million workers and peasants, had been torn away. A mighty economic force had thus been wiped out. These included men and women, both skilled and unskilled. Those who were killed were generally younger, which left an older population to tend to industry and agriculture. The USSR was deprived of a tremendous source of labour power, most particularly among the young on whom future generations generally rely. This set the USSR far behind the US, which had suffered no destruction at home and had lost 400,000 troops, or about one-fiftieth of the Soviet war dead. As soon as the war ended, the US was able to begin the production of consumer goods. These had been scarce during the war, but not nearly as scarce as in the USSR, which suffered the full-scale invasion of the Nazi armies.” (Perestroika: A Marxist Critique, 1987)

Jonathan Aurthur explains in his 1977 book Socialism in the Soviet Union:

The reliance on extensive (more of the same labour and means of production) rather than intensive (new technology) was another reflection of the historical conditions in which socialism was being built. Capital was very limited, help from the advanced capitalist countries was even more limited, and within the country there was a very small supply of skilled labour to build and operate sophisticated machinery, even if the capital to build or import it had been available. At the beginning of the period of real industrialisation (1927) the industrial proletariat was very small and its skilled sector even smaller. Eleven million peasants with virtually no technical or any other kind of training became industrial workers during the period of the First Five Year Plan. Under these conditions heavy industry could be built only by relying on large expenditures of human labour in the construction of big, basic, non-specialised factories set up to produce tractors one day and tanks the next day or the day after…

Further, capital expenditure on heavy industry had to be rigidly centralised in order to conserve as much as possible. Priorities within the capital goods sector had to be made. Thus less was spent on transportation than on the construction of factories. This is why even today the Soviet Union is very poor in paved roads and trucks. There was never enough capital to build what was necessary for the expanding economy. To get around the transportation “bottleneck” Stalin built universal production centres, huge industrial complexes in which different kinds of production were centralised in one place near sources of minerals or other necessary raw materials. Factories were not created as specialised units producing a particular product; rather they were made to build many different products. A given factory might produce heavy, large-scale machinery, as well as high quality steel, sewing machines, agricultural equipment, precision tools, elevators, and bicycles.

It is a law of technology that the more types of jobs a tool can do, the less specialised and productive it will be. Stalin’s universal production centres were the best solution to the needs of industrialisation under the existing conditions. But they could not and did not lead to the development of a highly technical, capital intensive industry.

Compared to the late 1920s, the Soviet economy of the 1950s was infinitely more complex and therefore more difficult to tightly plan… Michael Parenti outlines the issues in his excellent book Blackshirts and Reds (City Lights Publishers, 2001):

Central planning was useful and even necessary in the earlier period of siege socialism to produce steel, wheat and tanks in order to build an industrial base and withstand the Nazi onslaught. But it eventually hindered technological development and growth, and proved incapable of supplying a wide-enough range of consumer goods and services. No computerised system could be devised to accurately model a vast and intricate economy.

No system could gather and process the immense range of detailed information needed to make correct decisions about millions of production tasks. Top-down planning stifled initiative throughout the system. Stagnation was evident in the failure of the Soviet industrial establishment to apply the innovations of the scientific-technological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, including the use of computer technology. Though the Soviets produced many of the world’s best mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists, little of their work found actual application.

One important problem highlighted by Parenti is that, with the prevailing system of planning based on ambitious numeric quotas, enterprise managers had very little incentive to introduce new technologies. “They maintained their positions regardless of whether innovative technology was developed, as was true of their superiors and central planners.” Furthermore, the plan tended to encourage a mindset of quantity over quality: “Under pressure to get quantitative results, managers often cut corners on quality… For instance, since state buyers of meat paid attention to quantity rather than quality, collective farmers maximised profits by producing fattier animals. Consumers might not care to eat fatty meat but that was their problem. Only a foolish or saintly farmer would work harder to produce better quality meat for the privilege of getting paid less.”

The Soviet Union never had a problem with unemployment; on the contrary it suffered from overemployment – there were more jobs to do than there were people to do them. Consequently it rarely made sense for managers to sack people (and furthermore it was legally very difficult to do so). But if people know they are very unlikely to be sacked, it makes it easy for them to game the system if they are inclined to do so. Parenti writes: “If fired, an individual had a constitutional guarantee to another job and seldom had any difficulty finding one. The labour market was a seller’s market. Workers did not fear losing their jobs but managers feared losing their best workers and sometimes overpaid them to prevent them from leaving.” (ibid)

How does a socialist/communist society prevent these practices from occurring? Is strong ideology enough or will there always need to be some kind of incentive to work hard?

In many key areas of science and technology, the USSR was able to catch up with the west, even becoming a global leader in some fields. However, by the mid-1970s the gap had stopped narrowing and then widened steadily until the collapse of the USSR. Computer technology was the most notable contributor to this yawning productivity gap. Computers and robotics were starting to penetrate all areas of the western capitalist economy, especially in the US. This led to significant gains in productivity; it dramatically increased the spread of information; and it fed into new developments in maths and other branches of knowledge. The Soviet Union, however, “largely failed to absorb the revolution in communication and information-processing brought by electronics and computers” (Kotz and Weir). By the time of the Soviet collapse, use of computing in industry and military technology is reckoned to have been around 20 years behind the US.

The author mentions that china was able to close this technology gap through reforms. Throughout the article there are positive references to the post-Mao reforms which leaves me with the impression that the author considers Deng revisionism to be reasonable.

One relatively humdrum problem faced by Soviet citizens is that non-essential consumer goods and services were often either difficult to find or not terribly good quality (or both). “Many Soviet products, particularly consumer goods, were of low quality. Shoppers often faced long lines for ordinary goods in the notoriously inefficient system of retail distribution. Consumer services, from haircuts to appliance repair, were abysmal, if they were available at all.” (Kotz and Weir)

This issue was partly related to an egalitarianism that aimed to produce low-cost goods in large numbers in order to make them widely accessible. As such, everybody had food, clothes and housing, to go with the substantial social wage – education, healthcare, recreational facilities, libraries, and so on. Contrast this to western capitalism, where rich people can enjoy unbelievable luxury while poor people struggle to feed their families.

However, the problem was also partly a function of the way the Soviet economy worked. Central planners could mandate the production of a million hair-dryers, but in the absence of competition and with a guaranteed market, there was little incentive for an enterprise to produce good hair-dryers. Hanson writes: “Producers were concerned above all to meet targets set by planners. They had no particular reason to concern themselves with the wishes of the users of their products, nor with the activities of competitors. Indeed the concept of competition was absent: other producers in the same line of activity were simply not competitors but fellow-executors of the state plan.”

I think too much emphasis is placed on competition here and not enough on the lack of consumer feedback.

Many Soviet citizens felt envious of the consumer goods apparently enjoyed by people in the west, perhaps not always thinking about how the idealised picture painted by the movies had its counterpart in horrific poverty and in the ruthless domination of the neocolonies by monopoly capital. The higher echelons of Soviet society – doctors, scientists, academics, bureaucrats – recognised that their counterparts in the west enjoyed a higher standard of living, and many started to feel that socialism was an obstacle to further wealth.

In the grand scheme of things these should be fairly trivial concerns, but if a large section of the intelligentsia stops believing in the basic philosophical and economic underpinnings of society, this constitutes a quite serious problem for ‘actually existing socialism’ – a system which is always fragile in a historical epoch in which capitalism still dominates. Ideally, after half a century of socialist government, people would have developed a communist morality that wasn’t much concerned with material wealth; but the experience of all socialist countries to date shows that breaking the cultural and ideological prejudices of thousands of years of class society is not something that can be achieved in the matter of a few years.

Poor quality of goods and services, along with shortages of key consumer goods and the repressed inflationary pressure of high wages, low prices and insufficient supply, all served to create a vibrant unofficial ‘second economy’, outside the central economic plan and largely illegal. In a context where there is too much money chasing too few products, speculation and black market activity become almost inevitable.

Because activity in the second economy was better rewarded than normal work, it served to undermine the rest of the economy. Parenti gives the following example: “The poorer the restaurant service, the fewer the number of clients and the more food left over to take home for oneself or sell on the black market. The last thing restaurant personnel wanted was satisfied customers who would return to dine at the officially fixed low prices.”

Keeran and Kenny argue that the second economy reached a level where it created ”a layer of people who depended upon private activity for all or a substantial portion of their income” and that such people ”could rightly be considered a nascent class of petty bourgeoisie”. With the formation of an economic class comes the demand for political representation. Zyuganov writes that “the shadow economy was running out of space for expanded reproduction; consequently, its bosses raised the question of how to weaken political restraints by influencing the state and Party apparatus, including the CPSU Central Committee, from the inside. It was under such pressures that perestroika came into existence.” (op cit)
The growing second economy served to further reduce the effectiveness of the primary economy, contributing to shortages of goods and labour. All of this contributed to the undermining of Soviet socialism.

In 1965, a fairly wide-ranging reform was introduced, designed principally by the economist Evsei Liberman and sponsored politically by Alexei Kosygin. The reform argued that the central planning system was becoming less effective and more expensive as economic relations became more complex. It sought to increase productivity, dynamism and growth. Enterprises were given greater autonomy over use of resources, and a concept of profitability was introduced. The wage levelling of the Khrushchev era was partially reversed, in an attempt to incentivise professional training. The reform included attempts to increase the use of computerisation in planning, and to encourage technical innovation.

Controversially, the reform included some market measures, for example “letting enterprise managers keep more of the return on their sales to the state and investing it in improving their machinery” and allowing managers to “spend more of this additional capital on material incentives for the production workers, to encourage them to cut waste, find hidden reserves of productivity in the existing machinery, and so forth.” (Aurthur, op cit)

The reform had some limited success, and growth in the second half of the 1960s (the first few years of the Brezhnev period) was higher than it had been in the first half (the last few years of the Khrushchev period). However, the positive effects didn’t last more than a few years, and it became clear that the Kosygin reforms had not solved any long-term problems. A similar reform in the late 1970s had similarly uninspiring results.

It’s reasonable to assume that Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin was motivated by a desire to introduce progressive political changes consistent with developing socialism in changed circumstances. His methods, however, were disastrous. It should have been possible to make political changes without launching a severe frontal attack on Stalin and all that he represented. After all, Stalin was the most prominent Soviet leader from 1924 until his death in 1953; that is, 29 of the 39 years of the Soviet Union’s existence at the time Khrushchev made his ‘secret speech’. To criticise him so harshly, to tear down a personality cult so suddenly, meant to cast doubt on the entire Soviet experience to that point; it meant to seriously delegitimise the extraordinary achievements of the CPSU and the Soviet people during the Stalin era.

There’s a long section about ideological splits between the CPSU and various socialist governments/movements over time but to sum it up:

Whereas the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s had been the apple in the eye of the global working class movement, by the late 1960s it was viewed in a negative light by many of the progressive elements outside the socialist camp – due to the various issues outlined above, and also to the extraordinary intensity of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyite repression from the late 1940s onwards. When hundreds of thousands came out into the streets of 1968 in Paris and elsewhere, they didn’t carry portraits of Brezhnev.

As it became increasingly clear that US-led western capitalism was not on the verge of collapse; as the CPSU started to lose its undisputed leadership role in the global movement for a better world; and as the Soviet economy started to show signs of old age, nihilism began to creep into the popular mindset. The official line found in the pages of the party’s newspapers and textbooks was that the plan remained on-track – that the Soviet economy was going from strength to strength and that imperialism was wheezing its way to a long-overdue death. This narrative simply didn’t ring true to a lot of people any more. Rather than presenting and attempting to understand/explain the changed global situation, the party increasingly found itself shouting slogans that were out of touch with reality.

Khrushchev had also introduced a cultural ‘thaw’ which saw an increase in the number of foreign books, movies and records, and which allowed an unprecedented level of open criticism of the state by Soviet writers. This was most famously manifested in Khrushchev’s personal approval of the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a much-sensationalised account of life in Soviet prisons, written by the obsessively anti-communist tsarism-nostalgist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

David Shambaugh cites Chinese scholar Hu Yanxin in relation to the failures of CPSU propaganda and leadership in this era:

1. Propaganda was tedious in content, monotonous in form, and disconnected from reality.
2. The authorities concealed the truth by only reporting good news, which lost the people’s trust.
3. The CPSU dealt with intellectual circles by administrative and repressive means.
4. Real information had to come from abroad, but this only made Russians further disbelieve their own media.
5. The CPSU failed to accurately analyse the new changes in the West objectively, thus losing the opportunity to develop in line with the new scientific and technological revolution. (China’s Communist Party – Atrophy and Adaptation, University of California Press, 2008)

At the core of Reagan’s full-court press was a strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union by vastly increasing military expenditure, forcing the USSR to follow suit. Sam Marcy observed that “the Reagan administration went all out and spent more than $2 trillion to overwhelm the USSR. Previous agreements on nuclear treaties, which seemed to have stabilised the situation, were undermined by the Reagan administration.”

The escalation in rhetoric was accompanied by an escalation in economic warfare and geostrategic manoeuvring. Keeran and Kenny point out that the US aimed to “deny high technology to the Soviet Union and reduce European imports of Soviet gas and oil. By 1983, American high-tech exports to the Soviet Union were valued at only $39 million compared to $219 million in 1975. This economic warfare did not stop with denying the Soviets access to high-tech; the US also sabotaged the goods the Soviets did receive.” (Socialism Betrayed – Behind the collapse of the Soviet Union, International Publishers, 2004)

Meanwhile, realising that the Soviets were heavily dependent on oil exports to generate hard currency with which they could pay for the imports they needed from the west (particularly grain and high-tech products), the US organised for its client states in the Persian Gulf to increase oil production, thereby reducing the price of oil on the world market. Added to all this was “an increased propaganda offensive, diplomatic moves to reduce Soviet access to Western technology, the disruption of the Soviet economy by exporting faulty equipment, and an effort to bankrupt the Soviets by initiating a military build-up” (ibid).

The next section jumps into the Afghanistan conflict quite a bit, most of which we can probably skip. I did like this piece though:

The PDPA government introduced laws cancelling all debt for poor peasants (thereby benefiting nearly two-thirds of the population) and initiating land reform. It made a clear commitment to gender equality, setting up public education for girls and abolishing bride-price, arranged marriage and child marriage. Michael Parenti writes that “the Taraki government proceeded to legalise labour unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programmes that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed… The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform programme.”

Of course the US has to ruin everything:

The Red Army didn’t lose any of its major battles in Afghanistan; it won control of hundreds of towns, villages and roads, only to lose them again when its focus moved elsewhere. The US deployed increasingly sophisticated weaponry to the rebel groups at just the right rate so as to prevent the Soviet Union from either winning or withdrawing. Taking over as president in 1981, Reagan majorly stepped up US support for the Mujahedin, and from 1985 the weapons deliveries were increased by a factor of ten (Braithwaite) and came to include the famous FIM-92 Stinger infrared homing surface-to-air missiles.

Beyond the direct economic impact, the Afghanistan war served to further undermine Soviet self-confidence and the popular legitimacy of its government.

To the great majority of Soviets the involvement in Afghanistan had become a byword for an unloved and increasingly superfluous role that their government played in the Third World. To them, withdrawing from Kabul therefore meant the end of a failed intervention. By 1989 the common pride in the Soviet global role that had existed only a few years before was no longer there. It had been replaced not only by a lack of faith in the Soviet system, but also by a conviction that its leaders squandered their resources abroad while people at home lived in poverty… Since a substantial part of the CPSU regime’s overall legitimacy was based on its superpower role abroad, the failure in Afghanistan became a deadly challenge to the key concepts of its foreign policy: Soviet military power and the global advance of socialism. (Westad, op cit)

The next section focuses on Gorbachev, whom this author considers the main turning point for the return of capitalism.

After a decade of economic stagnation, declining popular confidence and escalating military confrontation with the West – and with three CPSU general secretaries in three years having died on the job (Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko) – there was an obvious need to breathe some new life into Soviet politics. Andropov understood this better than most; during the few months of his tenure, he encouraged younger members of the party’s Central Committee to step up and help modernise Soviet socialism. Mikhail Gorbachev, elected by the politburo as General Secretary after the death of Chernenko in March 1985, was part of this ‘new generation’. He was chosen “because he was young, energetic, imaginative, and – they believed – orthodox”.

Although Gorbachev and his team would later claim they had inherited a society in crisis, this wasn’t actually the case. There was no serious public unrest in 1985. In spite of assorted economic problems and a degree of popular dissatisfaction (hardly unusual in any society), there wasn’t any serious trouble, and very few people would have imagined that within a few years Soviet socialism would no longer exist. For the most part, people were more-or-less content with the status quo. The economy was growing, albeit slowly. Everybody had their basic needs met in terms of food, shelter, heating, clothing and healthcare. Education and cultural facilities were world class. The social welfare system was unparalleled outside the socialist world. The streets were safe and people had the opportunity to live interesting, fulfilling, productive lives.

This is obviously in conflict with the previous Anasintaxi article that stated capitalism was restored post-Stalin. Something to discuss for sure.

In the field of economics, the major objective of perestroika was to “modernise and streamline the Soviet economy through the introduction of new management techniques and technology in use elsewhere in the world, particularly in the highly developed imperialist countries.” The vision was, within 15 years, “to create an economic potential approximately equal in scale to that accumulated throughout all the previous years of Soviet government and to almost double national income and industrial output. Productivity of labour is to go up by 130-150 percent… The implementation of the programme will … raise the Soviet people’s standard of living to a qualitatively new level”.

The two major strategic themes put forward in order to reach these goals were: first, the extension of market relations within the overall context of public ownership, in order to boost innovation and productivity; second, an attempt to “democratise planning”, basically by pulling the plug on the entire central planning system. The former theme was not entirely without merit – it has worked rather well in China and Vietnam, for example. Dismantling the planning system, on the other hand, created unmitigated havoc, as a result of which the USSR, in 1990, experienced negative growth for the first time in its history.

“Worked rather well” in this instance can be debated.

The politburo went on to introduce a package of economic reforms that bore some resemblance to the Kosygin-Liberman reforms (discussed in the second article in this series). The centrepiece was a proposal to allow state production enterprises to determine their own output levels, on the basis that the enterprises had more insight into their capacity, resources and circumstances than the central planners did. Gosplan, the central planning agency, was to withdraw from micromanaging enterprises and switch to long-term goal-setting. Kotz and Wier note: “The economic ministries were to end their day-to-day management of production. Republican, regional and local soviets were to be granted a larger role in overseeing the economy of their respective areas. Within enterprises, workers were to be given expanded power over decision-making. These reforms embodied the leadership’s idea of democratising and decentralising the economy, within the framework of public ownership and economic planning”.

The reform was flawed in a number of respects, and had negative repercussions that would undermine the entire economic system. Worse, the leadership didn’t back out of the reform once it was clear that it wasn’t working; it was sudden and risky, imposed by the top level state machinery without suitable mechanisms for feedback and improvement. There was certainly no “crossing the river by feeling the stones”; it was more like taking a big leap into the middle of the river and hoping for the best.

The most immediately visible result of Gorbachev’s reform package was to create shortages of certain goods. Enterprises were now able to determine their own product mix, but there was no corresponding change in the market for those products: prices remained fixed by the state, and therefore most enterprises simply focused on producing those items that had the highest mark-up. Allen Lynch writes: “Most Soviet factories simply stopped making low margin consumer items, and massive shortages of everyday items quickly set in (eg salt, sugar, matches, cooking oil, washing powder, baby clothes, etc). By mid-1989, coal miners in Donbass had no soap to wash with after a long day in the mines, a development that triggered massive strikes and a coalition of workers and intellectuals against the Soviet system and Gorbachev himself.”

With the enterprises thrown into chaos and often struggling to sell their produce in a newly-competitive market, state revenues suffered a sharp reduction. Sitaram Yechury writes that this “led to a situation where the government had to increasingly resort to budgetary deficits. In 1985 the budget deficit was a modest 18 million roubles which rose to nearly 120 billion by 1989 or 14% of the Soviet Union’s GNP”. The fiscal deficit drove austerity: “during Gorbachev’s leadership, import of food grains and consumer items fell by the equivalent of 8.5 billion roubles.”

The next major step in Gorbachev’s economic reform was the 1988 law on cooperatives, which allowed people to set up their own businesses. British economist Philip Hanson describes this as “the most radical of all Gorbachev’s economic measures so far… Members of a cooperative could be few or many, and they could employ non-members. A cooperative was therefore capable of being a capitalist partnership, with the members exploiting, in Marxist terms, the labour of non-members”. Strictly speaking these cooperatives were not allowed to employ other people’s labour, but icn reality this regulation was observed almost exclusively in the breach.

Initially most of the cooperatives were cafés, restaurants, hairdressers and small construction firms – exactly the sort of business that tends to be quite effectively run on a small scale. However, the cooperative movement quickly came to be dominated by “pocket banks used by their founding enterprises to move funds around discreetly and cooperative banks that were able, when foreign-currency and government debt markets developed, to make large profits from playing very thin financial markets”. Many of the fabulously wealthy Russian gangster-capitalists of the 1990s made their start in ‘cooperative’ banks in the late 1980s.

In addition to paving the way for a new finance-capitalist class, the cooperatives also laid the ground for a lucrative non-productive underground economy: “Cooperatives providing consumer goods and services, which had to be readily visible to function, soon ran into difficulties from criminal gangs. Protection rackets developed, and the police were unable or unwilling to stop them”.

The first major organisational step towards breaking the CPSU’s power was taken at the 19th party conference in June 1988, which Gorbachev presented with a last-minute surprise proposal that he had been careful not to distribute in advance. The crux of this proposal was to increase the separation of the party and the state, tilt power towards non-party structures, stuff these non-party structures with proponents of the ‘new thinking’, and create greater executive power for Gorbachev and his allies

RIP party, this next part is really informative on the pure destruction of party ideology.

Keeran and Kenny assess that “the proposal, introduced in the final minutes in a surprise resolution by Gorbachev in the chair, amounted to the overthrow of the Central Committee.” Disoriented by the sudden appearance and radical nature of the proposals, a majority of delegates voted in favour.

The newly-created organs of power were chaotic, but they were much easier than the older structures for Gorbachev and his team to dominate, since they were largely composed of people that had been encouraged and promoted by Gorbachev and the increasingly anti-communist press. As a result, Gorbachev’s team suddenly had a mandate to accelerate the pace of reforms to a dangerous degree. Meanwhile, the new political space provided nutrient-rich soil for assorted right-wing nationalist movements around the country, leading to a bumper yield of insurrection and instability over the course of the ensuing three years.

Gorbachev also moved to change the class composition of the Communist Party. Before the 1988 Party Conference, he said very candidly that only people who supported his programme were eligible to be delegates: “There must be no more quotas, as we had in the past – so many workers and peasants, so many women, and so forth. The principal political imperative is to elect active supporters of perestroika.” Cheng Enfu and Liu Zixu observe that, “in the name of promoting young cadres and of reform, Gorbachev replaced large numbers of party, political and military leaders with anti-CPSU and anti-socialist cadres or cadres with ambivalent positions. This practice laid the foundations, in organisational and cadre selection terms, for the political ‘shift of direction.’”

Later in 1988, Gorbachev moved against the more traditionalist (that is: communist) members of the party leadership. The most senior official, Andrei Gromyko – a key negotiator at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, foreign minister from 1957 to 1985 and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1985 until 1988 – was removed from the politburo. Nikolai Baibakov was fired as head of the central planning agency after two decades, in spite of his vast wealth of experience (which included overseeing Russian oil production during World War 2). Yegor Ligachev, who had become increasingly vocal in his critique of perestroika, was demoted from head of ideology to head of agriculture. As the communists were systematically removed from the party and state leadership, supporters of ‘radical reform’ were promoted, including a certain Boris Yeltsin.

Ligachev’s role as head of ideology fell to Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s closest political adviser and widely regarded as the “godfather of glasnost”, wielding what Keeran and Kenny describe as “the most powerful and pernicious influence of anyone on the entire reform process”. We now know that Yakovlev had long since given up on his commitment to Marxism and had his heart set on transforming the Soviet Union into a multiparty parliamentary democracy and market economy along the lines of Canada (where he had spent ten years as Soviet ambassador). Initially he hoped this could be achieved through reforms, but he reveals in his memoirs that, with the reins in his hands, he decided that nothing less than counter-revolution would do.
“In the first years of perestroika most reformers had the illusion that socialism could be improved. The argument was only about the depth of improvement. At some point in 1987, I personally realised that a society based on violence and fear could not be reformed and that we faced a momentous historical task of dismantling an entire social and economic system with all its ideological, economic and political roots. It had become imperative to make profound changes in ideology and overcome its myths and utopias”.

Next up, the media is infiltrated.

Dissidents and anticommunists were appointed as editors of newspapers and magazines, and were given carte blanche to use their publications to openly attack the basic ideas of socialism and the whole nature of the Soviet system… Zubok explains that “Gorbachev and his assistants allowed the process of glasnost to go on until it became a whirlwind of revelations that discredited the entire foundation of Soviet foreign policy and the regime itself… Some Moscow-based revisionists began to hold the Soviet Union solely and exclusively responsible for the Cold War. They began to consider the policies of the West to be purely reactive and dictated by the need to fight Stalin’s communist aggression and totalitarian threat”.

Once the Congress of People’s Deputies was established in 1989, its proceedings were televised – another ad hoc decision by Gorbachev. “For thirteen days and nights, the proceedings transfixed two hundred million Soviet viewers”, who witnessed well-known personalities arguing persuasively against socialism.

Attacking the CPSU backfired badly for Gorbachev. He had made a dangerous assumption: that the liberals and nationalists he promoted would give him the political support denied him by the communists, thus allowing him to realise his dreams of a mixed economy with a welfare state and political pluralism. In fact, these elements wanted to go much further than Gorbachev. They didn’t want Nordic-style social democracy; they wanted full-scale neoliberal capitalism of the Milton Friedman variety. Soon enough they turned against Gorbachev and started looking for other means to promote their cause, stirring up nationalism and unrest, building openly pro-capitalist networks and attracting concrete support from the west.

Poor Gorbachev just doesn’t know what’s he’s doing, what a goober.

The leadership used its new-found freedom to start implementing much more radical reforms, closing down the central planning agencies altogether, liberalising prices, establishing market-based trade between the republics, and forcing state enterprises to survive or die in the open market. Many large enterprises were sold off at bargain-basement prices to budding capitalist opportunists. These abrupt, hasty and sweeping reforms were meant to introduce ‘dynamism’ into the economy; to leverage the supposedly dormant creative spirit of the Soviet people; to incentivise innovation and quality. Judged against their purported intent, the reforms were spectacularly unsuccessful, leading to the first recession in Soviet history and to terrible shortages of low-margin and previously subsidised products: “the Soviet economy moved from a condition of severe problems to one of crisis”.

In 1989 and 1990, socialist allies in Europe were transformed overnight into pro-western capitalist regimes, leading to further imbalances in the Soviet economy – the USSR had long enjoyed a symbiotic trade relationship with the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia – as well as to a growing popular perception that the writing was on the wall for European socialism. Much frustrated by the economic crisis, and falling prey to the cynical demagoguery of Yeltsin and his coterie, who blamed all problems on socialist planning and the ‘privileged bureaucracy’, coal miners carried out strikes on an unprecedented scale. This contributed to a crisis of legitimacy. Gorbachev had little choice but to go running to the western banks, with which the Soviet Union quickly worked up a sizeable debt.

This pro-capitalist constituency had money. And money, for the first time, had become a significant factor in the Soviet political scene. ‘Free elections’ turned out not to be so free in the case of the Congress of People’s Deputies, where money bought high-profile campaigns and extensive media coverage. This was an unfamiliar environment for the silent majority in the Communist Party that had been brought up to believe that political leadership was a responsibility and honour earned through service to the people, not paid for with ill-gotten gains. This change, together with Gorbachev’s insistence on dropping quotas for working class representation, meant that “a striking change occurred in the percentage of deputies who were workers, collective farmers and office employees: this dropped from 45.9% of the 1984 Supreme Soviet to only 23.1% in 1989”. The counterpart to this was the monumental increase in the representation of management and intelligentsia.

With the formation of the overtly anti-communist ‘Democratic Russia’ movement in January 1990, the pro-capitalist elements joined forces and consolidated around a political vehicle that seemed to offer the quickest possible route to their chosen destination. Democratic Russia candidates managed to win a plurality of seats in the Russian parliamentary elections of March 1990, including several key Soviets (Moscow and Leningrad among them).

Democratic Russia also played the major role in electing Boris Yeltsin as Chair of the Russian Parliament in May 1990. By this time, Yeltsin had become recognised as the undisputed leader of the anti-communist opposition. He resigned from the Communist Party in June 1990, realising that his differences with Gorbachev were insurmountable: Gorbachev, for all his ineptitude and liberalism, still hoped to keep the USSR together and maintain some elements of socialism – for example the welfare state.

The collapse of the socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe served to significantly increase the pressure on Soviet socialism. At the most practical level, there had been a tight economic integration between the CMEA countries: a similar economic model meant that economic planning could be internationalised. The sudden disappearance of the USSR’s key trading partners meant a vertiginous decline in imports and exports, leading to sudden shortages of various essential goods.

Seeing their country hurtling towards oblivion – and recognising that Gorbachev lacked either the will or the ability to save it – a group of high-level Soviet officials organised themselves to take control of the country and establish a state of emergency, with a view to pausing the reforms and pursuing all measures to prevent the dissolution of the USSR… However, the SCSE leadership quickly developed an acute case of cold feet, dropping its plan to storm the Russian parliament and showing no willingness to use force in support of its aims.

In early November, Yeltsin issued decree number 169, banning the CPSU altogether… Yeltsin ignored the negotiations for a new union agreement and moved purposefully towards declaring Russian independence. On 8 December, he met with the Ukrainian and Belorussian presidents, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, ostensibly for informal discussions. At this meeting, the presidents and their advisers drafted a document (known as the Belavezha Accords) announcing – with absolutely no legal authority – the dissolution of the Soviet Union: “The USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence.” Shushkevich’s memory of the discussion gives some idea as to how much attention was paid to the nuances of constitutional law: “Yeltsin said, ‘Would you agree for the Soviet Union to end its existence?’ I said OK and Kravchuk said OK too.”

Gorbachev’s resignation finally came on 25 December 1991. With no legal precedent or constitutional framework, Yeltsin simply transferred the Soviet state bodies and property to Russia, and on 31 December, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. This was the real coup d’etat. A great country was removed from the map, against the wishes of the majority of its people, by opportunist and conniving leaders. It was nothing short of a tragedy.

The author goes on to describe the effects of full capitalist restoration which I’m sure we’re all quite familiar with by now.

Comparing the two viewpoints, which assessment seems more accurate? While the complete collapse can be contributed mainly to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the question of whether the USSR was still socialist post-Stalin is in contention here.

From my perspective after reading both accounts it looks like a combination of the two in which capitalism was partially implemented under Khrushchev before being fully unleashed in the Gorbachev/Yeltsin era. I'm curious to know what other people think.

blinkandwheeze posted:

i think if your dictatorship of the proletariat can recapitulate petty bourgeois class interests then you are stretching the concept beyond the point of usefulness

It seems to me like a different way of phrasing Mao’s idea of socialist and capitalist “roads”. How is it different?

babyhueypnewton posted:

anyone who criticizes China today by defending Maoism against Stalin and the USSR

what would be a good example of someone doing this? "boo deng, yay mao, boo stalin" is not a configuration i think i've ever encountered in the wild

or maybe i'm misunderstanding, on account of all the the soju (thirsty thursday, sorry)

babyhueypnewton posted:

If anyone has already read Chris Bramall, they might be interested in this new work which elaborates on the claim that the rural communes were actually very productive and were the foundation of China's economic growth (Bramall even goes as far as to say the post-marketization growth was a kind of primitive accumulation of socialist wealth, like the post-USSR shock therapy, but in a controlled way which supported the growth of a nationalist bourgeoisie instead of the collapse of the economy):

babyhueypnewton posted:

It should go without saying that anyone who criticizes China today by defending Maoism against Stalin and the USSR is an enemy of the proletariat but I still feel compelled to say it. There is direct lineage from the class struggles and party purges of the late 30s to the cultural revolution as well as direct lineage from building socialism in the USSR against the right and left oppositions to the Great Leap Forward and CR, the idea that the CR was against the party and "state socialism" or that Maoism is the end of the party form is anarchist nonsense which makes Chinese people into mere playthings for ideological games played in the West.

i agree, and i will try to check out Joshua Eisenman's book. even Amartya Sen has had to basically admit that Mao laid down the foundations for China's ascent out of poverty. the anti-Deng/anti-Stalin/pro-Mao line is too silly to even respond to.

but iirc, Chris Bramall claims at the end of his book that China's growth is not sustainable, and that it will all come crashing down soon. that was back in 2008, when China's GDP was $4.598T. It was $11.119T in 2016, the last year we have full data. poverty rates continue to plummet: 17.1% in 2010, 4.5% (!) in 2016.

this is what drives me up the wall about MLMs. blah blah blah we're so materialist... OK, here's a Contradiction for you... if China is now capitalist, why is it seeing gains that India or Brazil isn't? why was capitalist restoration in the USSR a traumatic event that killed millions, but not in China?

babyhueypnewton posted:

I like this theory since it makes sense at a deeper level: we already know 'marketization' isn't actually efficient and is inferior to collectivization but at the empirical level we end up saying the opposite about China since both Chinese sources and American bourgeois academia say the same thing. The idea that China had immense growth and poverty reduction as the result of opening up to the market is disturbing - Chinese apologists may say it's Lenin's NEP but it's really Bukharin's. Defending Stalin, the accomplishments of Soviet collectivization and the construction of socialism, which really were the reason that communism became the ideology of global decolonization (as much as I like Lenin), is essential here against the new right opposition and the right opposition disguised as a left opposition.

if this is your position, then isn't the onus on you to demonstrate that a continued Stalin/Mao collectivization program would have yielded greater gains?

because the argument could easily be made that collectivization lays the groundwork for a NEP-like plan, which without reading Eisenman's book, appears to be what he's saying (like not reading a book has ever stopped me from making grand pronouncements about it). what if Lenin/Bukharin's mistake wasn't implementing the NEP, but that they tried to implement it first, before collectivization?

blinkandwheeze posted:

just as a quick rejoinder, this seems like a bizarre point -- clearly the maoist line is that capitalist restoration in the ussr wasn't a traumatic event that killed millions, since it happened decades before the collapse

fair, i'm conflating positions

blinkandwheeze posted:

beyond that, i don't find paeans to productive forces even particularly relevant to these arguments. if it were assumed that china was capitalist, then it would be predictable that a progressive social democracy having undergone national democratic revolution would outperform nations like india and brazil that remain deeply enmeshed in neocolonial and semifeudal relations of production

if this is the argument (and i can't tell if it's your argument, or just a hypothetical rejoinder) then that brings a new host of questions, since...

- the most successful 'progressive social democracies' gained much of their increases in standards of living, GDP, etc, through unequal exchange and neo-colonial programs
- the list of countries who were on the receiving end of imperialism that had national revolutions, became capitalist/social democracies, and saw the sorts of gains that the USSR or China did is very, very small

(i am drawing from Zak Cope, et al)

i can think of two possible counterarguments:

- that the gains made during the Mao years laid a groundwork that, even with a revisionist backslide into capitalism, set the country up for sustained success up to the present. i'm open to hearing arguments, but as stated before, i don't find this very convincing, the idea that a revisionist tendency within a truly functioning DotP can seize the party and backslide into capitalism without a hint of violence is very far-fetched to me
- that China is now an imperialist country, something i have heard claimed often, but have not seen much evidence to support it

shapes posted:

- the most successful 'progressive social democracies' gained much of their increases in standards of living, GDP, etc, through unequal exchange and neo-colonial programs

of course, but the leveraging of state assets to produce credit stimulus for productive sectors accompanied by social investment in technical educations etc. are still enormously productive measures in spite of that. most developing nations are restricted from pursuing measures of the same scope by enforced underdevelopment but the revisionist prc inherited a nation uniquely independent from such pressures thanks to decades of independent socialist development

shapes posted:

- the list of countries who were on the receiving end of imperialism that had national revolutions, became capitalist/social democracies, and saw the sorts of gains that the USSR or China did is very, very small

i think all this says is that the bourgeois-nationalist anticolonial revolutions, although progressive in character, were not as far reaching or systemic as proletarian led national democratic revolution. postcolonial states have for the most part continued to host neocolonial and semifeudal productive relations, whereas these were effectively eroded entirely by the chinese and soviet peoples

wuyong posted:

You may now possibly be able to find the Eisenman book in the secret pdf forum or whatever.

Wow you weren't kidding. Dunno how you did it but everyone should go check out the secret pdf forum.

littlegreenpills posted:

- very very few other countries were able to or could be bothered doing that

if this is true, it says more about the size of the country than any uniquely oppressive schema within, since urban/rural dynamics operate similarly in both national and international contexts. the intensification of this contradiction has been a hallmark of industrialization, and requires independent focus beyond the question of capital to resolve.

Mao said as much: that the contradiction between town and country remains even in a socialist country, and indeed that it was never resolved in his own time. though he also noted that a socialist country uniquely has the power to transform it into a non-antagonistic contradiction -- such as through movement of medical staff to service rural areas, etc. but then, i'm not sure a contribution like that would necessarily show up on the question of raw value transfers.

blinkandwheeze posted:

i think you're making ... a structural qualification whereas the DotP is a functional one

after more reading and pondering i'm still stalled on this point. i've found remarks that both support and counter it -- sometimes, frustratingly, from the same source. this suggests to me that it could be a distinction that may not have been very important to the writers in question at the time they wrote. i mean, it makes intuitive enough sense to say, for example, that to someone still writing from under a bourgeois dictatorship, these two qualifications might well look the same.

a small sampling follows:

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (ch 4) posted:

Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it ... Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

this one appears a lot in later authors, and stands out by the use of "be," instead of, say "function as" or "act as an instrument of," suggesting (though by no means necessitating) identity between the two

Engels, 1891 postscript, The Civil War in France posted:

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Engels, a critique of the draft social-democratic program of 1891 posted:

If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. (no longer on MIA; link here)

engels (and allegedly marx) arguing that the dictatorship of the proletariat should specifically take the form of a democratic republic is a detail i was not previously aware of, but it's enough to make me question the notion that discussions of form are relegated to heterodoxy.

Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky posted:

It must be explained to Mr. Kautsky that both these forms of government, like all transitional “forms of government” under capitalism, are only variations of the bourgeois state, that is, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Lastly, to speak of forms of government is not only a stupid, but also a very crude falsification of Marx, who was very clearly speaking here of this or that form or type of state, and not of forms of government.

The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitution for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”

this appears to fall under the "category of state" perspective (structural). but on the other hand:

Lenin, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (pamphlet draft/outline) posted:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the continuation of the class struggle of the proletariat in new forms. That is the crux of the matter, and that is what they do not understand.

The proletariat, as a special class, alone continues to wage its class struggle.

2. The state is only a weapon of the proletariat in its class struggle. A special kind of cudgel, rien de plus! [Nothing more.—Editor.]

that seems to more clearly resonate with the functional perspective.

Stalin, Foundations of Leninism posted:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a change of government, but a new state, with new organs of power, both central and local; it is the state of the proletariat, which has arisen on the ruins of the old state, the state of the bourgeoisie.

another form of "to be," here

Stalin, Concerning Questions of Leninism posted:

I have dealt above with the dictatorship of the proletariat from the point of view of its historical inevitability, from the point of view of its class content, from the point of view of its state nature, and, finally, from the point of view of the destructive and creative tasks which it performs throughout the entire historical period that is termed the period of transition from capitalism to socialism.

Now we must say something about the dictatorship of the proletariat from the point of view of its structure, from the point of view of its “mechanism,” from the point of view of the role and significance of the “transmission belts,” the “levers,” and the “directing force” which in their totality constitute “the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Lenin), and with the help of which the daily work of the dictatorship of the proletariat is accomplished.

he discusses the role of trade unions, soviets, the youth league and the party, and then goes on to expressly disconnect the ideas of "dictatorship of the party" and "dictatorship of the proletariat"; the former is a hegemonic relation that sits atop the latter. "The Party is the core of this power, but it is not and cannot be identified with the state power." he then quotes more Lenin:

Lenin repeatedly said that “the system of Soviets is the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and that “the Soviet power is the dictatorship of the proletariat” (see Vol. XXIV, pp. 15, 14); but he never said that the Party is the state power, that the Soviets and the Party are one and the same thing.

further along in the same piece:

I assert that Kamenev’s statement that “the dictatorship is not an alliance of one class with another,” in the categorical form in which it is made, has nothing in common with Lenin’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I assert that such statements can be made only by people who have failed to understand the meaning of the idea of the bond, the idea of the alliance of the proletariat and peasantry, the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat within this alliance.

(** My italics.—J. St.)

"hegemony of the proletariat" is a phrase that doesn't get as much attention as "dictatorship of" for obvious reasons, but it's an interesting one!

Mao, red book chapter 3 posted:

The number of intellectuals who are hostile to our state is very small. They do not like our state, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, and yearn for the old society. Whenever there is an opportunity, they will stir up trouble and attempt to overthrow the Communist Party and restore the old China.

another structural identification, here.

Mao, On the People's Democratic Dictatorship posted:

Our present task is to strengthen the people's state apparatus -- mainly the people's army, the people's police and the people's courts -- in order to consolidate national defence and protect the people's interests. Given this condition, China can develop steadily, under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, from an agricultural into an industrial country and from a new-democratic into a socialist and communist society, can abolish classes and realize the Great Harmony. The state apparatus, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument for the oppression of antagonistic classes, it is violence and not "benevolence". "You are not benevolent!" Quite so.

we can conclude from this that Mao says the dictatorship of the proletariat is the army, the police, the courts, etc. Can we say that these organs had entirely, decisively turned against proletarian interests prior to the smashing of the soviet state? I don't have an answer, but I suspect path-dependency and institutional inertia alone are suggestive of the importance of the absolute destruction of the entire state apparatus to the restoration of capitalism. to me, this also suggests that there's still a sense in which we can posit the DotP's existence (though frail and imperiled) right up to the point where these structures get exploded outright

my other concern with the functional qualification is that it problematizes the entire category of retreat, essentially deprecating strategy in favor of tactic. ontologically, I guess would be comparable to what critical realists term "actualism," which neglects to acknowledge the presence of mechanisms that, while still structurally real, are nevertheless not at the moment being operationalized. the NEP was a retreat, but it didn't signal that the dictatorship of the proletariat ceased to exist for a time, surely. likewise, the Long March was a retreat; it also proved a winning strategy, in the end.

Edited by Constantignoble (May 5, 2018 18:55:31)

Dimashq posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

wuyong posted:

You may now possibly be able to find the Eisenman book in the secret pdf forum or whatever.

Wow you weren't kidding. Dunno how you did it but everyone should go check out the secret pdf forum.

I mean library genesis 😅