Workers' Liberty

Go back and read the debate between SM and Foot; read the Irish articles about consistant democrats. Its obviously true that I have politically changed in many ways, but unlike you I havent forgotton the basic lessons I learnt in the AWL.
But more importantly think about it: EM is not a socialist project. It defends liberal democracy. You still havent said what's wrong with that other than to point out its not a socialist project.
Do you not think our times demand the reinforcement of bourgeois democratic ideals? Do you think that a fight with the Guardian oped writers isnt worth having?
Why don't you challenge us to a debate in your AWL branch?

Hi Jane,

It would be good if you could help arrange a Euston-supporter to come and debate the manifesto at the summerschool. We've already asked Nick Cohen but he can't make it.

Cheers

Sacha Ismail

Sorted. No bother.

I dont know what Daniel is going on about, 'Draw your own conclusions' Ok - I will, the people you asked couldn't make it - that's my conclusion!

...neither Marx nor Engels ever use the phrase "nationalised property relations." To say that they were in favor of nationalising property doesn't prove your point. There can be only capitalist or socialist property relations. "Nationalised property relations" means...nothing, really.

Nor is the argument about the NHS being a needs based service valid either. Are you saying that Marxists should have been happy or neutral over whether the Coal Industry remained as nationalised or private, because that was not needs based.

I think that no one should have to work in mines, period! In any event, the point was to keep them open so that miners wouldn't lose their jobs, yes?

As for it being easier for workers in a bourgeois democracy to control nationalised property for their own interests than in a Stalinist state, tell that to the Miners that faced the full force of Thatcher's boot boys during the 84-5 Miners Strike.

I said it was somewhat possible,i.e. not easy or automatic. It is conceivable that workers in a bourgeois democracy with a (geniune) socialist government could increase their control over nationalised property rather than simply ceding it to a state-appointed manager.

To say there are only capitalist or socialist property relations is completely undialectical, it suggests that these relations can change suddenly overnight.

You say this and then quote Lenin, who argued that the Soviet Union's economy was "state capitalist with bureaucratic deformations." Yes, that's right. The economic form was state capitalist; the political form was that of an increasingly deformed and distorted workers' state. By the time that the Soviet Union became unreformable all that was left was state capitalism(for want of a better term). And the "planning" that occurred in the USSR was not a malfunctioning version of socialist planning; it was something else all together. Central planners and unelected political authorities "planning" for the workers is not socialist and has no innately proletarian character.

To speak of "nationalised property relations" is to elide the question of the class character of those "relations." Martin Thomas has already explained how capitalist economies can be predominantly state-owned.

Even were I to agree with all the points you make here - which I don't - my response would be "So What?"

The issue was should socialists defend nationalised property, or should they support those that would overthrow it? In the case above should socialists have defended nationalised property in the Soviet Union against attempts by Yeltsin and the West to restore capitalism and private property even if this nationalised property could not be described as "socialist", but is described rather as "state capitalist".

So as I said at the beginning, suppose I accepted that nationalised property in the Soviet Union was not socialist, should I then defend it or not. Your answer seems to be no. My question then is, "In that case why defend similarly non-socialist nationalised industry in the NHS, or in the Coal Mines, or any other nationalised industry?"

My answer as to why such nationalised industry should be defended is quite simple, because as Engels points out although nationalised industry does not provide the answer to the problem, it points the way to the answer. Because nationalised industry by taking the capitalist form to its limit, it turns into its opposite, and consequently this form of property is progressive vis a vis private ownership.

Now we can argue about what implications the class nature of that ownership takes, and we can as a result of defining the nature of that class ownership decide how to respond to it, either with the need for a social revolution if we decide it is some alien class ownership, or a political revolution if we decide that the problem merely resides at the level of political domination of the state, but neither of those two factors change the progressive nature of nationalised property vis a vis private property in Engels' terms.

Arthur Bough

One doesn't support the existence of statified property of the USSR variety. One doesn't support its privatisation either. Neither option is desirable. Neither option is acceptable. One supports the democratic socialisation of property.

In the quote from Engels that you use, Engels is talking about how both the private monopolies and state industries which eventually emerge under capitalism help make planning possible and are, therefore, a harbinger of the planning that will exist in the "invading socialistic society." Note that Engels talks not just about state property providing the material basis for socialism, but private monopoly, also. He emphasizes that statified capital doesn't resolve capitalism's contradictions, but merely creates the "technical conditions" for its abolition. It does not follow that every every push in the direction of state-ownership is good for workers. (Was Japan's nationalisation of private banks in the late 90s in any sense progressive, from a socialist point of view?)

The NHS was the result of a Labour government which, in however reformist and insufficient a fashion, represented the British working class. And the NHS served the needs of workers. Nationalisation in Russia may have initially been the result of a workers' revolution but by the time Stalin and his allies consolidated power, nationalised property had been drained of any inherently proletarian content. Big difference. Hence one could not simply "defend nationalised property" where the USSR was concerned, even less so in Stalinist states which were by no means the result of workers' revolutions (Eastern Europe, China, etc.). The demand "oppose privatisation" HAD to be linked to the demand for real socialism, not just to the acceptance of authoritarian nationalisation as a lesser evil. (I don't know what the AWL said at the time, but this is what I would have said.)

I have to say I find it hard to see a difference. If as the proponents of "new class" theories propose the nationalised property in the Soviet Union was owned by some form of "state capitalist" class how is this different from the NHS also being owned by the British state acting on behalf of the capitalist class. In either case it would be state capitalist property. If you think that the NHS is in some way better than nationalised property in the Soviet UNion you would have to explain why. In particular it would be interesting to hear your explanation of how to the thousands of NHS workers currently being made redundant, whilst consutants are paid vast sums, and even GP's are paid up to a quarter of a million pounds a year, bureaucrats also paid lavishly, whilst drug companies and PFI providers leach off the NHS and suck it dry. So I would be very interested to know exactly what "proletarian content" you think the NHS has.

In fact it is a contrast with the nationalised property in the Soviet Union. If as the "new class" theorists argue the bureaucracy was some new class that appropriated surplus value from its control of state property as opposed to revenue as all bureaucracies including those in capitalist state's appropriate, if the nationalised property still operated as Capital, and still produced commodities then this was a very strange Capital and commodity production indeed. I can see no reason why a state capitalist class would be freed from the same imperative as that which drives individual capitalists - indeed according to Marx it is not he imnperative of the capitalist but the imperative of Capital itself - that is to accumulate Capital by the maximisation of profit. One of the ways in which profit is maximised is by keeping labour costs to a minimum.

In stark contrast to the willingness of the NHS now to sack thousands of workers the state industries in the Stalinist States were renowned for keeping workers employed way beyond what could be justified in terms of efficiency. Even today the State Owned Enterprises in China which account for only a minority of output account for 70% of all empployed labour. The extent to which workers were kept on in these industries was shown starkly once Stalinism collpased and the firms that did not simply disappear were turned over to private ownership - the workforces were decimated, in many cases literally.

I have yet to hear a good explanation from any new class theorist as to why the Stalinists, who were so brutish in all other aspects of their domination not only failed to act like good capitalists by seeking to maximise profits, but why they appear to have turned into veritable philanthropists when it comes to the employment of labour. As Marx tells us that a necessary feature of Capitalism is the continual recreation of a reserve army of labour the actions of the Stalinists if they really were state capitalists in appearing to go to some length to avoid the production of such a reserve army seems even less explicable.

I think if you were to ask those tens of thousands of workers that were thrown out of work from these factories, and found themselves eating food they found in garbage bins etc. whether they thought defending nationalised property even in its Stalinist form was a good idea rather than it being handed over to private capitalists, I think I know what the answer would have been. But no one asked them, and a political revolution happened above their heads led largely by the middle class that subsequently benefitted from the privatisation, and from which the oligarchs emerged.

Arthur Bough

I'm willing to grant that you're more up on the state of the NHS than I am. But most everything that's currently wrong with the NHS could be changed if a genuine socialist government were elected in Britain, yes? I.e. the NHS is reformable. If it's reformable then it still in some sense serves workers, just as bureaucratized-but-reformable unions do. (Yes I realize that the NHS is part of the British bourgeois state and the unions aren't, but again, the NHS was the result of an admittedly-reformist workers' party forming a government in Britain.)

Obviously all socialists oppose privatisation and unemployment in Russia, or anywhere else. But how were Stalinist bureaucrats any more philanthropic than the Japanese companies that adopted so-called "lifetime employment" after WWII? Even Japanese companies that did not practice permanent employment were more reluctant to lay off workers than U.S. or British firms. Large companies that utilized this practice were assured of a stable workforce. Also, because the fortunes of workers with permanent employment were tied to the company, employers were also confident that for the most part their workers would be loyal and hard-working. Perhaps even more importantly, employers who utilized permanent employment practices enjoyed a tremendous education and training advantage compared to either domestic or foreign competition. but eventually Japanese capitalism gave up this practice as a whole -- just as Russan (state-)capitalism did.

It's important to understand that various Soviet enterprises bid for labour, often in contradiction to the state plan--to keep sufficient qualified workers at their factory. Different bureaucrats, enterprises, ministries and localities inside the Soviet economy did, in fact, compete with each other. Imported techniques normally did not spread within the USSR from one firm to another. Competitive secrecy prevented such dispersion, and technological conservatism frequently prevented spin-offs from the new technology. Under Stalinism the primary goal of national capital accumulation had to operate in conjunction--and often at variance--with the narrower goals of local and sectoral bureaucrats: maximizing the value of the firm or sector they were responsible for. Individuals and small groups continued to appropriate the results of state industry.

To me, this does not sound like an economic system that was in a "blocked" transitional state from capitalism to socialism (as Ernest Mandel used to put it). It sounds like a system that was always in transition to...capitalism, capitalism as everyone recognizes it. When the USSR turned to free-market capitalism, this was not an arbitrary choice, but was based on the evolution of market solutions that Soviet bureaucrats had been experimenting with for a long time.

I Don’t Agree But That Is Beside the Point

Red I do not agree with your diagnosis, but that is beside the point, the point is that even were your diagnosis and that of the state capitalist/new class theorists correct then it would still not be an argument for supporting Yeltsin and those forces that sought to overturn nationalised property and institute private property. That was what the AWL were being accused of. I don’t know if that accusation is accurate, but the AWL have not responded to the charge here. I think, that a wider issue is at stake which brings us back to the whole Euston Manifesto which this thread was initially about. Let me, however, deal first with why I think your diagnosis is wrong.

1. You say that everything that is wrong with the NHS could be resolved if a genuine socialist government were elected in Britain. Yes I suppose that is true, but then I suppose that Marxists believe that most problems could be resolved if only we had socialism. That’s why we are socialists. But by the same token couldn’t everything that was wrong with nationalised property in the Soviet Union have been put right similarly by a genuine socialist government there? Wasn’t the fact that the majority of property in the Soviet Union was already nationalised, and that some attempt at planning was already in place, however, bureaucratic and inadequate an easier thing for workers simply to take over than in say Britain where the majority of property is privately owned, where the legal framework, and where the ideological superstructure built upon private property continually reinforces the idea that private property and the market is the natural order of things, a much, much bigger hurdle for workers to overcome?

2. Yes the NHS was created by a reformist bourgeois workers party, and it came out of demands from workers for such reforms. It is progressive on that we agree. But it is not socialist, any more than nationalised property in the Soviet Union. In fact, probably less so. The Tories when they came into power in 1951 did not seek to return it to private ownership. Its initial conception was from a Liberal Beveridge. And then what about say Rolls Royce nationalised by Ted Heath’s Tory Government. Should socialists have opposed its nationalisation, should they have refused to demand it remained nationalised?

3. There is a world of difference between the “lifetime employment” policies in Japan, and the vast retention of labour in the Soviet Union. In Japan vibrant dynamic industries expanding after World War II faced labour shortages. They had every incentive to retain labour, because the costs of the training etc. were higher than the costs of keeping on labour for relatively short periods of time when demand subsided. In addition Japanese capitalism has always operated on a different basis to western capitalism. Western capitalism has been concerned with short term profit maximisation, in recent years the watchword has been “shareholder value”. In Japan, however, the institutional nature of business ownership gave a more long term perspective of profit maximisation. In place of high mark-ups Japanese business has gone for market share. In that context being prepared to accept lower short term profits in return for continued expansion of output was seen as acceptable. But when Japan began to go into depression and deflation 15 years ago that all changed.

In the Soviet Union the continued employment of labour over and above what was profitable dragged on for decades, and could not at all be argued on the same basis.

Moreover, in Japan what you had were competing private capitals. If in the Soviet Union we are to believe that what we had was a single State capitalist class then this kind of competition between enterprises for labour makes no sense. A single state capitalist would simply allocate labour to those enterprises which generated the maximum surplus value for that state capitalist class. Is there any evidence that that was what happened? None whatsoever. In fact the way the Soviet economy was organised makes no sense at all from the perspective of what would best meet the needs of a state capitalist class. Capital works by averaging out the rate of profit. In those enterprises that have a higher rate of profit, more capital is attracted, and conversely capital moves out of those where the rate of profit is lower than average. There is absolutely no reason to assume that there is any reason for State Capitalism to operate differently. All a state capitalist class needs to do is to allow each enterprise to operate as any other capitalist enterprise would do, meeting the needs of the market, and to simply allocate capital to those enterprises which best meet market needs, and make the most profit. Is that what happened in the Soviet Union? Absolutely not.

Consider other aspects of these systems that contradict the new class theories. The Soviet Union was 80% agricultural. For centuries the peasants and agricultural labourers had lived there lives without need for literacy or numeracy. They could quite easily have continued to do so for several decades more. A capitalist class whether state capitalist or otherwise would have no reason to spend resources on educating such members of society unnecessarily, when the resources used in doing so could have been used to further enhance the surplus value appropriated by the new class. Yet that is precisely what they did. In fact by the 1950’s they had spent so much resources on education that they had overtaken the US. A similar use of resources was made in relation to health and science. Now science a case could be made for in relation to the need to develop industry, and military systems, but no such case could be made for health even allowing for the decimation of the Soviet population in the previous 30 years, as the spending on health care was way in excess of what was required to provide the kind of workforce the Soviet Union required as being effective.

Or consider another aspect – foreign policy. The whole history of capitalist foreign policy has been one of seeking ways of increasing the capacity to make profits. Did the SU do that? Look at Comecon. Yes after WWII the SU looted Germany for equipment etc. But the majority of the post war, Cold War period the SU subsidised other Comecon countries, sometimes in the context of say Cuba, Vietnam etc. to quite considerable sums. What kind of a capitalist colonial/imperialist policy is this which sees resources drained from the supposed colonial power? The extent of these transfers was illustrated recently in relation to the Ukraine, which was asked to pay the market price for its gas, which involved a 400% increase in the price!

Or take the so called national liberation struggles. The whole history of imperialism has been one of currying favour with every tom, dick or harry dictator who will look after the interest of the imperialists. In doing so the imperialists have almost without exception been on the opposing side to the national liberation movements, and for good reason – there is usually little profit in it. So why then did the new capitalist class in the Soviet Union do the exact opposite? Why did they in whatever bureaucratic manner side not with those from whom they could have profited, but with those opposing them?

4. Enterprises within the Soviet Union did compete against each other that is true, but under any transitional economy that will happen. What is important is the nature of the competition. Moreover, in the Soviet Union competition was introduced not as something desirable, but as a recognition of the failure of planning. And then we have to ask why on earth a state CAPITALIST class would want to engage in planning in the first place. The whole point of planning is that it implies some conception of desirable outcomes completely separate from those of commodity production i.e. the production of commodities to meet market demands and maximise profits. A state CAPITALIST class have every incentive to desire the latter, but no reason to be interested in the former.

5. All of the things you say about secrecy, about the lack of co-operation or spread of new technology etc. I agree with, but all this tells us is that this was not a socialist society, or perhaps even a society moving in the direction of socialism. But nor do these features, especially taken in conjunction with the other points made above tell us that this was a capitalist or state capitalist society either.

6. I do not believe that the move to free market capitalism was a choice decided upon by Soviet bureaucrats. Its true that having come to a dead stop in being able to find a way of taking the Soviet Economy forward within the confines of the bureaucratic planning methodology the Stalinists looked for other methods including the use of the market. But similarly a considerable amount of time was devoted to trying to devise ever more elaborate planning algorithms, considerable effort was made in developing consumer panels etc. And even after the fall of Stalinism many day to day statisticians within Gosplan were distraught at not having been able to crack the problem, which they continued to believe was one merely of perfecting the machine, rather than the need for the whole basis of the machine being changed through the democratisation of the planning system, and the introduction of direct ownership and control of the means of production in the hands of the workers.

The degree to which that is the case I think is attested to by the degree to which nationalised property remains a significant force with Russie, and the degree to which Putin is slowly drawing back within the remit of the state, those aspects of the economy that were taken over by the oligarchs.

But as I said all of that is beside the point of the discussion. I have started from the point of accepting the idea that the Soviet Union was State Capitalist for the sake of the argument even though I believe the above in brief shows it was not. The question then arises even if the Soviet Union were State Capitalist/Bureaucratic Collectivist on what basis would socialists support those such as Yeltsin whose agenda was not to replace state capitalist property with socialism, but with free market capitalism? That was the starting point of the discussion, and I can see no justification for arguing for support of free marketers in the Soviet Union, but against free marketers in the West. In another thread in relation to the issue of free speech the AWL has posed the question in precisely those terms – “Should socialists ally themselves with free marketeers”. It is perhaps a signal of the state of the movement that Marxists have to even pose the question.

I think there is in fact a common thread here with other issues such as Iraq, and Kosova which might not at first be apparent. But before I get to that exactly I have to make a bit of a diversion.

In the last couple of years I have been having arguments with Libertarians. What I find astonishing is almost a mirror image of the same approach. The Libertarians will tell you the US is socialist. They argued that Alan Greenspan, and now Helicopter Ben (Bernanke) is the central planner in Chief. The Government is socialistic to the core robbing people of their hard earned property through swinging taxes, and through a stealthy depreciation of the currency which liquidates the debts of the propertyless and pays back those to which the money is owed in worthless paper. They too believe that this socialist society is ruled over by a new class of bureaucrats, those working for the state, and those who do not legally own but control the large private companies that work hand in glove with their fellow socialists in the state apparatus, and in so doing exploit both the workers but more importantly for the Libertarians, the shareholders, that are supposed to own these companies.

Such beliefs are not surprising. One of the ideological founders of Libertarianism was Hayek, who in “The Road to Serfdom”, quoted approvingly from James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” where Burnham was one of the first to advocate this anti-Marxist, anti- materialist, new class nonsense in the context of arguing that society was moving to a situation in which the power of the technocrats and bureaucrats would lead them to become the new ruling class.

But I have just been re-reading Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, and although Rousseau is way off the mark in his idea that Man existed in some state of nature prior to his entry into Civil Society he does make an interesting comment in relation to property. He makes a distinction between “property” and “possession”. He says that in a state of nature Man can have possession of things, but that possession can be taken away by force at any time, just as it was acquired in the same manner. Without laws there can be no appeal to laws or morals to uphold the right to possess. Consequently, there can be no property, and certainly no right to property. What is different about Civil Society is that it has a set of moral and legal rules, and it is the acceptance of those rules which makes property possible. Things are no longer just possessed they are legally possessed, and the right to possess them can be justified by an appeal to the law and to morals.

This is fundamental to discussing the possession or control of the means of production by bureaucrats whether those bureaucrats be CEO’s in the US or bureaucrats in the Soviet Union. Fundamental to Marxist analysis is the analysis of class, and fundamental to that is the idea that class is determined on the basis of the relationship to the means of production. Specifically, the ruling class (in terms of the social dictatorship)have, according to Marx, always been that class which owned the means of production, and the exploited classes have been those that did not. If we look at the bureaucrats in either the US or the Soviet Union we then have to ask do they own the means of production? In the case of the US and other real capitalist states CEO’s often are the owners of the means of production, or do own considerable capital within their own right. But it is not necessarily the case. If we apply Marx’s criteria then we have to conclude that, however much these CEO’s may be able to use their power and position and the inertia of shareholders to feather their own nests to pay themselves vast sums (the CEO’s of the top 100 US companies have incomes 1,000 times the average wage) they most certainly do not constitute a new ruling class as a result of their control (possession) of the means of production. If you doubt it look at how Kozlowski, Lay, Skilling et al have been brought to book when they overstretched the mark.

If we apply the same test to the Soviet bureaucrats the same applies. Do they meet Marx’s test of owning the means of production? No they did not. Ownership requires the ability to dispose. The Soviet bureaucrats because they did not own state property did not have the power to dispose of it, for example to pass it on to their children. But clearly property belongs to someone, someone owns it. If the bureaucrats did not own the property then someone else did. That someone else was not the capitalist that had been dispossessed. So the only conclusion we can come to is that the owners of the property are in fact the workers that appropriated it from the former capitalist owners. Just as, however, much the CEO’s and capitalist bureaucrats might feather their own nest they property they administer is not their property, but the property of the capitalists. The fact that the political regime built upon this control over the means of production is particularly abhorrent does not in any way change the class nature of the property over which it has control, anymore than the control over capitalist property by Hitler’s Nazis, Mussolini’s fascists, or Napoleon’s Bonapartist regime changed the class nature of property in those instances.

Now when you attack the US or capitalism from the Left, the Libertarians will suddenly forget all about their definition of the US as being socialist, and will come to its defence. Similarly, despite the criticism of Stalinist/State Capitalist property an attack on say the NHS from the Right provokes a similar reaction.

Let me then come to how I think this reflects a link with Iraq, and Kosova. The EM group have started from the position that the working class is weak. In reality they have given up on the working class. The logical approach for them is then to seek an alliance with a larger more effective force that can give some hope of achieving at least something they feel is desirable. If we apply this to the cases I have cited and to the Soviet Union what do you get? In the Soviet Union you come to the conclusion that the political revolution that Trotsky argued was required in order to bring the state power under the control of the workers, and thereby to (in Trotsky’s terms) restore (in my terms bring about) workers control over the means of production which they already own, is beyond the capability of the Soviet working class. Therefore, this political revolution has to be carried through by some other force, and the only force that can do it is those pro-capitalist forces inside the Soviet Union allied with imperialism. So, nationalised property in the Soviet Union then has to be characterised as reactionary vis a vis free market capitalism, not because it is for any objective reason, but solely because those advocating this position have lost faith in the Soviet working class to bring about the revolution, and can only justify the then necessary appeal to imperialism on the basis that imperialism is in some sense more progressive. But at the same time state capitalist property in the West, which often has less claim to being progressive continues to be defended.

A similar logic applies in relation to Kosova. An independent working class position in relation to Kosova would have been to argue for the international Labour Movement to have isolated Milosevic’s regime, to have sought to support a socialist opposition within Serbia, and to have provided whatever assistance it could to those under attack in Kosova. But starting from the very real fact of the weakness of the Labour Movement this position is rejected, and once more an appeal to some more powerful force to come to the rescue is made, and once again that force has to be imperialism. In the case of the people from EM this appeal is open. The AWL’s position is somewhat different. It argued that whilst they would not argue for imperialism to become involved they would make it clear that they would not be sorry if imperialism did intervene, and did succeed in stopping the Serbian attacks. That despite the fact that such imperialist intervention would inevitably mean thousands of Serbians would be killed in the bombings, that imperialism would increase its grasp and reach further around the globe, that in making this approach the class is miseducated into false illusions in respect of imperialism and led away from the correct approach of independent working class action, that its actions were almost bound to lead and have led to pogroms against Kosovan Serbs, and to ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosova by Albanians.

The same is true of Iraq. Again the demand should be for the Labour Movement internationally to organise to support the Iraqi workers, not just in financial and political assistance, but in the organisation of an international workers defence organisation along the lines of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

Is it possible given the weakness of the Labour Movement internationally. Maybe not, but its better to put forward the right program and fail to implement it through lack of resources than to put forward a counsel of despair from the beginning, and argue instead for reliance on alien and enemy class forces whether overtly as the EM do, or shamefacedly, and couched in caveats, or commission by omission as I fear on some of the occasions the AWL have done.

Arthur Bough

"You say that everything that is wrong with the NHS could be resolved if a genuine socialist government were elected in Britain. Yes I suppose that is true, but then I suppose that Marxists believe that most problems could be resolved if only we had socialism. That’s why we are socialists. But by the same token couldn’t everything that was wrong with nationalised property in the Soviet Union have been put right similarly by a genuine socialist government there?"

Except that fixing everything that was wrong with state property in the USSR would've required a revolution. And you're right, the NHS has never been socialist in the sense that Marxists mean it (recall Shachtman's idea that the Labour Party might bureaucratically-collectivize Britain. Overstated, but with some truth to it regarding how Labour conducted nationalisations.) Fixing the NHS -- and we're talking about one specific industry here, not capitalism-in-general -- would require reform.

Again, I think you overstate the differences between the USSR and private capitalism. In the USSR and like states, enterprises were to a large extent required to be "self-financing" -- their success was to be judged by whether they showed a profit. Depending on circumstances, an economic enterprise may not necessarily be shut down for not turning a profit. Unprofitable enterprises were sometimes kept running with state aid. Nevertheless, the success of the careers of enterprise managers rested upon showing a profit. "Self-financing" came to be relied upon as something that would automatically insure the economic plan was met, ignoring that without the workers actively overseeing the economy, all plans would come to naught. Indeed, unless the workers were also assuming more control over the economy, self-financing couldn't help but lead to enterprises being out for themselves at the expense of others, to the squandering of resources, to massive deception in enterprise reports, to conflicting interests between the economic ministries and the individual factories and plants, etc. -- in short, to anarchy of production. This anarchy expressed itself differently than it did in the Western capitalist countries, but it was an elemental force all the same. It might not necessarily have led to the shutdown of unprofitable enterprises as in the West. But, in itself, this is hardly proof of non-capitalism. After all, to a lesser extent even in the Western capitalist countries, there are state-financed industries or bailouts such as those given to the Chrysler auto capitalists in 1979, or more recently the U.S. airline industry.

USSR-style capitalism may be deformed capitalism, but it's capitalism regardless. Private interests are rampant in the state sector, so that state property is in reality the property of a small class of bureaucrats in the ministries and enterprise managers, who treat their own sectors or plants as their own property and employ capitalist methods toward their workers. This position allows them to allocate wealth and privileges for themselves.

Regarding support for Yeltsin: your debate is with the AWL, not me, assuming that the AWL did in fact support Yeltsin, which they shouldn't have done.

Regarding COMECON: I don't see your point. No one thinks that the USSR was imperialist vis-a-vis Cuba, Vietnam, etc. But I don't see how one can seriously argue that the USSR wasn't imperialist towards Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Tanks speak more loudly than subsidies.

Yes, the USSR subsidized national liberation struggles, for political and not obviously profitable reasons. The U.S. does the same with Israel.

Regarding Rolls-Royce: one doesn't demand that a bourgeois government nationalise, or not nationalise, anything. If the workers don't control the enterprise then the formal/legal/jurudicial part matters little. One only opposes privatisation in the sense that one opposes unemployment.

Regarding inheritance of property, etc., I'm surprised you don't remember Trotsky's words from The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky shows that the bureaucrats can pass on to their children, if not property in the means of production, then status and future membership in the elite: the ruling caste 'almost monopolise the highest institutions of learning'. And for me it was proved that the bureaucracy did, in practice, own the USSR's means of production, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin, not the workers, made the decision to engage in mass privatisation.

As for Soviet health care: yes, under Stalinism, health care was theoretically free to everyone. However, even during those times, some got better treatment than others, depending on what bribes could be paid.

“Except that fixing everything that was wrong with state property in the USSR would've required a revolution. “

That implies you think that everything that is wrong with the NHS can be put right without a revolution in Britain. In other words whilst the Stalinists believed in “Socialism in One Country” you want us to believe in “Socialism in One Health Service”.

“Fixing the NHS -- and we're talking about one specific industry here, not capitalism-in-general -- would require reform. “

But that not only requires us now to believe in “Socialism in One Health Service”, but Socialism achieved through reform rather than revolution. I am all in favour, as I have written elsewhere, of removing the false dichotomy between reform and revolution introduced by Leninism. I am all in favour of seeing revolution, as Marx conceived it, as social revolution, as the working class becoming the owner and controller of the means of production, rather than seeing revolution in Leninist terms as a political revolution that secures control of the state, and then uses the state to transform property relations. I am in favour of the working class fighting for reforms through its own self-activity, that begin to bring about that change of ownership and control, as the prelude to the working class having become the dominant social class, then carrying through the political revolution to secure its control of the state, but I am not a reformist. I do not believe that it is possible to simply reform away the problems of capitalism, including those that beset the NHS, and it is unMarxist to believe that you can.

That is the whole problem of reformism it sows illusions that such reforms can provide a solution to the problems of the working class, whereas, of course the reality is that as long as capitalism exists such reforms can only ever be tenuous, and limited. Even were workers control of the NHS achieved – and I think you grossly underestimate the struggle that would have to be waged to achieve it – in any meaningful sense, then that advance would continuously be undermined by the capitalist state, it would be wholly dependent upon the capitalist state to fund its operations, meaning a dagger would be held at its throat every step of the way, and at the first opportunity or sign of weakness the capitalist state would reassert its control with a vengeance. In short the problems of the NHS can only be resolved through socialism, and that requires a socialist revolution.

In the Soviet Union the Political Revolution undertaken by the Leninists had secured State power, taking it away from the feudalists and capitalists. Having done so they could have gone one of two ways. They could, as in Germany, have carried through a capitalist transformation of society, or they could carry through a socialist transformation of society. Lenin clearly favoured the latter option, hoping that imminently socialist revolution in the West would come to their rescue. It didn’t and Lenin adopted the NEP as a necessary retreat from the socialist transformation of property relations. Stalin continued that retreat until the forces of Capital in the shape of the Kulaks turned round and bit him in the arse, and forced him to change course 180 degrees and resume the course of transforming property relations once more in the direction of socialism, but in a bureaucratic top down manner. Nevertheless, transformed they were. The consequence is that the social revolution was accomplished, albeit bureaucratically. And the result of that is that the Soviet working class merely had to lay hold for itself of state power, to carry through a second political revolution, just as the bourgeoisie in Britain and France had had to carry through further political revolutions to secure control of the state from those Bonapartist regimes that had taken advantage of their earlier weakness to rise up above the contending classes and leach off society through appropriation of revenue.

Unlike, the working class of Britain or other capitalist states the Soviet working class did not need to deal with all of the ideological superstructure built upon capitalist property relations. The ideological superstructure that says that private property is sacrosanct, that says that industries can only operate on the basis of private ownership, and the direction of entrepreneurial capitalists, that production can only be organised on the basis of profit maximisation, and meeting the needs of the market, because all those ideas had already been disposed of. Given that most Marxists believe that it is these ideological underpinnings of capitalism, the fact that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class such a transformation is not to be taken lightly. Nor did the working class of the Soviet Union need to go through the actual process of taking away the ownership of its property from capitalists as part of this revolution, or indeed of beginning the process of developing plans for production because that too had already been put in place, albeit that the property ownership was de jure more than de facto, and that the planning process would have to be almost scrapped and replaced with more modest plans and the development of organic links between enterprises.
That is not to at all underestimate the problems that faced the working class in the Soviet Union or other Stalinist, problems which were completely different from those which workers in Western democracies face, though, perhaps not so different from those faced by workers in other capitalist states where the ruling class operates without bourgeois democratic principles. But as the workers in Hungary, Czeckoslovakia, and Poland demonstrated those obstacles were not insurmountable. The main problem they faced was not the obvious one of the power of a totalitarian state, but the lack of a credible socialist leadership to enable them to undertake the necessary political revolution. Had the Labour movement in the rest of the world not been in a state of virtual collapse, and certainly of retreat that problem would not have been insurmountable either.

“Again, I think you overstate the differences between the USSR and private capitalism. In the USSR and like states, enterprises were to a large extent required to be "self-financing" -- their success was to be judged by whether they showed a profit.”

It is undoubtedly the case that the Soviet bureaucrats looked to such measures to try to resolve the problems encountered by a bureaucratic, central planning system. But they were precisely that, measures attempting to deal with problems arising from the failure of planning. And as I said before, what those who argue that what existed were capitalist relations have to answer is, why on earth were capitalists, albeit state capitalists bothering to try to plan in the first place, which implies an attempt to replace the anarchy of the market, the imperative of profit maximisation and commodity production, with some other determinant of social welfare, when the whole basis of capitalism is the operation of the market, and commodity production. Let us bear in mind that these changes were brought in during the 1970’s, 50 years after Stalin had seized power. If the Stalinists were really state capitalist with a cunning plan, how come it had taken them so long to begin this transformation, how come this transformation only comes about when the limitations of central planning had been reached.

Moreover, in any transitional economy I would anticipate that enterprises will be required to be largely self-financing. Such a society may well set out its overall priorities, and may assign resources to meet them whatever the cost, but not every economic activity can be a priority, and no Marxist has believed that you could go straight away to a fully planned economy. Consequently, the vast majority of enterprises in a transitional economy will continue to produce commodities, will continue to have to compete for labour, and will continue to have to generate sufficient income from their sales to meet their costs including the requirements for investment. What will be different about such a transitional economy will be the ownership of the means of production by the workers, and consequently, the incentive for workers in all enterprises to seek to co-operate in all areas where they can do so, and in so doing to begin to develop organic plans of production where the activity of each enterprise is increasingly tied into the activites of every other with which it interacts.

“Depending on circumstances, an economic enterprise may not necessarily be shut down for not turning a profit. Unprofitable enterprises were sometimes kept running with state aid. Nevertheless, the success of the careers of enterprise managers rested upon showing a profit. "Self-financing" came to be relied upon as something that would automatically insure the economic plan was met, ignoring that without the workers actively overseeing the economy, all plans would come to naught.”

Precisely, it was a means of trying to ensure that the plan was met, but how many capitalist economies do you know that base their economic system upon a plan? As I said before if the Stalinists were state capitalists why do they need a plan? In fact why do they need to subsidise unprofitable enterprises? We know why real capitalists subsidise unprofitable businesses. Either the business is seen as important for the national economy, and therefore, the interests of other capitalists, or the closure of the buisiness would cause severe social unrest, creating conditions where at best profit maximisation is reduced through workers activity, or at worst the system itself is threatened. Whilst, a state capitalist class might have reason to subsidise a particular industry for the fomer reason its totalitarian rule gives it less reason to be concerned with the latter. Surely, the logical way for a state capitalist class to behave is to let each enterprise stand on its own feet, to forget about concepts of plans and to give full reign to the market. That way profitable businesses expand, surplus value is increased, unprofitable businesses go to the wall and workers are thrown out of work reducing wages and allowing profits to rise further. The state capitalist class then merely has to sit back and draw its profits from the increasingly profitable enterprises, whilst the drain on that surplus value from unprofitable enterprises is removed. Certainly, in terms of competing with other Capital on the world market this would be the most sensible way to operate. Yet it is not what the Stalinists did.

“Indeed, unless the workers were also assuming more control over the economy, self-financing couldn't help but lead to enterprises being out for themselves at the expense of others, to the squandering of resources, to massive deception in enterprise reports, to conflicting interests between the economic ministries and the individual factories and plants, etc. -- in short, to anarchy of production. This anarchy expressed itself differently than it did in the Western capitalist countries, but it was an elemental force all the same.”

Quite true, and every transitional economy will face the same problems. It is why the class struggle does not end until socialism is achieved, and what we have is not a transitional society and economy, but a socialist economy and society. Worjkers laying hold of the means of production and beginning the process of gradually bringing the economy under conscious human control does not resolve all of the problems of humanity, or even those of economics it is merely the prerequisite for beginning to resolve them.

“It might not necessarily have led to the shutdown of unprofitable enterprises as in the West. But, in itself, this is hardly proof of non-capitalism. After all, to a lesser extent even in the Western capitalist countries, there are state-financed industries or bailouts such as those given to the Chrysler auto capitalists in 1979, or more recently the U.S. airline industry.”

That is quite true, but I have given reasons for such bailouts above. Moreover, it is quite different to point to this or that bailout of some capitalist enterprise or other from an economic system in which such bailouts are systemic. It is quite different to cosnider such bailouts within the context of an economic system in which the operation of enterprises is geared to the achievement of a plan rather than the demands of the market, where the main beneficiaries of the bailout are the workers that would lose their jobs rather than the shareholders of the company that would lose their capital.

“USSR-style capitalism may be deformed capitalism, but it's capitalism regardless. Private interests are rampant in the state sector, so that state property is in reality the property of a small class of bureaucrats in the ministries and enterprise managers, who treat their own sectors or plants as their own property and employ capitalist methods toward their workers. This position allows them to allocate wealth and privileges for themselves.”

But I could use all of the same arguments you put forward here in reverse to argue as the Libertarians do that the US is socialist. They say “socialist interests are rampant in the private sector and government”. They say “a small class of bureaucrats treat shareholders property as though it was their own, and use it to siphon of the profits that should go to the shreholders”. They would point to people like Kozlowski, or the fact that the CEO’s of the top 100 companies pay themselves 1,000 times the average wage, and that they have an intricate web that ensures the continuation of their rule by packing remuneration committees etc. as set here.

The Rich Get Richer

They point to the way the government robs property through the taxation system, manipulates the currency to depreciate it, and thereby further steal from those with assets, to plan the economy through the actions of the Federal Reserve, and the links between these top bureaucrats in industry and within the state through the military-industrial complex, and in so doin allocate wealth to themselves and their chosen projects rather than in accordance with the market.

Do they have a point? Yes, they have a point. I could add that increasingly businesses organise their activities not on the basis of responding to market signals, but on the basis of their own financial and business plans, and that having developed such plans the biggest businesses do not respond to the market, but attempt to shape it. It is an indication that capitalism increasingly adopts socialist methods to deal with its problems. Are the Libertarians right that the US is socialist? No, of course they are not, any more than Burnham was right in suggesting that it was being transformed into some kind of bureuacratic collectivist state along with all other industrialised states. He and they are wrong because the analysis is superficial, and not based on class analysis. The Libertarians have an excuse for that. They are not Marxists. But the definition of the Soviet Union as state capitalist is just a mirror image of the superficial analysis of the Libertarians. It too is not based on class analysis, and for that Marxists have no excuse, because it means a complete abandonment of the whole basis of Marxism, without that class analysis, without the tool of historical materialism the complete structure of Marxism collapses, and the conclusions reached lack that necessary objectivity, and the actions that follow are inevitably prone at best to pragmatism, and at worst to opportunism.

“Regarding inheritance of property, etc., I'm surprised you don't remember Trotsky's words from The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky shows that the bureaucrats can pass on to their children, if not property in the means of production, then status and future membership in the elite: the ruling caste 'almost monopolise the highest institutions of learning'. And for me it was proved that the bureaucracy did, in practice, own the USSR's means of production, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin, not the workers, made the decision to engage in mass privatisation.”

There is one simple question I would repeat. Did the bureuacrats have the right to transfer state property to their children? No they did not. Hence this property was not theirs. Did they even establish after 70 years of rule a mechanism for ensuring that their children also inherited their state positions in order that they could likewise treat state property as their own? No they didn’t. In fact on the contrary, and despite Trotsky comments, they established a pretty extensive and equitable education system that ensured that children from outside the bureaucracy had pretty much the same chance of securing such positions for themselves, which contrasts starkly with the lack of social mobility and educational opportunity in truly capitalist societies. As for the privatisations I don’t think it proves that at all. Did the decision of the Bolsheviks to nationalise this or that or all businesses mean that they owned them rather than the capitalists they were being expropriated from. The act of Yeltsin was merely the same act in reverse, in fact if anything it proves the opposite of what you say. If Yeltsin owned the enterprises why did he need to privatise them. Privatisation is a method of transferring ownership to capitalists, but if this property were already in the hands of capitalists no such transfer is required.
Now, Marx’s whole analysis of society – not just capitalist society – is based on historical materialism, the idea that ideas are a function of the material world, and primarily of the way in which Man goes about production. Furthermore, his extension of that is that society is broken down into classes, and it is conflict between these classes which is the driving force of change in society. Finally, that class within this context is defined in terms of the relationship to the means of production – ownership or non-ownership – not control or non-control. In fact Marx sets out the likely development within capitalism of a large middle class of bureaucrats and tecnocrats as capitalism becomes more technological, and even speaks of this class replacing the social function of the capitalists i.e. their day to day control of their own capital. But he certainly does not conclude from this that this middle class of bureaucrats become a new ruling class as a result of replacing the capitalits social function in production, for the simple reason that not only does Capital continue to operate as Capital, but also because the Capital remains the property of the Capitalists, and at the end of the day the bureuacrats are merely the hired help, albeit hired help which at times might get a bit above itself as with Kozlowski etc.

But no such ownership of property can be demonstrated for the Soviet bureuacrats either, and without that ownership we have no basis within Marxist theory for describing them as a ruling class. This is not just a question of whether Trotsky was right or wrong in describing the Soviet Union as a Workers’ State or not, it is about whether the experience of the Soviet Union requires us to give up the whole basis of Marxist class analysis and historical materialism in favour of some alternative sociological post-capitalist analysis. I for one prefer to stick with Marx.

“Regarding support for Yeltsin: your debate is with the AWL, not me, assuming that the AWL did in fact support Yeltsin, which they shouldn't have done. “

I haven’t seen the supposed article supporting Yeltsin so I am loathe to pass comment, but TomU above did agree the AWL had sided with Yeltsin against the CP.

“Regarding COMECON: I don't see your point. No one thinks that the USSR was imperialist vis-a-vis Cuba, Vietnam, etc.”

The point is that in promoting revolution albeit in a bureuacratic top-down form of revolution, and supporting these countries the Stalinists acted in a way quite inexplicable in terms of the dynamic for profit maximisation that drives a capitalist class. The whole experievcne of capitalism is that when it expands overseas, or when it enters into arrangements with foreign states it does so primarily to promote the maximisation of profit i.e. to establish sources of cheap raw materials, or to establish markets for its goods, or stable conditions in which it can invest its capital profitably. None of that was true in the Soviet Union’s dealings with these countries. Far from it, instead of creating conditions under which the Stalinist bureuacracy could increase its available pool of surplus value, it undertook huge drains of resources away from the Soviet Union to prop up these foreign states.

“But I don't see how one can seriously argue that the USSR wasn't imperialist towards Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Tanks speak more loudly than subsidies.”

Aggressive, expansionist yes. Imperialist in the context of a neceessary expansion overseas to meet the needs of Capital no. But then I can think of similar occasions when a healthy workers state might also have to be aggressive, and expansionist too. Sometimes offence is the best form of defence. In relation to Afghanistan I think that the arguments that have been used in relation to imperialism and clerical-fascism also show where deviating from objective class analysis can cause problems. The argument has been raised that in relation to pre-capitalist formations i.e. feudal relations or the kinds of Oriental despotism that are often associated with political Islam then imperialism is progressive. I agree, and in fact Engels himself sided openly with imperialist forces against the Arabian Chief Abd-el-Kader in Algeria (“Defence of Progressive Imperialism in Algeria”). But even were we to accept the definition of Stalinism as State Capitalism, and even if we wee to accept that this state capitalism was reactionary vis a vis market capitalism it seems rather a stretch to argue that it is reactionary compared to the brutish pre-capitalist regime that existed in Afghanistan. If then US imperialism acts progressively in Iraq in fighting against clerical-fascism albeit not such that it reequires us to support its invasion, but at least suficiently so that we have no cause to support the clerical fascists against it, it seems rather difficult then to argue that the Soviet Union was not equally acting progressively in taking on the same forces (actually in a far more thoroughgoing way than the US does in Iraq where it is arming and training some of those same forces) albeit not such that we needed to support its invasion, but at least such that we need not support those fighting against it with the aid of US imperialism.

“Yes, the USSR subsidized national liberation struggles, for political and not obviously profitable reasons. The U.S. does the same with Israel.”

The US supports Israel as an established state, and as a means of maintaining a strategic presence in the region for the protection of its interests. The closest I can think of it actually supporting a national liberation movement would be in relation to the Contras. The difference is that the US in undertaking such support does so for the purpose of attempting to secure compliant regimes that will benefit US capital. I can think of no instances where this was true of the Soviet Union. Yes its reasons were not altruistic. It sought to expand its sphere of influence, but it sought to expand its sphere of influence not for the purposes of securing markets, outlets for the investment of capital etc., in short all the things that motivate capitalists, but for ideological and political reasons. In other words it was driven by motivations not based on the dynamic of the needs of Capital, but on a quite different dynamic, not the dynamic of socialism as we would understand it either, most surely, but a different dynamic than that of capitalism all the same.

“Regarding Rolls-Royce: one doesn't demand that a bourgeois government nationalise, or not nationalise, anything. If the workers don't control the enterprise then the formal/legal/jurudicial part matters little. One only opposes privatisation in the sense that one opposes unemployment.”

Nearly every Marxist in the UK including the AWL would disagree, and the latter part of your sentence gives the reason why. In many, many instances where a business is about to go bankrupt, and the workers lose their jobs Marxists call for nationalisation of the enterprise in order to insist that the workers do not take responsibility for the vagaries of capitalism, and that the capitalists state pick up the tab. Yes they call at the same time for such nationalisation to be under workers control, but conversely when Thatcher began privatising industries during the 1980’s – not because of a need to make workers redundant, but purely on ideological grounds – Marxists opposed such privatisation even though it clealry was not under workers control, and in my opinion quite rightly, because Marxists as I said before are not agnostic when it comes to property forms.
There is a debate to be had here, however, in that I think it is important to stress that more important than nationalised property is workers ownership and control of property. For the reasons I have outlined previously in relation to the NHS I think that there are definite problems in relation to nationalised property compared to property directly owned by workers when it comes to workers control of that property. That is why I favour promoting means of securing ownership of the means of production directly into the hands of the workers, but in many instances that is not possible, and nationalisation is at least a step then in the right direction.

“As for Soviet health care: yes, under Stalinism, health care was theoretically free to everyone. However, even during those times, some got better treatment than others, depending on what bribes could be paid.”

True, but the point I made remains valid. A ruthless state capitalist has no logical reason to spend more than they need on providing healthcare for the workers, because to do so reuces the surplus value available for that state capitalist class. That the Stalinists did so tells me either that they perpetually acted illogically and in a way that was contrary to their interests, or that they were not in fact a state-capitalist class at all. I believe the latter a more plusible conclusion.

Arthur Bough

I think I've spent too much time responding to Arthur as is, and I don't seem to be getting my points across very well (certainly not where the NHS is concerned), so this should probably be the end from me. Forgive me for not being able to address every specific question.

I'm not advocating "socialism in one health service." I don't particularly disagree with anything you say regarding the NHS or reform and revolution. By "fixing" I just mean returning it to what it once was. I don't doubt that achieving workers' control of the NHS would be extraordinariliy difficult and could not be conducted separately from the struggle to overthrow capitalism generally. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

If Stalin "resume[d] the course of transforming property relations once more in the direction of socialism, but in a bureaucratic top down manner" then it follow that Stalin was in some sense a representative of the working class. This, I do not believe. Stalin was completely unaccountable to the Russian working class and he had the power to jail and kill workers. He therefore could not have been a representative of the workers. By extension the Eastern European Stalinist states must have been workers' states even though the workers had nothing to do with those "revolutions." The objections to this view and its logical conclusion -- that it would have been "progressive" for Stalinism to expand over all of Europe -- are well known and I need not repeat them.

You ask "why on earth were capitalists, albeit state capitalists bothering to try to plan in the first place, which implies an attempt to replace the anarchy of the market, the imperative of profit maximisation and commodity production, with some other determinant of social welfare, when the whole basis of capitalism is the operation of the market, and commodity production."

To define capitalism as a profit-driven system based on private property and the "anarchy of the market" is too empiricist and misses the real essence of the system. The essence of capitalism is the dominance of the social relations of capital. But what is capital? From Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts we learn that capital's essence is not private property but the self-expansion of alienated labour: the creative and productive powers of human activity that becomes an alien force that subsumes human will and needs to its own autonomous expansion.

The alienation of labour presupposes wage-labour which itself presupposes the separation of the direct producers from both the means of production and the means of subsistence. This social relation is not fundamentally altered simply by state ownership of the means of production and subsistence. The Soviet working class did not own their factories, just as British workers did not own the nationalised versions of British Steel, British Coal or British Leyland. State ownership, whether in Russia or elsewhere, was merely a specific institutional form through which the working class was excluded from both the means of production and the means of subsistence and therefore obliged to sell their labour-power. Workers did not work to produce their own needs, nor for the needs of their own families or communities, but for some alien other. In producing products that were not their own they served to reproduce their position as workers on an ever expanding scale.

In the USSR the capitalist class was constituted through the state and as such collectively owned and controlled the means of production. Nevertheless, by making the Russian working class work longer than that necessary to produce the equivalent of their labour-power the Russian state enterprises were able to extract surplus-value just as the counterparts in the West would do. Furthermore, while a part of this surplus-value would be used to pay for the privileges of the 'state bourgeoisie', as in the West, the largest part would be reinvested in the expansion of the economy and thus ensuring the self-expansion of state-capital.

As I believe Martin Thomas has already explained, in the backward conditions that prevailed in Russia, capitalist economic development could only have been carried out by through the forced development of the productive forces directed by the concentrated and centralised direction and power of the state. It was only through state-led capitalist development that both the internal and external constraints that blocked the development of Russian capitalism could be overcome. Yes, there were major distortions in the political economy of the USSR. But rather than seeing such distortions as arising from the degeneration of a society stuck between capitalism and socialism (which is what I take Arthur to be saying) they can be more adequately seen as distortions arising from an attempt to make a forced transition to capitalism from a position of relative underdevelopment.

But there was no real commodity production in the USSR, Arthur might say. Yes, there was. The workers alienated their labour. As such they did not produce for their own immediate needs but worked for the management of the state enterprise. Equally, the management of the state enterprise no more appropriated the labour from its workers for it own immediate needs any more than the management of a Western capitalist enterprise. The labour appropriated from the workers was used to produce products that were objects of use for others external to the producers. The USSR's state managers sought to make the workers produce a mass of products that were worth more than the labour-power and means of production used up in their production. As such the labour process was both a process of exploitation and alienation. State planning may have largely supplanted the market as the regulator of commodity production but as such it did not overcome the separation of labour from social needs that remained alienated from each other.

(Even Western capitalists want to plan -- they just don't want the workers to do the planning. Monopolies seek to remove as much uncertainty as possible from their economic calculations. Investment decisions and profit projections are vulnerable to the anarchy of market forces and competition from rivals. By capturing as much as possible of a given market or supply of raw materials, by engaging in “price-fixing” with their supposed rivals, monopoly firms attempt to inject as much certainty and planning into decision-making as they can.)

As for Arthur's statement that "a ruthless state capitalist has no logical reason to spend more than they need on providing healthcare for the workers" -- if it helps hold the entire system together (which, in the USSR, it did), then there is a logic to it. And the carrot (full employment, free education and health care, cheap housing and transport and an egalitarian wage structure) should never be separated from the stick (brutal police repression which served to atomize the working class and prevent it from becoming a revolutionary class-for-itself).

And Arthur makes too much of the "inheritance" notion which supposedly proves that the Soviet elite wasn't a ruling class. While I think that the "bureaucratic collectivist" analysis of Stalinism has been discredited (there was no overthrow of one class by another in the USSR, for one), and I think that he is too uncritical of Lenin and Trotsky, but Sean M. is largely correct in the following paragraphs:

"The bureaucracy extracted surplus product. There can be no doubt about that. The bureaucracy was a ruling class, a ruling class with peculiarities. It was not the same as most ruling classes, but the idea that it was somehow not a class system is ridiculous. I cannot think of anything that corresponds more to the worst features of capitalist class society than the Stalinist system.

For example, some people say that the ruling class did not pass on property. This is not the case. It did pass on property - not formal ownership of property as such, but the privileges that gave access to it: educational possibilities, membership of the elite. It would obviously have been better from their point of view to have had money in the bank that they could have used to control the means of production...But they had heirs. There was no question of them not being able to pass anything on.

This was a system that controlled the surplus product. Did they control all of it? Well, no. Black marketeering had an increasingly powerful role to play after the ending of the high terror period. But the Soviet ruling class controlled a very large part of the surplus product. They used it for their own purposes. They decided what to do. They decided what to reinvest. They decided what to have in the bureaucrats' private shops."

Anyway, enough from me on this topic. Funny how we went from the Euston Manifesto to "what was the USSR?" I guess it really does all come down to working-class independence...

"In many, many instances where a business is about to go bankrupt, and the workers lose their jobs Marxists call for nationalisation of the enterprise in order to insist that the workers do not take responsibility for the vagaries of capitalism, and that the capitalists state pick up the tab. Yes they call at the same time for such nationalisation to be under workers control, but conversely when Thatcher began privatising industries during the 1980’s – not because of a need to make workers redundant, but purely on ideological grounds – Marxists opposed such privatisation even though it clealry was not under workers control, and in my opinion quite rightly, because Marxists as I said before are not agnostic when it comes to property forms."

I don't mean to sound like I oppose demands for nationalisation under workers' control even when there's a bourgeois party governing. But it seems to me that opposition to Thatcher's privatisations could, again, be made purely on the ground of opposition to sacking workers, not because socialists believe that state property (without workers' control) is innately superior or preferable to "traditional" capitalist property.

“I think I've spent too much time responding to Arthur as is, and I don't seem to be getting my points across very well (certainly not where the NHS is concerned), so this should probably be the end from me. Forgive me for not being able to address every specific question.”

I hope it won’t be Red because I think you have put your points across well, and I have found the discussion interesting and useful. Marxists should be able to discuss these things openly and honestly, and its good that the AWL allow such discussion on this site, which others on the Left do not do. I’m only sorry that more such discussion does not take place here.

“I'm not advocating "socialism in one health service." I don't particularly disagree with anything you say regarding the NHS or reform and revolution. By "fixing" I just mean returning it to what it once was. I don't doubt that achieving workers' control of the NHS would be extraordinariliy difficult and could not be conducted separately from the struggle to overthrow capitalism generally. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. “

But what it once was, was a bureuacratic, socialised healthcare system, dominated by bureuacrats and highly paid consultants, and leached off by private capital. Nor could it ever have been anything much different. A bourgeois state, even one temporarily admimistered by a bourgeois workers party is not going to create socialist institutions – even if as Marxists we believed it was in their gift to do so, rather than any socialist institution having to be the product of independent working-class, self-activity. But despite what it once was, is now, and is every likely to be short of the socialist revolution, Marxists defend it as something progressive vis a vis, a privatised healthcare system.

“If Stalin "resume[d] the course of transforming property relations once more in the direction of socialism, but in a bureaucratic top down manner" then it follow that Stalin was in some sense a representative of the working class. This, I do not believe. Stalin was completely unaccountable to the Russian working class and he had the power to jail and kill workers. He therefore could not have been a representative of the workers. By extension the Eastern European Stalinist states must have been workers' states even though the workers had nothing to do with those "revolutions." The objections to this view and its logical conclusion -- that it would have been "progressive" for Stalinism to expand over all of Europe -- are well known and I need not repeat them.”

Unfortunately, I think that your statement “Stalin was in some sense a representative of the working class” is true. Not only some old representative, but prior to Lenin’s retun to Russia in 1917, the leading Bolshevik figure there, and even after Lenin’s return the Editor of the Bolshevik press, the chief organiser of practical day to day activities, one of the leaders of the opposition to Lenin’s April Thesis, and of course on Lenin’s illness, General Secretary of the Communist Party. I know that those who still cling to Leninism prefer not to refer to these unfortunate facts, but if you are going to try to discover the truth, and use it as the basis of your analysis, the first thing to do is stop lying to yourself.

You say that Stalin could not have been a representative of the working class because he was unaccountable to them, and had the power to jail and kill workers. Firstly, until 1927 there was opposition within the Communist Party to Stalin. He could have been held accountable, could have been removed had the working class rallied to the Left Opposition, but the fact is they didn’t. The problem was not that Stalin was unaccountable, but that the working class did not hold him to account, and the main reason they did not do so, is because the working class and peasantry in Russia were not class conscious socialists, they had not reached that level of development. In reality Stalin’s position was no different than say that of a Trade Union bureuacrat. The bureuacrat derives his position and power from the members of the Trade Union, he is a representative of the workers in that Trade Union. As a result his actions are constrained by that. Yet the union bureaucrat may well be more interested in looking after his own position, having a quiet life with the bosses and thereby avoid providing good leadership for the workers he represents, may even on occasion undermine them and sell them out. Whilst the TU bureuacrat does not have the same powers as Stalin in terms of killing and jailing them, they do have the power to expel trouble makers from the union, to impose other penalties, to work against the ability of union members to organise themselves and replace him. But all of that is not due to the bureuacrat being unaccountable, it is due to not being held to account, due to the workers in the union not being sufficiently class conscious and organised to have put in place a leader that would reflect their interests, a class fighter, or to have ensured that union structures and democracy keep such leaders in check. But none of that changes the fact that the leader they have is their representative, just that they are a bad representative, but a bad representative that still at the end of the day only holds their position on the back of the workers they represent. And yes if you base your class analysis as Marx did on ownership of the means of production then the other Eastern European states were workers’ states, because the capitalists had been expropriated, and the dominant social class was the working class. But as has been seen on many, many occasions in the past in relation to bourgeois states being the dominant social class does not necessarily mean being the dominant political class. The feudal aristocracy retained political control long after the bourgeoisie had become the dominant social class, and even after the feudal aristocracy had been overhtrown politically for a long time bourgeois rule came in the form of various foms of Bonapartist dictatorship or Constitutional Monarchy.

“To define capitalism as a profit-driven system based on private property and the "anarchy of the market" is too empiricist and misses the real essence of the system. The essence of capitalism is the dominance of the social relations of capital. But what is capital? From Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts we learn that capital's essence is not private property but the self-expansion of alienated labour: the creative and productive powers of human activity that becomes an alien force that subsumes human will and needs to its own autonomous expansion.”

I don’t think I said that a requisite feature of capitalism was private property, for such would rule out state-capitalism, though Marx seems to have believed that state capitalism was unlikely for the same reason he believed that private monopolies were unsustainable i.e. as he put it competition creates monopoly, and monopoly creates competition. In other words the existence of large monopolies which make monopoly profits always leads to other capitalists seeking to establish firms in competition even if this competition takes the form of some alternative commodity e.g. in response to the monopoly ownership of oil, and its increasing price, attempts are being made to develop alternatives e.g. Ethanol. Engels believes it is possible, but would be short lived because the open exploitative nature would lead to revolution.

But what is this self-expansion? It is the self-expansion of Capital, which is alienated labour within a system based on commodity production. It is this self-expansion that drives on Capitalists,a nd would, therefore, drive on state-capitalists just as much as private capitalists. Why? Because even if we discard the idea of competition within the sphere of the natrional economy dominated by the state-capital, this state-capital has to operate within the context of a world capitalist market, where competition does continue to exist. Moreover, even if we were to accept that this state-capitalist class isolated itself from this competition from some form of economic autarky – and Socialism in One Country certainly would support that argument – and that this state capitalist class is only concerned with its own consumption, not with capital accumulation, then we would still have problems in defining the Soviet Union in State Capitalist terms. Firstly, if the driving force of the state capitalists is consumption not capital accumulation, then Marx’s definition of Capital as being necessarily self-expanding goes out the window. If the means of production no longer possess this dynamic that requires their self-expansion then they no longer constitute capital, and if they no longer constitute capital, and what logical basis are the “owners” of these means of production capitalists. But secondly, the state-capitalists would have an incentive for capital accumulation, because in the longer term their ability to extract value depends upon the expansion of surplus value, otherwise they are forced into a situation of financing their consumption by the destruction of Capital. In reality the Soviet Union expanded the means of production at a remarkable rate – the extent to which it was able despite the criminal actions of Stalin to organise industrial production after the Nazi invasion, and quickly turn it round to overwhelm what was probably the most advanced capitalist capitalist country of the time (Germany), and to go from a Medieval society to a superpower and leader in the space race within the space of just 30 years is testament to that. In fact what was marked about the Soviet Union and other Stalinist states was the extent to which the economy was dominated by the production of means of production as compared to most capitalist states where consumer goods production dominates. But it is difficult to see how this “primitive socialist accumulation” as Alec Nove describes it actually benefitted the “State capitalists”, on the contrary the main beneficiaries seem to have been the peasants and workers drawn into the economy as a result of the industrialisation, and who benefitted from the vast resources spent on education, and healtcare. Where those workers and peasants lost out was in the brutal nature of the regime – which even under Khruschev had begun to be broken down, and was breaking down further under the impact of repeated revolts such as Hungary, Czeckoslovakia, and Poland – and the inability of the bureuacratic planning system to deal with the necessary production of consumer goods, which the bureuacrats from Khruschev on were trying to increase as part of an attempt to rule by consent rather than by force. It was that failure that led to all of the various experiments introduced by Khruschev and his successors, including the introduction of market mechanisms to deal with the inadequacy of planning.

“The alienation of labour presupposes wage-labour which itself presupposes the separation of the direct producers from both the means of production and the means of subsistence. This social relation is not fundamentally altered simply by state ownership of the means of production and subsistence. The Soviet working class did not own their factories, just as British workers did not own the nationalised versions of British Steel, British Coal or British Leyland.”

This is wrong on a number of counts. For a time I was self-employed. I owned my own means of production. Yet my labour was still alienated. Why? Because the product of my labour was not determined by me, it was not a product destined for my own consumption, but for the market. The ownership of the means of production by the working class collectively does not resolve the problem in and of itself of alienation. The only time that alienation can end is when the decision on what, to produce, how to produce it etc. is taken collectively by workers such that they feel that what they are producing is for their own consumption – even though in reality the majority of their production will be consumed by others, but that precisely because the decisions on what to produce are collective decisions and production and dsitribution are social actrs that their product is just part of a communal product. But that requires socialism not a transitional society.

When you say the workers did not own the means of production you are merely stating what has to be proved. The question remains if the workers did not own the means of production who did? If the supposed state capitalists owned the means of production then two questions pose themselves. Who were the state-capitalists – because the proponents of this theory never actually specify who was supposed to make up this state capitalist class? Secondly, by what means did this class recreate itself, what transmission mechanism did it use for transferrring this property to its children? The fact is tht if you try to identify who the state-capitalists are there are severe problems. In terms of the people who really did have control over state property it constitutes an infinitesimally small number of people, and even amongst these there is no strong evidecne of the ability to transfer position in the state apparatus to their children. The COP is not a candidate because it was overwhelmingly made up of ordinary workers and peasants who had no effective say in the Party or State. IF you simply refer to “the bureaucracy” then this covers a multitude of people including academics etc., and it is clear from anyone that has studied the functioning of the Soviet Economic and Poltiical system that this “bureuacracy” lacked the kind of homogeniety that Marx refers to as a requirement for a class in itself let alone for itself, with multitudinous cross cleavages and conflcts of interest.

Now going back to Rousseau if we accept that property exists rather than just possession this property has to belong to someone. It either belongs to the community as communal property, or it belongs to some class, or individuals. Clealry it did not belong to the capitalists from whom it had been expropriated. Nor did it belong to those that had day to day control over it because they had no legal claim to it, or ability to pass it on to their children or means of ensuring that their children were even able to exert control over it in the future. We can only then come to the conclusion that as their was no effective capitalist class in this society, and that the dominant social class was at least by the 1930’s the working class that the state was a workers’ state based on the social dictatorship of the working class, but a state under the control of a bureuacatic excrescence based on and leaching off that working class, in the same way that the TU bureuacracy does off its members, utilising the resources of those members for its own ends – and I am not aware of anyone claiming that these bureuacrats in the TU’s who control members assets etc. should be called a “Trade Union-capitalist class”.

“State ownership, whether in Russia or elsewhere, was merely a specific institutional form through which the working class was excluded from both the means of production and the means of subsistence and therefore obliged to sell their labour-power. Workers did not work to produce their own needs, nor for the needs of their own families or communities, but for some alien other. In producing products that were not their own they served to reproduce their position as workers on an ever expanding scale.”

But I would be interested to know how you think that even in a healthy workers state, especially one merely in transition, workers would earn a living other than by selling their labour-power. And unless you believe, and neither Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky belieeved it, that it is possible to go quickly to a planned socialist economy rather than the likelihood that it will take several generations to achieve, not only will workers continue to have to sell their labour power even within the context of collectively and co-operatively owning the means of production, but they will also continue to have to produce commodities not for their own consumption, but for sale on the market. They will continue to recreate themselves as workers, and as a working class right up until the moment that they have gone beyond these limitations imposed on them by material conditions and created socialism, and only at that point will they cease being workers, will class struggle come to an end.

“In the USSR the capitalist class was constituted through the state and as such collectively owned and controlled the means of production. Nevertheless, by making the Russian working class work longer than that necessary to produce the equivalent of their labour-power the Russian state enterprises were able to extract surplus-value just as the counterparts in the West would do. Furthermore, while a part of this surplus-value would be used to pay for the privileges of the 'state bourgeoisie', as in the West, the largest part would be reinvested in the expansion of the economy and thus ensuring the self-expansion of state-capital.”

I would recommend to you to read Marx’s “Poverty of Philosophy”. What you put forward here is a rehash of Proudhon’s ideas about workers being able to obtain the full fruits of their labour. If a society wishes to progress it requires that those that produce consume less than they produce. There is no other way to produce a fund for investment. Had the Soviet Union only produed as much as its workers consumed, or alternatively had workers consumed all they produced, it would have collapsed before the 1920’s were out. And a healthy workers state, will have to devote part of its production to meet the consumption needs of non-producers too, whether they be pensioners, children, the invalids, reseacrhers, academics, and yes bureuacrats and technocrats, supervisors and administrators too. What is more in the conditions of a transitional society it may even have to pay some of those people more than even skilled workers if it wants to get them to sell their labour-power voluntarily.

And on that point let’s also remember that it was Trotsky who wanted to introduce the militarisation of labour throughout the economy as he had done on the railways, that he wanted to transform the Trade Unions into the organs through which this militarisation and disciplining of labour would be organised, and that he was opposed in that drive by Lenin.

“As I believe Martin Thomas has already explained, in the backward conditions that prevailed in Russia, capitalist economic development could only have been carried out by through the forced development of the productive forces directed by the concentrated and centralised direction and power of the state. It was only through state-led capitalist development that both the internal and external constraints that blocked the development of Russian capitalism could be overcome.”

Well I don’t know if Martin has said that, but if he has then he is wrong. Russia had been developing at a very rapid pace every since the 1890’s. Yes, 80% of the country was agricultural and that agriculture was itself very backward benefitting from neither intesive production, or extensive land usage, and with terribly poor levels of investment, use of steam power let alone motor power, low levels of fertiliser use etc. But in the cities Russia had some of the largest factories and most modern factories anywhere in the world. Much of it was foreign owned, and Russia bore as much the nature of a colony as an Empire. It was partly the fear that Russia would be divided up between Britain and Japan that led Lenin to be so insistent in pushing ahead with the Revolution. But a look at South Korea, or many of the other Asian Tigers shows that rapid industrialisation and economic develop