Letter: State Capitalism (2010)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I read with interest your commentary on the socio-economic system that evolved in the former USSR in the November issue of  the Socialist Standard (“Workers State – Pull the Other One”). Absent was the discussion developed by the Socialist Labor Party of America that for me offers the clearest explanation (albeit of a muddled situation) of what happened, taking into account the Trotskyist, Maoist, (not mentioned in your commentary) and that of vanguardist apologentsia. The SLP study rejects the “state capitalist” appellation and concludes that the most accurate description is “bureaucratic state despotism”. As the pamphlet concludes:

“The mode of production Marx analyzed has a different mode of formation, different laws of operation and a different structure than the one in the Soviet Union. The effort to describe the U.S.S.R in terms of capitalist seems to be a substitute for making the same kind of thorough analysis of this new mode of production that Marx made of the dominant one of his day.” (page 46) 

This commentary can be found on line where the entire pamphlet can be read or downloaded.

Bernard Bortnick (by email from the US).

Reply:

As the article was a review of a book about the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel it is reasonable that it mentioned neither Maoist nor SLP theories of the nature of the former USSR. Russia could be described as having been a “bureaucratic state despotism” but that’s a political description that tells us nothing about the “mode of production” that existed there. The 1978 SLP pamphlet The Nature of Soviet Society you mention does go into this in more detail, arguing that what existed there was neither socialism nor capitalism nor a “workers state” but “a new class society based on state property”. But it did concede that “it is possible to attempt a Marxist analysis of the USSR and similar systems as state capitalist” and that “the most coherent state capitalist theories” hold that Russia can be termed capitalist “because the basic elements of the capitalist mode of production survive, though in modified form” and that these theories “point to the existence in the Soviet Union of wage labor, commodity production (i.e., production for exchange in a market), the extraction of surplus and its control by the state owners of productive property, the perpetuation of class divisions and state oppression”. Yes, precisely.

In theory Russia might have evolved into some new exploitative class society. The basic reason we described it as still being capitalist was the continued existence there of the wages system, the basis of capitalist exploitation, not to say of capitalism.

Editors.