State Capitalism was the economic system of the Soviet Union and the other so-called communist states of Eastern Europe and Asia. Thus state capitalism is closely associated with Stalinism. The Socialist Workers Party (US) doesn't use the term state capitalism, and rather calls the Soviet union and the other communist states "beaurocratically deformed workers states".

State capitalism allowed for investment within and outside the country to flow into Germany for distribution to industrialists in re-building the German war machine for a corporate-sponsored battle to the death against Soviet communism, which had itself prepared for western aggression to put down the revolution part two(three actually) by way of industrialisation of a centuries-old agrarian economy reliant on peasant labour.

The NDSP produced a pamphlet entitled, "The Road to Resurgence", which was for the benefit of the industrialists and banking elite in Germany in a move to assure them that corporations, private assets etc would not be nationalised. IOW's, it would be business as usual if that party was elected, and they were elected without Adolf Hitler as a candidate. With over a half dozen socialist and communist parties poised for election in 1933 Germany, the business and banking elite threw money and support behind the one party promising "business as usual." State capitalism was born in the 20th century and would be used as a model for economic resurgence in the United States from New Deal socialism in the mid 1930's to the Great Society years of the 1960's.

State capitalism still exists in the United States today and characterized by enforcement of private property laws, stock markets and wild speculation of capital markets like derivatives and said to be worth over half a quadrillion dollars around the world today, and by "Keynesian-militarism" similar to what existed in Nazi Germany. The amoral proftiteering from war is a permanent feature of war capitalism and Keynesian-militarism to this day with U.S. taxpayers spendin more on military than the next dozen nations combined. This economic arrangement produces offensive-minded government and direct conflicts of interest between state and the military industrial complex corporate lobby.

Publicly-funded agencies, especially DARPA, have produced technological advances over the years, like: silicon chip technologies, computer GUI's, parallel computing, RAID drive technology, the beginnings of the internet and important data communications protocols like TCP/IP, fiber optics, lasers, satellites, important metallurgical and medical advances, all handed off to a few dozen companies and wealthy families known today as "the market" and private enterprise. After WWII, no other nation in the world implemented "state-capitalism" in this way during the last century through to today.

Unemployment is used as a tool by both state and capital working together to undermine unions and worker's demands for living wages. Unemployment as a tool of coercion is key to state capitalism. Post-secondary education and health care are the most expensive in the world in the U.S.A, the model country for state capitalism.

By contrast, none of this was true of Soviet communism where housing and education were free, and all workers were guaranteed jobs and wages. The state was the worker's labour union, and there were no conflicts between capital and labour, because capital, in the western world sense of capital as applied to ownership of the means of production and fueling the economy, didn't exist within the bartering block of nations.

There wasn't the same monetary incentive for the Soviet bureaucrats to wage war with the military industrial complex. But that's changed today with diversion of profits from the sale of armaments to private hands in Russia. The Soviets were not the one's who bombed 25 nations after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and they weren't responsible for undermining populist movements to remove oppressive dicatatorships in over 30 countries over the course of the cold war. The Soviets didn't aid and abet 36 of the most brutal right-wing dictatorships in an attempt to prevent "domino effect."

Russia's perestroika reforms toward state capitalism is said to be the biggest tragedy of the last century and was marked by the deaths of millions in Russia and satellite countries as those countries were sold an economic plan that was more typical of 1920's America and 1980's CHile than resembling anything that the richest countries in the world ever implemented.

In bygone days of imperialism, money followed might and power. With state capitalism, the reverse is true today.

Corporatism is an ambiguous term that has several meanings, but all pertain to corporations owned largely by private capital in a corporate lobby- style market economy.

[ 24 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

That you think otherwise suggests that you are an unreconstructed Stalinist.

[ 24 November 2006: Message edited by: Left Turn ]

I'm not saying Soviet Union didn't experience birth pangs as per every other economic and political system in history. We can point out the flaws and mistakes made by any economic-political arrangement for hours on end and still not understand that there were clear differences between two separate and distinct economic systems.

The inequality that existed under Stalinism was similar to what existed in the western world of the 1930's, to put those times in perspective. The world didn't know anything better at that time in the first half of the last century.

But inequality, especially around democratic "state-capitalist" first and third worlds today, is unprecedented. Soviet politburo members did not come close to owning the private wealth holdings of todays multi-billionaires, like: Bill Gates, British royalty, Saudi oil sheiks, Walton family, Warren Buffet, E.P. Taylor, Irving's, Thomson's, Sobey's, Jodrey's, or the rest of a long list of individually wealthy people with unprecedented wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority today, not to mention Russia's new billionaire oligarchs since the criminal selloff of state assets and means of production into private hands during the dark days of perestroika reforms toward "state-capitalism".

[ 24 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Left Turn:
Obviously, your definition of "state capitalism" differs from mine. You appear to take "state capitalism" to mean Capitalism with state regulation to ensure that the system doesn't collapse, and that wealth flows upwards, ie. the conservative nanny state.

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ie. Nazi Germany and post-WWII America to be exact. Both economies were driven by a military-industrial complex feeding off taxpayer-funded schemes for Keynesian militarism. "Keynesian" because of the nature of the economic stimulus it provided war capitalism oriented economies and using publicly-funded technological discoveries handed to a capitalist class for profiteering in a market economy.

Technology was and continues to be an important economic driver of state capitalism. Capitalists have tended to spend profits while relying on the theft of publicly-funded research to maintain competitive advantage over other capitalist nations. Competitiveness is another key aspect of state capitalist economies, but only certain kinds of competitiveness are encouraged, and all of it for the benefit of capitalists, shareholders of corporations and banking elite.

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I take "state capitalism" to mean a system in which the means of production are owned by the state, but in which workers do not have democratic control of the means of production, and where the government is run like a business.

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The Soviet Union was an island, so to speak. State-capitalist nations waged trade embargos against the USSR as well as lucrative wars on prospective communist nations attempting to rid themselves of oppressive rule. Stalin's war communism was based on the real threat of western aggression to put down the revolution. Had there been no aggression against the revolution, history would have turned out completely different in all likelihood. Perhaps the rational left in Russia would have won power and not the extremists under Stalin. But I believe that without someone like Stalin at the helm, Russia would more than likely have been taken over by Nazi Germany, the first "state-capitalist" nation of the last century, and who knows what might have transpired in that frightening scenario. After WWII, Russians believed that all western nations were state-capitalist and fascist in nature. Many Russians still believe this.

But in order to have state-capitalism, there need to be two things: an interventionist state, and a capitalist class of billionaires to live off the surplus value produced by workers as well as compound interest.

[ 25 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:
But in order to have state-capitalism, there need to be two things: an interventionist state, and a capitalist class of billionaires to live off the surplus value produced by workers as well as compound interest.

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Fidel, your definition of "state capitalism" seems to just mean modern day capitalism then. Every capitalist state is "interventionist" on behalf of its elites. You're right that no purely laissez-faire capitalist state exists (and probably never has). It applies to your beloved "Nordic model" as it does to the US or UK.

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Originally posted by Lord Palmerston:

You're right that no purely laissez-faire capitalist state exists (and probably never has). It applies to your beloved "Nordic model" as it does to the US or UK.

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But it did exist. Capitalists prefer not to talk about what failed around the western world after a 30 year-long experiment ended in thousands of financial institutions declaring bankruptcy and wide-spread poverty a hallmark of state-capitalism as it existed then. 1929 stock market crash was the last of a series of historical crises born by laissez-faire capitalism with one exception in particular: the Chicago School of Economics experiment in laissez-faire capitalism, which failed almost as dramatically in 1980's Chile. Back to the 1930's.

Enter JM Keynes, a classic Liberal economist who consulted socialists in Sweden and Russia on how to save capitalism from itself, and voila! State capitalism was born in Hitler's Germany, and then with New Deal socialism under FDR. What came into effect in New Deal America was a mixed market economy with newly forged social services handled by the federal government. Life became so much more tolerable in North America over the next three decades during a time of unparalleled prosperity based on material acquisitiveness and economic theory based on consumerism in what would become the single most oil-dependent economy in the world.

Of course, the American capitalists quickly changed the goals of New Deal socialism to benefit a wealthy capitalist class. Europeans, many Americans themselves, and apparently some Canadians, still don't understand what the economic drivers were and continue to be for American state-capitalism to this day.

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While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not" -- Karl Polanyi

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Originally posted by Lord Palmerston:
State capitalism has generally meant how Left Turn and Steppenwolf Allende have described, as much as you'd like to insist the Soviet Union and Mao's China were socialist.

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That's fine, you people are a tough crowd and are not easily persuaded. There is something I want to ask rabble comrades wrt state capitalism though.

Comrade commissars:

If a country like Russia, which has endured perestroika reforms toward state-capitalism characterized by criminal transfer of some 70 percent of state assets and natural resources into the hands of a nouveau billionaire class of capitalists, then how would Russian workers go about re-claiming the means of production and resources by democratic process ?.

[ 25 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Social democracy is supposed to be pluralistic and seeks compromise via the democratic process, collective bargaining, public debate and any number of one-on-one relationships. The others are both absolutist and undemocratic, allowing compromise (or competition) only within highly controlled hierarchies. Broader cooperation is otherwise achieved through coercion, deception, or social conditioning.

Only interesting question here is how this 'state capitalism' actually differs from what we used to call 'communism' in practice, or what's now being equated with democratic socialism.

[ 25 November 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

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amd workers control of production

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Originally posted by Lord Palmerston:
I don't get it...you're saying the Soviet Union wasn't state capitalist because American elites were wealthier?

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That's already been debated, and I can't see the point in trying to convince babblers otherwise. They've laid out a 1920's definition for state capitalism, and they aren't budging. It's all state capitalism from their POV, which is valid from their perspective.

So back to the question: How would Russia's proletariat today go about gaining control of the means of production and natural wealth of the country through democratic means ?. I've purposely left out references to Russia's new billionaire class of capitalists for readability. We'll just refer to them as the "owners of the means of production" in Russia for now.

[ 25 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Biggest difference as I see it is that social democracy (as it's supposed to be, not as its practiced now by the likes of Tony Blair) operates on the principle that functioning societies need investment in both public and private sectors, as well as some democratic regulation, which helps to balance out the concentration of power and wealth. Old Soviet style communism and neo-liberalism, OTOH, both insist we can only have the one or the other, leading to more of the same except under different ideological names.

"Corporatism" as I'd define it tends to lead to one or the other extreme BEcause either form says the judgement, will and participation of the citzenry should Always be mediated Through larger corporate or expert groupings (or The party) while social democracy insists on more direct democratic processes (Not "Direct Democracy" per se) even if some public or private instituions may remain less than democratic in operation themselves. The citizen doesn't have to submit to corporate dictates in *all* spheres of life, like it's getting in North America now. The citizen in a SD state remain the sovereign power and source of legitimacy, which can then intervene into Other spheres if needed through public debate, watchdog organizations, democratic regulation, redistributive taxation, NGOs, independent media outlets, independent courts, or their elected representatives. Other more limited organizations and undemocratic interest groups can't intervene in certain central functions of democracy.

I would agree when you say social democracy is in a crisis now, because the wealthiest sectors of society have no intention of playing along anymore, and the public was conned into weakening our balancing public sector and legislature. I just don't think there's any other solution to this than more aggressive social democrat leadership and more public participation through democratic reforms. (genuine reforms, not easy to manipulate Direct Democracy) Less concentrated media is essential too.

That may just be My Opinion, but I'm sticking to it...

[ 25 November 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

A study tour of Sweden and Norway recently said they found less privatization of publicly-funded health care than was expected.

Swedes' U-turn on private health care

There was a lot of talk about Scandinvian and EU countries suffering high unemployment rates for several years. But there are economists now who say that "rigid labour market" economies tend to have lower unemployment rates on average than the U.S. and Canada with our so-called "flexible labour." I think this is another area where the certain EU and Scandinavian countries are feeling even less pressure to neo-Liberalize themselves.

It seems that Fidel is taking a position on this issue that is reminiscent of many Leninist and Stalinist groups that is based on mostly factless romanticism about the Soviet Union, China, etc., and the desire to defend these economies at any cost, out of fear that not doing so might weaken the case for further socialist reforms in other parts of the globe—despite the fact that these economies, and the regimes over them, largely by their own admission, were/are predominantly state capitalist.

Left turn’s definition of state capitalism is essentially correct:

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I take "state capitalism" to mean a system in which the means of production are owned by the state, but in which workers do not have democratic control of the means of production, and where the government is run like a business. Where increasing the total output of the economy takes precedence over the welfare of workers. This is the system that Stalin implemented in the Soviet Union.

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Actually it was instituted by Lenin and Trotsky and their supporters, supposedly as a transitional economic measure, as shown by the these people’s historic documents, business plans and economic analysis I have posted on other threads here, and further centralized and made fully profit-oriented/maximum wealth accumulating and fiscally austere by the Stalinist regime and later replicated to varying degrees in China, Eastern Europe, etc. with expansion of Stalinist imperialism (again as shown in other threads). So, despite the romanticism and rhetoric out there, there is no question what so ever that the Soviet Union and similar economies were/are predominantly capitalist. To say different is wholly wrong and increasingly being seen openly as fallacy.

But Fidel’s definition is not entirely wrong either:

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You appear to take "state capitalism" to mean Capitalism with state regulation to ensure that the system doesn't collapse, and that wealth flows upwards, ie. the conservative nanny state.

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By this definition, all forms of capitalism are state capitalism, since throughout history capitalist economies of every variety have relied on some sort of central coercive and regulatory authority to keep the working population down, ensure that the corporate proprietors, be they elite capital groups, private individuals or state bureaucrats, continue to expropriate wealth from the working people who create it and maintain their undemocratic control over it, and provide safety checks and balances to prevent (or try to prevent) economic collapse.

--the democratic control of businesses and other enterprises either directly by the workers in them, or by the communities and/or consumers they serve, or a combination of these.

--sustainable economics based on meeting individual and community need as determined by each

--long-term well-being of the community and its ecology as a whole.

--social measure of how people improve themselves or how free they are

--linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour (as opposed to exploiting others to get it).

--fostering of mutual liberty and equal rights to promote “the free development of each is the free development of all.”

The term was reportedly first used in 1816 in the Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark by Robert Owen, a former industrial corporate manager who studied the workings of communes and guilds in Europe and helped start the Home Colony Movement a series of self-governing democratic cooperative townships (which is the historic definition of a Commune, where the term “communism” comes from) based on the above mentioned economic practices. These successes inspired other economists like Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, who wrote [I]The Communist Manifesto]/I] calling on working people to develop this type of economy across the globe.

Similar definitions are from the Socialist Party of Great Britain founded in 1904, but which traces its roots back to the Chartist Party of the early 1800s.

Or the World Socialist Movement, which in various forms goes back to the First International

Or the Socialist Labor Party, the oldest current socialist party in the US, going back to 1876.

Obviously, these economics and the movements to achieve them, or at least relate to them in some practical way (labour and co-op movements, communes or “fee towns,” etc,) pre-date the term by many centuries

Again, "Communism," previous to 1835 was known as “communalism,” comes from the word "commune," which defines the numerous cooperative democratically self-reliant townships throughout central Europe, and the Communist Manifesto was written to advocate this form of democratic economy and government on a global scale (i.e.; socialism)

Communes were set up largely by Christian Socialist groups, like the Quakers, Icarians, Phalanx movements, and the secular Home Colony and New Jerusalem movements, and also by many trade and craft guilds (pre-industrial style trade unions), as well as anarchist farmer groups, like the Gleaners and the Diggers, throughout the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution.

“Social democracy” was first coined by Karl Marx in 1858 to describe the broad-based political and economic movements, including labour, cooperative, pro-democracy and nescient urban ecology movements, seeking to develop socialism or at least pushing for socialistic reforms to the oppressive capitalist economy—the idea of bringing democracy to every aspect of society, especially the economy. Marx saw this as a natural self-organizing of people that would over time fulfill what the Communist Manifesto had called for.

Although socialistic political parties had been around for over a century, the first one using the term “social democratic” started in Austria in 1860, and later becoming a nation-wide organization across both Austria and Germany in 1874.

The whole practice of evolutionary socialism via economic and social reforms developed from there.

While most social democratic/socialist/labour etc. parties (including the NDP) still have the full establishment of a socialistic economy as their ultimate goals in their constitutions, since World War II, most of them have been largely bogged down in left-liberal Keynesian reforms and various state capitalist ventures, to the point where many have seriously compromised their ability to actively push for any substantial changes beyond this.

In fact I think its a bit of a hold over from capitalist thinking, and people have trouble concieving of economies differenly than in capitalist terms. Hence the term capitalism shows up in the phrase.

I prefer the Command Economy.

The primary difference between the soviet economy and a capitalist economy, is that capitalist economies function in relationship to the the market. The market did no exist except in the underground in the USSR, therefore is wasn't a capitalist economy in its officially functioning form.

As far as economy goes, I am not sure that in a purely economic sense whether or not there is democratic control over the state businesses is really relevant, as in Left Turns definition, as to wether or not it is "capitalist." Does worker conttrol over the economy mean absolutely that the exchange of goods through the market will cease?

Isn't it possible to concieve of a system where there is some kind of functioning market, yet workers control the means of production. Small business people control their own means of production, without hiring labour, and function in the market. The same thing could happen on a larger scale with co-operative or communalized ventures.

It doesn't seem to be mutually exclusive.

Just like the relative level of wealth between the elite classes, compared between societies does not determine whether a country is capitalist or not, I think the level of democracy is an indicator is not a factor either.

What is key is the system through which goods are ordered and exchanged.

Still, and however, the thing is that a primary feature of capitalism, in particular the marxist definition of capitalism includes the market as the primary driving force of the economy, and the market is more or less absent from the functioning of the economy, so in the Marxist frame, or in any of the mainstream conceptions of capitalism the market is essential.

I don't see how we can get around this fact. Therefore I don't think we can call it capitalist per se.

If anything, the USSR bears more resembelance to a mercantile economy than modern capitalist economies, but even that doesn't really jive. So yeah, I call it the command economy, because I think that expresses something useful about how the company functioned.

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

About democratic control: While democratic control doesn't automatically produce socialism, I don't think true socialism can exist in the absence of democratic control. I think that some of the worker controlled factories in Argentina are more socialist than any factories in the Soviet Union ever were.

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: Left Turn ]

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Originally posted by Left Turn:
By my definition, all "state capitalist" economies are de facto command economies.

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Command economies, yes. But since the death of Vladimir Lenin and laissez-faire "state-capitalism" around the western world some five years later, the countries which used to practice "state capitalism" have changed dramatically. As was pointed out before, there are "state capitalist" command economies around the democratic capitalist third world which would qualify that definition in a crude sense in that they have very little next to no mixed market economy. Some countries have a very small percentage of workers in public sector jobs except for military and subcontractors to the military. Some state-capitalist countries typically have none of or a stark defficiency to varying degrees of the following:

1. a socialized pension plan for the aged
2. publicly owned electrical power generation, telephone system, railways, telephones etc
3. state-subsidized agriculture
4. a national housing plan
5. a national health care system that works
6. a sizable public sector employing a significant percentage of workforce
7. a social welfare system and unemployment insurance
8. publicly owned and taxpayer funded libraries, schools, water and sewage systems

There does exist a running experiment in "state-capitalism" in several countries around the world, but there are no fully homogenous "state capitalist" economies among richest first world nations - not since 1929 and the "state capitalist" world which Lenin knew before jotting down his view of state capitalism.

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About democratic control: While democratic control doesn't automatically produce socialism, I don't think true socialism can exist in the absence of democratic control.

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Ah! Democratic control. So this is one other thing that we should be concerned about. If a country like Canada sells off its crown corporations and valuable assets and wealth that go with them, what's left for future "democratically-elected" governments to manage on behalf of a socialist electorate ?.

What happens when elected governments point to NAFTA and GATS and WTO rules as the explanation for their impotence to do anything but hand over our stuff to marauding capitalists who are saving up to be unimaginably wealthy at the expense of our common good ?.

How would Russian worker's go about gaining democratic control of Russia's natural wealth and means of production after 70 percent of state assets and natural wealth is now legally in the hands of an infinitessimally tiny billionaire class of capitalist oligarchs, about 13 or more ?.

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Left Turn:
Cueball, the Soviet Union was both a command economy and and "state capitalist" economy. By my definition, all "state capitalist" economies are de facto command economies.

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While I know that the International Socialists and a few theorists contend that the USSR was "state capitalist" I don't think this is particularly accurate, particularly not after the demise of the NEP as there was really no internal market in the country - and in any case the term is somewhat amorphous and not very helpful.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:

While most social democratic/socialist/labour etc. parties (including the NDP) still have the full establishment of a socialistic economy as their ultimate goals in their constitutions, since World War II, most of them have been largely bogged down in left-liberal Keynesian reforms and various state capitalist ventures, to the point where many have seriously compromised their ability to actively push for any substantial changes beyond this.

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But we have Liberals today who are no where near Keynesian in practice. Dalton McGuinty is more Herbert Hoover than he is FDR. Keynes might as well have been a Marxist-Leninist as far as Conservatives were concerned then and now. And there is no such thing as a Liberal today.

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the reason why so many of them, to one degree or another have been in retreat in the wake of so-called "globalization" corporate capitalist style in the last 20 years.

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Retreat ?. I think the NDP has fought hard against neo-Liberal style reforms. The NDP has helped fend off Mike Harris' scheme for privatization to a certain degree with Pee-3's, and the Liberal Party in Ontario is having a tough time selling AFPee's. We've endured what was probably the shortest-lived experiment in dregulation-privatization of electrical power distribution in history here in Ontario during Harris' uncommon nonsense revolution, and the Liberals want to carry on with the same agenda but can't for a lack of results under Harris-Eves, and for a lack of public support today. The NDP may be outmatched by corporate money, but they never throw in the towel. The right has had the momentum since 1980, but they're losing it now. Time changes everything, and a hundred Liberals-Conservatives will always be evenly opposed with just a handful of NDP'ers calling them on their deeply flawed ideology.

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Isn't it possible to concieve of a system where there is some kind of functioning market, yet workers control the means of production.

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Originally posted by Cueball:
Isn't it possible to concieve of a system where there is some kind of functioning market, yet workers control the means of production.

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Argentinians supported Nestor Kirchner when he campaigned against neo-Liberalism and bureaucrats involved with previous brutal right-wing dictatorship. Kirchner is showing his true colours now with supporting police crackdowns on the piqueteros movement. The workers want to government appropriation of the abandoned factories and hotels from owners who still owe workers thousands of dollars in back wages and pension funds.

Cuba is experimenting with worker cooperatives today, and in spite of the U.S.'s efforts to step up the dated cold war embargo on the Cuban people, Cubans are proving that worker's cooperatives work.

I see Cueball is asking the most thought provoking question on this thread today. Anyone ?.

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Left Turn:
Cueball, the Soviet Union was both a command economy and and "state capitalist" economy. By my definition, all "state capitalist" economies are de facto command economies.

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What about the accumulation of capital. Sure, people managed to accumlates "things," such as consumers goods, and manipulated privilage so that they might have, say, free access to a Dacha, but this is not the same as being able to liquidate ones assets, and being able to invest the finincial return from those assets in new business ventures.

A) Cuba is not a democracy.

B) Cuba is what we'd call 'state capitalist'.

a) This automobile is not an orange.

b) We call this Automobile an Chevrolet.

Question, how did the Orange get into it?

Questions of economy are different that the dialogue on the issue of rights. As we have seen there is not necesarily anything democratic about capitalism. Capitalism, a system of organization of the economy can operate in almost any system of government, as has been proven time and time again.

A. We're glad Cuba doesn't resemble most demockeracies

B. Cuba is socialist

C. "Haiti is the freest trading nation in the Caribbean" -- Warshington [read "state capitalist shithole"]

A) How democratic is Laos?

B) How socialist is Laos?

C) Are its citizens better off than Americ...no wait...Amerikkkans?

D) Which country has more 'state capitalism' Amerikkka or Laos?

E) Which country is more corporatist? Amerikkka or Laos?

[ 26 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Cueball:

The primary difference between the soviet economy and a capitalist economy, is that capitalist economies function in relationship to the the market. The market did no exist except in the underground in the USSR, therefore is wasn't a capitalist economy in its officially functioning form.

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On the other hand if the USSR had been truly socialist production would have been in the hands of workers, and would have supplied what they really wanted.

I happen to think that the term "State Capitalism" doesn't imply a market, the way the term "Capitalism " by itself does. To me, the term "State Capitlism" implies both the absence of a market, and the absence of Socialism. "Capitalism" and "State Capitalism" stand in opposition both to one another, and to Socialism.

Sweezy outlines a history of radical/Marxist economic analysis of the past 100 years. Whether we call something "state" capitalism or not we ought to make use of all the tools and useful terminology at our disposal.

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Meanwhile, academic economists in the West finally got around to analyzing monopolistic and imperfectly competitive markets (especially Edward Chamberlin and Joan Robinson), but for a long time these efforts were confined to the level of individual firms and industries. The so-ca1led Keynesian revolution which transformed macroeconomic theory in the 1930s was largely untouched by these advances in the theory of markets, continuing to rely on the time-honored assumption of atomistic competition.

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I think Keynesianism(market socialism) made profound changes to state capitalism, from measuring economic output to creation of credit and central banking policies. The changes were extensive. Keynes really did save state capitalism from itself.

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Originally posted by brookmere:

Capitalism depends on market pricing. This is the reason why the USSR had such chronic shortages of consumer goods, wasted so much energy, and had so many other economic absurdities.

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Cold war embargos. State-capitalists in the western world colluded in an even more strategic way than Adam Smith said was possible. For instance, Cadbury's and Sunkist had partial global monopolies on chocolate and citrus and refused to trade with the USSR. Together with cold war propaganda pumped into the Soviet block of nations that everyone in the west lived in mansions and drove luxury cars, the lack of chocolate, oranges and other food staples in shops created an overall sense among Russians that communism had failed them.

Unlike American citizens, Canadians have the personal freedom to travel to Cuba and observe the effects of an obsolete and mean-spirited cold war embargo waged on an island nation of people for the sake of right-wing ideology. The effects of a several nation embargo of Cuba was most evident in the 1990's.

The 30 year experiment in state capitalism in the west experienced no such trade embargos and yet collapsed on its own in 1929. The Chilean experiment in laissez-faire state capitalism was even shorter, just sixteen years.

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The USSR was neither capitalist nor socialist. It fact it was feudalist, just like its predecessor, the Russian Empire. All of the institutions of the USSR were really based on Russian feudalism.

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The unindustrialized economy of Tsarist Russia was imperialist and propped up by peasant labour. Breadlines were just as typical of tsarist Russia.By the 1970's, bread in Russia was said to be so cheap that children used loaves as soccer balls.

[ 27 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Fidel:The unindustrialized economy of Tsarist Russia was imperialist and propped up by peasant labour.

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[ 27 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

A man was arrested for running around Red Square yelling, "Brezhnev is an idiot!" He got 20 years plus a day.

"What was the 'day' for?"

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Originally posted by unionist:
Today's Russians express the difference this way:

"Under socialism we had money but there was nothing to buy. Now we have no money and there is lots to buy."

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Originally posted by Left Turn:

I happen to think that the term "State Capitalism" doesn't imply a market, the way the term "Capitalism " by itself does. To me, the term "State Capitlism" implies both the absence of a market, and the absence of Socialism. "Capitalism" and "State Capitalism" stand in opposition both to one another, and to Socialism.

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Well if you are just talking about "absences" you are really not saying very much.

[ 27 November 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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M-Review: One of the more bizarre futures markets was created in 2003 by the U.S. Government’s Department of Defense along with a private company—betting on the likelihood of assassinations and terrorist attacks. As then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said on the Senate floor: “I couldn’t believe that we would actually commit $8 million to create a Web site that would encourage investors to bet on futures involving terrorist attacks and public assassinations...I can’t believe that anybody would seriously propose that we trade in death...How long would it be before you saw traders investing in a way that would bring about the desired result?” The uproar resulted in the canceling of the government’s participation in the program.

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Further, trillions of dollars (I think it is up to 2 trillion a day!) splash around in the world currency "markets" every day. The folks over at Monthly Review call this "the giant casino".

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The magnitude of speculation in all manner of financial “instruments” such as stocks, futures, derivatives, and currency is truly astonishing. Magdoff and Sweezy were clearly astounded by this tendency when they first sounded the alarm. Today financial analysts frequently pretend that finance can levitate forever at higher and higher levels independently of the underlying productive economy. Stock markets and currency trading (betting that one nation’s currency will change relative to another) have become little more than giant casinos where the number and values of transactions have increased far out of proportion to the underlying economy. For example, in 1975, 19 million stock shares traded daily on the New York Stock Exchange. By 1985 the volume had reached 109 million and by 2006, 1,600 million shares with a value of over $60 billion (http://www.nyse.com). Even larger is the daily trading on the world currency markets, which has gone from $18 billion a day in 1977, to the current average of $1.8 trillion a day! That means that every twenty-four days the dollar volume of currency trading equals the entire world’s annual GDP!

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John Bellamy Foster over at Monthly Review has written the Review of the Month on the subject of "Monopoly-Finance Capital". This is the tentative term he uses to characterize the current stage of capitalism. The essay marks the 40th anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966).

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JB Foster: On the one hand, it is clear that the system has not yet found a way to move forward with respect to its driving force: the process of capital accumulation. The stagnation impasse described in Monopoly Capital has worsened: the underlying disease has spread and deepened while new corrosive symptoms have come into being. On the other hand, the system has found new ways of reproducing itself, and capital has paradoxically even prospered within this impasse, through the explosive growth of finance, or what Sweezy was to refer to as “The Triumph of Financial Capital” (Monthly Review, June 1994). I will provisionally call this new hybrid phase of the system “monopoly-finance capital.”1

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I like Foster's honesty here. Nobody has it all figured out.

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The financialization of monopoly capital, it is now apparent, represented a whole new historical period—one that no one had any inkling of in the 1960s, and that, according to existing economic doctrine, both mainstream and Marxian, remains largely inexplicable today

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As I noted on another thread, I am happy to support the right kind of scientific partisanship and I hardly consider that to be "totalitarian", the subject of magical thinking, or akin to religious fundamentalism.

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Foster: Four decades after the publication of Monopoly Capital the contradictions of capitalism depicted there have metamorphosed into altogether more destructive forms. There is no existing economic theory that adequately explains the phase of monopoly-finance capital. But the specific answer to “the irrational system” that Baran and Sweezy provided in the closing sentences of their book (which they dedicated to their friend Che) is now more pertinent than ever: “What we in the United States need is historical perspective, courage to face the facts, and faith in mankind and its future. Having these, we can recognize our moral obligation to devote ourselves to fighting against an evil and destructive system which maims, oppresses, and dishonors those who live under it, and which threatens devastation and death to millions...around the globe.”

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Again, to what end? Will workers be de facto share holders? Will they produce competing television ads for toothpaste? Will they continue to strip the oceans clean of life so that tuna can sell for 89 cents a tin?

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I don't know if there was no response because because there is no answer to the question or because it was interpreted that I was just trolling.

In any case, at this site, http://stangoff.com/?p=423 Stan Goff turns his back on Marxism. He has a number of reasons. I will encourage you to read it for yourself, but here is one excerpt:

"It is only possible ... to effect the basis for any genuine and sustainable resistance movement in the United States by first attending to the question of local community independence, beginning with the material basics: food security, water security, energy security, acess to learning, and a health infrastructure."

May I say, HURRAY!

It is not that I am anti-Marxist so much as I reject another ideology that will carry on the same project of civilization but for a different set of beneficiaries that, given human development, will be hierarchical based and ultimately elitist (be it a capitalist, party, or other elite membership system). The problem is not how we manage civilization, it is civilization itself.

[ 01 December 2006: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

My initial remark is that he seems to be describing left sectarianism rather well. I'm not sure, however, whether that should lead to a "renunciation" of marxism or something else. The failure and collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, doesn't lead me to question my fidelity to my social class or the cause of peace. It just means another way has to be found.

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Frustrated Mess: To what end? Once workers have control of the means of production, what will they do with it?

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The whole idea is to deepen and broaden democracy to expand beyond a mere political/voting notion. To give people control over their own lives and a more planned and sensible approach to society than hitherto. Given the range of global problems in our curent world some would say that this is a necessity. Furthermore, the gigantic waste, the sales effort, the stupefying marketing and advertising, the speculative rather than productive business activity that current monopoly-finance capital is awash in, and so on of our current society could and ought be better spent in other ways. It makes no sense to live in a world where some are billionaires, able to afford private space travel ... and others don't have clean drinking water, a roof over their head, or enough nutrition to keep mind and body together. Socialism is just a means to those ends.

Furthermore, the ultimate aim of socialism is to change how people relate to each other. For society to be socially transparent with relations of equality and so on. And that's so radical many people can't even fathom it, as the late John Lennon so ably pointed out in his famous song, Imagine. But radical or not, it makes more sense than that "history has come to an end", that "there is no alternative", or that we have reached some ne plus ultra beyond which we're not able to go.

On Stan Goff ...

The only "organizational form" of marxism that I'm aware of are political parties that aim for working class government or socialism. If he's had enough of that, fine. I don't see why it's such a big deal. He's got other priorities, like child-rearing, and so on. Why make such a fuss? There's enough difference of opinion about alternatives, there are enough ways to struggle for radical reforms to make room for everyone. Not everyone has to be a salesman for socialism. Some are better than others at this. And, I think, some organizational forms of marxism are better than others; some are more sectarian than others. Goff outlines this a little too well as I think he's somewhat guilty of the same in his exposition.

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I am herein announcing and explaining my definitive rejection of Marxism in its current organizational forms, be they called Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist or Maoist.

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If the organization he belonged to was like a church then fine. That way they won't try to recruit him again. Otherwise, what's the point here?

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What happened? Why is there no organized left with the attention and support of broad masses of people in the US?

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I could quote from Stan Goff's own blog, further down: "An imperial working class has imperial privilege". There are more lengthy answers, of course. A lot of people struggle with this question. And many partial answers have been formulated. It's been shown, for example, that even in the US people will support many of the constituent aspects of socialism but will get stuck on the word itself. Abandoning ship doesn't seem like a particularly effective way of answering the question, however.

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The history of these organizations has been, for more than six decades minimum, a string of failures, punctuated by periodic successes only in mass work that was self-organizing outside Marxism to some extent anyway. I have come to believe this is a failure of the structure and of the over-reaching scope of these organizations.

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There are policies today that once were preached only by communists and the like. They have a history of being far ahead of others. The anti-apartheid movement in this country, to take just one example, relied upon the "very" left for many years long before other less radical elements joined. We're talking decades here. The mainstream media, and the public, treated the ANC as a terrorist organization. The strength of the anti-apartheid movement in this country, and other countries outside South Africa, made a major and unforgettable contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle as current South African leaders are happy to acknowledge and point out.

There's a slew of other policies and movements that have relied on "the very" left as well: the trade union movement, the peace movement, the women's movement. That's hardly a "string of failures".

On the "over-reaching scope" - To use my previous expression, there's got to be "salesmen for socialism". That is, if you think that's a realizable and worthwhile goal. Who else but such organizations are going to be such salesmen? Other than independent socialists, I mean, who are likely to be much less effective by virtue of their numbers and organizational strength.

My own understanding leads me to conclude that these organizations don't devote nearly enough time and effort to learning. It's all about activism. And that can be exhausting and the cause of burn out. There really is so much to do.

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Marx himself began his career preoccupied not with questions of economics, but of human happiness.

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Ha ha. Karl Marx as Deepak Chopra. That's pretty fucking funny. In my view, however, it's a steaming pile. Marx was radicalized by the practical questions that he faced as editor of the Rhenish Gazette and the events of Europe in the 1840's. It was in the offices of that paper that Marx met his lifelong friend and comrade, Fred Engels, who in some ways came to his conclusions about society before his friend Karl did. Initially, Marx was an anti-communist. He evolved. Marx wrote enough about the evolution of his views to find this stuff pretty easily.

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The stagnation impasse described in Monopoly Capital has worsened: the underlying disease has spread and deepened while new corrosive symptoms have come into being. On the other hand, the system has found new ways of reproducing itself, and capital has paradoxically even prospered within this impasse, through the explosive growth of finance, or what Sweezy was to refer to as “The Triumph of Financial Capital” (Monthly Review, June 1994). I will provisionally call this new hybrid phase of the system “monopoly-finance capital.”1

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I realize that the degree and depth of speculative investment in money markets with this new capitalism is unprecedented, but isn't it really just a return to older European style economy I once read termed as the Anglo-Dutch Liberal economy based on a central banking model and controlled by a European clique of financiers ?. The American economy and government, for instance, was supposed to repesent a break with the old world in that the economy was supposed to serve the welfare of the nation and people, not a cabal of financier oligarchs.

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The failure and collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, doesn't lead me to question my fidelity to my social class or the cause of peace. It just means another way has to be found.

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He certainly hasn't rejected Marx...

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The Marxist method (as opposed to doctrine) of interpreting these issues led me to address that latter question with deeper ones still? What do we mean when we say “organized”? Who do we mean when we say “masses”?

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Originally posted by Cueball:
I think that the term "state capitalism" is essentially useless.

In fact I think its a bit of a hold over from capitalist thinking, and people have trouble concieving of economies differenly than in capitalist terms. Hence the term capitalism shows up in the phrase.

I prefer the Command Economy.

The primary difference between the soviet economy and a capitalist economy, is that capitalist economies function in relationship to the the market. The market did no exist except in the underground in the USSR, therefore is wasn't a capitalist economy in its officially functioning form.

As far as economy goes, I am not sure that in a purely economic sense whether or not there is democratic control over the state businesses is really relevant, as in Left Turns definition, as to wether or not it is "capitalist." Does worker conttrol over the economy mean absolutely that the exchange of goods through the market will cease?

Isn't it possible to concieve of a system where there is some kind of functioning market, yet workers control the means of production. Small business people control their own means of production, without hiring labour, and function in the market. The same thing could happen on a larger scale with co-operative or communalized ventures.

It doesn't seem to be mutually exclusive.

Just like the relative level of wealth between the elite classes, compared between societies does not determine whether a country is capitalist or not, I think the level of democracy is an indicator is not a factor either.

What is key is the system through which goods are ordered and exchanged.

Still, and however, the thing is that a primary feature of capitalism, in particular the marxist definition of capitalism includes the market as the primary driving force of the economy, and the market is more or less absent from the functioning of the economy, so in the Marxist frame, or in any of the mainstream conceptions of capitalism the market is essential.

I don't see how we can get around this fact. Therefore I don't think we can call it capitalist per se.

If anything, the USSR bears more resembelance to a mercantile economy than modern capitalist economies, but even that doesn't really jive. So yeah, I call it the command economy, because I think that expresses something useful about how the company functioned.

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Good thread. I don't think 'state capitalism' is a very accurate term either, as the Soviet form of 'capitalism' was missing certain essential elements which both left and right traditionally agree mean big C Capitalism. Private ownership, profit motives and supply and demand versus centralized 'planning' for starters. If concepts of ground level markets and personal property however can be separated from Either reality of Privately owned and operated oligarchies then the left might be able to start working together on economic fundamentals again. Or at least start talking again. Good stuff.

[ 02 December 2006: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

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No market... Very limited acumulation of capital.... Let me ask you this, what was "capitalist" about it?

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Well, first off, Cueball, these two assumptions you make about the Soviet economy are not accurate.

As the documents posted on other threads show, there was and continues to be huge wealth accumulation, and dictatorial control over that wealth, by various corporate/bureaucratic cliques:
According to what I have researched, the Stalinist regime boasted its first post-revolution millionaire, a senior executive director over a series of steel and industrial plants, in 1934. By 1948, when Tony Cliff wrote the book The Nature of Stalinist Russia there were over 600 multi-millionaires.

By 1991, CPSU reportedthere were over 60,000 multi-millionaire capitalists with over $60 billion dollars in bank accounts and private investments across the globe—and that does not include the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of institutional investments and bank loans to countries and corporations. This is one way, according to socialist economist and five-time US Presidential candidate Eric Hass’ book[URL=] StalinistImperialism: the economic forces behind Russian Expansionism the Soviet elite used to maintain its imperialist influence over other areas of the globe.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, it’s gotten much worse. But according to Soviet figures quoted by Hass, the income gap between workers and bosses in the 1930s was almost as bad as today—senior corporate executives and bureaucrats making up to 1300 times as much as the average Soviet worker.

Second, in terms of there being “no market,” the truth is there clearly was a market, albeit a highly regulated and monopolized one—the standard of any so-called “command economy.”
If we look to Soviet documents, both in Lenin: Industrial Management under a State Capitalist Monopoly Framework or the 1930 corporatist model (that replaced the NEP) in Stalin on State Capitalism to Close the Historic Gap Between Russia and the Westwe see that while prices on many goods and services were pre-set at the retail level, it’s clear they were calculated based on a guaranteed profit mark-up. In addition, if senior managers and bosses over the various businesses and commissions were able to find “cost efficiencies” in speeding up production or otherwise increasing that profit margin they got to keep part of that bonus, with the other part shared with the central state apparatus.

The encouraged bosses to exploit workers at a harsher rate, pushing down labour costs to keep more of the cash themselves. This is a key way various elites got rich (or even richer, since many of the senior corporate bosses were in fact pre-revolution capitalists who were appointed to head the newly nationalized firms and ventures).

Add these practices together with the Stalinist regime’s ruthless drive to slash wages and subordinate local consumer markets to give priority to much more lucrative international markets (a standard practice right up until 1991), and you have a full prescription for a capitalistic economy.

Third “command economies,” as shown, are generally as capitalistic as so-called “free market” ones, since they operate pretty much like cartels. At the international and global level, we certainly see key fundamental sectors of the capitalist economy operating as cartels.

Oil, gas and other energy, as well as many base resource commodities and international finance and banking operate largely on this basis: various corporations and governments pre-determine how much will be produced and marketed at a pre-determined price schedule (depending on what part of the world and what time of year they are sold in).

And again, like in the Soviet era, much of the profit these bosses make comes out of the “cost efficiencies” (I hate that term) they can attain within the pre-set price schedule.

It’s long established capitalistic practice.

[ 02 December 2006: Message edited by: Steppenwolf Allende ]

The fact that their may have been indivdual operators whom made millions, does not speak at all to the issue of the nature of the Soviet economy. The Emperor Trajan was an extremely rich person, probably rich in a sense that comparatively speaking Bill Gates would envy. This does not mean that Imperial Rome was "capitalist."

Imperial Rome was feudal in its economic system.

Further, suggesting that having state trading cartels makes a system capitalist igores the fact that "mercantalism," basically the last stage of feudal economics was in fact basicly a system of cartels. Again, this is feudal, not capitalist.

The very fact that these millions of these millionaires appeared mostly in overseas bank accounts, and were not present in the internal financial system of the USSR, explicitly undermines your arguement, as it indicates that there was no state sanctioned mechanism in the USSR capable of handling the fundamental mechanisms of capitalist economics.

No systems by which banks lend money to individuals, or joint stock corporations, so that they could invest in their own business ventures.

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While I know that the International Socialists and a few theorists contend that the USSR was "state capitalist" I don't think this is particularly accurate, particularly not after the demise of the NEP as there was really no internal market in the country - and in any case the term is somewhat amorphous and not very helpful.

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First off, as said before, state capitalism isn’t a theory. It’s a fact—a common established form of capitalist economics practiced throughout the globe, including the former Soviet Union, China, etc. And, as shown in the previous post, there definitely was an internal market, albeit a highly regulated and monopolized one.

Keep in mind that despite what terminology academics might fight over, in fact every economy is in one way or another a market economy. If we use the generally established definition of a market as any forum or situation where people or organizations of some kind trade and exchange goods and services, then there’s no other way an economy of any kind can exist other than via a series of markets.

Remember, despite what the Fraser Institute and other liars say, capitalism isn’t the market. Rather, it is a series of economic prescriptions, philosophies and value judgments imposed on the market.

I have seen the article you posted here by Ted Grant, claiming, despite the legions of studies, documents and admissions by Soviet leaders, that the Soviet Union was basically socialist, before, and it’s based mostly on bogus rhetoric and sentimentalism.

Even he claims:

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…the capitalist laws of production will still exist under socialism (ETA just the use of the word “ender” shows how clued out he is), albeit in modified form

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So while he insists the Soviet Union supposedly wasn’t a state capitalist dominated economy, he admits that “capitalist laws of production will still exist ‘under’ socialism, albeit in modified form” is all he means by “socialism.”

Again, given the general historic definitions of socialism, an economy pretty much needs to have these dominant features:

--the democratic control of businesses and other enterprises either directly by the workers in them, or by the communities and/or consumers they serve, or a combination of these.

--sustainable economics based on meeting individual and community need as determined by each

--long-term well-being of the community and its ecology as a whole.

--social measure of how people improve themselves or how free they are

--linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour (as opposed to exploiting others to get it).

--fostering of mutual liberty and equal rights to promote “the free development of each is the free development of all.”

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:

Again, given the general historic definitions of socialism, an economy pretty much needs to have these dominant features:

--linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour (as opposed to exploiting others to get it).

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What happened to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."?

The central principle in any Marxist formulation of socialist society, is basicly that all persons are equally relevant to well being of the society as a whole, and that their labour is not quantified as having a specific market value, as the whole body of the people make up the complete value of the society to which all contributions are equally valued, however great or small. The dock worker is as important as the doctor, as they both require each others work in order to function.

The dock worker needs the doctor to set his broken limb, the doctor needs the dock worker to bring the wool which is used to make the bandages to heal the dock workers wound.

At least in that highly idealized aphorism that is the way it is.

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Keep in mind that despite what terminology academics might fight over, in fact every economy is in one way or another a market economy. If we use the generally established definition of a market as any forum or situation where people or organizations of some kind trade and exchange goods and services, then there’s no other way an economy of any kind can exist other than via a series of markets.

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This is not the way it worked in the Soviet economy. Yes there were markets for consumer goods, but actually not much of one for sevices. Further there was no market for steel, for instance.

The car factory did not go to the steel market and then bid on various lots of steel, what they did was they ordered it. "Commanded" it in fact based on the decisions of the planning committee.

There was no competative process of various companies purchasing steel off of one another, where the value of the steel was determined by supply and demand. What they did was they called up the management at the steel plant and said: "We need x amount of steel, please send it to us by the next available train, otherwise their will be hell to pay."

[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Who is saying it is socialist?.

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You sure are paranoid. I know you never said it was socialist. Ted Grant said it was in his article, and I was saying that he was wrong.

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Where do you come up with this stuff?

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:

Again, given the general historic definitions of socialism, an economy pretty much needs to have these dominant features:
--linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour (as opposed to exploiting others to get it).

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Oh well, I get it from here:

Communist Manifesto

and here:

Principles of Communism

and here:

Critique of the Gotha Programme

and here:

Claude Henri De Saint Simone--Socialism in France 1700s

and here:

Blanc, Louis (1811-1882). Organisation du travail. 1847.

and here:

J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi political economy 1815

and here:

Jean Jacques Russeau: Social Contract and Political Freedom 1762

there are a lot of other socialist sources I get it from.

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What happened to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."?

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linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour (as opposed to exploiting others to get it).

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Is not the same as "to each... from each."

The latter expresses a concept of an inteconected social organization which nullifies the value of labour, while yours potentially reasserts the principle of relative value. In theory, in your system, a labourer who is more productive might have more access to material goods, while in the other, such relativistic value assesments are nullified because all persons are equally valuable to the whol system of human organization.

I don't really care if one is right or wrong. What bothered me was your tendency to self-authorize by referring to the canon, in totalizing statements such as "the general historic definitions of socialism," as if such is an absolute.

In fact I think the Marxist definition, in "to each.. from each..." directly contradicts what you have said here, about the "historic defintion of socialism" but also almost everything you have said about the universal nature of markets.

That is fine, and you may be right, but please don't try and prove it by referring to the Canon, as if such a reference, a priori proves your point. I have read much of it.

So lets say, there is room for manouver here, in terms of what is, and is not socialist.

Not to put too fine a point of on it, but I challenge you to find Marx, Engels, or Russeau talking about "sustainable economics" as you have above, though you may think such is naturally implied, but that would be your own extrapolated view, not clearly part of the "general historic definitions of socialism."

Or what makes you think that Russeau and Marx can be made to agree? Marx doesn't seem to think so.

[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Imperial Rome was feudal in its economic system.

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More or less, yep, it was. I agree (and that’s probably not going to happen again for a long time).

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The fact that their may have been indivdual operators whom made millions, does not speak at all to the issue of the nature of the Soviet economy. The Emperor Trajan was an extremely rich person, probably rich in a sense that comparatively speaking Bill Gates would envy. This does not mean that Imperial Rome was "capitalist."

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First, while Trajan’s lavish lifestyle would likely make even Gates look modest, in terms of accumulated wealth, there was no way that a billionaire, as we know them today, would have been possible in a pre-capitalist largely subsistence economy like Rome, even though it was an oppressive class society.

Second, The Soviet operators are/were much more like Gates in that they accumulated wealth not simply because they wanted to live in luxury and total security, but rather because the dictates of the very capitalistic economics they were playing by pushed them to keep accumulating wealth before someone else got their hands on it—in many ways like what motivates Gates to keep accumulating.

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Further, suggesting that having state trading cartels makes a system capitalist igores the fact that "mercantalism," basically the last stage of feudal economics was in fact basicly a system of cartels. Again, this is feudal, not capitalist.

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I think you’re only partly right here. While it’s true the mercantile colonialist era features the last vestiges of feudal economics, it seems it was more the birth and first generation of capitalistic economics as well.

Marxism, Capitalism and Mercantilism

It’s clear to me that after Columbus accidentally tripped over America in 1492 and the sudden discovery of strategic interest by the ruling classes in maximizing the expansion of their influence everywhere, the next 100 years brought a huge change to the economies of Europe, Middle Asia and Africa.

Mercantilism and the Rise of Capitalism

Feudalism, with its focus on value as parceled land and various possessions and turf warfare, declined. It was largely replaced by the more abstract yet fluid value of money, interest and investment—in other words capital. The huge shift toward speculative investment and short-term returns took over.

This was accompanied by a shift in the mode of production, in terms of economic development, as the ruling elites no longer sought to just hoard enough crap to live in luxury, but to accumulate more wealth, land and territory in order to control new and existing markets and find new ones—because if they didn’t their competing rulers of other countries might get them (hence the huge exploration boom and the resulting colonialism).

Mercantilism as the First Stage of Capitalism

In other words, the mode shifted to accumulation for accumulation’s sake—exponential growth as the end in itself. That’s far more capitalist than feudal.

Mercantilism as the basis for Capitalist Development

It also signaled the rise of the modern national state, a key feature of capitalism of every variety, as the ultimate economic force, replacing the church. Also, the role of credit and banks became pivotal for the first time, since colonialism required so much capital outlay, even a lot of the rich royals had to borrow money or look for backers to finance them.

By the time the Industrial Revolution began growing in the mid-1700s, much of the economic mode, and even some of the framework, was already there. In fact, Adam Smith, in his book
Wealth of Nations complained that the super-wealthy mercantile colonialist and banking classes were, along with their control over the political state, using their accumulated wealth to monopolize and distort the new markets being served by manufacture and industry.

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Originally posted by Cueball:
The latter expresses a concept of an inteconected social organization which nullifies the value of labour, while yours potentially reasserts the principle of relative value. In theory, in your system, a labourer who is more productive might have more access to material goods, while in the other, such relativistic value assesments are nullified because all persons are equally valuable to the whole system of human organization.

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To expand on this point, and how it Marx's conception differs from your own, regarding the "general historical definition of socialism," and your view regarding "linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour (as opposed to exploiting others to get it)," you will find more or less what I wrote, (but in considerably more detail in the Critique of the Gotha program (re LeSalle) which you linked to above:

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What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

[SNIP]

Hence, equal right here is still in principle -- bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

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However Marx elucidates this is not the same as his view because:

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But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

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Marx in the Critique of the Gotha program deliberately and clearly argues against the "linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour," as a concept "stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation," and in fact argues for the elmination of such linkages because they allow for inequalities to be expressed in economic disparities between individuals.

And then he really gets rolling here:

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In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

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This is not the way it worked in the Soviet economy. Yes there were markets for consumer goods, but actually not much of one for sevices. Further there was no market for steel, for instance.
The car factory did not go to the steel market and then bid on various lots of steel, what they did was they ordered it. "Commanded" it in fact based on the decisions of the planning committee.

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First off, there definitely were markets for services—for example, if you went to a restaurant of coffee shop, record store, department store, hotel, gas station, etc., you bought and paid for whatever you needed or wanted, just like anywhere else.

Second, in terms of steel and cars, etc., a similar comparison would be the auto industry in the US. According to what I was told by delegates at the recent CAW convention in Vancouver, he Big Three automakers, and probably the other big car plants don’t go to the open market every year to buy steel—and steel firms don’t compete to win those contracts.

The Big Three in fact need so much steel, there’s no way one steel firm can supply it. So what happens is that deals are struck with several firms (like, say, IPSCO, Stelco, Dofasco, etc,) to supply a pre-determined amount of steel at a pre-determined price to produce a pre-determined number of cars to be sold in pre-determined quantities at pre-determined prices depending on what markets and regions they are sold in—much like your example in the Soviet Union.

But, also like in the Soviet Union, there is obviously no way for them to know exactly how many cars will be sold, or how demand will shift depending on what conditions affect it (e.g. global recessions, number of accidents fueling need for new cars, whether conditions affecting people’s purchasing priorities, etc.)

So often all these pre-determined plans go afoul and sudden changes, poor coordination and knee-jerk cost recovery measures go into effect, which themselves are often subject to sudden changes, etc.—much like in the Soviet Union.

That’s why every economist, Marxist or otherwise, that I have read says the infamous Soviet central planning was such a big joke, since the plans were having to be changed and tinkered with so often the end result was all of the same chaos and waste of capitalist-dominated markets that other countries experience.

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There was no competative process of various companies purchasing steel off of one another, where the value of the steel was determined by supply and demand.

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The competitive process, again according to sources like the Hass book I mentioned earlier, was internalized within the corporate monopoly structures in the country. For example, factory bosses clearly competed against each other, especially in the same industries, in terms of how much “cost efficiency” (read: profit) they could extract from production (read: labour), and they were rewarded for this—not only in terms of money, but in promotions, status and influence within the corporate structures.

That’s not that much different than how competition occurs within corporate management structures in the West or anywhere else.

Keep in mind the competition in the capitalist economy isn’t like good soccer game or a Battle of the Bands contest or a pro-wrestling match. It’s in fact a process of elimination for control over markets and domination of people and resources.

The ultimate goal is total monopoly. It was obviously very much a part of the old Soviet model—not only internationally, but internally as well, albeit in a varied form.

[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: Steppenwolf Allende ]

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What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

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Not to put too fine a point of on it, but I challenge you to find Marx, Engels, or Russeau talking about "sustainable economics" as you have above, though you may think such is naturally implied, but that would be your own extrapolated view, not clearly part of the "general historic definitions of socialism."

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First, yes I was extrapolating in order to put a brief general historic definition of socialism together for sake of discussion on this thread. You didn’t think I would post a 200-foot long definition based on everything those and others said, did ya?

That’s also why I posted links to other socialist organizations and cooperative development groups since they have far more detailed definitions.

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In fact I think the Marxist definition, in "to each.. from each..." directly contradicts what you have said here, about the "historic defintion of socialism" but also almost everything you have said about the universal nature of markets.

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I don’t think that’s the case at all. As both Marx and a host of other socialist economists and activists, including those I posted, the whole fundamental of what was considered “socialism” or “communism” was/is the democratic control of business and means of production by those who work in them and, on a broader social level, then communities they live in and serve. And doing this is based on the mode of satisfying human need and want via the long term stable development of the whole community and all of the individuals within it as best as possible—from each according to ability to each according to need..

In other words, in modern expression, sustainable development, or community economic development, which for the most part, to at least varying degrees, hold these modes and values in high regard (at least in principle)

Here’s an essay published by Wikipedia that actually tries to explain
From Each According to Ability to Each According to Need

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I don't really care if one is right or wrong. What bothered me was your tendency to self-authorize by referring to the canon, in totalizing statements such as "the general historic definitions of socialism," as if such is an absolute.

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Hey lose it. I wasn’t trying to “self-authorize” anything. I was trying to put together a brief definition here based on my own experience and research. Nothing more, nothing less.

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Marx in the Critique of the Gotha program deliberately and clearly argues against the "linking the acquisition of individual property to the individual’s labour," as a concept "stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation," and in fact argues for the elmination of such linkages because they allow for inequalities to be expressed in economic disparities between individuals.

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Yes he did, but as you also noted as the new democratic economy develops and the ability to produce and distribute in abundance relative to human need grows, the measure of “if he shall not work, neither shall he eat” is how people are likely to ensure everyone’s efforts will be rewarded and no one does without.

But that doesn’t mean one person’s labour would be seen as more valuable than another person’s labour. All it means is everyone who expects to benefit according to their needs in expected to contribute in kind.

When I listed this as one of the points of this historic definition, I was getting partly at that people would be acquiring or accessing the things they need to live and improve themselves by contributing their labour and skills to creating those things, not by exploiting each other like today.

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Or what makes you think that Russeau and Marx can be made to agree? Marx doesn't seem to think so.

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They certainly differed on many things. But if you read them and compare what they were advocating for, there are some pretty big similarities, especially in terms of rights and liberties. I was trying to go after the big picture over the last 400 or more years.

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Obviously, despite its forceful briliance, it is still a romantic crock of idealistic shit, but there you have it genuises can also be idealistic and full of shit.

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Ok, the Soviet Union was one big corporation. If you like. Fine. Then of course, corporations are command economies. Excelent. So, in a sense how different is this from Marx arguing, quite convincingly in the Critique of Gotha Program that:

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What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.
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It's no different than applying this observation to any other economy—including right here in Canuckistan.

In fact, you can argue that communist societies can be slowly developing much more out of the economies of the Scandinavian countries, or various regions of other European nations, where there is far more practical democratic socialist economic development, as well as practical political legacy, than there ever was in the Soviet Union.

It seems to me that despite all the revolutionary romanticism expressed in Marx' time, the real "revolution" toward a communistic society is actually an evolutionary process, which is obviously why Marx and other socialist economists supported the development of the social democratic movement. (Marx first coined the term social democracy in 1858) as a practical step-by-step process toward the development of such an ideal society.

The whole idea of “Building the new society within the shell of the old,” as the preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World says, is the obvious reality everyone faces and is exactly what the social democratic goal is, and that quote obviously recognizes this.

Good night for now. Snoring while typing can be fun, but slow.

[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: Steppenwolf Allende ]

I read it in the original. I think it is quite clear what it says, and it is oppositional to your earlier statement. It also quite clearly eschews the market as a basis of social organization, because of course if one eliminates the "value" of labour, as Marx quite clearly intends then there can be no "labour market," because labour has no "value," and the rest of the "bourgeois limitations" are out the door with all the rest is the obvious implication.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
AThe Nature of Stalinist Russia there were over 600 multi-millionaires.

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That link works, but it would be more convenient for us not to have to go digging for whatever it is you're sourcing to. 600 what ? Were they US dollar millionaires or merely ruble millionaires back then, which is more likely the case. The privileged elite class in the USSR never approached the level and degree of concentration of wealth that existed in the west then or now. Today, the CEO of Walmart earns more in two weeks than the average worker does in a year, a never mind obscene "performance" bonuses. Income gaps between rich and poor in North America have always been a canyon. The wealth gap has become a chasm. The superrich, especialy in America where wealth is concentrated the most, have learned from the world revolutions not to put their wealth on display.

We've had two basic types of economies since the birth of capitalism some 500 years ago. One is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model with central bank controlled by an oligarchy of financiers. The other was sovereign nation state, or allegedly what the American constitution was supposed to have created in that country in serving the general welfare of the people as a marked break with old European style of rule and economy.

It didn't work. What the Yanks ended up with after laissez-faire state capitalism took a swan dive in 1929 was socialism for the rich, "upside-down socialism, corporate welfare state, aka "Keynesian-militarism", like existed in 1930's-40's Germany, a kind of Bismarckian economy propped up by war industrial complex. The features of its leadership hierarchy is similar to what existed in Nazi Germany: a cosmetic leadership propped up by industrialists and banking elite, and a permanent shadow government bureaucracy. Upside-down socialism was needed to transform the failed American state-capitalist economy into a hybrid system powered by socialist ideas in order to counteract the threat of globol fascism in Europe. These two economies of recent history are examples of true state-capitalism, and they were unique in conception. New Deal-Great Society America, 1930's to 1960's, and Nazi Germany were even more state-capitalist than Lenin would have imagined in the early 1920's.

The Soviet system was a variation of the old Anglo-Dutch Liberal feudal model with some degree of socialism but with a command style economy. Overall, the world economy has been controlled by a financial monetarist oligarchy of private interests since a thousand years ago. This is the underlying shinola they teach in universities and colleges everywhere. Everything else is subordinate to this reality.

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By 1991, CPSU reportedthere were over 60,000 multi-millionaire capitalists with over $60 billion dollars in bank accounts and private investments across the globe

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Just so you know, that link still brings us to a "Page Not Found" dead end. Keep in mind that a million roubles even today is worth about $38 000 USDN. A Soviet rouble "millionaire" and western dollar millionaire are never directly comparable in terms of nominal wealth.

Russia claims more than 35 thousand rouble millionaires in 2001 Compare that wealth with the estimated 2.5 to 3 million high net worth Americans worth at least a million dollars USDN and not including real estate or other assets protected by exclusive property rights under the capitalist system. Get real.

Privileged Soviets between the years 1953 and 1987 were nowhere near as wealthy as todays Russian oligarchs Abramovich, Khodorkovsky or even competitive chess player Anatoly Karpov. The privileged in Soviet Russia enjoyed roomier apartments, caviar, annual trips to the Crimea(but then again, so did many of the Soviet working class have that privilege) maybe a few crates of Napoleon brandy and Cuban cigars now and then.

Of course, as I was saying in the other thread, Russia became a state-capitalist economy with some actual capitalists in the late 1980's and 1990's. Some 70 percent of state-owned assets were funnelled into the hands of about a dozen oligarchs during the perestroika years. You may be confusing the Soviet period with the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years when billionaire capitalists were created in Russia by illegal thefts of state assets.

[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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You are going to ask for me to read an explanation of Karl Marx's quite clear, high flown, rhetorical flourish in wikipedia, featuring the words of wisdom of such great thinkers as Ayn Rand, an article that points out that he might have copt it thematically from the bible and or Louise the Blanquist?

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I only offered that as an attempt to explain the quote, which I think it does try to do.

I also realize that as a general effort, it tries to offer some opposing sentiment to the idea.

However, I agree, Ayn Rand is hardly a worthwhile source for this. Her goofy book The Unknown Ideal, which is supposedly her defining work is so full of misassumptions convenient misinterpretations and bald-faced lies, typical of so-called "libertarian" pro-capitalist idiots, it's not worth anything.

Having siad this, however, there's not much question that Marx was influenced by the share-and-share-alike values of Christian Socialism (like Louis Blanc, Robert Owen, Quakers, Icarians, Fourier, etc.), especially since he repeatedly spoke highly of the efforts of many such organizations to develop practical socialist ventures and economies.

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I read it in the original. I think it is quite clear what it says, and it is oppositional to your earlier statement. It also quite clearly eschews the market as a basis of social organization, because of course if one eliminates the "value" of labour, as Marx quite clearly intends then there can be no "labour market," because labour has no "value," and the rest of the "bourgeois limitations" are out the door with all the rest is the obvious implication.

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Again, as I showed before, I don't think it's oppositional at all.

I do remember a quote from Marx (I can't remember if it was in Critique of Political Economy or another document, so I can't get a link) saying that he believed if the market was to become truly free, capitalism and class structures of any kind would cease to exist simply because there would be no coercive state mechanism to forcefully extract wealth from labour and accumulate it into undemocratic power cliques.

So if we use the general definition of the market as a forum or situation where people trade things of use to them, then even a forum such as in an ultimately communist economy where there is a free and equal and abundant exchange among people without coercion or restriction is still a market--obviously not a capitalist one, but still a market.

[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: Steppenwolf Allende ]

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Just so you know, that link still brings us to a "Page Not Found" dead end

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Actually, this does get annoying. The other day, I realized that the URL of that link has brackets (as in “(“ and “)”) in it, and it seems that the links I post here that do have brackets in them often don’t seem to work. I’m not sure what to do about it.

I did post another link to a report on the Soviet economy in the US Congress Library that has much of the same info (guess they got it from the same source) the other day. But that specific link also has brackets, so it probably won’t work either.

Here’s the main page link to the Library’s country studies section. It doesn’t have a link in it. You can try to navigate from there, although there is a lot of stuff to go through.

US Congress Library Country Studies

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600 what ? Were they US dollar millionaires or merely ruble millionaires back then, which is more likely the case.

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All the sources I quoted are in US dollars, not rubles. Russia, both today and in the Soviet Union days, trades mainly in US dollars internationally, like most countries.

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The privileged elite class in the USSR never approached the level and degree of concentration of wealth that existed in the west then or now.

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So what? The privileged elite classes in most countries never have approached the level of concentration of wealth that exists among privileged elite classes in the west, especially in the US, which, if memory serves, is home to the majority of the couple hundred billionaires in the world. It doesn’t mean their economies are not predominantly capitalist.

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Of course, as I was saying in the other thread, Russia became a state-capitalist economy with some actual capitalists in the late 1980's and 1990's.

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And of course, as the sources quotes show, this is not accurate. Russia, by the admission of the leaders and economists in the government, became a predominantly state capitalist economy shortly after the 1917 revolution, when most of the larger private sector commercial assets and businesses were nationalized, but many of the capitalists who owned and/of controlled those assets were appointed as the top corporate bureaucrats and executives to run the newly formed state-owned firms in a similar top-down profiteering manner for themselves. And that’s generally how the Soviet economy ran until it collapsed.

What you’re describing is a form of state-sanctioned privatization taking place as the country was unraveling in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
So if we use the general definition of the market as a forum or situation where people trade things of use to them, then even a forum such as in an ultimately communist economy where there is a free and equal and abundant exchange among people without coercion or restriction is still a market--obviously not a capitalist one, but still a market.

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This is the whole problem with your methodology. You simply reduce everything to commonalities, and lose what differentiates. Here, now we can use this broad brush to establish that this forum is a kind of market. Its just not very useful.

You seem to be getting at the idea that all of the modernist European social philosphers are bound by certain similar conceptions of society, as well as similar moral values representative of christian humanist traditions. That's fine. But this does not mean that even though Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Engels share some commonalities, that they can simply be piled into the same box willy-nilly.

Sire you might want to say that in broad strokes there is much similarity in conceptions, so that when one looks at a large scale bureaucratic structure like a coporation, it is bound to share certian similarities with Soviet Model Industrial producers. That is just the way things are.

All bureacratic structures indeed contain similar traits, and in fact this what defines them as bureacracies -- This does not mean they are the same.

And though I think there is a lot that is valuable in the comparisons you are making, I think you are missing the nuances, which actually define the difference between "capitalist economies" and other economies, picking and choosing surface similarities at the expense of looking at the root structures within the economic systems.

So, fine, if you like, the USSR is one large coporation, more or less, operating with a command economy, but you see, what you are missing is the nuances within the coroporation as a relatively closed system. And even if corporations are command economies, this does not mean that they, in an of themselves, are capitalist in their internal functionings. There is not market within in them, no competative venture capital investments, no internal banking structure, etc. etc.

In the end it seems you are making an analysis based on power relationships pure and simple, not the manner in which those power relationships are manifested, and basicly calling any and all hierarchical power relationships "capitalist." But this is the essence of why people make definitions about the different kinds of ways power relations are expressed in social relations, some are capitalist and some are not, instead of reducing everything to a meaningless commonality, in which anything could be a "market," apparently even this web site.

[ 04 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
All the sources I quoted are in US dollars, not rubles. Russia, both today and in the Soviet Union days, trades mainly in US dollars internationally, like most countries.

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Yes, that's what I'm saying, your one source that I was able to link to and go directly to the information you want us to read describes millionaire and billionaire capitalists in Russia who became enormously wealthy during the perestroika years, not anytime between 1953 and 1985. These are cold facts but not heresay or conjecture that I can't back up by suggesting you rummage around some web site describing 1920's Leninist Russia to decipher yourself.

There were many more dollar millionaire capitalists in Europe and North America than there were rouble billionaires in Russia during the years of Soviet communism. Extreme concentration of wealth and vast inequality has always been a hallmark of American state-capitalism, but never moreso since that country's ideologically-motivated departure from New Deal and Great Society socialist policies beginning in the 1970's-80's period and during the brief years of experimentation with Friedmanesque neo-Liberal monetarist policies.

Your saying that Soviet elite were wealthier before perestroika than after holds about as much water as Forbes Magazine's claim that Fidel Castro is a hundred milllionaire or billionaire or whatever false claim it is that Fidel has challenged them to prove, which they can't because it's more cold war crap emanating from Warshington via the Wall Street crooks.

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Here’s the main page link to the Library’s country studies section. It doesn’t have a link in it. You can try to navigate from there, although there is a lot of stuff to go through.

US Congress Library Country Studies

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[tongue in cheek]But that's your job to finger your corroborating U.S. government info for us, not ours. I can never find the bathroom in a public library, let alone someone else's homework.

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And of course, as the sources quotes show, this is not accurate. Russia, by the admission of the leaders and economists in the government, became a predominantly state capitalist economy shortly after the 1917 revolution, when most of the larger private sector commercial assets and businesses were nationalized,

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NATIONALISED?. You mean as in, no profit sharing agreements with actual Russian corporate enterprises with blue chip shareholders skimming the cream off the top with exorbitant dividend payoffs ?. This is what I'm saying, the structure of the economy was not "capitalist" at all, and what you're left with is insinuating that the state bureaucrats were stealing revenues from resources which, under the Soviet system, were bartered and traded for other goods with the Soviet Republics or sold at subsidized prices to satellite nations ... under the Soviet system.

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but many of the capitalists who owned and/of controlled those assets were appointed as the top corporate bureaucrats and executives to run the newly formed state-owned firms in a similar top-down profiteering manner for themselves. And that’s generally how the Soviet economy ran until it collapsed.

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That's not only untrue, it's bizarre. The billionaire oligarchy came into existence during perestroika years not before. A quick google search would confirm this fact for you. Because if Soviet bureaucrats were looting state revenues as much as you're claiming, then it's likely that the Soviet system would have collapsed as a direct result of that pillage decades before it did and not due to the factors pointed to by historians, like:

• a crippling cold war trade embargo
• Saudia Arabia dumping oil on world markets in 1985-87
• a U.S.-Saudi-funded proxy war in Afghanistan
• public perception in the USSR itself that the system was failing them
• cold war embargos on satellite nations with which the USSR traded
• the arms race
• etc

The Soviet Russians, a population decimated of manpower by two world wars, a civil war and a 25 country invasion in the 1920's to put down the revolution, is said to to have allocated considerable precious resources toward arms production during the cold war years, but they were no where close to allocating the same resources which RAND Corporation claimed they were to U.S. Congress in the 1980's ie. 50% of GNP, which was ridiculous, which Rand has admitted to in recent years. The military industrial complex overestimated the numbers, in fact, in order to justify their own Soviet-in-size defence budgets for Keynesian-militarism ie. "state-capitalism" or post-1929, post-capitalist agenda aka "socialism for the rich."

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What you’re describing is a form of state-sanctioned privatization taking place as the country was unraveling in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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The Soviet people were never poorer nor were Russian mortality rates higher than in the 1990's, during the transformation to "state-capitalism" which created the dozen or so billionaire oligarchs in Russia by way of the theft of an estimated 70 percent of previously state-owned and controlled assets, from vast oil and gas reserves to some of the world's largest nickel ore deposits to state vodka production in the years just before and after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

It's clear, at least to me, that your understanding of "state-capitalism" is the one that Lenin knew leading up to the collapse of laissez-faire capitalism in 1929 some five years after Lenin was buried. So if you're stalled at repeating the same dated information and expired links to ghost facts, I think I've made my point.

If we desire to have an idea of the kind of propaganda permeating just western society at the time of the cold war, watch the movie "The Terminal" with Tom Hanks. "Viktor" is told by a U.S. customs official that if he wants to enter the U.S., all he has to do is state that he is fearful of communist oppression in Bulgaria if turned away at border. Viktor is confused at that point and says something like, "But I am not fearful. Bulgaria is my mother country." Apparently, the character "Gupta" did have reason to fear being deported back to state-capitalist India, which was perhaps true to life and a relatively believable aspect of the movie compared with typical Hollywood propaganda movies we are used to and full of inaccuracies and half truths.

[ 04 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Pal. Why insist on denying something so obvious? Most of your arguments are only reinforcing what I’m saying. Then you turn around and keep trying to find socialism when there’s none to find.

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Yes, that's what I'm saying, your one source that I was able to link to and go directly to the information you want us to read describes millionaire and billionaire capitalists in Russia who became enormously wealthy during the perestroika years, not anytime between 1953 and 1985. These are cold facts but not heresay or conjecture that I can't back up by suggesting you rummage around some web site describing 1920's Leninist Russia to decipher yourself.

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Hey Sainthood. I have repeatedly provided you with facts from government sources, quotes from Soviet leaders themselves and links to books, analysis and business plans from throughout the Soviet era. Don’t whine to me about having to do some reading. I did through all this stuff and more. If you don’t, that’s your problem. One link doesn’t work. Too bad.

As for backing things up, you obviously can’t do that very well, considering the only article you linked me to is written by a Stalinist romantic who’s making all sorts of inaccurate assertions and un-supported statements to insist the Soviet economy was predominantly socialist/communist, when the cascade of undeniable fact—some of which has been posted here—shows different.

An example:

{QUOTE] Under communism the economic decisions and property were national and publicly owned.[/QUOTE]

That is crap and you know it. Economic decision-making was reserved exclusively for the capitalistic senior bureaucrats, executives and commissars in the various corporate power structures there. You yourself even admit that.

And given the extensive information and fact on the general historic definitions of socialism/communism, to even allude that the Soviet, Chinese, et al economies are mainly based on these is outright lunacy paralleling the US religious right and the Holocaust deniers.

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That's not only untrue, it's bizarre. The billionaire oligarchy came into existence during perestroika years not before. A quick google search would confirm this fact for you.

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Cynical denial of fact does not invalidate the fact. Any quick google search, like “State Capitalism,” “Soviet capitalism,” “Leninism” etc. shows all sorts of sites and info that verifies the far more in-depth, accurate and honest definitions of the Soviet economy, must of which I have read and studied at length and that I have posted here.

And if the fact that a state capitalist economic framework was set up in Russia just after the Revolution seems “bizarre” to you, then you might want to take some time and read some Bolshevik government documents, some quoted in the material above, and writings of these folks (like Introduction to the New Economic Policy. You will see that, given the conditions and situations they found themselves in at the time, it seemed to make perfect sense to them.

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There were many more dollar millionaire capitalists in Europe and North America than there were rouble billionaires in Russia during the years of Soviet communism.

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First off, as said many times by both me and so many others here, there is no such thing as “Soviet communism” and there never has been—unless, of course, we all missed some point where it was a stateless classless society where the economy was democratically controlled by workers and their respective communities and production was focused on sustaining the long-term prosperity of those communities by satisfying human needs first. If you believe this, then you’re way farther gone than you think.

Second, as I said earlier, the stats and estimates I listed here were from the sources I quoted and linked, and, again, they were in US dollar figures, not rubles.

Third, to waste more electrons repeating the same thing, the fact that there are many more millionaires in the US than in Russia in the Soviet era means nothing in terms of the capitalistic foundations of both economies. Compare the number and concentration of wealth of executives, economic dictators and titled lay-abouts in the US to just about any other region in the world, and you’ll see a huge gap. That doesn’t mean these other regions’ economies aren’t predominantly capitalist. It just means they are less powerful and extreme.

Fourth, trying to detract from the class divisions and capitalistic economics of the Soviet era by saying it was mainly relative within that economy (which I have it was more than that) does not score any points with me. The fact that according to government documents reported in both

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NATIONALISED?. You mean as in, no profit sharing agreements with actual Russian corporate enterprises with blue chip shareholders skimming the cream off the top with exorbitant dividend payoffs ?. This is what I'm saying, the structure of the economy was not "capitalist" at all

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Here’s your problem. You really need to sit down and do some historic and economic research to learn what socialism/communism is and what capitalism is. Simple nationalization doesn’t and never has led to the abolition of capitalism, but to state capitalism.

The fact is nationalization, while it has shown some real benefits for national economies and people, it is merely an historic compromise between the ruling capitalist institutions and public interest and working class movements for socialism. It is still very much capitalistic, and everyone from Robert Owen and Charles Fourier to Marx and Engels understood this and wrote about it. Lenin, Stalin, Mao & Co. all understood it as well.

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It's clear, at least to me, that your understanding of "state-capitalism" is the one that Lenin knew leading up to the collapse of laissez-faire capitalism in 1929 some five years after Lenin was buried. So if you're stalled at repeating the same dated information and expired links to ghost facts, I think I've made my point.

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Denial is still your biggest virtue. If you won’t acknowledge the reports and sources I posted throughout this debate from throughout the Soviet era, that’s your loss. The fact is that the fundamentals of the Soviet economy remained relatively in place until it collapsed, meaning that no matter how old the info is, it is still very relevant—far more relevant than the factless ravings of loonies who still want to see all kinds of socialism where in fact there was practically none. The only point so far you’ve made is that you don’t know or care what socialism or capitalism are and therefore aren’t taking any of this too seriously.

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This is the whole problem with your methodology. You simply reduce everything to commonalities, and lose what differentiates. Here, now we can use this broad brush to establish that this forum is a kind of market. Its just not very useful.

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Wait a second. I wasn’t reducing anything to commodities just because I used the term market. Commodities are clearly a capitalistic way of relating to products and services produced for trade.

Even in an ultimate communistic economy, where the state and classes and coercive property and regulatory relations won’t exist, people will obviously still produce goods and services that others find useful and trade them, the way they always have (we are physical beings tied to the earth, after all). That doesn’t mean this will be commodity production, brought and sold, subject to price fluctuation and inflation, etc.

The latter is a capitalistic regimen. The former is not. Remember, like I said before, capitalism isn’t the market. Markets have existed ever since people began trading (which is likely as long as there have been people), and they will continue to exist long after capitalism, and commodity production and trade with it, have gone bye bye.

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You seem to be getting at the idea that all of the modernist European social philosphers are bound by certain similar conceptions of society, as well as similar moral values representative of christian humanist traditions.

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No, not all. But it seems clear to me that most of the philosophers and economists, etc, from the Renaissance to the early 20th Century, that tended to support socialistic/communistic ventures, local economies and movements have strong fundamental (as opposed to just incidental) similarities. That’s why they seem to inspire and compliment each other in many ways, even if they strongly disagree on many characteristics.

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Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Engels share some commonalities, that they can simply be piled into the same box willy-nilly.

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I never did that. Those two clearly did share some similar views in terms of supporting civil liberties and various social reforms to aid those suffering the most from capitalist economics. But, as you know, the latter would have criticized the former as restrictive or even contradictory since he would only support these measures as long as they didn’t seriously challenge or undermine the undemocratic power and privilege of the corporate establishment and its capitalistic economics over the economy overall.

[QUOTE All bureacratic structures indeed contain similar traits, and in fact this what defines them as bureacracies -- This does not mean they are the same.[/QUOTE]

They are not the same—in terms of being identical. They each have many unique characteristics depending on the conditions under which they were formed and operate. But they all share more than just some similar traits—but many key fundamental features as well.

Namely, in the economy, they operate, to one degree or another in various ways, on the basis of extracting value from labour and accumulating and using it to advance their own wealth accumulating and market dominating agendas in perpetuity. That’s why I have no problem recognizing all of them, again in various ways and to various degrees, capitalist in some form.

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So, fine, if you like, the USSR is one large coporation, more or less, operating with a command economy, but you see, what you are missing is the nuances within the coroporation as a relatively closed system.

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Actually, I said the Soviet economy ran more like a series of monopolistic cartels than like a single corporate agency. And while the economies of Eastern Europe were generally much more restrictive in terms of foreign investment and other outside direct interest than their Western European counterparts, they certainly weren’t closed, as, even going back as far as Lenin’s time, increasing under Stalin and greatly expanding after World War II, was reciprocal foreign investment, often in the form of joint ventures between state-owned Soviet corporations and stock-held ones in the West.

Of course, the nuances and unique characteristics of each are there. But there are also many key fundamental similarities—more than enough, as far as I’m concerned, to identify both as capitalistic in various ways and degrees.

quote:

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And even if corporations are command economies, this does not mean that they, in an of themselves, are capitalist in their internal functionings. There is not market within in them, no competative venture capital investments, no internal banking structure, etc. etc.

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But as I pointed out with a couple examples and sources, many corporate structures, both in Eastern Europe and in the West, do have an internal competitive and marketing process. It’s a key way they see as gaining “efficiencies” (ei greater profits) in the way they operate.

Look at this another way. Right here in Canada, we have legions of successful practical socialistic ventures, like co-ops of various kinds, credit unions, labour-sponsored ventures and funds, community based sustainable business development, etc. All these are far more socialistic in practice (as well as in principle) than anything that happened in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

Yet do these have capitalistic qualities? Yes they do. It’s inevitable, given that we live in a capitalist-dominated economy, there is no way to avoid it. The question is do the capitalistic qualities take general dominance over the socialistic qualities and the philosophies that founds them? In some cases they do, and in others they do not, and in most cases it’s a tug of war between the two.

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Second, as I said earlier, the stats and estimates I listed here were from the sources I quoted and linked, and, again, they were in US dollar figures, not rubles

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Well you certainly did promise to nail up a proper source link, but I still haven't seen one. Yes, I did read about the billionaire oligarchs and their recently acquired wealth from the perestroika years. But you were a tad shy on the actual dollar amounts associated with Soviet era "capitalists."

They were and they weren't communist in Russia. My personal belief in socialism isn't as fragile as to have to deem it necessary to make broad-sweeping generalizations about recent history in protecting some perfect ideal I might have for the way it should be. If you were a geologist, you'd likely be what's known as a "lumper." Lumpers don't bother studying various sedimentary layers of geologic time, and therefore they can't know all there is to know about what is a vast and interesting subject. "Splitters", on the other hand, can become experts on one layer of rock and perhaps its relationship to other stratigrahic layers of the column, like "K-2" layer experts.

Anyway, maybe it's a poor analogy. I appreciate your comments, S.A., otherwise I wouldn't bother trying to nail up a proper reply. I've considered all of your comments, and the points you've made are acknowledged. You're a tough one, I must say. You've outlasted me on this one. Good show.

[ 06 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
Hello again Cueball,

Even in an ultimate communistic economy, where the state and classes and coercive property and regulatory relations won’t exist, people will obviously still produce goods and services that others find useful and trade them, the way they always have (we are physical beings tied to the earth, after all). That doesn’t mean this will be commodity production, brought and sold, subject to price fluctuation and inflation, etc.

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This is the exactly the kind of reductionism I am talking to you about. So, I come out and say there was no market in the USSR (meaning capitalist "free' market). Then you say, everything is a "market," and then point out that their are different types of "market," to counter my claim. If there are markets then there must be capitalism, as to say.

So in the first case you use your reductionist brush to assert that markets exist in the USSR
therefore it is capitalist. Then in the secong assert that there are different types of "markets" so it might be possible for a society to exist with some kind of "market" and not be capitalist.

quote:

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Originally posted by Cueball:

If there are markets then there must be capitalism, as to say.

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This is the exactly the kind of reductionism I am talking to you about. So, I come out and say there was no market in the USSR (meaning capitalist "free' market). Then you say, everything is a "market," and then point out that their are different types of "market," to counter my claim. If there are markets then there must be capitalism, as to say.

So in the first case you use your reductionist brush to assert that markets exist in the USSR therefore it is capitalist. Then in the secong assert that there are different types of "markets" so it might be possible for a society to exist with some kind of "market" and not be capitalist.

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OH for Christ’s sake. This is a load. It seems, Cueball, that you’re becoming more interested in just being argumentative than actually pursuing the discussion further. You know I never said this.

You know damn well that when I was referring to examples of internal markets in the Soviet economy that these were/are capitalist dominated markets, as was the Soviet economy. That’s what we were talking about—capitalism.

The examples I offered were clearly that—markets that were/are dominated by capitalist economics and relations, including commodity production and trade (buying a selling, price fluctuation and inflation, quality concerns, scarcity, internal competition between bureaucrats for more money, promotions, status, etc.)

And the array of info and sources I have posted here and linked to are based on documented fact, historical development and verified experience on the Soviet era, so don’t give me this “reductionist” horse shyte, since you know that’s not what I was trying to be.

To repeat, any forum or situation where people trade can be considered a market. That doesn’t automatically make it a capitalist market. For example, if let you borrow my truck to move things with and, in return, you come and do carpentry work on my house, that’s trade. But it’s not capitalist trade.

Actually, as far as I can tell, most of the trade between working class people throughout the world is this type of utilitarian trade or barter. But that obviously doesn’t stop the economies of the world from being dominated by capitalist economics of varying kinds (that’s one of the many prices we all pay for so far failing to democratize our economies, as has always been called for by the socialist movement).

Even our friend Fidel understands this, when he says:

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free trade per se is not an idea born of capitalism. Trade existed for a good many centuries before the birth of capitalism, which some put at about 500 years ago. Capitalists use trade as an all powerful weapon in subjugating various countries to free trade as they see fit to serve imperialist agenda.

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He obviously knows that trade and markets existed long before capitalism and will still be here long after capitalism is finally retired.

SO when you say:

quote:

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If there are markets then there must be capitalism, as to say.

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That runs against what I have been telling you, and, for that matter, sounds pretty reductionist to me.

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Around and around the mullberry bush. You just keep redefining the terminology, or squeeze the facts to suit the arguement you want to make.

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The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

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The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only insofar as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives.

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You have not shown how they operated as capitalist markets. What you have done is shown that there was abuse of the system, and preople became rich, and that there was supression of the labour movement. That is about it. You have then also asserted really wild unfounded, and non-analytic things such as:

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Second, The Soviet operators are/were much more like Gates in that they accumulated wealth not simply because they wanted to live in luxury and total security, but rather because the dictates of the very capitalistic economics they were playing by pushed them to keep accumulating wealth before someone else got their hands on it—in many ways like what motivates Gates to keep accumulating.

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Its just assertion after assertion and not analysis. I don't know anyone careful Marxist or socialist critic who would say that the imperative in capitalism is to accumulate wealth "before someone else got their hands on it." Its just not an analysis of how capitalist economics work to force capitalists to continue to accumulate wealth.

The primary motive behind the accumulation of capital is the need to prevent your enterprises and yourself getting sucked under and going broke because others can capture a larger share of the market by reducing the cost of labour, primarily. But this did not happen in the USSR, because businesses were not in competition with each other.

In fact consitently, completely unprofitable businesses continued to function, pumping out tons of excess goods and raw materials, while shortages in other areas were rampant. They simply would not curtail useless production, because of the vested interest of the o;igarhcs of the bureacracies.

You have not shown how mechanism worked as capitalism in the USSR, merely asserted that there was "capitalistic" economics. Assertions are not good enough. Simply noting that there were stores where people bought things, the state (as primary employer) sought to reduce costs and that some people exploited their position to become wealthy says nothing about how the system worked internally.

I maintain, that as a "command economy" the mechanisms within the Soviet Union did not conform to the level of financial management of the economy through "markets" and the exchange of goods, and more importantly "investement financing" at the discretion of private interests, instead it was managed on demand through a predictive central planning process, not on the basis of supply and demand.

As with your millionaires the case is clear.

These millionairs could not use the internal economic structures of the Soviet Union as a vehicle to accumulate capital. It simply was not legal to do so. So, they salted away their stash overseas, because there was no bank in the USSR which they could use as a base to accumulate and then reinvest capital, nor did they need to for fear of losing their market share due to competition, because their positions were secured, more or less.

They were rich managers, who manipulared cajoled and conived to benefit themselves, not capitalists.

Things like banks and proper systems for capital investment are absolutely essential aspects of capitalist systems, and part of how capitalism works when considered as closed system. These did not exist in the USSR.

There is some justice in the idea that the USSR was a large corporation, which was in competition internationally with all kinds of other entities, and in making the point that all coporations are command economies, but corporations themselves are not capitalist in their internal organization, though they are capitalist in how they relate to the rest of the world, externally through the economy at large, with other financial entities.

Or are you going to maintain the the command economy is capitalist in its own internal organization? Say that managers of different departmens have capital at their disposal that they invest will-nilly without reference to the budgets set by the central planning adminstration.

That isn't what happens. What happens is that budgets are set internally by the corporation, managers as employees are paid sometimes on the basis of their performace, but in the main the money they handle is not their money, but the money of the coporation as a discrete social enterprise in and of itself. Managers are often bonussed for streamlining operations and cutting costs, but these are not their savings, but the savings of the entity as a whole. In other words there is no "free" flow of capital or "investment" or competition internal to the bureacracy. Granted the managers employment is tied to their business perfromance, but this is only a linkage not an absolute relation, as is the relation between the investor and their money. The manager can not just walk away taking with them whatever share of accumulated capital they deem it their right, the money is not theirs, to de-invest, as a capitalists can.

Therefore, as we have agreed that the USSR was a command economy in its internal organization, and therefore not capitalist in the mode of its internal organization, but bureacratic, I don't see what the dispute is, as we are talking about how the Soviet Union worked internally to itself.

[ 07 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

At one point, the Washington-based IMF bank loaned Haiti $22 million USDN, and within about two weeks some $16 million went missing, presumably in Jean Claude Duvalier's (Baby Doc) personal bank account. The west has loaned billions to right-wing dictatorships as their economies went down the drain faster than grease through geese.

Syngman Rhee stole billions from Korea. Laos was put in the hole by corrupt leaders stealing tens of millions in IMF loans. "Laos Down the Drain" is a good article describing the colonialization of that country by western banking financier oligarchy. The list of corrupt despots and "long-time" allies of the west is a long one.

And so it was in the end for the Russian oligarchs during the 1990's. One oligarch obtained about a quarter of the world's known nickel reserves for less than $300 million dollars. An oil reserve worth $85 billion to western markets was scooped up for about $159 million with financing from two oil magnates in Texas. The Russian government is still embroiled in legal battles over renationalising former state assets with several oligarchs who've fled the country with billions of dollars.

"Dominant revenue" was at stake for the west throughout the cold war. The U.S. has pushed for dollarization of the world's economies for several decades and with base currency backed by a hidden fist. There has been no greater looting of an economy than during several decades of Keynesian militarism in the U.S. where taxpayers are on the hook for the largest national debt in the history of the world. The infamous S&L scandal, as but once instance of Republican Party looting has taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $32 billion dollars a year for the next 30 years. Recent years looting by the Bush crime family and friends has been described as one big hustle of American taxpayers.

And the looting is beginning to show in the USSA with crumbling infrastructure. The once immaculate cold war era sports complexes are in various states of disrepair across the country. Public transit and railways are decades behind the times. At one point during Dubya's rein, almost every state, and all of the "red" states were running budget deficits. Deregulation and privatization of electrical power distribution has left several states with massive debts and tens of thousands of homeowners in the hole after remortgaging to pay their electrical bills. It's the ideology, and our weak and ineffective governents here want to integrate our economy and culture with theirs in creating "flexible" labour markets and making it easier for corporate America to loot our natural wealth in order to prop up the economic and ideological equivalent of the Titanic. It will collapse not because of external cold war forces but rather due to several factors common to previous expansionist empires, and for reasons the ideologues refuse to face up to, like global warming and technological stagnation wrt a sustainable energy source. God help us.

[ 07 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

But most important to the former type of right-wing lunatic ideological agenda as you point out, is the overall agenda to undermine public confidence that democratically-elected governments, the very thing we've been discussing on yet another Cuba thread, are capable of managing public assets and services for the common good. By and large, FTA and NAFTA and CAFTA are extremely anti-democratic in nature. It's a criminal agenda that is paving the way to for an ideology that was tried decades before and failed: Decentralize, deregulate and privatize. They essentially want to pick up where laissez-faire state capitalism left off in the 1930's around the western world and in 1985 Chile and 1990's Argentina. It's a free for all as far as they're concerned, once in power. It's the ideology. Liberals are the no different. They're cut from the same cloth with their demanding entitlement to their entitlements, and they've been mismanaging Canada's economy for several decades. Sky-high national debts are a modern imperialist technique for placing entire nations under indentured servitude, and the superrich get richer with compound interest owing on massive debts racked up by our two old line parties. At least the Soviets had cheap housing, free education and guaranteed job security. Capitalist west has competitiveness in industries, but only certain types of competitiveness are encouraged among workers but not the parasitic multinational corporations themselves seeking Soviet-in-scope monopoly control and massive taxpayer subsidies since the end of laissez-faire.

Public workers abuse taxpayer-funded credit cards for millions, auditor finds

[ 07 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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At least the Soviets had cheap housing, free education and guaranteed job security.

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And I think this is evident with how white and blue collar crimes are punished in North America. White collar crime is said to be worth ten times that of blue collar street thefts every year. The value of white collar thefts is over a $100 billion on average every year. Blue collar crimes tend to be petty with small value thefts, but the largest incarcerated population in the world right now isn't over-represented by white collar criminals. And I think it has something to do with the level of sophistication used in the thefts of what tend to be significant amounts of money ie banking, health care, stock fraud, and in Canada, defrauding taxpayers. A black or native person in the U.S. would likely do more hard time for knocking over a liquor store than a politician caught with hands in the cookie jar, or the CEO and CFO's of a company who abscond with worker's pension funds and stock profits made with insider knowledge.

[ 07 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Yes all courtesy of the Gulag.

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Of course, entire city of Moscow was built by unpaid Gulag workers. And to make it more disturbing, in Soviet Union cars drove people!!!

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The whole idea is to deepen and broaden democracy to expand beyond a mere political/voting notion. To give people control over their own lives and a more planned and sensible approach to society than hitherto. Given the range of global problems in our curent world some would say that this is a necessity. Furthermore, the gigantic waste, the sales effort, the stupefying marketing and advertising, the speculative rather than productive business activity that current monopoly-finance capital is awash in, and so on of our current society could and ought be better spent in other ways. It makes no sense to live in a world where some are billionaires, able to afford private space travel ... and others don't have clean drinking water, a roof over their head, or enough nutrition to keep mind and body together. Socialism is just a means to those ends.

Furthermore, the ultimate aim of socialism is to change how people relate to each other. For society to be socially transparent with relations of equality and so on. And that's so radical many people can't even fathom it, as the late John Lennon so ably pointed out in his famous song, Imagine.

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But, we are speaking not in terms of equality, democracy, or individual autonomy, but workers owning the means of production. The production of what? For what purpose? In fact, this has been a sticking point among socialists forever, has it not? First, it arises from the concept of an industrial society. Owning the means of production means supplanting capitalist ownership.

This then raises the question of organization. How do workers organize themselves to manage the means of production? Do they establish heirarchial organization? And if so, then would the capitalist system of rewards and punishments be retained in order to ensure the workers' workers are being productive?

And if all these problems can be worked out, what is the point if the only result is the earth is stripped bare in the name of the working class rather than in the name of the capitalist class? Or, will workers maintain the same wasteful, harmful, destructive, murderous, and enslaving system of a mass consumption economy? And if not, why do they need the means of production? Why not just throw off the entire system?

quote:

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
But, we are speaking not in terms of equality, democracy, or individual autonomy, but workers owning the means of production. The production of what? For what purpose? In fact, this has been a sticking point among socialists forever, has it not?

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"Capitalism", or neo-Liberalism, is a fairly rigid ideology. It's always workers labouring for a parasitic overclass. It's a reactionary ideology in that change only occurs when it's absolutely necessary, but in the meantime, the inputs are the least in extracting the most from the environment and labour. Accumulate more wealth at the top always.

Socialism has always been considered the more diverse of the three isms produced by the French Revolution: conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism. In a true worker's society, we can make it anything we want. Like John Lennon once said, imagine. I suppose we have to free our asses first at which point our minds will follow.

quote:

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Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

---

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Therefore, as we have agreed that the USSR was a command economy in its internal organization, and therefore not capitalist in the mode of its internal organization, but bureacratic, I don't see what the dispute is, as we are talking about how the Soviet Union worked internally to itself.

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No we haven’t agreed on this at all. I have shown you examples and sources proving there were/are internal markets and even a competition process among many of its bureaucratic management structures, and that both domestically and internationally, capitalistic economics played a central role in determining Soviet foreign policy.

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Its just assertion after assertion and not analysis…… You have not shown how mechanism worked as capitalism in the USSR, merely asserted that there was "capitalistic" economics. Assertions are not good enough.

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That’s a laugh coming from your perspective on this. Looking back at our respective posts, you are the one who’s hurling out unsubstantiated assertions about the Soviet economy, whereas I have taken the time to list sources, examples and documentation, both disproving your assertions and backing up what I have to say.

I’m not trying to be Mr. Arrogant here. But I have taken the time, as a former student of economics, and someone involved in practical socialistic economic development, to learn about Soviet economic history and process. That’s why I call it state capitalism without reservation (along with China, etc.)—not just because Lenin said so (although that alone is a powerful persuader).

You have repeatedly claimed, without fact, that there were no internal markets, that there was no wealth accumulation, and no competitive process of any kind. I listed references and examples showing that in fact all of these were key features in various forms of the Soviet economy. Yet you ignore them.

You automatically assume that command economies and cartels can’t be capitalist. I showed you again examples of the huge role such structures play, and have always played, in the capitalist economy everywhere. Yet you forget this.

I also have repeatedly posted documents and writings and business plans of the Soviet government and leaders throughout the formative years of the country showing and admitting outright that various forms of capitalist economics and structures were being implemented there and some of the reasons why. Yet you keep denying this.

[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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In fact consitently, completely unprofitable businesses continued to function, pumping out tons of excess goods and raw materials, while shortages in other areas were rampant. They simply would not curtail useless production, because of the vested interest of the o;igarhcs of the bureacracies.

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This shows a lack of familiarity with the Soviet economy and much of the internal workings of large-scale corporate enterprise—both of which, as I have maintained, are fundamentally capitalistic.

First, not fair to say that Soviet industries were engaged in useless production any more than industries anywhere else are. The fact that many goods were being produced that could not be sold, while there were huge shortages of goods in other sectors was largely due to the same conditions that confront major capitalist firms in other economies

[URL=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779 2002261%3A4%3C787%3ACSITHT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6]The documents [/URL]I have studied and posted here show that the supposed[URL=http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=M8QE2vspVCoC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&sig=BoSgGnPLdt0hAXs1ieDx8-nz9zI&dq=Internal+Workings+of+the+Soviet+Economy&prev=http://scholar.go ogle.com/scholar%3Fq%3DInternal%2BWorkings%2Bof%2Bthe%2BSoviet%2BEconomy%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D]planning of the Soviet economy[/URL]was a [URL=http://books.google.com/books?id=ifzxEVMfjvsC&dq=Capitalism+in+Soviet+Economy&pg=PP1&ots=es3skYh2d0&sig=SrRFpZiOOYshMIlRv-wrYM216uY&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den %26rls%3DSUNA,SUNA:2006-18,SUNA:en%26sa%3DX%26oi%3Dspell%26resnum%3D0%26ct%3Dresult%26cd%3D1%26q%3DCapitalism%2Bin%2BSoviet%2BEconomy%26spell%3D1&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1#PRA1- PA164,M1]big joke.[/URL]

First, the plans were hugely vague and grossly inaccurate in terms of the expectations of market demands, and therefore were constantly being changed.

Second, the corporate capitalist bureaucracies were constantly deferring and undermining the plans to suit their own capitalistic agendas, hence leading to over-production in various sectors and scarcity in others.

Third, the plans were developed by high-paid pork-choppers, financial managers and consultants, investment strategists, market sociologists, etc. with little relation to the average working class person’s reality. There was little or no input from labour or consumer organizations or local governments or business interests. That’s why the first was such a big thing.

As to “unprofitable businesses” are concerned, that is a matter of interpretation, depending on how you look at it. In modern corporate capitalism, especially in in major corporate conglomerates, often companies are made tolook unprofitable, or intentionally set up to be unprofitable, often for political reasons or to offset on the books income from other ventures. The four main reasons for this are generally to:

Hide income from non-executive shareholders and/or creditors, and employees.
Avoid paying taxes on income
Attain a political or public relations goal
Facilitate the operations of more profitable subsidiaries (even if they themselves don’t turn a profit)

The first one is exactly often how senior managers and executives like their pockets—by reporting their salaries and bonuses as operational expenses (which in many cases is legal), or buying goods from another subsidiary owned by the same corporation at twice the open market price, etc.

This was certainly a common practice in the Soviet economy, along with the others (with the possible exception of tax avoidance).

quote:

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I maintain, that as a "command economy" the mechanisms within the Soviet Union did not conform to the level of financial management of the economy through "markets" and the exchange of goods, and more importantly "investement financing" at the discretion of private interests, instead it was managed on demand through a predictive central planning process, not on the basis of supply and demand.

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And I have repeatedly shown you that in fact your “command economy” and “Predictive central planning” (especially since those plans and budgets were based largely on forecasts of consumer market demands—as in the numbers and fashions and quality of products and services the population would want or need).are clearly expressions of capitalism, falling well within the historic practices and relations of capitalist economics, including banking, investment financing and internal markets.

Both the Leninist, Stalinist and [URL=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282 19640 54%3A3%3C490%3ATDEOTS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y]Brezhnev-era [/URL]governments, as well as the [URL=http://books.google.com/books?id=ifzxEVMfjvsC&dq=Capitalism+in+Soviet+Economy&pg=PP1&ots=es3skYh2d0&sig=SrRFpZiOOYshMIlRv-wrYM216uY&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den %26rls%3DSUNA,SUNA:2006-18,SUNA:en%26sa%3DX%26oi%3Dspell%26resnum%3D0%26ct%3Dresult%26cd%3D1%26q%3DCapitalism%2Bin%2BSoviet%2BEconomy%26spell%3D1&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1#PRA1- PA164,M1]Gorbachev[/URL]crowd, noted that state central planning and corporate monopoly do not do away with capitalist production and trade modes and social relations, but rather simply manipulate them (what neo-cons call "market distortion").

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These millionairs could not use the internal economic structures of the Soviet Union as a vehicle to accumulate capital. It simply was not legal to do so. So, they salted away their stash overseas, because there was no bank in the USSR which they could use as a base to accumulate and then reinvest capital,

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What? Huh? Have you been paying attention at all? How the Hell do you think they were able to acquire those millions in the first place? From the money tree? The fact is those internal structures, including the banks (which played a key role in Russian imperialist influence over other parts of the globe), is THE ONE AND ONLY WAY they acquired that wealth: by extracting it from the labour of their employees, just like corporate bosses do anywhere else. The foreign investment these types were allowed to make just shows how deep the capitalist influence over the Soviet economy went.

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They were rich managers, who manipulared cajoled and conived to benefit themselves, not capitalists.

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Denial in the face of overwhelming fact is amazing. The very fact they had/do have almost absolute exclusive decision-making power over capital wealth and power of attorney over what to do with it makes them capitalists. Individual title stock ownership is not a requirement to have such absolute control, nor has it ever been. You can clearly see this everywhere, including Canada, where bureaucrats and executive managers wield such exclusive control over capital and budgets of crown corporations, including, to a large degree, setting their salaries and bonuses for themselves.

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Managers are often bonussed for streamlining operations and cutting costs, but these are not their savings, but the savings of the entity as a whole. In other words there is no "free" flow of capital or "investment" or competition internal to the bureacracy.

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There certainly is, as I have shown. Of course there are major differences in how these manifest themselves, but the basis and impetus for them are definitely there, for sure.

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The manager can not just walk away taking with them whatever share of accumulated capital they deem it their right, the money is not theirs, to de-invest, as a capitalists can.

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You know, I hate to say this, but you could actually learn something from reading the Globe and Mail Report on Business just to see how unrelated to reality this is. Most investors out there are completely out of the loop when it comes to controlling capital and corporate governance. With few exceptions (like labour ventures, co-ops and similar socialistic ventures), capital is controlled by exclusive tyrannies of mega-capitalists, administrative bureaucrats and legal and trade consultants. That’s part of what has always made the system so destructive and oppressive.

Better yet, try reading Focus on the Corporation or The Left Business Observer.

I got more to say, but I’ll wait until tomorrow.

[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: Steppenwolf Allende ]

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
No we haven’t agreed on this at all. I have shown you examples and sources proving there were/are internal markets and even a competition process among many of its bureaucratic management structures, and that both domestically and internationally, capitalistic economics played a central role in determining Soviet foreign policy.

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Oh we don't. How sad.

Well then, since you are a former student of economics, I will tell you plain and simple that your studies have been in vain. As a former coporate manager I can tell you that "no," competition in the workplace is primarily social and not economic at all except in the brownie points sense. Each seperate cubbyhole is not an independly run economic enterprise in competition with all the other cubbyholes.

You don't go around to all the Adminstrative Assistants looking to see which one will give you the best deal on staples. There is no "market." You ask for staples, and you get them, or not.

[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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You don't go around to all the Adminstrative Assistants looking to see which one will give you the best deal on staples. There is no "market." You ask for staples, and you get them, or not.

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So your experience makes you an expert on everything everywhere. I never said all corporations work with an internal market. I said many do, especially larger conglomerates and mult-national firms, and I have given you links to practical examples where this happens.

I also never said managers go around to see who gives them the best deal on staples. But there certainly are firms that might reward a manager with additional bonuses and/or salary or promotion, etc, if s/he figured out a way how to use less staples while getting the same amount of work done.

As a self-employed worker, I know if I can cut some costs somewhere, I usually can reap the benefit of that. But if I'm an employee in either a private, stock-held or state-owned corporation, it would be my senior bosses who would get that benefit, not me or any of my co-workers.

Starting to get the picture yet? Of course not.

Note to the moderators: my last post is long and loaded with links to sources that I pain-stakingly posted in order to try to satisfy the demands of this debate. Sadly (or more like angrily) some of them did not embed like they are supposed to.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:

So your experience makes you an expert on everything everywhere. I never said all corporations work with an internal market. I said many do, especially larger conglomerates and mult-national firms, and I have given you links to practical examples where this happens.[/b]

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I thought it was clear I was challenging your authorizing statement, about how you were a "former student of economics."

In anycase, so are you saying now that those companies that do not have internal markets are not "capitalist" structures in terms of their internal working system? Are they something else?

Oh wait! I thought you said everything functioned through markets a little while earlier! Are you now saying that there are different kinds of markets, again, or are you back at the everything is a market and therefore the same stage, again?

One thing is clear, you will contest any arguement I make in some manner or another even if the arguement you make completely contradicts another arguement you made before.

[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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"Capitalism", or neo-Liberalism, is a fairly rigid ideology. It's always workers labouring for a parasitic overclass. It's a reactionary ideology in that change only occurs when it's absolutely necessary, but in the meantime, the inputs are the least in extracting the most from the environment and labour. Accumulate more wealth at the top always.

Socialism has always been considered the more diverse of the three isms produced by the French Revolution: conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism. In a true worker's society, we can make it anything we want. Like John Lennon once said, imagine. I suppose we have to free our asses first at which point our minds will follow.

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Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can

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Can you imagine that? Modern workers movements would merely replace the driver of the big ship "Civilization" as it continues swallowing up the lands and resources of other peoples.

Look at this way, Fidel, how does the city of Toronto feed itself? It imports food from other places. It imports energy, goods, resources. All of that requires extraction of raw resources or the harnessing of peoples and land in the "hinterland". The relatively low cost of fuel in Toronto, for example, can't be viewed in isolation of violence in Iraq, turmoil in the mid-east as a whole, unrest and dispossession in Nigeria, and the destabilization of large regions of Africa.

As well, the relative consumer wealth of North America can't be viewed in isolation of the relative poverty of resource rich southern nations.

Nor can our overflowing supermarkets be viewed in isolation of famine and/or malnutrition in nations that no longer grow for domestic needs but for western export markets.

So how would workers, owning the means of production, continue the extraction of food, resources, and even intellectual knowledge (the theft of grains and seeds by bio-tech firms is, ought to be, a blood-boiling scandal), from other nations more fairly?

[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
Look at this way, Fidel, how does the city of Toronto feed itself? It imports food from other places. It imports energy, goods, resources. All of that requires extraction of raw resources or the harnessing of peoples and land in the "hinterland". The relatively low cost of fuel in Toronto, for example, can't be viewed in isolation of violence in Iraq, turmoil in the mid-east as a whole, unrest and dispossession in Nigeria, and the destabilization of large regions of Africa.

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Well for one thing, I think we have to realize that the whole "capitalist portion" of the existing mixed market socialist North American economy is a lie. It's as unsustainable for us here as globalization of the current capitalist system would be for the rest of the world. The inability for the most capitalist, most oil-dependent nations to come to this realization is among the first signs of crisis of a failing system. In fact, M Spector posted a thread recently discussing the gross divide between the richest few and the vast majority of humanity for whom the capitalist model isn't working. The IMF and WB are not, I repeat, not preaching mixed market socialist economy to the developing third world, and that's the problem. What they are preaching is neo-Liberalism ie. markets for everything. That approach has been tried in various places in the last century and failed miserably. If you want to know more about that, I think it's worth another thread altogether. Be prepared to discuss GATT-NAFTA and GATS.

25 years ago, there were half a billion chronically hungry people. Today, the number is estimated to be 800 million. The current democratic capitalist system is already a colossal failure considering that an estimated 100 to 150 million human beings have perished during this global experiment in democratic capitalism between just the years 1947 and 1979.

So we have a very low benchmark of achievement to meet and exceed in appealing to hundreds of millions of hungry people where cash crops are being exported to "the market" on an annual basis. Mechanized farming methods in the U.S. have desertified a quarter of the most fertile High Plains region of the U.S. since the 1980's. Obviously, we need to reclaim arrable farmland from where capitalists are building factories and chemical plants for the production of useless plastic widget economy. Cuba is a good example of sustainable agriculture today.

The rebel armies in the Congo using slave labour in mining tantalum for eventual use in cell phones is totally unnecessary. But it's happening because of the nature of capitalists seeking to save a buck on the cost of labour. Africa is a colony, a repository of raw materials for the west to raid at will. Get rid of capitalism, and the "rebel" mercenaries will have no one to pay them to murder and oppress. Plenty of tantalum elsewhere without marauding capitalists creating their own black markets in cheap labour. Torontonians could have their cell phones without gross human rights abuses happening in Africa. The situation in Africa stands out as one of a long list of reasons for scrapping the capitalist system.

As for Ontario's energy needs, we could could supply our own electrical power with a publicly-owned system. We need to generate power locally where it's used. Capitalists trading in power using long distance transmissions is far too expensive and inefficient as the grid suffers overall power losses with the atempt to marketize it. In fact, the overall situation is that Canada is a net exporter of electrical power, as well as overall energy sources, to the U.S., a country that has failed to meet its own electrical power needs through the expansionary nature of capitalism. They want Canada to build more nuclear power plants so they can be greener. Conservation and alternate sources of power generated locally is the answer for the time being before technological breakthroughs can be made toward sustainable energy sources.

FM, the ways in which we could do things differently are endless. What's certain is that it will be absolutely necessary that we do before very long, because the current semi-capitalist system is destroying the natural economy. "Without the environment, there can be no economy." What we don't need is to transform our society into a neo-Liberal total capitalist economy. That way is a dead end for humanity. Socialism is the future.

[ 08 December 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]