the Soviet system and the w-s

Dear WSN,

For those of us who don't have the final answer before starting to type /
read and hence would be interested to know more,

re: whether the Soviet system was capitalist, the key question is where you
locate your definition of capitalism: on the shop-floor or the system of
global trade in essential commodities. If the former, you have the
articulation of the modes of production; if the latter, a world-system with
disparate modes of labor control. This is the essence of the
Brenner-Wallerstein debate, appended by a very strong intervention by Andre
Gunder Frank with the suggestively titled, and insightful paper "Long Live
Trans-Ideological Enterprise!". May I direct the attention of those
interested to that area of scholarship. As for the w-s presence of the
(former) state socialist bloc, there is a literature about that also, incl.
some of  Chris Chase-Dunn's work, lastly a piece coauthored with Terry
Boswell in the _Humboldt Journal_ as well as my 1992 piece entitled "Dual
Dependency and Property Vacuum: Social Change on the State Socialist
Semiperiphery" in _Theory & Society_. 

The truly interesting thing about the ways in which the Soviet-type system
exhibited features of capitalism and if yes, what kind, and if not, what
then, is that the picture changes as you move around various social 
locations
of society. 

- From the perspective of labor, the appropriation of surplus does
take place, suggesting a class society with exploitation; 

- from the perspective of capital, there are serious problems with
valorization due to the administered nature of markets, the
non-profit-motivated system of investment and the absence of a private
ownership class; 

- from the perspective of the bureaucracy, its rational administrative 
system
is continually disrupted and distorted by incessant, often outright
amateurish and annoying mobilizing efforts on part of the ruling party and
its extensions; meanwhile 

- the same party suffers from an utter initial absence of a working class in
these peripheral or semiperipheral (i.e., "latecomer" and
underindustrializing) societies and severe problems due to lack of long
working class traditions (i.e., the absence of an ethos of worker solidarity
in a social context that has been characterized by peasant and artisanal
life). 

- And when the working class does act, it is against the power of the party
whose political practices are burdened by unerasable traces of its Stalinist
past.

- The working class is also very confused as, while it is true that
individual consumption tends to be truly abysmal in contrast to western
Europe, the ubiquitous while clearly unfair point of comparison, it is not 
so
bad in comparison to the local past.

- Add to that the fact that *collective* consumption is really very, very
strong, accounting for the fact that all of the post-state-socialist states
have entered their post-1989 history with *higher-than-expected* performance
in quality of life measures (i.e., their scores are above the regression 
line
of expectations on the basis of per capita GDP). I have done more on this in
the paper included in the David Smith-Dorothy Solinger-Stephen Topik (1999)
volume entitlted States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy.

re: Kornai, IMHO his otherwise in many ways innovative and stimulating work
suffers from (1) an inability/unwillingness to theorize anything bigger 
than,
and beyond the scope of, the nation state, a common shortcoming of
conventional institutional economics and (2) a very simplified distortion of
the Polanyian scheme of the modes of economic integration (basically mapping
"redistribution" on state property and "the market" on non-state property
also called the second economy, both of those being enormous distortions).
These two features unfortunately render Kornai's elegant schemes nearly
unusable for an analysis of the really existing experience of social change
in central & eastern Europe.

May I also add that, as organizers of the PEWS conference a few years ago, 
my
good colleague, current PEWS Pres Dave Smith and I were dismayed to see that
there was no submission about the post-1989 central/eastern European cases 
/ 
issues. Talking about that one-fourth of the world that has experienced the
Soviet-type system appears to be somehow very difficult for ws scholars. 
Some
of this is understandable (language skills etc) and because the issue of
socialism and its chances / discontents are close to the heart of people
interested in social change on the world scale. On the other hand, it is 
IMHO 
a major and conceptually quite crucial omission, and precisely because of
the salience of this issue we should do much more.

Jozsef Borocz