Re: the Soviet system and the w-s

Jozsef Borocz posting on the nature of the Soviet system raises some
pretty fundamental questions: Just what was that system?  Why did it not
work?  To what extent was it dependent on the eastern European satellites?
And perhaps most importantly, in what way might it serve as a model or
anti-model for a world system, which it was intended to be prior to the
consolidation of the Russian Revolution as "building communism in one
country".

After reading Jozsef's posting, I felt as though, in a previous posting, I
had perhaps had the final answer before I started to type.  I used the
analogy of the duck -- if it walks, quacks, looks, then it must be one, even
if it pretends to be a peacock.  I appreciate Jozsef's point that what is
perceived as a duck from one perspective may indeed be something very
different from another.  I must admit that I have not read much Marxist
literature myself -- Das Kapital a ong time ago, Sweezy and Baran almost as
long ago, Monthly Review until not quite as long ago, and a few other
things, but absolutely nothing recent.  But I think I understand that
capitalism, as understood by Marxists, depends on whether you have both
input markets by which the capitalist class can appropriate the surpluses
produced by workers and output markets in which surpluses can be denied to
consumers.  A market is needed for "valorization"; that is for determining
the subsistence wage that must be paid to labour and the maximum price that
can be charged to the consumer.

A market of this general kind is a highly monopolized market.  It is a
market in which the single capitalist, or a colluding capitalist class, has
absolute control.  Having such control, the capitalist can absolutely
determine the character of the market, setting all input and output prices,
appropriating all surpluses, not allowing any of the free forces that
determine supply and demand in a competitive market any scope.  I would
suggest that, in its most essential form, this is what the Soviet system was


like.  This is how it was intended to operate.  However, there was another
dimension to it, one which is supposed to be absent in capitalism.  This was
ideology.  Unlike communists, capitalists do not have this.  They are
supposed to be motivated by greed and greed alone.  The goal of the Soviet
leadership was to develop a communist society, one in which the state would
whither away and ownership and control would rest with the working class,
and people would no longer have any cause to be greedy.

My view is that Russia was the wrong place to try to achieve anything of
this general kind.  It was too disparate in terms of many different
ethnicities with many different quarrels, and carried far too much
justifiably paranoid historic baggage about being invaded and sacked from
all directions.  As well, there was no extensive working class at the time
of the revolution.  The communist regime therefore slipped into the familiar
Russian mode of holding the country together by sitting on it, by imposing
from the top, by liquidating dissenters or sending them off to the gulags.
And economically, it behaved like the ultimate textbook monopolist,
appropriating all surpluses and even the market in order to build mountains
of capital.

Following World War II, it appropriated the surpluses of its eastern
European satellites much like a textbook imperialist would.  It is possible
that a considerable part of the rebound of eastern Europe since the fall of
Russian communism can be explained by the fact that countries like Poland
and Hungary are now able to keep their surpluses and no longer have to ship
them off to the Soviet Union.

In my view, the failure of the Soviet Union represents the failure of the
policy of first building communism in one country and then exporting it to
others.  Might it have worked better in any other country?  Perhaps.  It is
probably working better in China, where more of a mix of state and private
enterprise appears to be emerging and where the benefits of monetized and
relatively free markets appears to be recognized.  Toward the end of the
Soviet State, attempts were being made to liberalize the economy and convert
to a more market based system, but by then it was too late.  There was too
little to build on.

Would communism have succeeded if, instead of building communism in one
country, the policy of international revolution had been pursued?  Probably
not.  It is likely that it would not have happened.  As has been
demonstrated time and again, most recently in Seattle, international
interests are simply too diverse to accept singular solutions.  The most
unacceptable solutions of all are those which are based on someone else's
ideology and notions of how things should be done.

I'm afraid I'll have to stop here because I'm out of time, and probably out
of thoughts as well.  But if people are interested, we can continue.  A
place to start might be our existing global institutions and why they are
not as effective as they might be.  Here I'm thinking of the WTO, the ILO,
the World Bank, the IMF, the various environmental protocols, and the UN
itself.  Why, apart from capitalists, are they not working?  How could they
be fixed up and woven into an effective global system which continued to
respect national sovereinty?  Anyhow, that's it for the moment.  Must run.

Ed Weick


>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
>
>
>
>
>