[Marxism] Soviet economic model

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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I offer a chapter of my book, The Life and Death of Stalinism, published 
in 1990:


http://lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter5_stalinistcapitalism.pdf.

Since then Soviet archives have been opened to scholars, and I believe 
that the broad ideas in this chapter are illustrated in, for example, 
the book The Political Economy of Stalinism by Paul R. Gregory, which 
might be available online.


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Re: [Marxism] Marxism Digest, Vol 166, Issue 21

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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In the 1960's the CP bookshop on East 13th Street in NYC, pictured in 
the article, had been renamed after Thomas Jefferson. Probably a product 
of the Popular Front period, and interesting in the light of today's 
debates.


On 8/18/2017 9:18 AM, marxism-requ...@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote:

Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2017 00:39:20 -0400
From: Dennis Brasky 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: [Marxism] The forgotten world of Communist Party bookstores
Message-ID:

Re: [Marxism] Zoom update

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Hi Ralph and all,

Thanks for your recap. As I see it, Marx’s orchestra metaphor was meant 
to describe labor under capitalism, and I guess (because I’m still 
reading) that Lebowitz applies it also to labor under “real socialism.” 
Those are both exploitative class societies. But things would not be the 
same under Marx’s proposed society of associated producers (communism), 
where all share the decision-making powers of the conductor even though 
at any moment they may assign the leadership task to one person. If that 
is “protagonistic democracy,” then I think that’s what Marx advocated.


I have two basic problems with Lebowitz’s take. 1) If he believes that 
for Marx an imposed authority (conductor vs. conducted) applies even 
under communism, I don’t see where he finds that in Marx’s work. 2) Nor 
do I see how the desired protagonistic democracy can be attributed to 
Chavez’s Venezuela, where the first step towards communism – the 
overthrow of capitalist power – had not been taken. Even where there 
existed workers’ councils, industry and the state were not in the hands 
of the working class, so the workers did not have the power to set 
either goals or methods of work. Those were set by the laws of capital: 
profit, competition, etc., and in the end they were enforced by the 
still-capitalist state.


On one of Lebowitz’s main themes, I agree that “real socialism” (i.e., 
Stalinism) did not measure up to the standards of socialism or communism 
as Marx envisioned them. And of course, he is not the only one to have 
said so. I have not finished reading his book on The Contradictions of 
Real Socialism, so I cannot yet say how his analysis stacks up against 
others.


But on another of his themes, I am mystified as to how he sees anything 
like Marxist standards being met in Venezuela. Chavez may have spoken 
beautiful words about socialism, and that may well have encouraged many 
workers in their struggles with their capitalist bosses, but he by no 
means consistently supported their struggles. He acted as if he was the 
sole conductor, not one of a democratic many.


Walter





On 5/5/2017 11:34 AM, Ralph Johansen wrote:
I'm sorry that you didn't make it Sunday, and the next session is on 
May 14, 10AM ESDT, not May 9 as I mistakenly had it. I did send this 
message but possibly no follow-up, and we met on the 30th. Still no 
recorded sessions online from David for you to review and catch up.


At the last meeting we were discussing Lebowitz's chapter 8 page 149, 
on The Orchestra Conductor, and we agreed to take it from there.


Here, Lebowitz appears to tie this orchestra view to Marx, the 
statement on coordination  to "insure a harmonious cooperation of the 
activities of individuals" ( Marx) - his metaphor of the orchestra 
conductor, for whom music is the only thing that counts - I am 
necessary; without me, there would be chaos. In this perspective, the 
right to participate collectively in discussions and to offer 
suggestions to improve a predetermined course of action is permitted, 
ie, democracy is collective participation, often considerable - not 
participation in the development of the goal but rather to comment and 
approve the plan of the conductor.


So, the question for discussion is this statement and whether Lebowitz 
correctly ascribes this view to Marx as opposed to his own view, and 
if so whether we subscribe to Lebowitz's view - that for people to 
transform themselves through their activities it is essential that 
they fully participate in the planning and carrying out of 
organization through "protagonistic democracy."


So, what of Marx's view if true, and why did he go there?

  On 4/14/2017 7:53 PM, Walter Daum wrote:
>>> In my case the 16th poses no problem, but the 23rd will be on the
>>> weekend of the Historical Materialism conference in NY, so I would
>>> have to miss the zoom group then.
>>>
>>> Walter
>>>
>>>
>>> On 4/14/2017 9:10 PM, Ralph Johansen wrote:
 So postpone a week?



On 5/5/2017 6:33 AM, Walter Daum wrote:


Hi Ralph et al,

I missed Sunday’s meeting; I don’t think I got the Zoom invitation.

On May 9 I would like to participate. The Ghosh article looks very 
interesting – will that be part of the discussion?


Walter


On 5/5/2017 3:02 AM, Ralph Johansen wrote:


In Sunday's meeting we discussed chapters 6 and 7 of Lebowitz's The 
Socialist Imperative. For the next session on May 9 we will cover 
chapters 8 and 9.


Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy by Jayati Ghosh 
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2017/0317ghosh.html


This is worth reading, whether or not one agrees that what he 
depicts here spells 

Re: [Marxism] Zoom update

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Hi Ralph et al,

I missed Sunday’s meeting; I don’t think I got the Zoom invitation.

On May 9 I would like to participate. The Ghosh article looks very 
interesting – will that be part of the discussion?


Walter


On 5/5/2017 3:02 AM, Ralph Johansen wrote:


In Sunday's meeting we discussed chapters 6 and 7 of Lebowitz's The 
Socialist Imperative. For the next session on May 9 we will cover 
chapters 8 and 9.


Globalization and the End of the Labor Aristocracy by Jayati Ghosh 
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2017/0317ghosh.html


This is worth reading, whether or not one agrees that what he depicts 
here spells the end of, rather than a wrenching shift in, the go-along 
position of labor and the end of the social contract which has bought 
class quiescence especially but not exclusively in the advanced 
countries.


For instance, and this has to do with our discussion Sunday, in the 
face of climate change, energy and resource depletion and falling 
profit rate that goes with a profit-driven, market-dominated, 
increasingly capital-intensive, expansionary, highly competitive 
capitalist world economy, with the prospect of multiplying goods and 
services and two cars in every middle-class household's driveway in 
China and India and Brazil and Mexico and who knows where else, how 
long can capital continue to produce for and generate an ever-larger 
world market through global rentier mark-up oligopsonies, 12,000-mile 
supply chains and cheap labor, and all the shifts entailed? As opposed 
maybe to the dominance again of domestic production for domestic 
markets? Things seem to be moving ever faster in less predictable ways.




 
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Re: [Marxism] Rosa Luxemburg's 'The Accumulation of Capital', , 100 years on

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Hi Patrick, Of course I agree that the three “grabs” you mention occur, 
and that they are crucial for capitalist production. But I don’t agree 
that they are, in today’s conditions, non-capitalist. They are part of 
how capitalist economy works; they exist in addition to the direct 
extraction of surplus-value in the sphere of production. Luxemburg held 
that capitalism required not just the grabbing of extra surplus-value 
outside the production sphere – it needed to loot by force 
non-capitalist *modes of production.* The Marikana massacre was the 
forcible suppression of a strike within capitalist production, a strike 
by proletarian miners whose labor was super-exploited by capitalists. 
Luxemburg’s scheme doesn’t apply here. As John Smith said in the post 
that triggered this discussion: “Harvey is right to draw attention to 
the continuing and even increasing importance of old and new forms of 
accumulation by dispossession, but he does not recognize that 
imperialism’s most significant shift in emphasis is in an entirely 
different direction – toward the transformation of its own core 
processes of surplus-value extraction through the global labor 
arbitrage-driven [i.e., by super-exploitation] globalization of 
production, a phenomenon that is entirely internal to the labor-capital 
relation.” Yes, my comments were grumpy. I grump especially at reformist 
institutions that inappropriately appropriate Luxemburg’s revolutionary 
good name. But my main point was to grump at theorists (Harvey and 
Wolff) who suggest that the center of imperialism has moved South, or 
that it is the oppressed countries in the global South that extract 
surplus-value from the imperialist countries in the global North. Those 
fictions turn the real imperialist globe upside down. Walter On Tue, 5 
Sep 2017 17:09:06 +0200 Patrick Bond  wrote: There 
are questions in this (exceedingly grumpy) review posed to me, so I sent 
back this quick answer to Walter Daum:


Walter: [Bond] repeatedly quotes her statements to the effect that
?capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist relations.?
But the main examples he provides are those of extractive industries
that strip the continent of minerals, and he vividly describes the
infamous massacre of platinum miners at Marikana in 2012. How is this an
example of ?super-exploitative relations between capitalist and
non-capitalist spheres? being confirmed in Africa today?

My reply: The super-exploitation of the non-capitalist sphere entails:
1) land grabs of the soil above which the minerals are found;
2) nature grabs of the minerals themselves;
3) grabs of the social reproduction of labour power in the form of
super-exploited women suffering the conditions of migrant labour in
neo-apartheid SA (more athttp://womin.org.za)

Sorry I didn't make that clear, but you'd agree?

Cheers,
Patrick

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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Patrick Bond wrote: David's just replied to the latest version of the 
critique by John Smith, published recently in the Review of African 
Political Economy:

http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

I’m not convinced. Harvey claims that Smith’s GPS is cockeyed and that 
is wrong to interpret the reversal of the East-to-West drain as the same 
as South-to-North. He says that for him the East means the block 
consisting of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. And he 
says that “wealth has moved from West to East.”


It is of course true that this East has grown much wealthier, and has 
gained relatively in comparison to the rest of the world. But that is 
not exactly what he said in his commentary that Smith quoted and in 
previous works – namely, that the "flow of value" had shifted and has 
largely been reversed, so that the East is now "draining" value from the 
West. There is a difference between the amount of wealth in a region and 
which way the wealth flows.


Moreover, as to East vs South, in a 2009 article on Socialist Project 
(and the next year in The Enigma of Capital), Harvey wrote that this 
unprecedented shift "has reversed the long-standing drain of wealth from 
East, Southeast and South Asia to Europe and North America that had been 
occurring since the eighteenth century." Here, with Southeast and South 
Asia included, it appears that the reverse drain now goes not just to 
China, Japan and the "Tigers" but also to poorer countries like India, 
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and 
Indonesia.


Harvey supplies no figures, but I think it hard to believe that the new 
wealth in Harvey's East is derived from draining value from the West. 
(All the harder to believe this of Cambodia and Bangladesh!) Where, for 
example, does China's growth and wealth come from? Above all, from the 
super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of *Chinese* workers, many of 
them migrants driven economically out of their rural homes to the cities 
where they live and labor under miserable conditions (remember the 
Foxconn suicides) with wages one-tenth or less of those in the West.


Yes, China and Japan own lots of US debt. But the rate of return they 
get on it is close to zero, as Larry Summers has gloated. More 
generally, China's overseas investment income has been in the red for years.


It is an extremely dubious proposition that the flows of centuries have 
reversed direction and that the East in Harvey’s terms is draining value 
from the West – and even more dubious that, as he implied previously, 
that the South is draining value from the North. I can believe that the 
East, like the West, is draining value from the South. But that is not 
what Harvey’s GPS tells us.


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Re: [Marxism] What Happens to a Factory Town When the Factory Shuts Down? - The New York Times

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Powerful essay but not complete online. My wife spotted a call for revolution 
in the print version which is not in the online version. It’s in one of the 
extended photo captions, under a picture of a lone protester with an American 
flag and a sign reading “DEAL WITH A REAL EMERGENCY: GM LORDSTOWN!” Here is the 
text:
Werner Lange, 72Protester
This is my 40th day out here. I usually stand up on the corner there, and the 
workers come out around 3 PM at the end of the shift. A lot of them will stop 
by and say, “thank you very much.” They bring hot chocolate, coffee, gift cards 
for Starbucks and McDonald’s. I get hugs.
This plant is in our blood, and it’s in our bones. Corporations can’t control 
these people. I’m talking about myself, to. I taught school for most of my 
life, 40 years of sociology at the college level, most of it just over there at 
Kent State. I grew up with this plant. The best thing about this valley is the 
sense of community. We are committed to family, committed to the community, and 
all we want to do is have a living wage so we can raise our kids and our 
grandchildren and have a few minutes of leisure.
But all of that is at stake now. It’s almost like a dying patient here. Where’s 
the righteous anger? Where’s the outrage? Where are the mass protesters? The 
power is there; it’s just untapped. We want to give it a spirit of 
resurrection, and if that doesn’t work, try insurrection. I’ll be flying my 
Spirit of 76 American Revolutionary flag. That’s what that’s all about.

Louis Proyect wroteDate: Sun, 5 May 2019 13:31:40 -0400

Photo-essay on the closing of GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio best seen on 
NY Times website.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant.html



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Re: [Marxism] Erdogan’s imperial play comes undone

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Sub-imperialism is a valid and important concept. Callinicos is right that it 
was introduced by Marini with regard to Brazil, and it has been extended by 
Patrick Bond and others to South Africa. In the Middle East it might well apply 
to Iran and Turkey. As I read him, Marini regards a state as sub-imperialist if 
it is not imperialist on the world scale (it remains exploited by the 
imperialist powers) but plays an imperialist-like role regionally.
Callinicos has abused the term by applying it over-widely and ignoring the 
“sub” aspect. His tendency, for example, labeled Argentina sub-imperialist in 
order to avoid taking sides against Britain in the Malvinas/Falklands war in 
1982. In effect the IST treated the war as an inter-imperialist conflict. They 
seem to be doing the same to avoid taking the side of Turkey against Russia, to 
the extent that for his own reasons and for the moment Erdogan is defending the 
remnants of the Syrian democratic revolution. 
The RKOB is right about Callinicos. But his misuse of the term doesn’t mean 
that sub-imperialism has to be confusing.

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[Marxism] Rethinking Voting for Democrats

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Along with much of the left in this country that identifies with the tradition 
of revolutionary Marxism, the LRP has considered it a basic principle to oppose 
voting for capitalist parties. We have condemned such voting as “crossing the 
class line” and for undermining the struggle for independent working-class 
political organization and action. In the United States, the Democratic Party 
postures as the friend of labor, women and minorities, so we have had to warn 
especially against illusions in it. Along with the openly right-wing 
Republicans, the Democrats are in fact a major party of the U.S.’s imperialist 
capitalist class, one of the bloodiest ruling classes in history.
...Nevertheless, two major factors have prompted us to reconsider the principle 
of not voting for capitalist parties and to consider a range of possible 
electoral tactics that the principle would generally forbid. 

http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/elections-capitalist-parties.html
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Re: [Marxism] Rethinking Voting for Democrats

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Yesterday Ralph Johansen raised two issues: how to address the Sanders 
enthusiasts; and what about the Democratic Party majority who are wary of 
Sanders’ far-reaching reforms? I’ll take up just the first for now. 
Agreed, the Bernie activists aren’t bound by the No Vote for Capitalist Parties 
principle. This particular document wasn’t addressed to them directly, although 
it does indicate our approach. It was addressed to a left audience (and 
therefore posted here) in order to explain why our traditional position needs 
changing – a position we’ve shared with many on the left. 
The Sanders movement is an important development that no one on the left, 
including my group, found a satisfactory (i.e., revolutionary) way to connect 
with. The DSA by and large dove in uncritically. The ISO in 2015-16 stayed 
aloof, counterposing the Green Party. But that went nowhere, since the Sanders 
activists believed that his campaign offered genuine hopes of transforming 
America politics and achieving concrete reforms that could relieve the economic 
precariousness they were facing. The Greens weren’t a contender. Socialist 
Alternative straddled those two approaches, pretending not to be working in the 
Dem Party but in reality behaving more like DSA. Both SAlt and the ISO called 
for Sanders to run independently, knowing full well (I assume, since he made it 
absolutely clear) that he would support the Democratic nominee, both last time 
and this. That meant reinforcing illusions in bourgeois politics.
What should have been tried, in my opinion, is an approach like Lenin’s 
“critical support.” Not just offering a few criticisms (or even worse, 
“reserving the right to criticize” without doing so), but telling the truth 
about the racist, imperialist, anti-working-class Dem Party and the candidates 
who accommodate to it. We and others could not get much of a hearing if we said 
it’s a capitalist party so don’t vote for its candidates. We might have gotten 
a hearing if we’d said, OK, let’s put Sanders to the test of office. Let’s 
elect him and see whether the Democrats adopt his program and whether he 
mobilizes his movement to come out into the streets to fight for it. He hasn’t 
done that so far, even though there were several key opportunities during 
Trump’s reign when that deserved to be done. Why hasn’t he? Because his 
strategy is purely electoral. His “political revolution” means political in the 
everyday bourgeois sense, i.e.,electoral. But his supporters will more easily 
see the limitations of his strategy if he gets into office. That would be a 
step forward toward creating an independent working-class party.
Now that Sanders is in all likelihood out of the race, the issue for the 
Sanders activists is what to do next. This I think our statement does deal 
with. We’re not advocating critical support for Biden in the Leninist sense. 
Voting for him would be purely defensive, to get rid of Trump. A few years ago 
it might have been comforting to think that Trump’s incompetence tempered his 
malevolence. In the present crisis they reinforce each other. Keeping him in 
power would not only boost the drive to autocracy, as we argue in our 
statement. It could doom us all. 
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Re: [Marxism] Rethinking Voting for Democrats

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Really what? That’s a neat little article by Lenin, concisely dissecting the 
U.S. bourgeois parties of his day. It doesn’t say anything about tactically 
voting for one of them to stop the other, but I assume he was against, as was 
Debs. He doesn’t suggest that the Dems were a lesser evil than the Repubs, or 
vice versa. 
Lenin had equally strong denunciations of the bourgeois parties of his own 
country, Russia, and there, under specific circumstances, he advocated a 
defensive vote for Cadet candidates to stop the Black Hundreds from taking 
office. So where’s the principle of *never* voting for a bourgeois candidate?--
On 3/16/20 1:48 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
From: http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/elections-capitalist-parties.html
"Our reconsideration of the principle of not voting for capitalist parties is 
yet to be concluded, but our study of the history of the Marxist movement has 
confirmed that the proponents of this principle, ourselves included, have 
perpetuated a good deal of mythology.
"We do not know how or when the principle became the common view of whole 
sections of the U.S. far left, including just about all Trotskyists. To the 
best of our knowledge, no such principle was ever cited by our classical 
Marxist teachers: Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky."
Really?
V.I. Lenin, The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential 
ElectionsPravda No.164, November 9, 1912
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