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On Nov 5, 2014, at 9:41 AM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:
Actually Trotsky was focused on the contradiction between the forces
and
relations of production (and associated norms of distribution), i.e.
how
the inadequacy of the former hamstrung efforts to move beyond
bourgeois
forms of the latter
Actually, no bolshevik (including Koba-Stalin, whose Okhranik/Petrine
program for the reconstruction of the Empire was still carefully
concealed)) could say that the "productive forces" (foremost among
which was the abysmally low cultural/technical level of the laboring
masses) inherited from the Czars were remotely close to the requisites
for development of a socialist society. Thus the total unanimity on
the impossibility of constructing socialism in a single backward
country like Russia. In 1918 Lenin went so far as to state that "for
us, state capitalism would be a step forward." And by 1921, after
three years of indescribably devastating civil war, soviet Russia's
productive forces had deteriorated (deaths, destructions, emigration
of the technical intelligentsia) far beyond their already miserable
level. For the bolsheviks the only hope for socialism in Russia was
their incorporation into a European soviet republic. Nevertheless,
thanks to the enormous cultural impetus of the proletarian revolution,
soviet Russia under NEP was in the 1920's able to advance as far as a
relatively democratic state capitalism that equalled and even exceeded
pre-revolution levels of economic output--a mixed economy with state-
owned industrial trusts and banks alongside private businesses,
commodity production for domestic and world markets, peasant-owned
agriculture, and generalization of waged labor with real trade unions
defending the rights of workers. Thus along with the political
relations characteristic of a bureaucratically-deformed workers' state
(as Lenin characterized the USSR in 1922) went a set of entirely
capitalist relations of *production*. As the bureaucratic deformation
of the bolshevik regime proceeded, thanks to the maleficent
organizational genius of Koba-Stalin and the political incompetence of
"old" bolsheviks like Zinoviev and Bukharin, by 1929 the Stalinist
counterrevolution was able to emerge into full daylight. Stalin sent
NEP "To the Devil" with his total forced collectivization of
agriculture and breakneck industrialization. Over the next nine years
the necks broken included virtually all the remaining bolshevik cadre
together with millions of workers, peasants, artists, writers, and
technicians. What remained at the end of the purges (when Yezhov was
liquidated and Beria took over the secret police establishment from
which the present Czar, Putin, was to emerge) was now a *totalitarian*
state-capitalist regime (as Trotsky stated, "Stalinism and Fascism are
symmetrical phenomena") with a new bureaucratic ruling class. The
state-capitalist relations of production that had existed under NEP
were changed *in form* to those characteristic of fascism--wage labor,
commodity production, managerial absolutism, all enforced by
unremitting police-state repression. The resulting monstrosity
retained from soviet Russia only the brand name "USSR" (as a vampire
state it had as much right to that brand as any of the Undead has to
his predecease name).
When Trotsky was writing The Revolution Betrayed it was already a
stretch to believe, as he did, in the possibility of a revived
bolshevism.
By the time it had been published that hope was tenuous in the
extreme. Two years later it had been definitively murdered. But,
entirely isolated from any contact inside Russia, Trotsky still
refused to give up that dream. That the "inevitable" defeat of Nazi
Germany in the coming war might lead to a regeneration of the Russian
workers' state, this was the slender reed to which he clung when he
wrote in 1939 that "The Nature of the Soviet Union is not yet Decided
by History." Alas, the Decision had already been made. The Stalinist
state-capitalist form of Czarism, still with us today in somewhat more
"Westernized" form, had become unshakeable.
By playing word games with phrases like "productive forces," "property
forms," and "production relations" the Orthodox managed for fifty
years to pretend that under the Stalinist "USSR" brand they were
buying a "Degenerated Workers' State." Some pretend that Russia even
now is a "workers' state!" In the 1950s-1960's the dominant faction of
the Fourth International even expected a socialist revolution to be
introduced to western Europe through invasion by the Russian Army (by
the early 1960's the same types, then as now, moved their trust onto a
new brand--the "Arab Revolution" of the Boumediennes and Qaddafis).
On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 11:41 PM, michael a. lebowitz via Marxism
Louis wrote:
From "The Revolution Betrayed":
'The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between
capitalism
and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from
adequate to give the state property a socialist character'
On this matter, they clearly shared a focus on the primacy of the
productive forces--- in contrast, eg, to an emphasis upon the
relations of
production.
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