We don't hear much about the situation of the working class in Russia today. There was a population loss in the 1990's. Is the Russian working class ruthlessly oppressed and exploited by the new bourgeoisie there ? Isn't it still sort of state capitalism ?
Charles ^^^ (This is part of a continuing series on "Does Socialism Have a Future". My next post will examine the state capitalist attitude toward Cuba, particularly in light of some useful research found in Julia Sweig's "Inside the Cuban Revolution : Fidel Castro and the urban underground".) In 1948, Tony Cliff defended the idea that the Soviet Union was "state capitalist" in the internal bulletin of the British Trotskyist movement. His analysis was couched in terms of Marxist fundamentals: "There is no aspect of the problem of Russia about which so much confusion has been spread as whether the economy is moved by the law of value or not. The main reason for this confusion lies in the lack of clarity as regards the definition of the law of value which leads to mistakes in the effort to locate it in the body-economy. Many of the Marxists who have dealt with Russia have 'found' the source of activity of the law of value even where it does not exist, while others have not found it even where it does exist. Even though we shall repeat some of the ABC of Marxism, it is necessary to sketch the essence of the law of value as a prelude to determining whether it acts in the Russian economy and, if so, how." The "law of value" is a reference to Marx's discussion of the circulation of commodities in Volume One of Capital. There was of course a bit of a problem in applying this law to the Soviet Union considering Marx's emphasis on profit-making: "The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation." But this hardly describes the Soviet bureaucrats, does it? From the late 1920s until the arrival of Perestroika, the "restless never-ending process of profit-making" was alien to Soviet society, whatever else its faults. The Soviet "liberal" intellectuals of the 1980s who were so enamored of Milton Friedman bitterly complained that the state interfered with rational economic processes. As Marshall Goldman once pointed out, profit-making was considered criminal in the USSR: "In all fairness to Gorbachev, no one has yet been able to figure out how to make a successful transition from a Stalinist, centrally planned economy to a market-oriented system in a relatively short time. The Soviet-type system developed in very different ways: the market atrophied, prices became distorted, individuals hesitated to assume initiatives, and profit making became associated with criminality and antisocial acts." full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/01/30/state-capitalism-theory-and-rea lity/
