Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Re: [pen-l] Fwd: Debates within ecosocialism: John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore and CNS | Louis Proyect: The Unrepenta
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Ian Angus has written a reply to Fred Murphy's critique of Jason Moore. I think it is pretty devastating. And it is based upon a thorough reading of nearly everything Moore has written. http://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/06/23/two-views-on-marxist-ecology-and-jason-w-moore/ Angus, by the way, has written a fine book, Facing the Anthropocene, which combines a thorough examination of the science of climate change and a Marxist analysis of both the science and the social science of the rapid destruction of nature we are now experiencing. Available from Monthly Review Press. The people who have endorsed Ian's book are a pretty remarkable group. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Re: [pen-l] Fwd: Debates within ecosocialism: John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore and CNS | Louis Proyect: The
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Fred Murply wrote: > I don't read the passage below in Foster's 2005 intro as "promoting > virtues"; Foster also said in the same 2005 article that "Yet, it [The Soviet Union] remained a post-revolutionary society distinguished in many ways from capitalism. Competition between enterprises played almost no role in the economic workings of Soviet society. Private ownership of the means of production had been abolished. Unemployment was virtually non-existent. Many basic social amenities were guaranteed. "Despite its veering away from socialist goals, the Russian Revolution´s expropriation of capitalist private property, followed by the creation of a distinct post-revolutionary society, constituted a grave threat to capitalism, especially if other peoples were thereby encouraged to follow the same path." So on one hand, Foster denounces some features of later Soviet society; on the other hand, he still holds it's a "post-revolutionary society", a threat to capitalism, etc. It's shameless when someone who knows the crimes of the system apologizes for it; but that's what Foster does. Indeed, Foster goes on to repeat the tired old propaganda from the Soviet revisionists about themselves; he refuses to look deeply into these claims. Thus, Foster writes that "Competition between enterprises played almost no role in the economic workings of Soviet society." This is an important part of Foster's view of late Soviet society; it's part of why he believes it's a model for environmental planning which we need today. But in fact, under the Soviet system of "Khozraschet" (self-financing), both making a profit and competing with other enterprises were major facts of the Soviet economic system. It worked in a somewhat different way than it does in Western capitalism, and there was a somewhat cloaked form of competition, but the rampant anarchy of production in the Stalinist and later Soviet system are well-known. Serious economists studying the Soviet Union, economists with varied political trends, recognized this, and differed mainly in their explanation of why it took place. You, FM, cite his criticism of the Soviet system and his historical account (which is more like a series of apologies and excuses for what happened), but you leave out the fact that he regards it as a model anyway. Appendix: On competition between enterprises in the Soviet Union It's a commonplace in certain circles to say, as Foster does, that there was little competition between enterprises in the Soviet Union. But it's not true. One serious study of the Soviet economy after another showed the widespread anarchy of production that existed. It's widely known that it wasn't true that competition had been overcome. Soviet managers themselves knew it wasn't true. They had to compete, and compete hard, if they were to survive in their positions. In an article I wrote on the anarchy of production in the Stalinist and later Soviet system, I pointed out the following situation: "For one thing, when one looks closely at the Soviet system, one finds a swirling struggle of manager against manager and factory against factory underneath the overall planning by the ministries. ... "In one form or another, this continued after the First Five Year Plan. It was so widely recognized that managers openly wrote about it in the Soviet trade journals and newspapers. They said that they had to violate the law and the planning directives in order to fulfill their obligations under the plan. Even during the height of the bloody repression of the mid-1930s, when economic managers were among those most vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, or even execution, they continued to write about how they flouted the law. One professor, David Granick, who has studied Soviet management extensively, wrote that: . " 'In actual fact, plant directors have possessed great authority. But in theory, they have not; and so they have constantly struggled to legitimize their power. During the course of this perennial battle, they have often felt sufficiently self-confident to ridicule publicly the laws they were violating. Even at the height of the 1930's purges, there were some plant directors who went out of their way to write signed articles in the national press describing how, in their own work, they had been violating both the law and instructions from superiors, announcing that they considered these violations to be quite proper, and stating flatly that in the future they had every intention of continuing and even extending the violations. '(27) "It might be said that this shows
Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Re: [pen-l] Fwd: Debates within ecosocialism: John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore and CNS | Louis Proyect: The Unrepenta
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I don't read the passage below in Foster's 2005 intro as "promoting
virtues"; rather he offers a reasonably accurate analysis of Soviet
historical development - parallel in most ways to Trotsky's assessment but
without the "degenerated workers state" formulation. State-capitalist or
Maoist analyses such as the one you seem to put forward are at a loss to
explain developments in the 1990's, when "the ruling stratum [did] turn
itself into a true ruling class..." In this regard, see
http://monthlyreview.org/2000/02/01/the-necessity-of-gangster-capitalism/
"Second, crucial to the foregoing argument has been recognition of the fact
that the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 was not the end, as often said, of
actually existing socialism but simply the termination of a historical
process that had commenced three quarters of a century before with the
first significant attempt to break away from capitalism and to build a
working socialist society. The Russian Revolution and subsequent
revolutionary breaks had occurred under extremely unfavorable conditions in
economically underdeveloped countries. Internal struggles and external
interventions brought most of these revolutions down not long after they
emerged. In the Soviet case the society had ceased to pursue a socialist
path toward equality and cooperation, in which the direction of the society
would be determined by its own working class, as early as the Stalinist
takeover in the 1930s. After that it became a stagnant post-revolutionary
(but no longer in any meaningful sense socialist) society, which still
managed to maintain itself in existence and to provide a modicum of
benefits to its population. Yet, its very stagnation guaranteed that it
must at some point in the future either move decisively toward socialism by
turning back to the masses, or toward capitalism by allowing the ruling
stratum to turn itself into a true ruling class, which would inevitably
choose capitalism over socialism. In the end the latter transpired. Hence,
the real defeat of socialism in the Soviet Union, as opposed to the demise
of the Soviet Union as a separate nation state, occurred not with the end
of the Cold War, but had taken place decades prior in the 1930s."
On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Joseph Green via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
> POSTING RULES & NOTES
> #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
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> *
>
> Correction to my last post on Foster's "Marx's Ecology":
>
> It was not in his book of 2000 but in his introduction to the July-August
> 2005 issue of Monthly Review that John Bellamy Foster promoted the
> "post-revolutionary" virtues of the Soviet Union despite the bad things
> that
> happened. ("The Renewing of Socialism: An Introduction":
>
> http://monthlyreview.org/2005/07/01/the-renewing-of-socialism-an-introduction/
> )
> ...
>
--
Fred Murphy | 12 Dongan Place #206 | New York, NY | 212-304-9106
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[Marxism] [UCE] Re: [pen-l] Fwd: Debates within ecosocialism: John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore and CNS | Louis Proyect: The Unrepenta
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Correction to my last post on Foster's "Marx's Ecology":
It was not in his book of 2000 but in his introduction to the July-August
2005 issue of Monthly Review that John Bellamy Foster promoted the
"post-revolutionary" virtues of the Soviet Union despite the bad things that
happened. ("The Renewing of Socialism: An Introduction":
http://monthlyreview.org/2005/07/01/the-renewing-of-socialism-an-introduction/
) This is discussed in my review of Foster's "Marx's Ecology" (August 2007,
"A review of John Bellamy Foster's 'Marx's Ecology': Marx and Engels on
protecting the environment ": http://www.communistvoice.org/40cMarx.html). In
the review, I note that Foster glosses over the nature of the Soviet Union in
his book, and later gives his apology for it as "post-revolutionary" in his
article of 2005.
-- Joseph Green
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