Part 2 of 3
Let us attack the question from another side. How can one have a transition to communism without a communist class, which is also in transition? Industrial society has industrial classes. Classes emerge on the basis of the productivity infrastructure and its tools - technology. What creates the communist class is the robot, not ideology or mysterious "social relations." What does the robot demand as a productivity tool? The robot demands the distribution of the social product outside the value relationship. Why? Because robots cannot engage in exchange. What happens when robots begin making robots, a process at its early stages? The value form is torn asunder.
Perhaps 3 billion people exist on earth outside the process of the production of commodities - the value relationship, and the numbers are going to leap in the next 10-20 years. Advanced robotics, computerization and digitalized production process literally destroy the value relationship and create a communist class, which is the concrete transitional form of the proletariat as it is detached from production or kicked out of its material - value, relationship within commodity exchange.
Trying to organize an industrial economy on the basis of communist social relations is the same as trying to rearrange chairs on a sinking ship. However, in real life if one is on a sinking ship it is a practical question to rearrange chairs and determine who should be saved. Generally, we say the women and children should be saved first, if possible, but I think the "women's movement" may have done away with this concept.
The idea of studying Soviet socialism so that we will not make the same mistakes is an interesting proposition.
First of all, this means studying the evolution of the value form and not simply the political shell of Russian society. It is not possible to make the same historical error after a given social formation has passed from one qualitative state to another. What happens is that you make new mistakes, or rather new historical errors. Here is an example or political conclusion that seems obvious to me. It is not possible for anyone on earth to recreate the Leninist form of organization because the conditions that gave rise to this organizational form have passed from the world stage. The configuration of Russian society in 1902 - 1917 - that is the actual class forces, is forever gone to history.
Stalin's doctrine of Leninism and his party policy cannot be applied in a society undergoing transition to electronic computerized production. Stalin's doctrine could be applied to a country of petite bourgeois producers undergoing transition to industrial relations. It is not a question of revolutionaries being careful not to "apply Stalin" because one cannot apply that, which has lost its validity and through application achieve a mass material form for that, which no longer exist.
The Soviet party under Lenin was an insurrectionary force that later evolved into a militarized industrial form of organization. The party was not the state or the administrative (industrial) bureaucracy. In the American context can one imagine a person trying to apply Jeffersonian democracy under conditions where 90% of the population is not tied to the land or rather family farm?
>"One thing may be certain now and that is with no big entity pushing a social >agenda, social progress in the west is going regress and or come to a halt. No one >to compete with" <
frames the social question incorrectly. Regression and a certain apparent stagnation is the actual process of transition or the dialectic of the leap.
First the injection of the new qualitative ingredient - robotics, computerization and digitalized production process, begins the transitions and compels society to reorganize itself around new means of production. This new qualitative ingredient is "the big entity," that compels society to leap from one political form of rule to another. A new political form must stand upon new economic relations or it collapses no matter what the policy of a political group or individual.
The period of the overthrow of slavery in America proves this definitively. The slaves where freed but Reconstruction was overthrown and the black was reenslaved as sharecropper until a technological development occurred that kicked him out of the economic category called sharecropping. That is the political revolution needed an economic basis to stand on and as long as hand labor dominated agriculture no policy on earth could free - emancipate, the black and white sharecroppers.
The existence of Soviet power represented an external ingredient so to speak, to the political form in which capital organized the industrial infrastructure and could not force or compel the leap from industrial relations to postindustrial relations. The competition between Soviet power and capital imperial authority did in fact condition a certain democratization in America and revolutionization of the means of production. In this competition Soviet Power lost not because of wrong policy by this or that leader, but because of the evolution of America's industrial economy and beginning the leap first.
In other words the Soviet Union went out of business because it could no longer compete within the world industrial framework. Now America and Japan did not undergo the leap first because of correct policy by this or that leader, but because of how industrial society emerged and evolved. This has much to do with the discovery of America and the trajectory of development of manufacturing and America emergence as a pure capitalist country. In Japan's instance she was reconstructed after the war with the latest development in technology.
Perhaps looking at this issue in a time frame closer to us can illustrate what is meant. The cold war was aimed at denying the Soviet the technological means to effect/affect the leap in their backward industrial economy. The Soviet's military apparatus was first class, meaning its effective capacity to prevent military encroachment. Their industrial economy was always one to one and a half generation behind that of America. Their agricultural economy was several generations behind Brazil.
No correct policy by any leader could solve this problem and Putin isn't going to solve it either. Politics cannot solve any problem of history or history evolution as development of the mode of production.
The Stalin period is understood by everyone - no matter what political orientation, to be an era of industrialization. Industrial society cannot evolve into a communist society on the basis of organizing the economy a "certain way." The reason is the value form. Stalin understood this and outline the problem in "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR," which is the reason it is called "economic problems" in the first place. He also describes the value form in transition and as it existed internal to the country and in their external relations with industrial capital.
Melvin P.
