21st Centuary Socialism

Last night I tried to participate in an entertaining debate on the UK’s Socialist Unity Blog [www.socialistunity.com] , following Tucker’s Ken Livingstone interview chapter 2. The SWP theocrats defended their “state capitalism in the USSR” dogma which they apply automatically to every revolutionary regime that trys to build socialism before the coming of the “global proletarian revolution.” Their detractors asserted that following every anti capitalist revolution, global imperialist reality demands an armed revolutionary state that is capable of defending progressive social gains, as well trying to build a socialist economic alternative.

SWP camp followers displayed total illiteracy in Marxian economics by arguing that USSR bureaucrats traded “the surplus value” of their workers with fellow Western capitalists in the global markets. SWP theocrats are completely oblivious to the fact that the Marxian concept of surplus value is an abstraction of labour time in the context of capitalist relations of production, where workers are “free” to sell their labour-power to capitalists in a market economy. Only a fool would maintain that the Soviet economy operated as a capitalist market economy. The SWP’s detractors correctly argued that socialist countries have to trade with each other, as well as trade with the capitalist world in order that their people can survive.

But I think that the Anti- SWP mob failed to establish whether the USSR state bureaucracy constituted an exploitative class. If one does not establish that the USSR was free of class exploitation then I’m afraid that the SWP only loses the argument on a technicality, rather than on a practical or moral basis.

We have to remember that capitalist surplus value is not the only existing form of labour exploitation. Ruling classes in pre-capitalist societies tended to appropriate the fruits of labour by the force of divine feudal rights or more simply by brute force. Gordon Brown displayed a “Keynesian” version of feudal brute force when he gave the Halifax to Lloyds bank. The capitalist share holders of Lloyds bank didn’t gain their monopolistic market share last week by extracting extra surplus value from their workers. The British government allowed them to appropriate monopolistic wealth with the grace of God and with the help of the Credit Crunch.

The important point being that in benefiting Lloyds Bank Gordon Brown did not act as loyal servant of the “free market.” On the contrary, had Gordon been loyal to free market dogma he would have let the market take care of bankruptcies. Had he been a socialist he would have taken over the financial industry under democratic public control. He acted neither in the name of neo liberalism nor socialism, but in the collective interest of the capitalist ruling class. Following his friends in Washington, Gordon had to socialise market risk, while making sure that financial rewards fall into even fewer private hands.

SWP theorists look at socialist countries and revolutionary regimes through classical political economy. The trouble is that one can’t even analyse social relations in the UK purely through the prism of capitalist political economy. In post-1945 Britain, organised labour was so powerful and the influence of the USSR was so great that the capitalist class had to make genuine compromises with the British working class. Social compromises began to give way to a mixed and hybrid economy only partly based on private market mechanisms. But the capitalist class remained in charge of both state power and colonial plunder. And this is the political complexity of imperialist Britain we are talking about here, not the USSR as it was at that time under overwhelming economic and military imperialist siege.

To begin raising serious questions about the nature of social relations in the USSR, we have to do a lot more research regarding the political decision making structures of its collectivist economy. And yes, we do need to understand the basis of its economic relations with fraternal socialist countries as well as how it survived under imperialist encirclement, and how did that effect it development.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2010 04:28PM by tylo.