State Capitalism is a valid Marxist Category : was Cuba

[Adam Rose]

>     Carlos Replies:
> 
>     Annalysing the Soviet Union or Cuba requires two different          
>     approaches. You cannot utilize the same parameters since their
>     political, economical and social conditions were extremely
>     different.
> 

Japan and Britain are both "Liberal Democracies" - but they got there 
by completely different routes. We can still say they are both 
Liberal Democracies, but we also need to examine the concrete historical
circumstances of their development.

I didn't do this for the USSR + Cuba in my first post - but I will later,
I promise.

>     You seems to annalyse *one aspect* of the economy of the former
>     Soviet Union and present-day Cuba -- namely, the state-capitalist
>     conditions of reproduction of capital -- without integrating
>     all the other political and *social* questions: namely the          
>     questions of class, caste, bureaucracy and state machinery.
>

As I said towards the end of my first post, I will give an account of how
the USSR became State Capitalist and a separate account of how Cuba
became State Capitalist.

>             a) The Soviet Union progress towards a socialist economy
>             rested entirely upon the possibility of worldwide           
>             overthrown of capitalism.  Stalinism made that possibility
>             (together with other *objective* conditions) impossible.
> 
>             b) The Soviet Union, even under Lenin, fell into a category
>             of a workers state with "bureacratic deformations" -- Not
>             capitalist, not socialist -- an intermediate stage in which
>             the predominat conditions were, at one hand the             
>             overwhelming supremacy of capitalism as a world system and
>             on the other had the dictatorship of the proletariat as the
>             regime to maintain the control of the economy and its       
>             development under the control of the working class.
> 
>             c) After Lenin, the defeat of the opposition to Stalin, the
>             trials, the purges, the destruction of the Soviets, etc the
>             Dictatorship of the proletariat (not the remains of         
>             the bourgeois state) withered away, little by little.
>             In its place, the "bureacratic tendencies" of the state
>             under Lenin's became the *nature* of the state.
>             This
>             process allowed capitalist economy to be, more and more,
>             the predominant factor in the Soviet Union.  Only the
>             bureacracy and its centralization remained of the previous
>             political stage.  Its overthrowing in 1980s and 1990s was
>             the final stage of an slow-motion counter-revolution that
>             succesfully restored capitalism in the Soviet Union.
>

The problem with this analysis is that the logical consequence of your
analysis was to side with the vestiges of what you think is a workers state,
ie the State Bureaucracy, against the people on the streets.
             

>  
>             f) State capitalism is a *valid* Marxist term insofar there
>             is a current inside the Marxist movement that sustain that
>             as a major programmatic, theoretical and political issue.

This is a ridiculous thing to say.
Pink elephants don't exist just because you think about them.

Adam.

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK



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