Working Class

Joe R. Golowka joeG at ieee.org
Thu Jul 4 09:39:12 PDT 2002



> In terms of income, the USSR had a more egalitarian distribution of
> income than capitalist nations

So do you consider west european style welfare states coordinator states too? What's the range of gini coefficients you need to be coordinator as opposed to capitalist?


> In terms of power, it is not that coordinators as a class had less power
> than a capitalists class. But is was exercised in a fundamentally
> different way. The relation of workers to the Soviet elite was much
> more like the relation of workers to managers in the U.S. than the
> relation of workers to capitalists.

How so? You don't think the USSR followed m-c...p...m'-c'? What's wrong with viewing the managers & planners as the soviet coordinator class and the upper party members (politburo, etc.) as capitalists?


> In short, I think that if you were analyzing the Soviet Union at any
> point in it's early history - I think considering it a "coordinator
> state" would have had better analytical and predictive power than
> considering it a "state capitalism".

What does a coordinator model accurately predict that a state monopoly capitalism model doesn't?

-- Joe R. Golowka JoeG at ieee.org Anarchist FAQ - http://www.anarchyfaq.org

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged." - Noam Chomsky



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list