I read a large # of articles from MR from the 50's, in the Greenwood Press reprint series, "Radical Periodicals in the U.S.A, " a great collection of about a hundred rad journals issued in the early 70's, in many university libraries. Much was embarrassing, in retrospect apologetics. Esp. bilge like the innumerable poieces by Konni Zilliacus, a Labour MP.
However, by the time of Solidarity in Poland, Sweezy (see the collection, "Post-Revolutionary Society, " had moved to a pov that Soviet type social formations were class societies, neither capitalist or socialist or in transition to socialism. The ghost of Shactman, Bruno Rizzi and others who saw these non-capitalist class dominated "bureaucratic collectivist" hovered over these essays. (When a totalitarian Party, originally quite democratic, with marxist origins, destroys the original animating core of the Party, the Old Bolsheviks, and the Party elite substitutes itself for the w/c and peasantry, in effect, "owns" the State, that owns the means of production, distribution and exchange, and ALL potential democratic-revolutionary political and social institutional mechanisms for asserting from below, socialist ideas and plans, by the "masseses" have been smashed by the Party elite, only minds encrusted w/ Old Left dogma would see the USSR as socialist.. The simple nationalization of the MOP, was just a negation, not a supercession of the logic of capital.)
Sweezy's virtue was that he (see the debates w/ Bettelheim too, as well as the pieces in Post-Revolutionary Society) re-evaluated, who really held power and who were the exploiting classes in, ahem, Really Existing Socialism.
>From de Long's blog>...Later on Sweezy--to my mind at least--deterioriates. In Sweezy's 1953 essay collection, _The Present as History_, it is hard to avoid seeing the Party hack. For example, consider claims that the "political leadership in the Soviet Union is acting as the agent of the working class.... [T]he working class is the ruling class in the Soviet Union," or that there is "more genuine democracy in the economic and social spheres in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world." These simply cannot be taken seriously as attempted descriptions and analyses of the state of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s by anybody who has made any attempt to inform themselves. They are party-line bilge.
The mid-1960s book, _Monopoly Capital_ I find harder to classify. Very interesting (and I think valuable) in _MC_ is the neo-Galbraithian neo-Veblenesque critique of consumer society: capitalism's problem is not that it is less productive than socialism but that its productivity is directed toward useless, counterproductive, and happiness-destroying ends. This critique does, I think, have a lot of truth in it, and I have always found it quite valuable. It does, however, lead me to places I do not want to go: "One need not have a specific idea of a reasonably constructed automobile, a well planned neighborhood, a beautiful musical composition, to recognize that the model changes that are incessantly imposed upon us, the slums that surround us, and the rock-and-roll that blares at us exemplify a pattern of utilization of human and material resources which is inimical to human welfare...." Sweezy would have been very happy indeed as the Commissar for Culture who banned Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
In _MC_ Sweezy (and Baran) have the potential for freedom. By the mid-1960s there is no longer a serious Party to be a hack for, no longer a Stalin for a stooge to follow. But they don't take advantage of it. The health of the Movement takes a certain priority over the intellect, in the same way that the Party line had done in previous decades. There is a bait-and-switch on foreign policy going on in the book: On one page the Communist Bloc is peaceful and subject to brutal attack by the likes of Dean Acheson who is "organiz[ing] counterrevolutions in Eastern Europe" (never mind that Acheson was a believer in containment, not rollback. Hell! Dulles was a believer in containment, not rollback, save when he wanted to appear otherwise for domestic political purpose). On another page we have "the revolutionary peoples have achieved a series of historic victories... Vietnam, China, Korea, Cuba, and Algeria.... It is no longer mere rhetoric to speak of a world revolution: the term describes... the dominant characteristic of the historical epoch." It's as if Sweezy (and Baran) expect their readers to be stupid: not to recognize that the World Communist Movement cannot at the same time be peaceful and defensive and also expansionist and militant.
Moreover, there are statements in _MC_ about the U.S. domestic economy in the mid-1960s that are extremely hard to credit as attempts at analysis. To argue in the mid-1960s boom that "capitalism’s basic law of motion, temporarily thwarted [during World War II] soon resumed its sway. Unemployment kept steadily upward, and the character of the new technologies of the postwar period sharply accentuated the disadvantages of unskilled and semi-skilled workers.... By the end of the 1950s the real state of affairs could no longer be concealed: it was impossible to continue to believe in the existence of a meliorative trend..." Such passages are things it would be helpful for the Movement to believe. They are not conclusions reached through serious analysis." The failure to theorize about just why the U.S. and Britain wound up on the USSR's side in World War II similarly strikes me as a place where Sweezy (and Baran) dare not go, because the conclusions they will reach will be unhelpful to the movement.
As for Sweezy's other and later writings.... I always found anything cowritten with Magdoff to be worth reading.... I always found anything cowritten with Huberman to be not worth reading.... I always wondered how much of the stuff about the revolutionary economic and political potential of third-world socialism was meant to be taken as serious analysis, and how much just to keep up the spirits of the Movement by telling them earnestly that somewhere socialism was advancing and utopia was being constructed.
-----Original Message----- From: Tahir Wood <twood at uwc.ac.za> Sent: Mar 2, 2004 6:07 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] Sweezy, Stalin, etc.
I have to say this has been a tedious day (it's near the end ot the working day here) on the list and a low point in terms of content. The debate about Sweezy degenerates into "was he a friend of Stalin's?" and the debate on Stalin into "was he better than Yeltsin?". Unfortunately this is all too similar to: "are the Democrats the same as the Republicans?". Doug, maybe you should use your prerogative to be a bit more critical of the line of rhetoric that your posters follow.
What might be just a tad more interesting is a debate about (a) Sweezy's brand of marxism, which seems to fall somewhere between Keynes and Lenin's 'Imperialism, the highest stage ...' (and quite far away from Marx), and (b) the nature of Soviet-style socialism as defined successively by Lenin and Stalin. I can't think of two more important topics for a leftist list - instead we have this circular debate that just goes on and on. Chris, you are particularly prone to saying the same thing over and over in ever more sarcastic language - yet you sang a different tune, I thought, in your brief off-list comment to me about Stalin a while ago.
Please - I know this isn't an academic list - but can't we have just a little more content, whether historical, theoretical or whatever? Despite my interest in the topics that were under discussion, I wouldn't have wanted to reply to one of the messages that were posted today. And the periodic debate about "principles" is just, well, the pits (so we don't appear to share the same principles, well boo-hoo!)
Tahir
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