PAT BOND:
The Soviet system was closer to state capitalism than anything else, I reckon.
But uh oh, I can just hear the stampede of critics now...
JOHN GULICK:
One small dude does not a stampede make, but I'll raise a little dust anyhow.
To me this little observation betrays your vocation as a non-class struggle
Marxist. (Whatever you call that kind of Marxist... I forgets.)
"What?!?" some of you must be saying. (Or so i'd like to imagine anyway, perhaps
no one is paying any goddamn attention.) "Surely anyone who is a Marxist and
says that the USSR was state capitalist is a class struggle Marxist, since saying that
the USSR was state capitalist is tantamount to saying that Soviet workers were
exploited just as are workers in capitalist economies!"
But actually, being a class struggle Marxist means paying attention to the power
relations at the point of production... and Soviet-style economies were non-capitalist
precisely to the extent that virtually the entirety of the work force had guaranteed
jobs. No commodification of labor-power, no variable capital; no variable capital, no
capitalism.
So, the Soviet economy may have been many undesirable things, and even exploitative
in the sense of allocating unequal gains for unequal efforts, or in the sense of the party-
state apparatus autocratically deciding what to do with the surplus product (which it
what state capitalism implies I suppose), but state capitalist it was not.
(Now, away for a nap, before I begin resembling a certain PEN-L listmember, despite myself.)
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