[lbo-talk] Fitch and Brenner

[John Thornton]

John Gulick wrote:
>  
>
> "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
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> relations at the point of production... and Soviet-style economies were non-capitalist
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> precisely to the extent that virtually the entirety of the work force had guaranteed
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> jobs. No commodification of labor-power, no variable capital; no variable capital, no
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> capitalism.
>
>  
>
> So, the Soviet economy may have been many undesirable things, and even exploitative
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> in the sense of allocating unequal gains for unequal efforts, or in the sense of the party-
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> 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.

Doesn't your objection to the term state-capitalism rest on your 
definition of capitalism.
Even in the FSU one was forced to sell their labor for wages.
Labor market as imperative rather than opportunity is part of what 
defines capitalism.
It was certainly an imperative rather than an opportunity in the FSU.
There was a need to reinvest surpluses and a need to improve 
labor-productivity.
There was certainly competition for resources as well.
You need more than this objection if you want to object to the term 
state-capitalism for the FSU.

John Thornton