[lbo-talk] State capitalism, or the real thing

[James Heartfield]

MacIntosh writes that the Bolsheviks went wrong "in instituting a project of the accumulation of capital (i.e. forced industrialization)"
But industrialisation, forced or otherwise, is not identical to the accumulation of capital - not unless you abandon Marx's method of historical specification. The question is, was the direction of resources towards industrialisation commissioned by the outlay of capital. The answer, after Stalin's suppression of the N.E.P. is no, it was not. It was directed from the centre, bureaucratically. This is not a question of moral disapproval (or approval) of what Stalin did, but a scientific question of how we analyse the developments that took place in Soviet Society. If you subordinate that process to the categories Marx developed in the analysis of capitalist society (categories, may it be said that he took over from bourgeois economics and modified) all that you succeed in doing is making the thing that took place look like something it is not, i.e. capitalism, which is of course the result you are bound to come up with, because you imposed those categories in the first place. But they just don't fit. What is the rate of profit in the Soviet Union? What is the value of fixed capital? You just cannot tell because there is no market exchange taking place, no capital, no equivalence between wages and access to goods, no equalisation of the profit rate, no destruction of capital values, no overaccumulation.

It is an historical question, but more importantly it is a methodological one. Like the joke 'what's the difference between a postbox and a hole in the road?' 'I don't know' 'Well I won't be sending you to post my letters, then'. Or 'What's the difference between the Soviet Union and America?' I don't know. 'Well I won't trust you to explain what we have to do'

The theoretical distinction between the technical labour process and the value relations is at the core of Marx's theory, it begins with the distinction between use value and exchange value, for the obvious reason that the theoretical distinction between industry and capitalism is the precondition to the practical distinction between industry and capitalism, which is to say the organisation of industry on a socialist basis (which the Soviet Union certainly never was). But those comrades who abandon Marx's theoretical differentiation between industrialisation and capital accumulation are letting go of the theoretical condition of transcending capitalism.

Tub-thumping rhetoric (which, by the way, never fooled anyone) about how Russia is really capitalist, makes you feel good, but the price you pay is to turn your critique of capitalism into a romantic anti-industrialism, of the most reactionary kind.