[lbo-talk] McLemee: short sweet intellectual history of Western Marxism in France

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 27 02:47:57 PST 2010


(No top posting! See below! :) )

----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Pollak quoted Scott McLemee To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org

With their comrades in the American factories, the French adherents of SOUB agreed that the Soviet system was not socialist. Nor was it even headed, however slowly, in that general direction. It, too, was barbarous. Workers were exploited and had no power. Stalin's party had assumed the role that capitalists would normally play.

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It's true that workers in the USSR (I'm talking Brezhev era here) didn't have much effect on the political process or organization of labor. On the other hand, they really didn't do very much work and job security was nigh-total. There was virtually no labor discipline outside of social shaming and peer pressure. It's a stretch to consider it an extension of capitalist relations.



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