State Capitalism Political Tradition' of I.s

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"We often seek salvation from unfamiliar phenomens in familiar terms. An attempt has been made to conceal the enigma of the Soviet regime by calling it "state capitalism." " This term has the advantage that nobody knows exactly what it means. The term "state capitalism" originally arose to designate all the phenomena which arise when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the means of transport or of industrial enterprises. The very necessity of such measures is one of the signs that the productive forces have outgrown capitalism and are bringing it to a partial self-negation in practice. But the outworn system, along with its elements of self-negation, continues to exist ...The first concentration of the means of production in the hands of the state to occur in history was achieved by the proletariat with the method of social revolution, and not by capitalists with the method of state trustification. Our brief analysis is sufficient to show how system. The former is reactionary, the latter progressive with the Soviet (Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, pp 2458247-8) as a capitalist system....

The International Socialists have just re-issued Tony Cliff's book on Russia. This was first written in 1948 in the internal Bulletin of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and was competently refuted (by led Grant) in the next issue. Its publication reflects a growing crisis in the IS group.

Even leading IS members now protest at the lack of 'politics' 1 their paper, Socialist Worker. In a desperate attempt to establish some sort of a political tradition' around which to retain the membership, the IS leadership have recently been digging up and republishing some of the best-forgotten writing: of Chiff and other anti-Marxist "theoreticians' of the IS.

Cliff's book was simply confused capitulation to the Cold War, and an abandonment of Marxist analysis in place of a purely 'moral' repugnance Stalinism.

Capitalism corresponds to particular historical stage in the development of the productive forces. The capitalist owns the means of production and undertakes production of commodities for exchange on the market in order to expand his capital. In this process capital takes the form alternately of money and means of production. The expansion of capital is the increase in value held by the ruling class. The source of this value is the unpaid labour time of the working class, who own nothing but their labour power.

ASSERTION

Cliff tried however to assert that the Soviet bureaucracy was the ruling class of new "Bureaucratic State Capitalism though he was never able to prove this fiction throughout his book It remained an a priori assertion. In the chapter devoted to 'proving this hypothesis, having quoted Marx to the effect that the essence of capitalist production is 'accumulation for accumulation's sake' Cliff then just mroceeds to the assertion:

We can say therefore tnat the Russian bureaucracy 'owning"

as it does the state and controlling the process of accumulation is the personification of capital in its purest form." (p. 169)

This totally begged the question of whether it was capital that was being accumulated or simply means of production. The question how the surplus value of the soviet working class is transformed into capital at the hands of the bureaucracy was never explained by Cliff.

Cliff could find no sources of capital accumulation in Russia since as he says "The division of labour within Russian society is in essence a species of the division of labour within a single workshop.

LENIN and TROTSK Revolution have been (p. 203) Under capitalism, the accumulation of means of production is only important as part of the press of capital expansion. The process of capital accumulation takes the form of money invester in means of production for the purpose of expanding the sum of money.

This process periodically breaks down, resulting in a falling rate of profit and a cessation of production by capitalists. Needless to say Cliff is able to identify no such process in Russia. AS Trotsky wrote in his classic analysis of the degenerated workers stale in Russia Revolution Betraved:

"The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of 'state capitalists' will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently any special property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income: it pretends that as a special social group it does not even exist. Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism. All this makes the position of the commanding Soviet stratum in the highes degree contradictory, equivocal and undignified, notwithstanding the completeness of its power and the smoke screen of flattery that conceals it. (pp. 249-50)

Cliff tried to find the causes both of the absence of crises in Russia and the cause of 'capital' accumulation in the international military competition with the west. He fails in both attempts, but the ideas thrown up became the basis of the capitulation of IS to the superficial appearance of stability presented by post-war capitalism. as expressed in the revisionis economic theory of the "permanent arms economy".

As regards accumulation, all that military competition ensures is that Russia devotes much of its productive resources to armaments. This would be necessary even for healthy workers state.

Diff however seems to think that "competition' is the cause of capital accumulation. In Tact as Marx insisted, capitalist comoctition Y: I.S. believes that all the gains of destroyed by the parasitic Kremlin is the result of capitalists attempting to preserve the value of their capital especially in times of economic crises. Likewise if Russia was a capitalist state then certainly arms production would not stave off the falling rate ( profit, in fact it would exaggerate the tendency through inflation as it has done in the capitalist states.

State Capitalism in Russia presents us with a galaxy of similar confusions, and distortions of Marxism. Against the mumbo jumbo of people like Cliff Trotsky consistently insisted that in analying the nature of the Soviet Union it was necessary to CLIPP: refuted by Trotsky.

begin from the contradiction between the nationalised nroperty relations and the asitic bureaucracy, not, as Clif one-sidedly, with the te altarian political rule of the bun aucracy alone. Trotsky analysed the Soviet Union in terms of its relations of production as a workers' state.

"Classes are characterized by their position n the social system of economy, and primarily by their relation to the means of production. In civilised societies, property relations are validated by laws.

The nationalisation of land, the means of industrial production transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreien trade, constitute the basis of the Soviet social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as proletarian state is for us basically defined."

(Revolution Betrayed Trotsky understood that ial organ (and such every is) can take shape o as of the deeply roo inner the 1917 Russian needs of production" (In Defence of Marxism). By contrast the bureaucracy hinders the development of the productive forces in the Soviet Union. Such development as there has been has taken place despite the bureaucracy. The planned economy of the USSR, based on the nationalised property relations presupposes for its proper working. Sovict workers democracy. In the absence of the capitalist market, the management by the working class, through its soviets and factory committees, of all levels of the productive apparatus is the only method of successful planning. In this sense the proletariat is the only class that expresses the deeply rooted inner needs ot production. The ошевистасу; by diverting production to its own ends, and being based upon the suppression of workers democracy, cannot plan effectively. It is this contradiction that is the source of the numerous mistakes and crises in the Soviet economy, not some mythical 'State Capitalism'. Trotsky was far from ignoring the extent to which political power had been arrogated by the Kremlin bureaucrats:

"In its intermediary and regulating function, its concern to maintain social ranks, and exploitation of the state anparatus for personal goals, the Soviet bureaucracy is Similar to every other bureauстасу. especially the fascist But it is also in a vast way different. In no other regime has a bureaucracy ever achieved such a degree of independence from the dominating class. In bourgeois society, the bureaucracy represents the interests of a possessing and educated class, which has at its disposal innumerable means of everyday control over its admini•tion of affairs. The Soviet bureaucracy has risen above a class which is hardly emerging from destitution and darkness, and has tradition of dominion or command.

"In this sense we cannot deny that it is something more than burcaucracy. It is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society."

The strength of the bureaucracy as a bonapartist form of rule rests on the isolation of the USSR and the pressures of world imperialism which through the bureaucracy's policy of 'socialism in one country Kinder the process of world revol ation necessary for the international development of the productive forces needed to achieve socialism.

Despite this, comparative development of the productive forces has taken place in the USSR. If therefore Russia is capitalist, then it must be the case that. as Grant noted:

"If we have state capitalism in Russia (ushered in by a proletarian revolution) then it is clear that the crisis of capitalism on which we have based ourselves for the past decades was not insoluble but purely the birth pangs of a new and higher stage of capitalism......This would shatter the entire theoretical basis of the Leninist-Trotskyist movement". (E. Grant: Reply to Cliff c. 1948)

This attack on Trotskyism 15 the one consistent thing IS has tried to do. Once the analysis of the present epoch as one in which capitalism can no longer fundament ally develop the productive forces is overthrown, then with it is overthrown any understanding of the crisis of leadership in the working class and the necessity and possibility of building revolutionary leadership.

Cut adrift without any understanding of the epoch in which we live, and writing off the past revolationary gains of the working class, begins only from the spontancous movements of workers Here it breaks decisively with Trotskyism. Trotsky founded the Fourtl International in 1938 on the basis of massive defeats for the working class in the period following 1917, because he understood that these defeats expressed the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Flowing from this was the need to raise the consciousness of the advanced sections of workers in line with the objective tasks posed by the crisis of capitalism, through the struggle for the Transitional For the IS however "The history of the Fourth International has shown the futility of creating an organisation that does not reflect a rising tide of class consciousness" (International Socialism 18 pp2-3j This is a clear recipe for centrisn and pragmatism, opening the way for the rank-and-file, opportunist politics of the IS.

Trotskyists take their starting point not with the spontancous movements of the working class, but the conflict between the consciousness developed by those movements and the objective requirements of the working class.

In doing so they come into confliet also with the state capitalist theories of IS. It is on this basis that the WL fights to build the Fourth International as the revolutionary leadership in the working class, by taking up the struggle to defend and develop the Transitional (see also our the sis or chiff latest book crisis: socia contract or socialism?" - Socialisi Press, number 5. April 3rd. 1975)

Y JOHN LEA.