[Justin]: Well, I don't want to get into this distraction on the Russian question, but you could call the system bureaucratic collectivism (Schachtman's term) or the command-administrative system (the perestroichiki's term), or totalitarianism, or lots of things, but the fact is we don't really have a good name for it.
How about the 'vanguard mode of production'?
Cf. Lebowitz, 'Kornai and the Vanguard Mode of Production' in Cambridge Journal of Economics (May 2000).
Nope. "mode of production" is an exclusively Marxist term and concept, and it signifies a whole epoch in the historical development of conscious human labor characterized by a specific set of class relations. The reason that Schachtman was dead wrong was that the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he fantasized as a historically new *ruling class*, had no ability (or desire) to inaugurate a new mode of production--its "historical mission," now completed, was to make prevalent and modern the capitalist mode of production within the Great Russian Empire.
Incidentally, while Stalin, alas, was alive, I never heard any of his minions within, or acolytes without, the Russian Empire dare to express anything but the greatest pride at the appellation "Stalinist."
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos
