Re: naming that system

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 8/14/2004 2:47:45 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   >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. <   Comment   One can actually inaugurate a new Mode of Production - in material life . . . on the basis of political fiat?   I do not believe that industrial socialism was a new Mode of Production of course an industrial society.  Is not the basis of every mode of production in society . . . every form of society that has existed and can exist . . . a certain stage of development of the division of labor, human energy, machine and tool development and primary energy source -- with the property relations within? And is not the meaning of division of labor in society an _expression_ of all these things as primacy as opposed to the political form of society and the legal _expression_?   Naming the system begs the question what is the meaning of "system?" On the one hand no one disputes . . .  with any credibility that the industrial system of production prevailed under the majority of Stalin's tenure. No one disputes . . . with any credibility . . . that is was a certain kind of industrial system.   Once one shifts the shape of the question . . . "naming the system" . . . and pose the matter more clearly . . . the answer becomes more than 50% apparent. The fundamental feature of the mode of production in the Soviet Union was industrial with the property relations within.   What was restored in the Soviet Union was not an antiquated mode of production . . . which as a general rule is impossible to restore . . . but a specific property relations.   Once a new mode of production arises and takes root and then stands on its economic legs it is generally . . .  impossible . . . to "unnegate" the new qualitative defintion, that is the new mode of production.     Its . . . like  . . . . it is imposibble to deevolve society back to landed property relations (agricultural society) as the primary form of wealth and political feudalism because there no longer exist anything to go back to support this "negated" mode of production.   That is to say the industrial mode of production and it's property relations grew out of the previous mode of production - sublated, and the previous mode of production is no longer waiting in the back ground for restoration . . . but is gone and no longer exist as a historical category.     Melvin P.