On Aug 2, 2012, at 4:25 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
Some people on the left see the Southern slaves as "proletarians." I
don't understand that at all. If those folks were proletarians, how
about the direct producers under the late Soviet Union? were they
proletarians, too? so the USSR was capitalist?
Under Stalin a lot of the direct producers were on collective or state
farms and could not leave. Their status was serf-like. But urban
workers were wage laborers and entitled to change jobs--though the
rulers tried to make that as difficult as possible the rate of
turnover was always significant. So they were proletarians just like
other workers. Of course the USSR was always economically capitalist
(nobody doubted that NEP was a state-capitalist economy) though
initially ruled by a proletarian state. That contradiction was
violently terminated in the 1935-1938 bloodbath when virtually all the
proletarian communist elements of the state were purged and replaced
by parvenu industrial managers. Russia today is obviously state-
capitalist under the rule of a KGB type and his silovaki. The mineral-
rich parts of the former USSR are ruled likewise by pure Stalinists on
the order of the Aleivs and Nazarbayovs and Karimovs. Between Stalin
and Putin there were a number of changes but nothing like either a
political or social revolution. So the USSR was capitalist indeed.
Shane Mage
"scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities
that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying
attention to"
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