me:
> But instead use simpler terms: as Marx pointed out, under wage labor,
> some sort of reserve army of unemployed is needed to motivate people
> to work.
CB: > This is from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. Marx means that the
> bourgeoisie hold that some unemployment is needed to motivate
> wage-laborers to work. Marx isn't endorsing isn't putting this forth as
> a Communist perspective
Of course! instead, it's a critique of the so-called "communism" that
prevailed in the now-defunct USSR. It's a critique from a communist or
socialist perspective, applying Marx's insights (where appropriate) to
other modes of production or class systems besides capitalism.
me:
> [We're not talking about white-collar professionals here,
> but production workers.] The relative ease of getting and keeping a
> job in the old USSR was an important part of the very-common saying
> back then that "we pretend to work and they [the government] pretends
> to pay us."
CB: > Actually work was done at a worldhistoric rate in the SU. It
> industrialized much more rapidly than the advanced capitalist countries
> had.
The very-common saying (and I) was referring to not to the process of
accumulation of state-owned means of production -- or the resultant
rise in the net material product -- but instead to the situation of
the stabilized USSR that prevailed in the post-Stalin, pre-Gorbachev
era. (Were you talking about the Stalin era?)
The accumulation was quite possible despite relatively low work
effort: what's needed is the suppression of current consumption of
goods and services (use-values) and the plowing back of the freed-up
resources into building new means of production. This was facilitated
by the relatively elastic supply of resources to the growing sectors,
including the relatively elastic supply of labor-power after the
"socialist primitive accumulation" of the 1930s. (The phrase was
coined by the Marxist economist Evgeny Preobrazhenzky, but the policy
was put into practice in a much more extreme way by Stalin.) BTW, the
drying up of the supplies of labor-power and natural resources to the
growing sectors was an important reason for the slowing growth rate of
the USSR during its final phases.
CB:
>... To say that they pretend[ed] to work in the SU flies in the face
> of overwhelming material evidence to the contrary: The gigantic
> production and accumulation of use-values which was the SU.
I thought that you saw the SU as more than the production and
accumulation of use-values. Don't pro-Soviet types argue that there
solidaristic values and the like?
Anyway, the production and accumulation of use-values can be arranged
even without insufficient worker effort: all you need is large numbers
of workers or they are assigned a large number of hours of work per
year (or both). In any event, Soviet use-values had (and have) a
reputation as being of low _quality_ (outside of the military sector).
BTW, the Cubans I talked to in the 1979 on my trip to Cuba (led by our
fearless leader Michael Perelman) agreed on this issue of quality. For
example, they did not want to buy the glut of pressure-cookers that
had been delivered from the USSR (or somewhere else in the East Bloc)
because of fear that they would explode. On the other hand, they
defended the idea of installing a Russian nuke on the island, because
it was part of military technology. This was before Chernobyl.
> The facts
> are completely against the socalled common saying, the commonality of
> which joke we only have evidence from from lots of anti-Sovieteers
> walking and talking after the fall of the SU.
If we reject all of the evidence simply because it comes from
"anti-Sovieteers," we should also reject any evidence provided by the
pro-Sovieteers. In fact, each of us should reject _all_ evidence that
does not come from direct experience. But none of this evidence
should be rejected completely. Instead, it should be treated carefully
and critically. To go toward total rejection of everything that comes
from a single type of source is to go down the road to dogmatism.
("Oh, you don't believe in Freud's Oedipus Complex theory? it must
because you have that Complex!")
me:
> The benefits of "no poverty, free rent, free health care, free child
> care, free workers' vacation resorts, free college" were "moral
> successes," as Charles points out, to the extent that they were
> realized in practice.
CB:> It was substantially, though of course not perfectly realized in
> practice. It was real enough so as to be a historic first aspects of
> socialism realized.
I never went to the old Soviet Union. But my old friend, the expert
on the USSR (who was a socialist, by the way), said that the Soviet
anti-poverty efforts were incomplete, applying most completely to
those in the big cities. He also pointed out that the USSR did a much
better job of fighting poverty than the US ever did (and I agree).
By the way, he visited the USSR several times. One of the most
startling revelations was that in Leningrad (now called St. Pete,
after the Floridian retirement center) most or almost all of the
heating was totally centralized. That is, all apartments got heat from
the same government-owned plants. The government tended to turn the
heat on a bit too late in November for most people's taste. Brrr...
Another fact he noticed: the USSR's official press emphasized the
facts of high unemployment in the US. This seems to have been part of
effort to get people to work harder and to be more loyal to the
government, by telling them that life could be worse in the US. It was
the mirror-image of propaganda efforts in the US (which emphasized the
USSR's inadequate protection of free speech and the like). As usual,
the most effective propaganda has a basis in actual facts rather than
being invented.
--
Jim Devine / "The radios blare muzak and newzak, diseases are cured
every day / the worst disease is to be unwanted, to be used up, and
cast away." -- Peter Case ("Poor Old Tom").
