Comrade Miyachi Tatsuo,
The responses to the article criticizing Wu Lien were reread and I am not entirely comfortable with what I have written. The theoretical premise was based on abstracting the "logic" from Marx Critique of the Gotha Program concerning value, exchange, distribution, equality (bourgeois right); the state power as "the government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labor." There is of course the economic framework for the evolution of the class struggle during the era or time frame Marx calls "a political transition period."
My failure to put forth the specific character of the agricultural sector obscured understanding the class basis - the economic axis, of commodity circulation (distribution) and consequently commodity production and commodity exchange in the Soviet Union.
I use The Critique of the Gotha Program as a theoretical framework. The evolution of the industrial stage of development of the productive forces as it is interactive with agriculture has been historically called "the antitheses between town and country," by the Marxist movement.
This distinction - (antitheses) between town and country consists not only in the fact that the conditions of labor in agriculture differ from those in industry, but mainly and chiefly in the fact that whereas in industry there was public ownership of the means of production and of the products of industry in the Soviet Union, in agriculture there was not public ownership but group or what was called collective-farm ownership of products. These products were sold to the working class with the state acting as the mediator of the distribution process. The state was not the fundamental mediator of the exchange process because value or rather the law of value mediates commodity exchange.
The collective farms as a class of producers were unwilling to alienate their product except in the form of commodities. That is to say one can properly speak of a surplus product in the agricultural sector as that which was over and above what was directly consumed by the farmers. In exchange for this "over and above that which is consumed" the farmer receives the articles of personal consumption they desired, produced in the pubic sector of the economy. As a class of producers the collective farms recognized as the only valid economic relationship with the towns - industry, the commodity relationship or exchange based on purchase and sell of their products with the products produced within the public ownership sphere of the economy.
This reality is called the class struggle and also means that commodity production and trade is a feature of socialism, as it existed in the previous historical configuration. As long as the two basic productive sectors of the economy existed, commodity production and circulation must exist. Nevertheless, the change in property relations excites a change in the form and content of exchange. Televisions appeared as articles of personal consumption amongst the workers in the towns and retain a commodity form in relationship to the country. On the other hand clothing and say tobacco - products originating and produced primarily from the "country," retained a certain commodity form, which describe the degree to which the law of value remained in force. However the state as the mediating and administrative instrument of a class would set prices for cotton and tobacco, which limited the sphere of operation of the law of value.
On the level of theory in the Marxist arsenal, the antagonistic mode of class conflict or contradiction between the different sectors of the economy was being dissolved, but not the contradiction "itself." Antagonism does not mean violence.
It is of course understood that housing was not a commodity and did not appear as an item to be brought and sold by private producers in the Soviet Union. The public system of transportation - specifically the railway cars and trains and even airplanes, were not commodities brought and sold by private producers.
The historic resolution of the antitheses between town and country is precisely historic because it is an aspect of developmental processes in the history of the evolution of the productive forces or class relationships and not a factor that arises on the basis of the administrative agency as the state or "government."
Stated another way, the development of an all-embracing production sector, with the right (class mandate) to dispose (distribute) of all consumer goods produced in the country is the phase of development in which commodity circulation gives way to circulation of articles of consumption and the "money economy" becomes superfluous. Money economy appears within quotes because money cannot allow means of production to pass into the hands of the individual no matter what quantity of money ones acquires.
How the formation of a single and untied sector for the production and distribution for everything comes about is the arena of the class struggle. The proletarian state could not and did not seek to expropriate the masses of individuals constituting the producers in the country - that is compel them to alienate their products on the basis of need and not the exchange mode of distribution. Collectivization was a class policy, whose cutting edge was aimed at that narrow stratum of the agricultural population identified as the wealthy peasant or persons who acquired their wealth on the basis of commodity exchange.
Misunderstood in unraveling Soviet socialism are the waves and phases of transition of commodity production. Confusion abounds concerning Marx presentation of form and content of exchange in The Critique of the Gotha Program. The Soviet communist referred to their society as a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Marx refers to the transition period as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The difference between the two is the development of the productive forces.
Hence, the idea of labeling Soviet society "state socialism" - which certain Marxist claim, is a rather bourgeois conception of production relations, classes under socialism and why the class struggle persists. To our bourgeoisie, Soviet socialism appears as the state power owning capital, hiring workers and concentrating capital into the hands of the state authority. I am not claiming you assert this proposition, merely trying to cover several areas of concern.
What is clear is that the bourgeoisie as a class was opposed to what they saw in the Soviet Union because it takes their power of capital away. To the bourgeoisie it appears that this power of capital is transferred to the state, when in fact power is transferred to a different class who administered through the state and capital itself is under assault and being abolished as a social power.
To the bourgeoisie it appears as if people were making products in the Soviet Union and that damn Stalin is keeping all the money for himself and his cronies in the administrative apparatus. Stalin of course possessed no personal wealth. The idea that Soviet socialism was "state capitalism" is preposterous. Nothing could pass into the hands of administrators but personal items of consumption and this matter is understood by anyone that cares to examine the facts.
Stalin's death and the resulting political struggle expressing class tensions, untied the hands of the administration and was the environment for the 4th Edition of the Political Economy Text. Even with its monumental bribery and after Stalin's death the expansion of the black market and the siphoning of public property into the hands of racketeering scoundrels, it would take the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry to dismantle the system of its dictatorship and restore the power of capital.
I cannot pause here to exhaust an in depth description of the system of the proletarian dictatorship, which was not the state power proper but the state, collective farms, cooperatives, Soviets, trade unions, trade and administrative organizations of all kinds.
Soviet society rapidly passed from building the foundation of socialism ("controlled private enterprise") to consolidating socialist production in every sphere. Money could not be vanquished with the wave of a wand because of the primacy of class factors described as the producers who constitute the "country" - agriculture. It was not simply a question of "wrong policy" or a misunderstanding of Marx, but real material development of the productive forces and the degree of evolution of the law of value.
How various groups understand the development of the law of value as expressed in policy is the arena of the class struggle or what Marx called the "political transition period."
As strategist of the proletariat, the question poses itself as how to gage the trajectory of development of the productive forces in its qualitative and quantitative boundary. Stated another way, what is the proper pace of industrial development and collectivization? What magnitudes of material resources are to be invested in what sectors of the economy? How does one satisfy the historical assertion of the town people for cheap food stuff and the demand of the agriculture producer for an exchange of products - value, that develops the country at the pace of the industrial centers? These questions were called the arena of the class struggle in the Soviet Union.
The idea that Marx did not speak of the class struggle under socialism is repudiated by his term the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" class.
Certain question taken from Marx Capital are artificially pasted on the totality of Soviet reality; like hiring of labor in industry and socially necessary labor or surplus products being appropriated by the state in this period of time - 2002, is utterly bourgeois. Fifty years ago this pasting of Marx concepts from Capital on Soviet life was merely an ultra left deviation primarily. Today this so-called deviation has revealed itself for what it is - reaction against revolutionary transition. This "reactionary intellectual movement" is the power of capital and has been morphed and appears somewhat different, but its signature has not and cannot change.
The state is an instrument of a class and class policy. To speak of "necessary" and "surplus" labor in the Soviet industrial infrastructure is sinning against reality because all the labor of all members of society was necessary for the extension of production, the promotion of education and public health, the organization of defense, the arts and sciences, development of technology, etc., and it was just as necessary to the working class in power, as the labor expended to supply personal needs of the worker and his family.
Is it not clear that "necessary" and "surplus labor" are categories of capital formation and reproduction? Further, these categories are components of commodity production proper - speaking of socially necessary labor and the law of value. Expropriation - surplus labor in the form of products, is a class act by one sector of society against another. Marx Capital is written to describe the working of capital as it historically evolved. Talk about surplus products - arising on the basis of the surplus labor that the worker provides to the capitalist, is a category of class and capital expropriation and its use as an instrument of accumulating private profits. A class cannot expropriate itself as a historical entity. The working class cannot sell its labor-power to its self.
Marx Critique of the Gotha Program is a gigantic theoretical contribution to the science of society that allows one to abstract his method in form and content or the dialectic of transformation and modes of expression.
In my estimate it is not a question of "overcoming" a Stalinist limitation but rather a historical limitation in which socialism evolved. The vantage point of history allows for the total unraveling of industrial socialism and its problems of development. Stalin was a class and historical period that rapidly evolved into an imperial power based on its specific environment of operations.
In American history Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were a class that rapidly evolved into an imperial power based on our specific environment of operations. To criticize them for being slaveholders in a slaveholding society and failing to understand the working of capitalism abstract men from the environment in which they personify class factors.
Melvin P.
